Jane Lapotaire, the British stage actor whose only Broadway performance — in the title role of Pam Gems’ Edith Piaf musical Piaf — won her a 1981 Tony Award, died March 5, in the UK. She was 81.
Her death was reported today by The Guardian. A cause was not disclosed.
A veteran of the British stage and television, Lapotaire was a co-founder with Laurence Olivier and others of London’s The Young Vic in 1970. On TV, she played Marie Curie, Cleopatra and, in two 2019 episodes of The Crown, Princess Alice of Greece.
But it was her transformative performance on Broadway in Piaf that brought Lapotaire to the attention of the American public. She’d already won an Olivier Award for her West End performance two years earlier, and in ’81 she took the Tony for Best Performance by a Leading Actress/Play, beating out such well-known names as Glenda Jackson (Rose), Eva Le Gallienne (To Grandmother’s House We Go) and Elizabeth Taylor (The Little Foxes).
Lapotaire later would regret her decision to attempt a Hollywood career following her Broadway success, explaining in interviews that that, at age 40, she became “very aware of not being ‘glamorous’ in the accepted sense.”
Her stage career in London was much more successful, to say the least: In addition to The Young Vic, Lapotaire performed at such revered venues as the Bristol Old Vic, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She was appointed CBE in 2025 and attended the investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle last month.
Born on December 26, 1944, in Ipswich, Suffolk, Lapotaire would go on to study acting at the Bristol Old Vic before joining the National Theatre under Olivier’s leadership in 1967. She was accepted into the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974.
Her British many stage credits would include The Homecoming, The Taming of the Shrew, Oedipus, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, Shadowlands, Hamlet (opposite Kenneth Branagh) and a touring production as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class. It was while performing in the latter production in 2000 that Lapotaire suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage that she later chronicled in her 2003 memoir Time Out of Mind.
After surgeries and a period of recuperation, Lapotaire returned to acting, both on stage and television, with her post-hemorrhage credits including Casualty in 2009, Downton Abbey in 2014 and the two episodes of The Crown in which she played the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
In 2020, she played Granny in Netflix’s version of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca that starred Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas and Armie Hammer.
Lapotaire’s film credits include Antony and Cleopatra (1972), Lady Jane (1986), James Ivory’s Surviving Picasso (1996), Shooting Fish (1997) and The Young Messiah (2016).
Lapotaire is survived by Rowan Joffé, her son with The Killing Fields director Roland Joffé. She and Roland Joffé were married from 1974 until their divorce in 1980.
English (US) ·