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Over a 50-year career, Isabel Dean showcased talent and versatility, though she never fully realized the early promise she showed. With large eyes and classically sculpted features, she became best known for portraying somewhat steely, aristocratic ladies of grace and refinement. Her broader capabilities were evident in her stage work, both in classical and contemporary plays, much of which took place in provincial theatres—partly because early in her career she alienated "Binkie Beaumont," the leading West End theatrical manager. Born Isabel Hodgkinson in Aldridge, Staffordshire, in 1918, her initial ambition was to become an art teacher. She studied painting at Birmingham Art School and joined the Cheltenham Repertory Company as a scenic artist in 1937. Soon, she began taking acting lessons and performing minor roles with the company. “It was inevitable, given her stunning looks,” a company member later remarked.
After working with repertory companies in Brighton and Norwich, she made her London debut on 1 May 1940 as Maggie Buckley in an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s thriller Peril at End House, followed by a Shakespearean role as Mariana in Robert Atkins’s Regent’s Park production of All’s Well That Ends Well. A significant break came in 1943 when she portrayed Jenny in John Gielgud’s acclaimed production of Congreve’s Love for Love at the Phoenix Theatre.
The next year, she joined Gielgud’s repertory company at the Haymarket, reprising the role of Prue in Love for Love and understudying Peggy Ashcroft as Ophelia to Gielgud’s Hamlet—the last time he played the part. Dean performed as Ophelia several times when Ashcroft was ill and followed this with the role of Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Harold Hobson praised as “as pretty and sharply defined as it was lovely.”
When Beaumont invited her to tour India with Gielgud’s company, but only to play the maid in Coward’s Blithe Spirit and again understudy Ophelia, she declined, leading Beaumont to regard her as ungrateful. She never worked under his management again and made few further West End appearances. Instead, she took leading roles in Oxford, Brighton, and the Boltons Theatre, including a radiant Juliet.
She returned to the West End in 1956 as Mary Dallas in the thriller The Night of the Fourth at the Westminster Theatre and, three years later, portrayed Miss Frost, the Catholic lodger seduced by a young student, in the successful production of J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man at the Fortune Theatre.
Meanwhile, Dean became a familiar television presence. She played the principal female role in Nigel Kneale’s hugely popular sci-fi horror series The Quatermass Experiment (1953), a six-episode live broadcast with filmed inserts. Dean portrayed a scientist whose astronaut husband returns from a mission infected by an alien parasite that transforms him into a vegetable-like creature.
When the successful radio comedy A Life of Bliss was adapted for television with its original star George Cole as the bumbling bachelor hero, Dean was cast as his assertive sister Anne.
Other TV roles included Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, David Mercer’s The Parachute (as John Osborne’s mother), Julian Bond’s 13-part series A Man of Our Times, and the upscale soap opera 199 Park Avenue, set in a luxury apartment building where the residents’ stories are connected by a gossip columnist seeking stories. Created and written by Dean’s husband, William Fairchild, it aired twice weekly but lasted only nine weeks. Dean married Fairchild, known for screenplays such as Morning Departure, The Malta Story, and Star!, in 1953; their marriage ended in the early 1970s.
In theatre, she found success in several contemporary plays, including John Osborne’s A Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) at the Royal Court, which transferred to the West End, and provincial productions of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw and John Bowen’s chilling Robin Redbreast. She achieved particular acclaim as Hester in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (at Guildford in 1971 and Nottingham in 1972), following in Peggy Ashcroft’s footsteps once more. Her powerful portrayal of a clergyman’s daughter who leaves her High Court judge husband to pursue a desperate and obsessive affair with a young RAF pilot demonstrated that Dean’s talents had often been underused.
In 1977, she appeared alongside Gielgud for the first time since playing his Ophelia, in Julian Mitchell’s Half Life at the National Theatre.
Dean’s film career began in 1943 with a small role in The Man in Grey. Later films included David Lean’s The Passionate Friends (1948) and Sidney Gilliat’s The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953), in which she embodied droll elegance as the wife of Robert Morley’s Gilbert. “How does it feel to be married to a transcendent genius?” her husband asks as he completes The Mikado. “I suppose I’ve always taken it for granted, dear,” she replies.
In Alexander Mackendrick’s A High Wind in Jamaica, she offered a beautiful and moving depiction of Victorian motherhood in the film’s early scenes. Her final West End stage appearance was as Alan Turing’s tragic mother (played by Derek Jacobi) in Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code (1986).
A few years earlier, critic Harold Hobson had written: “Our own stage is rich in actresses of whom the chief jewel is Peggy Ashcroft—and the most undervalued is Isabel Dean.”
Dean passed away in 1997 at the age of 79.
