1. Anna Massey won a BAFTA Best Actress Award for the role of Edith Hope in the 1986 TV adaptation of Anita Brookner's novel Hotel du Lac, a role that one of her co-stars, Julia McKenzie, has said "could have been written for her".
22 Facts About Anna Massey
1. 2.
Anna Massey performed over one hundred character roles in British film and television.
3.
Anna Massey was born in Thakeham, Sussex, England, the daughter of British actress Adrianne Allen and Canadian-born Hollywood actor Raymond Anna Massey.
4.
Anna Massey's parents divorced when she was an infant and she continued to live in England with her mother.
5.
Anna Massey was the niece of Vincent Massey, a Governor General of Canada, and her godfather was film director John Ford.
6.
Anna Massey then left the cast in London to repeat her performance in New York in October 1956.
7.
Anna Massey made her cinema debut in the Scotland Yard film Gideon's Day as Sally, daughter of Jack Hawkins's Detective Inspector.
8.
Anna Massey played a potential murder victim in Michael Powell's cult thriller Peeping Tom and appeared in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing.
9.
Anna Massey noted that her character's nude scenes in Frenzy were performed by body doubles.
10.
Anna Massey continued to make occasional film and stage appearances, but worked more frequently in television.
11.
Anna Massey made her first small-screen appearance as Jacqueline in Green of the Year in October 1955, and thereafter featured in dramas such as The Pallisers, The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 1979 adaptation of Rebecca, The Cherry Orchard, and Anna Karenina.
12.
Anna Massey appeared in a number of mysteries and thrillers on television, including episodes of Inspector Morse, The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, Midsomer Murders, Strange, Lewis, and Agatha Christie's Poirot.
13.
Anna Massey was the narrator of This Sceptred Isle on BBC Radio 4, a history of Britain from Roman times which ran for more than 300 fifteen-minute episodes.
14.
In 1987, Anna Massey was awarded the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her role in Hotel du Lac after acquiring the TV rights two years earlier, only a few weeks before the novel won the Booker Prize.
15.
Anna Massey appeared as Mrs D'Urberville in the 2008 BBC adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
16.
Anna Massey was the principal narrator of the BBC Radio series on British history This Sceptred Isle.
17.
Anna Massey recorded several audiobooks, including Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.
18.
Anna Massey was known for a high level of preparation and effort, with one producer saying that she had a practice of using five different coloured pens on scripts to mark out "breaths and pauses" and the development of a scene; for example, "if a phrase early in a paragraph was going to be picked up again later, she would highlight those two bits in the same colour, so that it would remind her that that first phrase was referring to something later".
19.
Anna Massey published an autobiography in 2006, Telling Some Tales, in which she revealed a difficult early life, including a distant relationship with her father and estrangement with her brother.
20.
Anna Massey described her failed marriage to actor Jeremy Brett, discussing his struggle with bipolar disorder.
21.
Brett and Anna Massey divorced on 22 November 1962 after she claimed he left her for a man.
22.
Anna Massey died from lung cancer in Kensington, London on 3 July 2011, aged 73.