SHEILA GISH, the actress who lived in Chalk Farm, died on March 9 aged 62.
The actress – who was well known for portraying heroines in Tennessee Williams plays – had suffered from cancer.
A tumour in her right eye needed surgery in 2002, and Sheila had her right eye removed. But this did not stop her working: wearing an eye patch, she appeared for the last time as Arkadina in a Stephen Pimlott production, The Seagull.
Sheila spent her earliest years in Egypt and the Sudan where her army officer father was posted, then returned to England for schooling. After training at Rada she did a stint in repertory, in Pitlochry, where she met Roland Curram, her first husband, and the father of her two daughters. But her time in rep was short: by the age of 22 she was appearing in the West End, and she also had a small part in Darling, that Swinging Sixties film directed by John Schlesinger.
Her career began with a series of comedies and farces in which her blonde beauty was dominant. This career was rewarded with a Clarence Derwent Award for her part in Alan Ayckbourn’s Confusions in 1975. In 1981 she was offered yet another dizzy blonde, in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. Instead, to the surprise of many, she opted for a production of Racine’s rarely performed Berenice, which required a depth of drama, passion and classical training that few until then had known she possessed.
After Berenice, her next major challenge was Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Her performance was, rightly, acclaimed as definitive. The came a series of dark, despairing women: the doomed Clytemnestra for Deborah Warner’s Electra (1991), the incestuous Yvonne in Les Parents Terrible, against Jude Law’s sickly son (1993), yet another suffocating mother in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (1997), and Joanne, a wittily drowning alcoholic in Stephen Sondheim’s Company (1994) for which she won an Olivier Award.
There were also film and television appearances, including two Kingsley Amis adaptations, in one of which – That Uncertain Feeling (1985) – she met her second husband, the actor Denis Lawson.
She leaves behind her husband Denis Lawson, and her daughters Kay Curram and Lou Gish.

JUDITH FLANDERS