She appeared in the
West End in
Michael Clayton Hutton's
Power Without Glory,
Seán O'Casey's
Red Roses for Me,
Noël Coward's
Peace in Our Time,
John Griffith Bowen's
After the Rain (also on
Broadway), and plays such as
Little Boxes and ''Where's Tedd
. She was a member of the Stables Theatre Company. She also appeared on Broadway in the premiere season of Boeing-Boeing'' (1965). In Manchester, she appeared in
Eugene O'Neill's one-act play
Before Breakfast, directed by
Bill Gilmour. She also directed the play herself, for the
RSC at the Old Red Lion,
Stratford, in 1975. She played Mistress Quickly in Terry Hand's 1975/76 production of
Henry IV, Part 2 and
Henry V also for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She made over 500 television appearances, including a
Play for Today, "O Fat White Woman" (1971), adapted by
William Trevor from his own short story, and
Ken Russell's television film
Song of Summer (1968), in which she played
Jelka Delius, the long-suffering wife of the composer
Frederick Delius. Russell cast her again in his cinema film
The Music Lovers (1970) as
Tchaikovsky's mother-in-law. In the 1974 BBC television series
Shoulder to Shoulder, she played the composer Dame
Ethel Smyth. In the 1970s British police drama
The Sweeney, episode
Big Spender, she appeared as Edith Wardle the wife of a dishonest employee of a car park company who becomes involved in an elaborate fraud. ==Personal life==