Jean Marsh, who has died aged 90, created the classic 1970s television series Upstairs, Downstairs with her friend and fellow actor Dame Eileen Atkins. As well as co-writing the series, Marsh played the part of Rose Buck, a parlour maid, who became something of a sex symbol in the early 70s and returned as the housekeeper when the series was revived nearly four decades later.
The period drama, “the everyday story of Edwardian folk”, as the Guardian described it at the time, followed the intertwined lives of the upper-class Bellamy family and their servants, at 165 Eaton Place in Belgravia, London. Set between 1903 and 1930, the series documented a period of immense social change.
Marsh and Atkins had originally conceived of a story centred around two maids. Both from working-class families, the actors wanted to create a drama that depicted characters with backgrounds more like their own. They came up with the idea “over a Sunday lunch”. The Forsyte Saga was then a popular television drama series. “It was beautiful, of course,” Marsh recalled. “The clothes, the houses ... But we thought ... who is cooking the food and ironing the clothes? At the time, apart from Dickens there was nothing written about the working classes. And I was determined to be the maid and not the lady.”
Their idea was developed by the television producers John Hawkesworth and John Whitney and taken up by London Weekend Television. Upstairs, Downstairs ran for five series on ITV between 1971 and 1975, winning two Baftas. For her role as the hard-working parlour maid, Marsh won an Emmy for outstanding actress in a drama series (1975) as well as two Golden Globe nominations. Audiences in the UK peaked at 18 million and the show was sold to 80 countries.
The two repeated the success with The House of Eliott, about two sisters who set up a fashion house in the 20s, which ran for three BBC series (1991-94).
However, when they proposed a re-make of Upstairs Downstairs for the 21st century – this time on the BBC – the series (2010-12) was overshadowed by ITV’s Downton Abbey. Marsh, the only member of the original cast, reprised her role as Buck, and Atkins played an “upstairs” character, Maud, Lady Holland. Despite critical acclaim, with Keeley Hawes and Ed Stoppard in the starring roles, the series could not capture the same audiences as Downton and was axed after nine episodes.
Marsh’s big screen credits included Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), The Eagle Has Landed (1976) and the fantasy films Return to Oz (1985) and Willow (1988), but Rose Buck is the role for which she will be best remembered.
Born in London, Jean grew up in Stoke Newington. Her father, Henry, was a printer’s assistant, and her mother, Emmeline (nee Bexley), a parlour maid “in a big pub hotel” who lived to the age of 102; Jean later described her as the prototype for her Upstairs, Downstairs character. (Atkins’s father, meanwhile, had been a chauffeur and an under-butler in “a grand household”.) The Marsh family of four lived in two rooms with no kitchen and no bathroom. Jean and her elder sister, Yvonne, shared a bed.
She left school at 15 to train as a dancer. “If you were very working class in those days you weren’t going to think of a career in science,” she told the Guardian in 1972. “You either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworth’s.” She quickly built a career in acting, working first in repertory theatre, in Huddersfield and Nottingham.
In 1959 she went to the US to appear on Broadway with John Gielgud in his production of Much Ado About Nothing. One of her first television roles was alongside Laurence Olivier in the US television film The Moon and Sixpence (1959), playing his Tahitian mistress. “People would say: ‘If it turned out you were an earl’s daughter we wouldn’t be surprised ... I was, like: ‘Excuse me, but I am actually a scrubber.’”
She went on to appear in The Saint (1964-68), The Tomorrow People (1994) and, much later, the 2007 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, playing Mrs Ferrars. She also had a long association with Doctor Who, appearing as Lady Joanna in the 1965 serial The Crusade, Morgaine in Battlefield in 1989, and the companion Sara Kingdom in the 12-part The Daleks’ Master Plan in 1965-66, with William Hartnell as the first Doctor. She reprised the role in a series of Doctor Who audio plays between 2008 and 2016.
Her friendship with Atkins was a long collaboration. They met in their 30s, Atkins just divorced from the actor Julian Glover and Marsh separated from the actor Kenneth Haigh after a 10-year relationship. “We were exactly the same age, both sort-of working class and we were always laughing,” Marsh said.
She was married for five years from 1955 (when she was 20) to the actor Jon Pertwee, who later played Doctor Who; as well as the relationship with Haigh, she had an affair with Albert Finney and a long-term partnership with the film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. He said that they had spoken by phone “almost every day for the last 40 years”.
Marsh enjoyed her image as a sex symbol and was fond of speaking mischievously in interviews. At 78, she said: “Men look at me. They might be very happily married but they just think: ‘Nice’.”
Marsh was appointed OBE in 2012.
Her sister Yvonne died in 2017.
• Jean Lyndsey Torren Marsh, actor and writer, born 1 July 1934; died 13 April 2025
