My wife, Bardy Thomas, who has died aged 77, was a voice coach at the Central School of Speech and Drama, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Rada.
Among those she worked with over the years were Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Perkins, Terence Stamp and Lenny Henry, the last of whom she helped when he was playing Othello with no previous Shakespeare experience. Many others, including Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Rayne, Matthew Rhys and Katy Cavanagh, have written about the importance of her teaching to their careers.
Bardy was born in Wheelock, Cheshire, to Kathleen (nee Black), a housewife, and Albert Henshall, an accountant who was chairman and president of Stoke City football club. Growing up in the nearby small town of Alsager, she went to St Dominic’s high School in Newcastle-under-Lyme, where she discovered a love of literature, especially poetry.
From 1965 to 1968 she trained as a drama teacher at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and then stayed on to join the staff as a voice teacher, working in that role for 11 years.
In 1979 she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, also as a voice teacher, until in 1981 she went freelance so that she could balance her theatrical work with the demands of raising a young family.
Thereafter she worked on a number of shows at the National Theatre, including John Wood’s Richard III, and directed various plays for Art Depot, a theatre company she and I set up, including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece at the Almeida theatre in London in 1988 and Sweet As a Nut at the Warehouse theatre in Croydon in 1990, which won the Charrington’s London Fringe award.
In 1994 Bardy took up a full-time voice coach job again, at Rada, where she eventually became dean of studies and also directed student performances of As You Like It, Cymbeline, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Rivals and Juno and the Paycock, before retiring in 2007.
Between 2016 and 2019 Bardy ran a series of evenings called Shakespeare Out Loud, in Halstock, Dorset, which were designed to give people with no previous experience of acting a taste of how professionals approach Shakespeare’s texts. She also wrote two published novels, Into the Hill (2013) and A Good Man (2017), as well as a play, A Passing Star, that was intended for radio but was never taken up.
A beautiful, intelligent and warm woman, she loved her dogs and her kitchen garden.
Her first two marriages, to the actor Tony Robinson and to Jem Thomas, both ended in divorce. She is survived by me, our two children, Jack and Bea, a son, Olly, from her second marriage, and three grandchildren, Lucien, Robyn and Margot.
