Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who appeared in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Frenzy, dozens of other films and TV and on West End and Broadway stages, has died. She was 88.
Her family said today that she died September 16 at her home in Warwickshire, England, but did not give the cause.
Barry Foster and Barbara Leigh-Hunt in ‘Frenzy’
Everett Collection
Leigh-Hunt was best known in the U.S. for her key role in Hitchcock’s penultimate thriller Frenzy (1972). She played Brenda Blaney, who is brutally raped and killed by the notorious “Necktie Murderer” in London. She was the ex-wife of Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), who is suspected of the crime that actually was committed by his friend Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), to whom he turns unwittingly for help.
“I was invited out to Pinewood Studios to speak with Hitch for about half an hour,” she told the BBC in a 2017. “To me he was a cinematic god, but I was convinced it was a complete waste of time as I’d never even made a film. On my way home, I called my agent from the station. I was astonished to hear they’d already been on the phone to say I had the part.”
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Born on December 14, 1935, in Bath, Leigh-Hunt Leigh-Hunt made her name on the London stage, winning an Olivier Award decades into her career for playing Sybil Birling in Stephen Daldry’s 1993 revival of An Inspector Calls at the National Theater. She often appeared at the Old Vic in London and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in such shows as Henry V, Measure for Measure and Love’s Labour’s Lost. She also starred as Ophelia in Hamlet, opposite her husband Richard Pasco in the title role.
Leigh-Hunt also appeared on Broadway in 1950s productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and King Henry V and again in the mid-’70s play Sherlock Holmes.
She also did extensive work in British TV, guesting on dozens of series and playing Lady Catherine de Bourgh opposite Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle in the BBC’s 1995 miniseries Pride & Prejudice. Her big-screen credits range from Henry VIII and His Six Wives and Oh Heavenly Dog to A Merry War, Billy Elliot and most recently Mira Nair’s 2004 Vanity Fair, starring Reese Witherspoon.
A funeral will be held October 12 at St. John’s Church in Aston Cantlow, followed by a prive burial. The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Royal Theatrical Fund or Denville Hall.
Information on survivors was not immediately available. Leigh-Hunt was predeceased by Pasco, to whom she was married from 1967 until his death in 2014.