Upstairs Downstairs and Doctor Who actress dies at 90

Upstairs Downstairs co-creator and actress Jean Marsh has died aged 90, her agent has confirmed.

The British screen and stage star won an Emmy in 1975 for her portrayal of hard-bitten but ultimately kind-hearted maid Rose Buck in the TV drama about class in Edwardian England.

Marsh also had roles in Hollywood films including Cleopatra, Willow and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy and on TV in Doctor Who.

In a statement, Marsh’s friend the film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg paid tribute to her as “wise and funny… very pretty and kind, and talented both as an actress and writer”, adding she died “peacefully in bed looked after by one of her very loving carers”.

Marsh came up with the idea of a period drama involving the servants of a wealthy family while house sitting in France with her friend Dame Eileen Atkins, she later told the New York Times.

She went on to co-create the series, which told the story of the Bellamy family and their servant staff who lived underneath them, alongside John Hawkesworth and John Whitney.

The 1970s ITV series was a critical and popular success and also found a fond audience in the United States, where it aired on PBS.

Upstairs Downstairs is said to have partly inspired the Downton Abbey series and was later reimagined by the BBC in 2010. Marsh became the only original cast member to return, portraying the same role in five episodes.

Asked by the Daily Telegraph in 2010 why viewers appeared to be so interested in master-and-servant dramas, Marsh said: “We still seem to want it because if you rose out of your class, you knew you had done well. And we like it because the past is not as worrying as the news.”

She was later forced to scale back her acting commitments following a stroke.

Other notable TV credits during her long career included roles in The Twilight Zone and Grantchester. Her stage credits include plays by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.

Marsh, who was married for five years to Dr Who actor Jon Pertwee, also co-created the costume drama The House of Elliott.

In 2012, she was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to drama.

In his statement, Lindsay-Hogg described almost daily phone conversations with Marsh over the past 40 years. She was, he said, an “instinctively empathetic person who was loved by everyone who met her”.