In 2003 she lost her right eye to skin cancer.
(meta data) TITLE: Obituary: Sheila Gish | Global | The Guardian (meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/michaelcoveney (meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian (meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2005-03-11T07:50:43-0500 Skip to main content The Guardian - Back to home Support The Guardian Available for everyone, funded by readers Search jobs Sign in current edition: US edition Elections 2020 US Politics # Sheila Gish Formidable leading actor renowned for her powerhouse performances Michael Coveney Fri 11 Mar 2005 07.50 EST Gish... 'a rampaging Mrs Venable' in Suddenly Last Summer, at London's Comedy Theatre in 1999. Photo: Tristram Kenton A s a femme with more than a touch of fatale, Sheila Gish, who has died, aged 62, of cancer, was a formidable leading actor for the last 20 years of her distinguished career. She had enjoyed success in many a light comedy, and as one of a versatile quintet in Alan Ayckbourn's Confusions at London's Apollo theatre in 1976. But she really made audiences sit up as Racine's doomed heroine, Berenice, in Christopher Fettes's production at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1982, and, a year later, as Tennessee Williams's Blanche du Bois, directed by Alan Strachan, first at Greenwich and then at the Mermaid theatre. The critics hailed an actor justifying a long, simmering claim to star status. Both roles wallowed in helplessness and physical need, and Gish, the very opposite of a dumb blonde, with her tigerish technique, voluptuousness, energy and physical prowess on stage, gave unbeatable tragic performances. Her Blanche, said Nicholas de Jongh, made a final exit as "a glazed version of Marlene Dietrich, quite mad but serene". Gish was ideal casting in such rabidly reprehensible roles as Joe Orton's man-eating Mrs Prentice, in What The Butler Saw (in an otherwise tame 1990 revival), and the raddled, incestuous Yvonne (besotted with her young son, played by Jude Law) in Jean Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles, directed to the decadent hilt by Sean Mathias at the National theatre in 1994. With the same director, she delivered a rampaging Mrs Venable - opposite a ravishing Rachel Weisz - in another Williams hothouse drama, Suddenly Last Summer, at the Comedy theatre in 1999. Again, her character was obsessed with her own son. Her hair was lacquered and coiled "like a lion's mane after an expensive visit to the salon," said one critic; she resembled "some garden district Lucrezia Borgia in regal purple," said another. Working with Fettes again in 2002, Gish played Racine's Phaedra at the Riverside studios. The constant incestuousness was now becoming a bit of a cliché. "Imagine a vampire drinking its own blood," said Benedict Nightingale, "or a ghost haunting itself." I had never seen a Phaedra from whom life was so visibly draining, but the production was generally counted a failure. Gish emanated physical strength and tenacity, even when afflicted by a cancerous tumour and losing her right eye in an operation to remove it in 2003. Within weeks, she was rehearsing at the Chich ester festival theatre, where she opened as the over-the-hill actor Arkadina, in Phyllis Nagy's sprightly new version of Chekhov's The Seagull. Gish did glamour as well as anyone, and her performance, stately as a galleon, was gorgeous with self-esteem, elegant and irresistibly vain. Even the eye-patch seemed like an extravagantly good idea. Sheila Gish was born in Lincoln, the daughter of an army officer. In the course of a peripatetic postwar childhood, she stayed in an SS officer's house in the rubble of Dusseldorf, and saw child beggars in Egypt and Sudan. After boarding school and Rada, she started work in rep, and met her first husband, the actor Roland Curram, with whom she had two daughters, Lou Gish and Kay Curram, both actors. She met her second husband, Denis Lawson, in 1985, when they were both appearing in a BBC adaptation of Kingsley Amis's An Uncertain Feeling. They fell deeply in love and Curram, with whom she remained on friendly terms, subsequently came out as gay. On television, Gish demonstrated her range as a notable Mrs Fluck, Diana Dors's mother, in The Blonde Bombshell (1998), and resorted to more familiar type as Lady Montdore, a stuck-up character adept at spotting an eligible earl, in the 2001 version of Nancy Mitford's Love In A Cold Climate. She took good film roles in A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg (1972), with Alan Bates and Janet Suzman, and in the Merchant/Ivory Jean Rhys film Quartet (1981). These were but enamelled vignettes; her real business would always be on the stage. She won an Olivier award as the steaming alcoholic Joanne in Stephen Sondheim's Company - "Here's to the ladies who lunch" - directed by Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse, and in the West End, in 1995. And, in Phyllis Nagy's Never Land, at the Royal Court (then occuping the Ambassadors) in 1998, she gave a remarkable exhibition of emotional displacement as a woman moving through alcoholism to rain-drenched despair. Small - she was 5ft 4in tall - and lustrously blonde, with a magnificent figure, of which she was justly proud, Gish was a powerhouse performer, an outstanding character in the postwar British theatre, and much loved by her family, peers and colleagues. She is survived by her husband and two daughters. · Sheila Gish, actor, born April 23 1942; died March 9 2005 Reuse this content
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