Jane Lapotaire has died aged 81

Jane Lapotaire has died aged 81.

Laportaire had a remarkable stage career spanning over five decades, rooted firmly in classical and Shakespearean theatre.

She trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from 1961 to 1963, joining the Bristol Old Vic theatre company in 1965 and the National Theatre in 1967. She was also a founding member of The Young Vic Theatre in 1970/71, where she took on leading roles including Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew and Jocasta in Oedipus. She then moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974.

The role that defined her career came in 1978: she performed the title role Édith Piaf in Pam Gems’s play Piaf, directed by Howard Davies for the RSC, in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London at the Warehouse Theatre in 1979. Two years later, the show moved to Broadway, where Lapotaire won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She also won the Laurence Olivier Award for the same role.

Among her other most memorable stage appearances were playing opera diva Maria Callas in Terence McNally’s Master Class, and Gertrude to Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Her many other stage credits included Shadowlands, Dear Anyone, Antigone, Venice Preserved, Ghosts, Henry VIII, and her one-woman show Shakespeare As I Knew Her.

Her distinguished career was cut short in 2000 when she collapsed in Paris with a massive brain haemorrhage while giving a Shakespeare masterclass. She made a remarkable return to the stage over a decade later: in 2013 she returned to theatre with an emotionally charged account of the Duchess of Gloucester in the RSC’s Richard II, starring David Tennant. Subsequent appearances included Queen Isobel in Henry V (2015, with Jude Law as Henry) and the Duchess of York in Richard III (2016), both for the RSC.