When she was offered the role of the matriarchal Irene Raymond in EastEnders, Roberta Taylor told the producers she didn’t mind what the character looked like as long as she didn’t have to wear a cardigan.
After struggling through melodramatic storylines for three years (1997-2000) – Irene played an ex-wife and estranged mother with a toyboy lover, a supermarket and a penchant for new age trends (including feng shui and aromatherapy) – she promptly moved to the BBC for another heavy-hitting role in ITV’s The Bill (2002-2008), as the hard-drinking, hard-nosed Detective Inspector Gina Gold.
Taylor, who has died aged 76, supported these powerful roles with a distinguished theatre career, honing her craft and her unique blend of glamour and vulgarity during a long association – 1976 to 1995 – with the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and with seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Exchange in Manchester, the Birmingham Rep and in the West End.
Her last major TV series was the cozy comedy Shakespeare & Hathaway (2018–22), starring Jo Joyner as Luella Shakespeare and Mark Benton as a shambolic Frank Hathaway in the style of Colombo, and Taylor as the extravagantly dressed and hoarse theater costume designer Gloria Fonteyn.
The series was largely filmed in Stratford-upon-Avon and Taylor managed to create genuine emotion in her solemn dedication of the ashes of a dead dog to the River Avon, just below the terrace of the bar at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
Taylor’s last outing was Jonathan Harvey’s jukebox musical Dusty (2018), which closed after a short tour despite a promising dramatic premise and strong performances from Katherine Kingsley as Dusty Springfield and Taylor as her undermining mother (“cunning and subtle,” said Susannah Clapp in The Observer).
By now almost a household name, audiences and theatergoers were familiar with Taylor’s brand of cutting-edge, emotional truth, warm, expressive voice, and those large, flowing brown eyes set in a pretty, square face. She triumphantly demonstrated how a truly good actor can encompass grand tragedy, high comedy, and superior soap operas with ease.
And she had the advantage of being an authentic Cockney, whose stage work, as in her high-profile television career, was rooted in the family life and characters she described so vividly in her well-written memoir, Too Many Mothers (2005).
Roberta, commonly known as “Robbie”, was born in Plaistow, East London, the daughter of Winifred Roberts, a scheming woman on the old trolleybuses, and another bus conductor, Robert Archer, who had married elsewhere and didn’t stick around. She grew up in a small house on the Isle of Dogs with her mother, an overbearing grandmother and several aunts.
But these women in her life, she always claimed, made her the woman she was. She attended the nearby church primary school, St Luke’s, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s grammar school, but left without qualifications to take a series of secretarial jobs. While training to be a dental nurse, she took drama classes at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel.
By then she had married (in 1966) Victor Taylor, a ropemaker, with whom she had a son, Elliott, the same year. An older friend in Portobello market advised her to audition for drama school. She did so, successfully, at Central School, in 1973, on the same day that Peter Guinness, another aspiring actor, and her future life partner and second husband, were auditioning.
Taylor had set her sights on a job with Citizens, which subsequently developed under the leadership of Giles Havergal, designer Philip Prowse and translator/dramaturg Robert David MacDonald into Britain’s most exciting and internationally oriented theatre company.
She joined the orchestra after graduating in 1976, appearing that year for the first time in the repertoire of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins (their last collaboration) and in a beautiful version of Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade, the first in English.
Other memorable performances included La Duchesse de Guermantes in A Waste of Time (1981), an extraordinary four-hour compression of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; and majestic, comic performances in Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1984), in which Taylor was extraordinarily funny as Amanda, with a refined sense of vulgarity not unlike what I imagine Gertrude Lawrence was in the original production, and in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1986). Taylor was hilarious as the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley, who finds an incriminating bracelet on her wrist, utters a four-letter curse word, and, when trying to slip a letter down her dress, flashes her bare breasts.
In 1990 she starred in the Citizens revival of Brecht’s Mother Courage with Glenda Jackson, also playing at the recently renovated (now defunct) Mermaid Theatre in Puddle Dock, London. As Yvette, Taylor complemented Jackson’s terrific lead role, whoring among the army in red platform lace-up boots.
Much later, in 2014, she returned to the Citizens in Dominic Hill’s revival of Hamlet, playing Gertrude to Guinness’ Claudius. One evening, when an angry Claudius came down from stage left with orders to follow him, she unexpectedly turned and left stage right, earning a huge laugh and redefining the wedge of discontent that drove their relationship onto the stage.
Her films were few, but notable scenes include Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1990), starring Anjelica Huston and Mai Zetterling, and Brian Gilbert’s Tom and Viv (1994).
Taylor, a committed smoker, suffered from emphysema and a fall two months ago exacerbated her underlying ill health with pneumonia, an infection she could not overcome. She divorced her first husband in 1975 and settled in Pimlico, central London, and then in Vauxhall, with Guinness, 20 years ago. They married in 1996.
He survives her, as do Elliott, his granddaughter Ellis, and his two stepbrothers Brian and Lionel.
• Roberta Alexandra Mary Taylor, actor, born February 26, 1948; died July 6, 2024