Barbara Leigh-Hunt, the Olivier Award-winning actress who portrayed one of the victims of Barry Foster’s Necktie Murderer in Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, Frenzy, has died. She was 88.
Leigh-Hunt died peacefully Sept. 16 at her home in Warwickshire, England, her family announced.
The British star also was known for her performance as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the acclaimed 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.
During her seven-decade career, Leigh-Hunt appeared for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, in the West End and on Broadway. She received her Olivier in 1993 for her turn as Sybil Birling in an NT revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry.
In Frenzy (1972), filmed in London, Leigh-Hunt portrayed Brenda Blaney, the ex-wife of a struggling former RAF squadron leader (Jon Finch), who police at first think is the serial killer on the loose. Her character is raped and murdered in what many consider the most graphic sequence Hitchcock ever filmed.
Her film résumé included Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), Bequest to the Nation (1973), Joe Camp’s Oh Heavenly Dog (1980), Paper Mask (1990), A Merry War (1997), Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000) and Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair (2004).
Leigh-Hunt was born on Dec. 14, 1935, in Bath, Somerset, England. She graduated from Bristol Old Vic theater school in 1953 and a year later made her theatrical debut in London with the Old Vic.
She traveled with the company to Broadway to appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1954 and in Hamlet and King Henry V in 1958-59. And with the RSC in the 1970s, she acted in Travesties, King Lear and Sherlock Holmes, which she accompanied to Broadway in 1973.
Leigh-Hunt also appeared in plays for Mike Newell (Mrs. Mouse, Are You Within?), Tom Stoppard (Travesties) and Richard Eyre (Bartholomew Fair, Racing Demon) and portrayed Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the NT in 1988.
She was married to actor Richard Pasco from 1967 until his 2014 death. Donations in her memory can be made to The Royal Theatrical Fund.
