My friend and colleague Polly March, who has died of cancer aged 77, was an actor of rare intelligence, wit and taste. She was particularly brilliant in comedy roles, where she had the unerring instincts of a light comedian – or a clown, when the role called for it. But she could also break your heart with her depths of emotion and truth.
Until a few days before her death, Polly was directing a production of Coriolanus with Roaring Voices, the company of young actors she founded in 2014 and ran with Teatru Salesjan in Sliema, Malta.
She was born Marie-Therese Azzopardi-Preziosi in Sliema, and adopted the rather snappier stage-name Polly March when she started out as an actor. Her Maltese father, John, worked in government and her English mother, Nancy (nee Rickard), was a concert violinist. Polly was sent to Britain for her education and, after leaving Holy Trinity convent school in Bromley, trained in London at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Stanislavsky Institute.
In the 1970s Polly was a founder member, with the artistic director Richard Everett, of the Upstream Theatre in Waterloo. Her life and work were intertwined with her Christian faith. Her one-woman show about Lilian Baylis, Beauty and the Bounders, won several awards and in 1986 was broadcast on BBC radio. Other solo performances included a play about Julian of Norwich, and The Small Zone, about the dissident Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya.
After starring at the Watermill theatre, Newbury, in my musical The Great Big Radio Show in 1993, she was invited back to the theatre to appear in a series of Alan Ayckbourn plays.
On radio, Polly acted in dramatisations of CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia books with Paul Scofield and David Suchet. She also appeared in the 1997 Peabody award-winning drama Bonhoeffer: The Cost of Freedom.
In 2012 Polly returned to live in Malta for family reasons. She quickly became a leading light in the theatre scene, encouraging and supporting a whole generation of young theatre-makers. Latterly she campaigned for justice for the memory of the murdered investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. Polly was also out on the streets of Naxxar at dawn every day, feeding stray cats, and featured in the 2023 film Cats of Malta, as one of a dedicated (and slightly eccentric) band of cat-lovers.
In the play I wrote for her, Star of Strait Street, Polly portrayed a real-life heroine of the second world war, Christina Ratcliffe, who went to Malta to entertain the troops and ended up as an aircraft plotter. It was staged as part of the 2023 Festival of Chichester and also toured Australia and America.
All who knew Polly loved her dearly. She had a wonderfully generous heart and brought lightness and life to every situation. My wife Lizzie and I were blessed to know her, to work together, and to share a joyous friendship with her over more than 50 years.
Polly is survived by her sister, Elizabeth, nephews, Julian and Antony, and and nieces, Alison and Sara.
