Rosalie Sylvia Crutchley (4 January 1920 – 28 July 1997) was a British actress. Trained at the Royal Academy of Music, she was perhaps best known for her television performances, but had a long and successful career in theatre and films, making her stage debut in 1932 and her screen debut in 1947.
Crutchley had dark piercing eyes and often played foreign or rather sinister characters. She also played many classical roles, including Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Hermione in The Winter's Tale and Goneril in King Lear.
Contents
Life and career
Crutchley was born in London on 4 January 1920. She trained at the Royal Academy of Music.
Her screen debut was as a violinist who is murdered in Take My Life (1947). She played Madame Defarge twice in adaptations of A Tale of Two Cities, in both the 1958 film and in the 1965 television serialisation of the same story.
She played Catherine Parr in the 1970 TV series, The Six Wives of Henry VIII and played the same character in its sequel, Elizabeth R (1971). She had previously portrayed Henry's first wife Catherine of Aragon in the 1953 film The Sword and the Rose.
Other roles included Mrs Sparsit in Hard Times (ITV, 1977) and Electra (1974). She also starred in the 1979 BBC TV production of Testament of Youth, playing the role of the Principal of Somerville College, Oxford. She was in the films Quo Vadis (1951), as Acte, the former mistress of the Emperor Nero (Peter Ustinov) and The Haunting (1963), as the sinister housekeeper Mrs Dudley.
