Jean Marsh, the striking British-born actress who was both the co-creator and a beloved Emmy-winning star of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the seminal 1970s British drama series about class in Edwardian England, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 90.
The cause was complications of dementia, the filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, her close friend, said.
“Upstairs, Downstairs” captured the hearts, minds and Sunday nights of Anglophile PBS viewers decades before “Downton Abbey” was even a gleam in Julian Fellowes’s eye.
The show, which ran from 1971 to 1975 in England and from 1974 to 1977 in the United States, focused on the elegant Bellamy family and the staff of servants who kept their Belgravia townhouse running smoothly, according to the precise social standards of Edwardian aristocracy. Ms. Marsh chose the role of Rose, the household’s head parlor maid, a stern but good-hearted Cockney.
The New York Times review, in January 1974, was affectionate. John J. O’Connor described the show as “a charmingly seductive concoction” and a “frequently marvelous portrait.” He praised Ms. Marsh for playing Rose with “the perfection of a young Mildred Dunnock.”
By the time the show ended its American run, it had won a Peabody Award and seven Emmys. Ms. Marsh herself took home the 1975 Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series.
In 1989, 13 “lost episodes,” which had never been shown on American television, made their PBS debuts. The London critic Benedict Nightingale, writing in The New York Times, called that the TV-series equivalent of “belatedly discovering that Beethoven wrote the ‘Eroica’ as well as his other eight symphonies.”
Asked by The Telegraph in 2010 why the British were still so fascinated by the past and the master-servant dynamic, Ms. Marsh gave two reasons: “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.”
Jean Lyndsay Torren Marsh was born on July 1, 1934, in London. She was the younger of two daughters of Henry Marsh, a printer’s assistant and maintenance man, and the former Emmeline Bexley, who worked as a maid in her teens before becoming a bartender and eventually a dresser for the theater.
Jean was 6 when the Blitz (the Germans’ concentrated World War II bombings of London) began. At 7, she entered ballet classes and soon showed talent in acting and singing as well as dance. Rather than pursuing a traditional education, she attended theater school, which her parents considered a practical career move.
“If you were very working class in those days, you weren’t going to think of a career in science,” Ms. Marsh explained to The Guardian in 1972. She summed up her options: “You either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworth’s.”
She made her screen debut at 18 in a British television movie, “The Infinite Shoeblack” (1952), based on Norman Macowan’s stage drama, and her feature film debut a year later as the landlady’s daughter in “The Limping Man” (1953), a British mystery thriller that starred Lloyd Bridges as an American war veteran.
In 1959, Ms. Marsh went to the United States, primarily to be in John Gielgud’s Broadway production of “Much Ado About Nothing.” She played Hero, the virtuous young woman who fakes her own death for a noble reason.
That same year, she made a handful of American television appearances, ranging from a network production of “The Moon and Sixpence,” with Laurence Olivier, to an episode in the first season of “The Twilight Zone,” in which she played an alluring brunette robot created as a companion for a prisoner (Jack Warden) on an asteroid.
In the 1960s, she stayed busy with television, stage and the occasional film. She had a tiny part in the Elizabeth Taylor version of “Cleopatra” (1963) as Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony (Richard Burton).
The idea for “Upstairs, Downstairs” was born, Ms. Marsh recalled in a 1992 interview with The New York Times, when she and the actress Eileen Atkins were house-sitting in the South of France for a wealthy friend.
“I’d love more of this,” Ms. Marsh announced one day, poolside. Ms. Atkins replied, “Then write down the idea,” referring to a concept they’d talked about for a series contrasting the lives of a wealthy Edwardian family and their servants. Ms. Atkins’s father had also been “in service,” working as a butler.
The series made its debut in 1971.
In the early 1990s, Ms. Marsh and Ms. Atkins teamed up again on a new series, “The House of Eliott.” A drama about two young women aspiring to be fashion designers in 1920s London, it was a modest success. They also worked together on the 2010-12 “Upstairs, Downstairs,” a sequel of sorts to their original creation.
There was some consternation about the timing of “Downton Abbey,” a British series about an aristocratic Edwardian British family and their servants, which arrived with great fanfare around the same time (2010 in England) as the new “Upstairs, Downstairs,” and covered much of the same ground. “It might be a coincidence,” Ms. Marsh said in an interview that was reported worldwide. “And I might be the Queen of Belgium.”
Before and after the original “Upstairs, Downstairs,” Ms. Marsh’s career was wide-ranging, although Broadway was little more than a blip on her path.
After her debut in “Much Ado,” she returned in 1975 (at the height of her American television fame) to star in “Habeas Corpus,” a farce by Alan Bennett. Her final appearance was four years later as Tom Conti’s doctor in “Whose Life Is It Anyway?,” directed by Mr. Lindsay-Hogg, but she did continue to perform in regional theater in the United States. Her London stage appearances included “The Bird of Time” (1961), “The Chalk Circle” (1992) and “The Old Country” (2006).
One of her most memorable films was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Frenzy” (1972), in which she played a bespectacled secretary who finds her boss strangled and blames the wrong man. She also appeared in “Willow” (1988), a fantasy, as an evil sorceress, and “Back to Oz” (1985), as an evil princess.
Aside from “Upstairs, Downstairs,” she was probably best remembered on the small screen for her early appearances on “Dr. Who.” Her final television appearance was in an episode of the British series “Grantchester” that aired on “Masterpiece Mystery” in 2015. Her character, a cantankerous invalid, is found dead within the story’s first 15 minutes.
Ms. Marsh married the British actor Jon Pertwee in 1955, and they divorced in 1960. She also had long romantic relationships with the actor Kenneth Haigh and with Mr. Lindsay-Hogg.
“I have had partners who I have thought about marrying and who have thought about marrying me,” she told The Telegraph in 2010. “The problem was that we never thought it at the same time.”
There were no immediate survivors.Her older sister, Yvonne Marsh, died in 2017.
As for the secret of her youthful energy and her enjoyment of life well into old age, she seemed to say that being interested was the key.
“I’m enchanted by people,” she told The Daily Mail in 2013. “I look at them and think: ‘Oh, he’s bought a wonderful knobbly carrot.’ Everything I notice.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
