Daphne Slater - Telegraph She was still a student when she appeared in a BBC documentary, I Want to Be an Actor (1946), alongside the drama adjudicator Irene Vanbrugh. Her season at Stratford in 1947 had taught her much about stagecraft, and when she appeared in Christopher Fry's new play The Lady's Not For Burning (Arts, 1948) the following year, she won critical acclaim. She went on to play Anya in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, directed by Alec Clunes, at the same venue and in 1950 reprised another Stratford role, as Marina in Pericles, at the Rudolf Steiner Hall. While critics admired her Angelique in Molière's Le Malade Imaginare (Garrick, 1951) - "Daphne Slater gives her wan little apple face a happy outing," Tynan noted - her West End career was destined for a premature end. She had met her future husband, the actor John Harrison (Benvolio in her debut Romeo and Juliet), and while their offstage romance blossomed she chose to follow him to Nottingham when he was appointed director of the Playhouse there in 1952. She refocused on television, and in the same year played Elizabeth Bennet to Peter Cushing's Mr Darcy in the first BBC Television version of Pride and Prejudice. Daphne Slater had already made her mark in Jane Austen as Harriet Smith in a 1947 television version of Emma, and completed an Austen trilogy for the BBC in 1960 as Anne Elliot in Persuasion. In 1956 she earned further plaudits in the title role of Jane Eyre, opposite Stanley Baker playing Mr Rochester. For her last major BBC role, in 1957, as Prue Sarn, the girl with a hare lip, in a six-part series based on Mary Webb's Precious Bane, Daphne Slater underwent considerable physical discomfort. Her upper lip was turned back and fixed under the nostril with a technique used in plastic surgery. The procedure also produced the necessary speech defect required by the part. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s she continued to make television appearances, and was Portia in a BBC production of Julius Caesar (1959), with Eric Porter as Brutus and Michael Gough as Cassius, and Fay Compton in a revival of JM Barrie's 1920 period piece Mary Rose the same year. In 1962 she starred in Alun Richards's play Nothing To Pay in the Armchair Theatre series on ITV, and in 1968 she brought an appealing melancholy to the role of Queen Mother in a BBC adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's The Man In The Iron Mask. One of her last television roles was as Mary Tudor opposite Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R (1971). Daphne Slater's first marriage, to John Harrison, ended in divorce in 1964, and she married, secondly, an Austrian businessman, Frederick Kolmar, with whom she lived in Germany and Switzerland. He predeceased her, and she is survived by her first husband and their two sons. Daphne Slater, born March 3 1928, died October 4 2012