Actor who exuded intensity and stillness on stage in a vast range of Shakespearean roles
The glory days of Barbara Jefford, who has died aged 90, as the leading classical actor of her generation at the Old Vic, came in the 1950s. In that distant decade, she played every Shakespearean female role going, from Imogen and Portia to Beatrice, Rosalind and Desdemona. It was reckoned that she appeared in all but four of his three dozen plays.
She made her name as Isabella in Peter Brook’s 1950 staging of Measure for Measure – rarely done in those days – at Stratford-upon-Avon. Brook wanted an unknown to play the virginal novice opposite John Gielgud’s Angelo. And he asked her, as she knelt before the Duke to plead pardon for Angelo, whom she had “bed-tricked” in order to save her condemned brother, to hold a pause for as long as the audience would allow. Two minutes is an eternity of silence, and that’s what she sometimes commanded.
