She looked fragile, innocent and vulnerable on stage, but the actor Emily Richard, who has died aged 76, was strong, beautiful and radiant, with big brown eyes and a transfixing stare.
In the 1970s she was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company under Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands that came to fulfilment in David Edgar’s 1980 adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, in which she played Kate Nickleby – a still centre in a teeming production by Nunn and John Caird that went to Broadway in 1981 and became a Channel 4 film.
Richard shared that journey with the actor Edward Petherbridge, whom she married in 1981. They had first met, in 1976, in the touring Actors’ Company formed by Petherbridge and Ian McKellen in 1971.
In 1978, they both joined the RSC’s small-scale touring company led by McKellen in Twelfth Night and Chekhov’s Three Sisters, both revelatory productions, in which Richard played Viola and Irina, and Petherbridge, Feste and Vershinin.
Outside the RSC, she had an eclectic, stop-start career, dogged in its later stages by ill health. But her quality shone in everything she did, whether it was playing Tess of the d’Urbervilles on BBC radio (1971) or a young Christian Bale’s mother in Steven Spielberg’s magnificent Empire of the Sun (1987), based on JG Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel of his war years in Shanghai.
That film was scripted by Tom Stoppard, whose stage play The Real Thing she graced – alongside Haydn Gwynne, Clive Francis and Ewan McGregor – in a 1993 BBC radio production. She had a lovely melodious voice, and great projection, which came in handy when, later in life, as the stage work dried up, she worked as a tourist guide around the sights of London.
Born as Anne Richards, she grew up in north London, the middle of three daughters of Ronald Richards, a ship’s captain in the merchant navy, and his wife, Nancy (nee Brooks), a fashion consultant. She was educated at Channing girls’ school in Highgate and, after a brief spell at secretarial college, trained, unhappily, at the Webber Douglas school; she left after one year having been told that she was “too timid” on stage.
Nonetheless, she blossomed as Mole in a 1968 schools touring production of Toad of Toad Hall and – having won her Equity card and changed her name – glimmered archly as Ela Delahay in a 1971 revival by Braham Murray of Charley’s Aunt starring Tom Courtenay as Fancourt Babberley; this was a production of the Manchester-based 69 Theatre Company, which morphed into the Royal Exchange. After a national tour, the show went to the Apollo in the West End.
Richard was now on the radar, and she played roles in Emmerdale Farm (1973) and Father Brown (1974); linked up again with Courtenay in the hit TV series The Glittering Prizes, starring Tom Conti; and, before joining the RSC, took the lead role in a 1976 BBC television adaptation of Lorna Doone.
At the end of the 70s, at the RSC, she was Thaisa, the hero’s doomed royal wife in an exemplary, uncluttered production of Pericles starring Peter McEnery, and in a fine revival of Nikolai Erdman’s Russian classic The Suicide (with Roger Rees in the title role) – both of these directed by Ron Daniels.
After the Nickleby adventure, she had returned to Stratford-upon-Avon in an enchanting, Edwardian production by Barry Kyle of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 1984, ideally cast for her beauty and vivid articulation as the Princess of France, alongside Rees as Berowne, Kenneth Branagh as the King of Navarre and Petherbridge as a whimsical Don Adriano.
Later RSC productions included a curiously misfired 1993 Macbeth, led by Derek Jacobi and Cheryl Campbell, in which she was a memorably beleaguered and poignant Lady Macduff and, in the same year, a severely truncated version of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein.
Richard first appeared on television in 1969 and had leading roles in several series: Enemy at the Door (1978-80), about the wartime Nazi occupation of Guernsey (though it was shot in Jersey); The Cleopatras (1983), written by Philip Mackie and directed by John Frankau – she was Cleopatra Tryphaena, queen of Egypt; and Oscar (1985), a biographical series of three dramas narrated by Michael Pennington, in which she was Constance, wife of Michael Gambon’s Oscar Wilde.
She appeared with her husband on stage for the last time in 1988 at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L Sayers (and Muriel St Clare Byrne); Petherbridge offered a reincarnation of his Lord Peter Wimsey on television, she was the crime novelist Harriet Vane. Her last BBC radio work came in Fame and Fortune (2007), Frederic Raphael’s sequel to The Glittering Prizes.
She and Petherbridge lived in north London, settling in later years in Lewes, East Sussex, where she continued to indulge her great talent for embroidery and lace-making.
She is survived by Petherbridge, their children, Dora and Arthur, her stepson David (from Petherbridge’s first marriage to Louise Harris), and by her sisters, Frances and Nancy.
• Emily Richard (Anne Richards), actor, born 25 January 1948; died 2 October 2024
