Barbara Leigh-Hunt has died aged 88.
The actress passed away peacefully at her Warwickshire home on September 16.
Alfred Hitchcock included Leigh-Hunt in his penultimate film, Frenzy (1972), in which she played a victim of a necktie murderer, played by the late Barry Foster.
She described the film director as the ‘perfect gentleman’ after working alongside him.
The movie magic continued with Leigh-Hunt’s academic vice-principal in Billy Elliott (2000), Lady Bareacres in Vanity Fair (2004) with Reese Witherspoon, Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), and Bequest to the Nation (1973).
As well as films, the star has featured in TV and theatre works, with many more notable performances.
She starred in the 1995 TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with co-stars Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, while her theatre career saw her working for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. She appeared on both the West End and on Broadway.
She featured in the play Pack of Lies (1983) opposite Judi Dench, Mrs Mouse, Are You Within? (1968), and King Lear (1976). In 1993, she was awarded a Best Supporting Actress Olivier for her turn as Sybil Birling in An Inspector Calls.
The stage and screen icon was born in Somerset, and raised by her mother Betty, who would regularly take her young daughter to the theatre.
The pair moved to London while Leigh-Hunt was a teenager and she graduated from the Bristol Old Vic theatre school in 1953.
Her first acting job was on BBC radio show Children’s Hour in 1947, and after her graduation, she toured America and Canada, with the Old Vic performing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night.
In 1967 she married the actor Richard Pasco, who she remained with until he died in 2014.