In Honour of Anna Massey

On Sunday the British actress and CBE Anna Massey died, and though I have admittedly only seen her in one role I wanted to pay tribute.

She was the daughter of Adrianne Allen and the actor Raymond Massey, who is familiar for instance for embodying the menacing Karloffian cousin in Arsenic and Old Lace (he was also in East of Eden with James Dean, in the black-and-white Scarlet Pimpernel adaptation as Chauvelin and in John Ford's How the West Was Won playing Abraham Lincoln), and was born in Thakeham, West Sussex in 1937. As a teenager she acted first on the stage, and in the course of time covered works from classic playwrights from Pinter through Shaw and Shakespeare to Ibsen, Beckett, O'Neill and Sheridan; in 1958 she began her film acting with a role in the crime drama Gideon's Day.

The minor film role in which I saw her is as Eudora, the maid to Helena Bonham Carter's heroine in Hazard of Hearts. Adapted from a Barbara Cartland novel, this kind of role seems a test at once of the seriousness and the humour of an actor, since you can either find the material beneath you and do a cynical work of it, or take pride in embellishing the material and enjoying the melodrama with a strain of critical wit. Since the script was slender the portrayers had to fall back on a rich vein of stock characters. Anna Massey's touch as a Cassandra-like croaker and affectionate elder servant was deftly convincing, dignified and individual at once.

In the 80s BBC filming of Mansfield Park, she was Mrs. Norris — still a busybody and a chatterbox, but sincere, which was not the case in the book but certainly makes her far more sympathetic. Besides her expressive face, diction, postures and gestures, and formal, old-fashioned air are the traits of a distinguished thespian tradition.

Her important roles, in controversial films from the 1960s and 70s and then a series of classic film adaptations, testify to her range. In recent years she was Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest with Reese Witherspoon and Rupert Everett, and Mrs. Shrike in The Machinist (2004) with Christian Bale.  The CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) was awarded in 2005.

"Anna Massey dies aged 73" [Guardian], by Xan Brooks (July 4, 2011)
Anna Massey [IMDb] and Other works Accessed July 4, 2011
Raymond Massey [IMDb]
"Actress Anna Massey dies at the age of 73" [BBC] (July 4, 2011)
"Anna Massey" [Daily Telegraph] (July  4, 2011)