The actress ‘shunned’ for playing Queen Camilla
Haydn Gwynne was best known for playing Margaret Thatcher, Queen Camilla and the cynical news editor in Drop the Dead Donkey
When Haydn Gwynne decided she wanted to be an actress she felt like she was “coming out of the closet”. She was in her mid-twenties, had a degree in sociology, was fluent in French and Italian and had just spent five years teaching English at the University of Rome.
On a holiday in New York, she took in some Broadway shows and had a moment of revelation. In “a bolt of lighting” she realised she did not want to go back to the classroom. She wanted to go on stage and had been “in denial”; acting had been her true calling all along.
“I had suppressed my ambition and thought it wasn’t a proper job,” she said. “So when I finally told people my dark secret, I remember feeling surprised people weren’t more shocked.”
She moved back in with her parents and wrote to every theatre company in Britain. With no theatrical training and only a handful of amateur stage appearances in school and university productions to her name, she was ignored or rejected everywhere she turned.
“I didn’t mind the letters saying ‘Thanks but no thanks’,” she said. “It was when you went for a reading. They weren’t unkind and they would smile at you. But you could see in their eyes that they weren’t interested. That hurt.”
Eventually, towards the end of 1984, Alan Ayckbourn offered her a part at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in his revival of Sandy Wilson’s eccentric 1971 musical His Monkey Wife, based on a John Collier story about a man who marries a chimpanzee.
From there her ascent was rapid. As a late starter she bypassed the usual ingenue parts and went straight into heavyweight lead roles from Restoration comedy to Ibsen. She could also sing and was cast in 1988 to play Billie Burke, the long-suffering second wife of the Broadway producer Flo Ziegfeld, at the London Palladium in the lavish, no-expense-spared musical Ziegfeld.
With Gwynne looking resplendent in a pounds 10,000 stage costume, it should have been a dream part but it turned out to be a career-threatening disaster. The show became one of the most expensive and derided follies in stage history, closing after seven months with losses of pounds 3 million that sent its producers into liquidation.
Gwynne was one of the few to emerge from the debacle with her reputation intact, having sung her torch songs with flair and style; but she admitted the experience was “traumatic” and “the nightmare to end them all’‘, which left her crying herself to sleep after each excruciating performance.
She fled to California and spent weeks on a road trip, driving across the United States alone wherever her inclination took her and out of radio contact with her agent. When her odyssey finally ended, the hire company told her they had never had a car returned with so many miles on the clock.
Back in Britain she landed the role of Dr Robyn Penrose in Nice Work, the BBC’s 1989 adaptation of David Lodge’s Booker-nominated campus satire. The series attracted much attention for its explicit - and intentionally comical - sex scenes in which she cavorted naked with Warren Clarke.
“I didn’t totally mind that because the script was funny,” she remarked. “But people hovering around you, wiping the sweat off your brow, putting make-up on your bits ... I’d be happy never to play a love scene again for the rest of my life.”
The role that made her a household name came in 1991 in Channel 4’s topical sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey as Alex Pates, the professional but waspish and cynical news editor. Set in a television newsroom and with real-life politicians such as Neil Kinnock and Ken Livingstone making guest appearances, the show was a TV landmark but Gwynne surprisingly chose to quit after the second series. “If I had kept playing Alex I might have typecast myself,” she said. “I had visions of only being offered feisty, middle-class women with a script that called for them to get their kit off at regular intervals.”
She received more high-profile television roles and came to specialise in the portrayal of tough-talking professional women, including the no-nonsense Dr Joanna Graham in ITV’s long-running Peak Practice and Superintendent Susan Blake in the BBC’s police drama Merseybeat. Yet, ever keen for fresh challenges and with the lure of the stage rather than the screen never far away, she chose to leave both series well before they ended.
She did several seasons with the RSC but, as she grew older, she worried that her career would fizzle out “once you’re no longer shaggable”, as she bluntly put it.
Such fears proved unfounded. She was tall and willowy - her patrician features meant that she was a natural to play older and imperious figures, none more so than Margaret Thatcher, whom she portrayed on the West End stage in 2013 opposite Dame Helen Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth in Peter Morgan’s play The Audience.
“Everything about her [Thatcher] was antithetical to what I believe in,” Gwynne said. “But as soon as you are asked to play someone like this, you stop judging. You’re coming at her from the inside out.”
She was due on stage in the role on the day that Thatcher died. Once it was decided that the performance should go ahead, it led to an evening of intensified drama, as Gwynne recalled.
“It was electrifying. The audience were absolutely petrified about how they should react,” she remembered. “There was a huge build-up before my entrance and when I walked on with Mrs Thatcher’s distinctive gait, there was always laughter.
“That night, there was absolute silence; the anxious feeling in the auditorium was so palpable and overwhelming that for a moment there was a real danger that we would be infected. I took a mental deep breath, and Helen did, too, and we seized control and the audience relaxed and came with us.”
Three years later she played Camilla, then the Duchess of Cornwall, in the Channel 4 comedy sitcom The Windsors, alongside Harry Enfield as Prince Charles and Richard Goulding as a lager-swilling Prince Harry. Portraying the future queen as a cartoonish villainess ruthlessly plotting her way to power, she played the part “as if she were Joan Collins in a soap called Balmoral”. But, she insisted, the series was not anti-monarchist but merely “silly and affectionate and just having fun”.
It seemed that the royal household did not get the joke and Gwynne believed she was subsequently shunned. “I had met her [Camilla] years ago before The Windsors,” Gwynne said. “But now any time we’re at the same event, I get shooed away or bundled off in case we come face to face.”
This year The Windsors was revived in a coronation special with Gwynne now elevated to Queen Camilla and thrilled that her scheming had come to crown-jewelled fruition. She also played Lady Susan Hussey, Queen Elizabeth’s woman of the royal bedchamber, in the Netflix series The Crown.
Haydn Gwynne was born in 1957 in Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, the daughter of Rosamond (nee Dobson) and Guy Hayden-Gwynne, a former Barnardo’s boy who ran a printing business. Educated at Burgess Hill girls’ school she represented Sussex at tennis at junior county level and for a while contemplated a professional career. Instead she went to Nottingham University and then to Italy before her moment of revelation that she wanted to act.
Despite the disaster that was Ziegfeld, she retained a love of musicals and one of her signature performances came as the dance teacher Mrs Wilkinson in Stephen Daldry’s 2005 stage musical based on his own movie Billy Elliot. After a triumphant run on the London stage that earned her a nomination for a Laurence Olivier award, she reprised the role on Broadway and picked up a Tony nomination.
There were further Olivier nominations for her roles in the West End musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (2015) and in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (2017).
She is survived by her two sons, Orlando and Harrison, from her marriage to Jason Phipps, a psychoanalyst, from whom she had recently separated, although they remained friends.
Her spirited, high-kicking rendition of The Ladies Who Lunch was a highlight of Cameron Mackintosh’s Stephen Sondheim gala Old Friends in the West End last year and she was due to rejoin the cast for a further run in London last month but was prevented from doing so by her cancer diagnosis.
It meant that her final West End appearance came in The Great British Bake Off Musical in March this year, when her character, modelled on Prue Leith, performed cartwheels across the stage, leaving the audience in admiration.
(Haydn Gwynne, actress, was born on March 21, 1957. She died of cancer on October 20, 2023, aged 66)