Freda Dowie obituary

Terence Davies, one of Britain’s most original film-makers, said he would never have made his autobiographical classic Distant Voices, Still Lives if Freda Dowie had not agreed to play his mother in it. She has died aged 91.

Dowie, a character actor with a mournful look, portrayed this matriarch of a Liverpool working-class Catholic family during the 1940s and 50s with stoicism, forbearance and a quiet solitude, as her character – and her children – endured beatings from her husband, played by Pete Postlethwaite.

Despite Davies saying he toned down the violence, Dowie recalled: “It was tough working with Pete, as he was full of anger then. You could see why Terry cast him.” The director had seen Postlethwaite’s potential to explode into fits of rage, while being intent on casting Dowie after spotting her playing a string of victims on television.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), made in the lyrical, evocative style ever present in Davies’s work, is presented as fragments of a family’s life, complete with singsongs in the pub. However, the harshness prevents it from being nostalgic, instead merely bringing to the screen memories of a childhood.

Although Postlethwaite credited the film as his breakthrough, it never achieved the same fame for Dowie. But it did bring her opportunities to take character roles in groundbreaking television dramas. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1989), based on Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical novel about Jess, a girl growing up in a Pentecostal household in Lancashire and coming to understand her sexuality, she played Mrs Green, a fellow church member of the girl’s controlling mother (Geraldine McEwan). Mrs Green’s piety is questioned when her mood changes from devout and glum to appearing to revel in holding a wine glass to a wall to eavesdrop on a “fornicating” couple.

View image in fullscreen

Later Dowie appeared in Our Friends in the North (1996), Peter Flannery’s epic nine-part drama paralleling four Newcastle friends’ emotional upheavals over more than 30 years. She brought a quiet dignity to the role of Florrie Hutchinson, stuck in the middle between the socialist idealism of her son Nicky (Christopher Eccleston) and the disillusionment of her trade unionist husband Felix (Peter Vaughan), a former Jarrow marcher.

On finding a machine-gun under her son’s bed, Florrie – another Catholic – goes to church to pray for his soul. She later shows fortitude as Felix battles Alzheimer’s disease – until she can cope no longer and allows him to move to a care home. In the final episode, set in 1995, Nicky returns from Italy for Florrie’s funeral, which marks the transfer of the “older generation” mantle to the “friends”.

Dowie herself followed no faith, although she did explore the thoughts and sayings of the Indian spiritual teacher Meher Baba – ultimately rejecting his belief that he was the Avatar, God in human form.

Born in Carlisle, Cumbria, Freda was the daughter of Emily (nee Davidson) and John Dowie, who sold fried fish. At Barrow girls’ grammar school she passed her higher school certificate at 18, excelling in French, German and Latin, as well as English literature. After training at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London she worked as an acting coach and became principal of the North West School of Speech and Drama in Southport, Merseyside, also adjudicating at local festivals and school competitions.

In 1958 she switched to acting, and began performing in repertory theatres. Within a few years her talent was recognised by the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose experimental group cast her as Mug in Boris Vian’s play The Empire Builders at the New Arts theatre club, London, in 1962. Two years later she appeared alongside Glenda Jackson in the same group’s Theatre of Cruelty season at the Lamda theatre club in London, under the director Peter Brook. Dowie also acted in a string of Greek tragedies, notably with a moving performance in the title role of Electra, alongside Derek Jacobi’s Orestes, at the Greenwich theatre (1971). At the same venue a year later she played Queen Victoria in Brunel.

Her 50-year television career, beginning in 1959, included parts as Princess Marie in War and Peace (1963), Fanny Thornton in North and South (1966), the Mother Superior helping at a refuge for vagrants and alcoholics in Jeremy Sandford’s play Edna, the Inebriate Woman (1971), Miss Branwell in The Brontës of Haworth (1973), the dual role of The Sybil and Caesonia in I Claudius (1976), Sally Brass in The Old Curiosity Shop (1980), Rachel Wardle in The Pickwick Papers (1985), Maria Insull in Sophia and Constance (1988), Mrs Waule in Middlemarch (1994) and Dulcie Green in Common as Muck (1994 and 1997).

Dowie’s rare big-screen roles included nuns in the horror films The Omen (1976) and The Monk (1990). On BBC radio, as well as acting in dozens of plays she was a popular Morning Story and poetry reader and in 1960-61 played Aliss Oliver in the soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary.

Her first two marriages, to Lionel Butterworth in 1952 and John Goodrich in 1961, ended in divorce. Her third husband, the artist, Times art critic and maker of arts documentaries David Thompson, whom she married in 1970, died in April this year.