Jean Lindsay Torren Marsh was born on 1 July 1934 in London. As a child, she attended dance and pantomime classes as a therapeutic therapy, so to some extent her further career in show business was not accidental. She began as a model and dancer, and later worked in English repertory theaters. It was not as an actress, but as a dancer Marsh first appeared on the screen in the musical fantasy of Michael Powell’s Tales of Hoffman (1951). During the filming of one of the films, she met her future husband,
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Jean Lindsay Torren Marsh was born on 1 July 1934 in London. As a child, she attended dance and pantomime classes as a therapeutic therapy, so to some extent her further career in show business was not accidental. She began as a model and dancer, and later worked in English repertory theaters. It was not as an actress, but as a dancer Marsh first appeared on the screen in the musical fantasy of Michael Powell’s Tales of Hoffman (1951). During the filming of one of the films, she met her future husband, actor John Pertwee. Their marriage lasted five years, from 1955 to 1960. In 1959, she made her Broadway debut as Hero in Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Sir John Gilgud, one of the pillars of English theater. While in the United States, Marsh starred in several television productions, including one of the episodes of the science fiction series The Twilight Zone (1959), in which she played an android robot. In the UK, she continued to play in theater, film and television, in particular, Marsh was familiar to viewers as Princess Joana and Sarah Kingd from the television novels Crusade and General Plan of the Daleks in the science fiction series Doctor Who. However, in general, throughout the sixties, Marsh remained in the shadows - so, her name was not even mentioned in the credits of the famous film by Joseph Leo Mankiewicz "Cleopatra" (1963) with the star couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, where she appeared in a small role of Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony.
And only in the seventies, the situation began to change, after Marsh together with actress Eileen Atkins invented and created a television series "Up, down", telling about the life of the privileged London family and their servants in the early twentieth century. The series was very popular and ran on British television from 1971 to 1975. Marsh herself played the devoted and discreet maid Rose in it. For this role, she was nominated twice for an Emmy Award and twice for a Golden Globe. Ironically, after almost twenty years in show business, she was voted the best new actress of 1972 in the UK. Other roles she played during these years include Mrs. Rochester in the television adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre (1971, D. Delbert Mann), the stiff marriage agency secretary in Alfred Hitchcock's famous crime thriller The Excitement (1972) and Joanna Gray, the Nazi spy in the military adventure film The Eagle Landed (1976, directed by John Sturges). In 1975, the actress returned to Broadway in Alan Bennett’s play Habeas Corpus, and in 1979 she played in Brian Clark’s psychological drama Whose Life Is It, After All?.
In the first half of the eighties, she starred in the American comedy series Nine to Five (1982-1983), subsequently played two similar characters in Hollywood fantasy fairy tales – Princess Mombie in Return to Oz (1985, directed by Walter Merch) and the evil Queen Bavmord in Rondou (1988). Also, many years later, she returned to the updated series “Doctor Who”, starring in the role of a witch in the next story “Battlefield” (1989, dir. Michael Kerrigan). In the early nineties, Marsh renewed her creative alliance with Eileen Atkins, inventing and creating a new television series, Eliott House (1991-1994), a costumed story of the lives of two sisters in London in the twenties and thirties. This time, Marsh did not star in the series, limiting herself to the role of the creator and writer of the show. She is also known as the author of fiction - she owns the novels "House of Eliott", "Guardians of Finnders Abbey" and "Iris". In 1994, for a small role of actress Anna von Hagen in the fantastic thriller "Fatherland" (1994, dir. Christopher Menol), she was awarded the American Cable Television Award.
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