Cleo Sylvestre, who has died aged 79, was a trailblazing British black actor and one of the first performers of colour on television soaps – Coronation Street in 1966, then Crossroads for two years – and the first black woman to play a leading role at the National Theatre, in Peter Nichols’ acerbic The National Health or Nurse Norton’s Affair (1969). Cleo was staff nurse Norton.
Until she arrived as a regular in Frank Dunlop’s Young Vic company in the early 1970s, alongside actors including Jim Dale, Denise Coffey and Nicky Henson, her roles were invariably those of social underlings. She doggedly held her ground even in small parts, notably in two early and significant Ken Loach films – Up the Junction (1965, about factory workers in Battersea, south London), and Cathy Come Home (1966, a lacerating drama about homelessness that led to the foundation of Shelter), both on the Wednesday Play strand on BBC TV.
But her breakthrough was triggered by her appearance in Some Women (1969), by another notable TV director, Roy Battersby, which was based on four stories from imprisoned women, and shown late-night on BBC2 after a public protest when the BBC at first pulled it.
The morning after Some Women aired, Reg Watson, the producer who later created Neighbours in Australia, rang Cleo, inviting her to visit the set of Crossroads, the hugely popular motel soap (then drawing 15 million viewers) lorded over by Meg Richardson played by Noele Gordon. She went, and agreed to join the cast, staying for two years as Meg’s adopted daughter, Melanie Harper, doubling as receptionist and chambermaid.
Other television shows she graced included Till Death Us Do Part (1967 and 1972), Z-Cars (1967), Callan (1972), Grange Hill (1979, 1989-90), Doctors (2007 and 2016), New Tricks (2006) and The Bill (episodes from 1988 to 2004).
Later in life, she said that, as a black actor, she felt she was “a hamster on a wheel” – “nothing led anywhere,” not the stint at the National, nor Crossroads; any more than had her West End debut – as a hotel worker – in Simon Gray’s first stage play, Wise Child (1967), in which Alec Guinness dragged up as a blackmailed crook on the run.
The play was a flop, though the critic Harold Hobson hailed Gray, already a successful novelist, as a playwright of consequence. He was right. And the performances at Wyndham’s theatre of Cleo as well as those of Guinness, Simon Ward and Gordon Jackson were terrific.
Sylvestre was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and brought up by her mother, Laureen (nee Goodare), a dancer, and Owen Sylvestre, a Trinidadian flight sergeant who had come to Britain to fight in the second world war. The couple married in 1944, but divorced in 1955.
As a child, Cleo received letters from an “Uncle Ben” in Sierra Leone, whom she presumed was a relative. Only decades later, when her daughter Zoë visited Sierra Leone, did Cleo discover that Uncle Ben, a lawyer called Ben Lewis, was in fact her father. One of Cleo’s godparents was the composer Constant Lambert; another the Labour MP and peer Tom Driberg, a Soho chum of Laureen’s.
Cleo’s white grandmother, Laureen’s mother, a dancer, was born in Yorkshire and moved to New York, where she ran a dance school. Laureen left Yorkshire and relocated to London, where she herself worked as dancer, notably in the Shim Sham club in Wardour Street. In one 1965 episode of Doctor Who Cleo was a belly-dancer.
She
grew up with her mother in a council flat in Euston, north London, was educated at Camden school for girls and trained at the Italia Conti stage school.
Her first show business strike-out, and an amazing one, was a 1964 recording she made of Phil Spector’s great pop song To Know Him is to Love Him, backed by the Rolling Stones, whom she had met on a blues night in the Marquee club.
After the Young Vic, she married Ian Palmer, an advertising executive, in 1977, and raised a family of three children while working in regional theatres, in Lincoln, Brighton, York, Derby and Coventry. From 1996 to 2016 she was co-artistic director of the Rosemary Branch pub theatre in Islington.
During this later period of her life she returned to the London stage in Antony Sher’s first play, ID (2003) – brilliantly directed at the Almeida by Nancy Meckler – playing the “Cape-coloured” unattainable beloved of the man who assassinated the South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid. She took the roles of several black heroines (Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker and the Nobel peace prize winner Wangari Maathai) in Alison Mead’s A Century of Women (2011) at the Leicester Square theatre.
In 2018 she appeared in the hospital drama Allelujah! by Alan Bennett at the Bridge theatre; and in 2021 she was Mrs Pugh in a radical, not totally successful, staging of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood set in a care home, also featuring Michael Sheen and Siân Phillips, at the National Theatre.
She delivered her solo show, The Marvellous Adventures of Mary Seacole, about the British-Jamaican nurse who served in the Crimean war, in the House of Lords, the National Portrait Gallery, on the Edinburgh festival fringe and in Pentonville prison. She was a council member of Equity and a board member at the Young Vic and Hoxton Hall, one of London’s last remaining music halls.
She was also the inspiration for a character in the broadcaster Zeb Soanes’s children’s books, illustrated by James Mayhew, starring Gaspard the urban fox. Soanes, a friend and neighbour in Hackney, east London, used Cleo as a template for the lovable Honey, whose dog Finty befriends the fox, boasting that his owner has been in “films and everything”.
Later film parts included a cameo in Paddington (2014) and in 2021 she featured in the Channel 5 remake of All Creatures Great and Small as Anne Jackson, an interwar domestic help in the Yorkshire dales, echoing some aspects of her grandmother’s story, and reappeared in the same role last year.
Her last television appearance was on the BBC’s Antiques Road Show last month, where she reminisced about her time recording and hanging out with the Rolling Stones when Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, especially, used to pile into her mother’s tiny Euston flat for her delicious cooking.
Cleo was appointed MBE last year. Ian died in 1995; she is survived by their three children, Zoë, Lucy and Rupert.
• Cleo (Cleopatra) Mary Sylvestre, actor, born 19 April 1945, died 20 September 2024
