​Jean Marsh, who has died aged 90, co-created the historical domestic drama Upstairs Downstairs, and starred as the parlourmaid Rose Buck, a role that bridged three decades in her acting career.
The show was the joint creation of Jean Marsh and Dame Eileen Atkins, a close friend and fellow actress who, like her, came from a working-class background. The feline, green-eyed Jean Marsh was then in her mid-thirties, out of work, almost penniless and of no fixed address.
The pair accepted a job as house-sitters in the south of France, where they colluded on possible scenarios for a television series that could depict the working classes fairly. “We still had giant-sized chips on our shoulders,” she recalled, and she was irritated by grandee roles. (“I’ve got the sort of facial bone structure that is supposed to make a good duchess. They never cast girls with fat faces as duchesses.”)
Jean Marsh in 1975 – Chris Barham/ANL/Shutterstock
They toyed with the idea of a drama focusing on the domestic staff of a household: “About that time, in 1967, The Forsyte Saga was on and we kept asking: ‘Who does the laundry in their house? Who does the cooking?’”
Back in England, and despairing of any further progress, Jean Marsh called a television producer to pitch the idea. Within a few days London Weekend Television had signed up the series, and production began in less than three months, with Jean Marsh plundering Mrs Beeton’s Household Management for background. Master tapes spent almost a year in storage before finally being broadcast – in black and white – on October 10 1971. Soon, LWT executives realised that they had a hit on their hands.
Running for 68 episodes from 1971 to 1975, Upstairs Downstairs drew audiences of 30 million and was sold to 80 countries. In her role as Rose, plucky and generous head housemaid at 165 Eaton Place, Jean Marsh received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, and claimed to have been sent greater quantities of lustful fan mail “than the beautiful girls on the show”.
The series won two Baftas and a Golden Globe. There were spin-off novels, a spin-off television serial Thomas and Sarah (1979), a magazine and a cookbook. Gerald Clarke, of Time magazine, called it “the most exalted soap opera ever to be shown on TV”.
The cast of Upstairs Downstairs. Back row, from left: Christopher Beeny, Jenny Tomasin, Jacqueline Tong, Karen Dotrice and Gareth Hunt. Front row: Angela Baddeley, Gordon Jackson and Jean Marsh – ITV/Shutterstock
Jean Lyndsey Torren Marsh was born on July 1 1934 in Stoke Newington, north-east London. Her mother, Emmeline, worked as a housemaid in a pub hotel; her father Henry was an outdoor maintenance man and printer’s assistant.
The family were creative and largely self-taught. Henry Marsh learnt to play the piano by ear, and when the young Jean fell ill with nervous paralysis, the parents enrolled her in ballet lessons as treatment. These were followed by classes in piano, singing and mime.
As she told The Guardian in 1972: “If you were very working class in those days, you weren’t going to think of a career in science. You either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworths.”
Jean Marsh aged 17 – Mirrorpix
She left school at the age of 15 and began working as a dancer for film. Her first onscreen appearance was in Happy Go Lovely (1951), and she was the principal dancer in Where’s Charley? (1952).
From 1956 she began a steady career in television, including a role as a robot in an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959), and co-starred alongside Laurence Oliver in the American television adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1959). That year she also made her Broadway debut in John Gielgud’s Much Ado About Nothing.
From 1965 she took various roles in Doctor Who: first as Princess Joanna of England in The Crusade, then as Sara Kingdom, a short-lived companion of William Hartnell’s Doctor who was clad in a “fabulously ridiculous” catsuit of tight-brown tweed, before being hit by a ray gun that aged her to death. In 1989 she returned opposite Sylvester McCoy as Morgaine, the chief villain in the Arthurian story Battlefield.
In a 1966 episode of The Saint – ITV/Shutterstock
On the big screen, she put in a brief appearance as Octavia in Joseph Mankiewicz’s vast historical epic, Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
The hapless production proved so monumentally expensive that it made a loss despite grossing more than $50 million. Feelings ran high, and Jean recalled an atmosphere that was “so extravagant, so louche, it affected everyone’s lives. Richard and Elizabeth weren’t the only people who had an affair.”
Away from Upstairs Downstairs she secured a key role in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), as the secretary who finds her boss strangled to death. She negotiated a break from her contract with LWT to appear on the New York stage, in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus (1975).
With Ian Hendry in the television film Your Money or Your Life – Popperfoto
When Upstairs Downstairs finished later that year she returned to America, playing Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest as well as the sophisticated lead – also called Gwendolen – in the West Coast premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (in repertory together, 1977), and opposite Tom Conti in Whose Life Is It Anyway (1979) on Broadway.
Despite the widespread popularity of Rose Buck, some of Jean Marsh’s most memorable work was in science fiction and fantasy. Return to Oz (1985) was a dark adventure film based on the work of L Frank Baum (creator of The Wizard of Oz), in which Jean played the dual role of a brutal psychiatric nurse and a witch with a detachable head.
For the effects-laden Willow (1988), directed by Ron Howard, she was enveloped in rubber latex and warts. Make-up took five hours a day and the dust and smoke machines gave her bronchitis, but she maintained that it was “huge fun. I used to walk down the street, and kids would run away from me.”
Her 1955 marriage to Jon Pertwee, when she was 20 – PA
She and Eileen Atkins joined forces once again in 1992 for The House of Eliott, the story of two sisters in 1920s London who establish a dressmaking business. The following year Jean published her first novel, inspired by her work on the series, under the same title. Her later novels included Iris (2000), and Fiennders Abbey (2011).
In 2009 the BBC commissioned a revival of Upstairs Downstairs, to star Keeley Hawes and Ed Stoppard. The first episode aired at Christmas the following year, now set in 1936, six years after the original series had concluded.
Jean Marsh reprised her role as Rose Buck, with Eileen Atkins playing an “upstairs” character, the redoubtable Lady Maud Holland. Neither was involved on the scripts, and Eileen Atkins departed after the first series. In 2011, as the second series was due to begin filming, Jean Marsh suffered a minor stroke, curtailing her involvement on the show, which was subsequently cancelled.
With her OBE medal in 2012 – Sean Dempsey/PA Wire
She was an ardent Francophile, who would translate articles from Le Monde into English, then the next day translate them b​ack into French, to see how far she had drifted from the original.
Jean Marsh married, in 1955, the actor Jon Pertwee. They divorced in 1960. Though she lived with Albert Finney and Kenneth Haigh, both actors, and was in a 10-year relationship with the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, she never remarried.
Jean Marsh was appointed OBE in 2012 for services to drama.
Jean Marsh, born July 1 1934, died April 13 2025​
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