Michael Darvell pays tribute to the exceptionally versatile actress and singer Haydn Gwynne…
It is a crying shame that actress Haydn Gwynne had to pull out of Old Friends, the tribute Sondheim compilation at London’s Gielgud Theatre. She had been part of the one-off performance in 2022, giving an outstanding rendition of ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ from Company. This year Cameron Mackintosh is staging the piece for a whole season’s run. Sadly Gwynne was unwell during the rehearsals and had to leave the production. She had been suffering from cancer and died on 20 October 2023.
Gwynne was one very talented lady with the ability to succeed at whatever the theatre, the cinema or television threw at her. She could play equally well in classical or modern drama or comedy and she was an excellent musical performer, so it is a source of great sadness that she didn’t appear in more musicals. It is obvious that she could have held her own in anything by Sondheim who at times specialised in strong, not to say tough, women – perhaps a quality inherited via his mother.
The Great British Bake Off Musical. Picture: Roy Tan
I could see Gwynne tackling any number of his great female roles such as Mama Rose in Gypsy, Domina in A Funny Thing…, Cora in Anyone Can Whistle, Leona in Do I Hear a Waltz?, Joanne in Company, Phyllis in Follies, Desiree in A Little Night Music, Nellie Lovett in Sweeney Todd or, say, The Witch in Into the Woods. Well, enough of fantasy casting because Gwynne gave us plenty to enjoy in her career and it is such a shame that she left us at just age 66.
Haydn Gwynne was born in Hurstpierpoint in Sussex to Guy Thomas Haydn, who ran a printing business, and his wife Rosamond. Haydn’s first love was tennis and she played at county level, possibly hoping to became professional. Instead she studied sociology at the University of Nottingham and also became fluent in French and Italian. Following graduation she worked in Italy on a five-year lectureship, teaching English as a foreign language at the University of Rome La Sapienza. After she returned from Italy to the UK she decided on an acting career and first worked for Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough. She then began to appear on television including the Lovejoy series with Ian McShane and David Lodge’s Nice Work. Then After the War (1989) was a mini-series by Frederic Raphael about two Jewish boys who become friends but fall for the same girl.
Old Friends. Picture: Danny Kaan
It was, however, the TV sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey in 1990 that really brought Gwynne before the viewing public in a big way. She played Alex Pates, the assistant editor on a fictional news channel but, although the show always had topical items from the real news, it concentrated more on what was going on behind the screen and the hilarious inter-relationships between the channel’s staff members. Alex Pates was a feisty, often bad-tempered shrew of a woman with an unhappy home life, and Gwynne’s excellent playing of the part brought her a BAFTA nomination.
She played Portia in a 1996 TV adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, opposite Bob Peck as Shylock and Benjamin Whitrow as Antonio. Gwynne was also in the TV movie Hospital!, a spoof medical drama for the launch of Channel 5 in 1997. Her other TV shows at this time included Time Riders, a science fiction series for children, and Peak Practice, about a collection of country doctors, which ran for nearly ten years from 1993. Gwynne played one of the doctors from the seventh series. Other appearances were in Kavanagh QC, Verdict and Dangerfield etc.
After those she appeared in Merseybeat, Chris Murray’s drama series about police officers in Liverpool. Later on her TV work included the BBC mini-series of Lucy Floyd’s The Secret (2002), Dalziel and Pascoe, Absolute Power, set in a PR firm with Stephen Fry, John Bird and Angus Deayton, and Consenting Adults, Julian Mitchell’s amusing account of the Wolfenden Committee’s report leading to the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
Television certainly took up much of Gwynne’s career and she was in most of the popular shows of the day – Poirot, Sherlock, New Tricks, Midsomer Murders, Silent Witness, Law & Order UK, Death in Paradise, Father Brown and The Crown – as a Lady in Waiting. She was Calpurnia to Ciaran Hinds’ Caesar in five episodes of the long-running series of Rome. The last TV series that Gwynne made was The Windsors in which she played Queen Camilla in a farcical soap opera version of the Royal Family, the members of which are seen in very unconventional roles and surroundings.
Gwynne made a few feature films, from a small part in Car Trouble with Julie Walters in 1986, through David Cohen’s comedy The Pleasure Principle with Peter Firth, Michael Frayn’s comic screenplay for Remember Me? with Imelda Staunton, Robert Lindsay and Rik Mayall, and These Foolish Things, a rom-com with Julia McKenzie, Charlotte Lucas and Zoe Tapper plus guest appearances by Terence Stamp, Anjelica Huston, Roy Dotrice, Joss Ackland and Lauren Bacall. In Peter Morgan’s The Audience Gwynne was Margaret Thatcher to Helen Mirren’s H.M. The Queen. For the live streaming of the National Theatre’s The Threepenny Opera she played Mrs Celia Peachum, Polly’s mum. For Angus Jackson’s 2018 film of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Coriolanus with James Corrigan, Gwynne played Volumnia. It was her last appearance in a feature film.
City of Angels
Gwynne’s acting career started with Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough and it was in a musical, no less – Sandy Wilson’s His Monkey Wife. She then joined other provincial theatres in Manchester, Northampton and the Octagon in Bolton where she was in productions including Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Congreve’s The Way of the World. Later on she worked with Kevin Spacey at The Old Vic and was in productions at the Donmar Warehouse, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National and the Hampstead Theatre.
Her next musical was the ill-fated Ziegfeld playing Billie Burke, wife of the Broadway producer and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. The show at the London Palladium was directed and choreographed by Joe Layton, with a book by Ned Sherrin and Alistair Beaton to music and lyrics by Berlin, Coward Gershwin, Hammerstein, Kern etc but it was not a crowd-pleaser. Len Cariou starred in the title role but it ran for barely six months during which Topol took over the lead. Gwynne did her best but the show was really a non-starter from day one.
Better times lay ahead. City of Angels by Cy Coleman, David Zippel and Larry Gelbart opened on Broadway in 1989 and ran for nearly 900 performances, gathering several Tony Awards. It didn’t reach London until 1993 and ran only four months at the Prince of Wales Theatre. It had a good cast with Roger Allam, Henry Goodman and Haydn Gwynne. The show had five Olivier Award nominations including Best Actress in a Musical for Gwynne but the show only won for Best New Musical.
Gwynne was lucky enough to get a part in Stephen Daldry’s production of Billy Elliot: The Musical, with music by Elton John. It was based on the famous film which Daldry had also directed. Gwynne played Mrs Wilkinson who ran the ballet class that Billy joins, and she was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical. The show had ten nominations, winning five including Best New Musical. Gwynne repeated her performance on Broadway where she was nominated for a Tony Award, one of 15 nominations of which the show won ten. In New York the show ran for over 1,700 performances from 2008 to 2012. It had opened in London in March 1995 and closed in April 2016, having won five Oliviers, the Critics’ Circle Award, the Evening Standard Theatre Award and the Theatregoers Choice Award. It then played the world to even greater success.
Billy Elliot
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was a 2010 musical by David Yazbek and Jefffrey Lane, based on the Pedro Almodovar film about a group of women in Madrid covering their relationships with men and the inherent problems therein. It opened at London’s Playhouse in 2015 with Tamsin Greig and Haydn Gwynne and both were nominated for Olivier Awards. It hadn’t run for long in New York – just 99 performances – and it closed early in London too. Gwynne’s next musical show was in 2021 when she took over in the Barbican Centre’s amazing revival of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.
Earlier in 2023 she played a character not unlike chef-cum-broadcaster Prue Leith in The Great British Bake Off Musical. It sounded as if it might have suffered a soggy bottom but Musical Theatre Review’s reviewer awarded it five stars. Some audiences found it great fun but the show only had a limited run for three months. And that brings us to the end of the story with no happy conclusion because, after causing such a storm in Old Friends in 2022, Gwynne died as the extended season in 2023-24 got underway. A great actress, Gwynne will be sorely missed by all who saw her work in film, on television and particularly in the theatre which was probably her natural home.
Haydn Gwynne had two sons, Orlando and Harrison, by her former partner, psychoanalyst Jason Phipps. She was born on 21 March 1957 and died on 20 October 2023. R.I. P.
Michael Darvell
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