Jean Marsh
- Publication: The Times
- Date: 2025-04-15
- Author:
- Page: 48
- Language: English
Actress and co-creator of Upstairs, Downstairs who won an Emmy for her role as the no-nonsense parlourmaid Rose
The best ideas often come from ordinary beginnings. In 1969 two actress friends, Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, were in Atkins's kitchen riffling through family photographs and musing on the fact that both had parents who had been in domestic service. They sensed the germ of a television drama. Marsh pitched the idea to a producer friend and a couple of years later Upstairs, Downstairs, a saga of masters and servants at 165 Eaton Place, a large townhouse in Edwardian London, hit the screen. Loosely inspired by The Forsyte Saga, it would run for five series and become one of the most successful costume dramas on television.
The show, however, got off to a shaky start. It was hit by a technicians' dispute over extra payments for using colour, and London Weekend Television, the ITV company which had bought the show, had such low expectations that it waited a year for a transmission date. Even then it was tucked away late on Sunday evening. But audiences loved the show, which was sold to 70 countries and proved particularly popular in the US. where it won seven Emmy awards.
Atkins had hoped to appear but was committed to playing Queen Elizabeth I on the West End stage so as the prim parlourmaid, Rose Buck, Marsh became one of the stars of the series, alongside Gordon Jackson's butler, Hudson, and Angela Baddeley's cook, Mrs Bridges. David Langton and Rachel Gurney played their employers, the Bellamys.
Marsh was somewhat weary of being cast in aristocratic roles —"I've got the sort of facial bone structure that is supposed to make a good duchess." she reasoned — and her aim was to depict the working classes accurately. Asked why she thought the British were so fascinated by the relationship between masters and their servants. Marsh said: "Because if you rose out of your class. you knew you had done well. And we like it because the past is not as worrying as the news."
Upstairs, Downstairs did not make Marsh rich (she was paid just f150 for the idea) and though there were regular and welcome repeat fees they were pegged at 1970s levels. With The House of Eliott, another period drama she devised with Atkins in the 1990s, she made sure of securing a better deal.
The programme was set in a London fashion house in the 1920s established by two sisters, who were played by Stella Gonet and Louise Lombard. It ran for three series, attracting more than ten million viewers, and was parodied by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders as House of Idiot in their eponymous sketch show. Marsh regarded the spoof as an accolade.
In 2010, Upstairs, Downstairs returned to the screen, this time on the BBC, as a three-part Christmas special. Marsh was the only member of the original cast to reprise her role, with Rose now running a domestic servant agency and returning to 165 Eaton Place as housekeeper to the new owners. Atkins played one of the upstairs characters, Maud, Lady Holland.
The revival of Upstairs, Downstairs was seen as a BBC riposte to the success on ITV of another masters-and-servants piece set in the Edwardian era, Downton Abbey. Marsh dismissed the idea, insisting that the new Upstairs, Downstairs had been three years in the making. She also accused Downton of pinching incidents from her original. Julian Fellowes. the creator of Downton, retorted that he drew his inspiration not from Upstairs, Downstairs but from his own country house drama, Gosford Park.
Jean Lyndsey Torren Marsh was born into a working-class family in Stoke Newington, north London, in 1934. Her father, Henry, was a printer's assistant with Odhams Press, and her mother. Emmeline, had been a housemaid. a job which provided part of the inspiration for Upstairs, Downstairs. It was a tough childhood. There was little money and the family of four shared two rooms with no bathroom. As a child, Marsh suffered from nervous paralysis. which affected her legs and, later, part of her face. She left school at 16.
Despite this unpromising background. she was determined to go on the stage. and with parental encouragement she made her way as a photographic model. 'child actress and dancer. "If you were very working class in those days," she said, "you weren't going to think of a career in science. You either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworths."
While still in her teens she danced in the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film. The Tales of Hoffmann. She had repertory experience in Huddersfield and Nottingham and, unusually, made her Broadway debut before she reached the West End, playing Hero opposite John Gielgud in Much Ado About Nothing in 1959.
Her first West End play. Bird of Time, came two years later and for a decade or so she crisscrossed the Atlantic. In the US she acted in summer stock, had a small part in the film Cleopatra and appeared in The Twilight Zone. In Britain, she made an appearance in Doctor Who, as a judo expert in a catsuit and black boots, and had a leading role in The Informer, one of the TV hits of 1967. She was the stern secretary in Alfred Hitchcock's final British film, Frenzy, and, in probably her best cinema role, the German spy in The Eagle Has Landed (1976).
It was her portrayal of Rose in Upstairs, Downstairs which made her name, not only in Britain but, to her surprise, in America. The series ran on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which made Marsh its poster girl: "1 was on buses and rubbish bins everywhere." American audiences took to the series and she won a best actress Emmy.
When Upstairs, Downstairs finished, it was back to Broadway for Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus with Donald Sin-den and Rachel Roberts. Marsh stayed on, once more dividing her time between America and England, with an apartment in New York and a cottage near Henley-on-Thames. She appeared in other Broadway plays, including Whose Life is it Anyway? with Tom Conti, and in the early 1980s she was the artistic director of Adelphi University Theatre on Long Island. She also had a leading role in the American office sitcom — based on the film Nine to Five.
In Britain she was Gertrude to David Threlfall's Hamlet (1986) at the Oxford Playhouse, and other stage work included Blithe Spirit, Uncle Vanya and Miss Madrigal in The Chalk Garden. On television, she returned to Doctor Who (1989) as Morgana, an evil enchantress, and played the Matron in Psycho Ward 11 in The All New Alexei Sayle Show.
After a break from the stage, she appeared in Bennett's The Old Country and was back in the West End in 2007 in a revival of the French farce Boeing Boeing opposite Mark Rylance. This was after she had a hip replacement, and longstanding glaucoma had been corrected. "For the first time in 34 years", she recalled, "I walked on stage and could see the audience, which was a nightmare. I didn't realise they sat there waving their fans!"
She was Mrs Ferrars in a TV version of Sense and Sensibility and in 2008 she played Mrs Touchet, companion to the heiress, Isabel Archer, in a stage version of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady in the Peter Hall season in Bath. She wrote a book on favourite walks and her novel, Finders Keepers, a bodice-ripper set in Edwardian England, was short-listed for the Romantic Novel of the Year prize.
At 20 she had a short-lived marriage to the actor Jon Pertwee, who was 15 years older. She subsequently lived with the actors Albert Finney and Kenneth Haigh and had a ten-year relationship with the film and theatre director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. "I have had partners who I have thought about marrying and who have thought about marrying me," she told the Telegraph in 2010. "The problem was that we never thought it at the same time."
Auburn-haired and sharp-featured, Marsh was something of an eccentric. She claimed never to wear underwear, for years did not own a television set, and would go for long walks alone and in the dark, stopping to lie on her back and talk to the moon. Yet she did not live in the clouds. "I'm enchanted by people," she said in 2013. "I look at them and think: 'Oh, he's bought a wonderful knobbly carrot.' Everything I notice."
Jean Marsh OBE, actress and writer, was born on July 1,1934. She died of complications arising from dementia on April 13, 2025, aged 90
Caption: Upstairs, Downstairs found fans in America, where Marsh became a poster girl
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- Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=Jean Marsh | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Jean_Marsh | work=The Times | pages=48 | date=2025-04-15 | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=12 July 2026 }}</ref>
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