Sheila Burrell

Sheila Burrell was a British actress whose career was rooted in the theater. Born in Blackheath, London, she trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and made her first stage appearance in 1942, playing Patsy in The Patsy. Two years later she made her London debut at the Prince of Wales Theatre as Rose in The Rest is Silence. Over the following decades she worked with the Bristol Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, taking roles such as Goneril in King Lear, Margaret in Richard III and Lady Sneerwell in The School for Scandal, and she appeared in New York in A Severed Head in 1964. She named Barbara in Dark of the Moon, Honor Klein in A Severed Head and Queen Margaret in Richard III as her favorite stage roles. American viewers knew her best as Lady Rochford in three episodes of Six Wives of Henry VIII.