Anna Massey

Two of the most uncomfortable British films ever made about the act of watching gave her her first and most famous screen roles. In Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, in 1960, she is Helen Stephens, the neighbour who befriends the wrong man. In Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, twelve years later, she is Babs Milligan, in the same structural position again. Being cast twice as the woman who gets close to a suspected killer says something about her face on camera: alert, unsentimental, entirely credible as a person who notices things.

She worked constantly, in more than a hundred character roles across British film and television, and the honours came from the small screen and the stage rather than from cinema. She won a BAFTA for Best Actress as Edith Hope in the 1986 television adaptation of Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, a role her co-star Julia McKenzie said could have been written for her, and an Olivier Award in 1982 for a supporting stage performance.

The back half of the filmography is a gallery of formidable women in period adaptations, and she is superb in it: Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park, Mrs D'Urberville in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, Queen Victoria in Around the World in 80 Days, Mrs Bedwin in Oliver Twist. Late on, The Machinist used her as Mrs Shike, a horror part in all but name, which suggests she never lost whatever it was that Powell found in 1960. She died in 2011.