Barbara Leigh-Hunt

Barbara Leigh-Hunt was an English actress who moved easily between stage, film and television. Born in Bath, she performed with the Bristol Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, and appeared on Broadway in Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes and Justice. Her work in the National Theatre staging of An Inspector Calls brought her the 1993 Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress. In cinema she took the role of Catherine Parr in Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), and also appeared in Bequest to the Nation (1973), Oh Heavenly Dog (1980) and Billy Elliot (2000). Her best-known screen part came in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), where she played a woman killed by a serial killer. She voiced the farmer's wife in The Plague Dogs (1982). On television she was Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Lady Cumnor in the 1999 adaptation of Wives and Daughters.