Anna Cropper R.I.P. - Mother of Linus Roache

[Reza]

Anna Cropper
Insightful actor at her best in haunted roles
Philip Purser
Wednesday February 07 2007
The Guardian

Anna Cropper, who has died at the age of 68, was an actor whose most memorable TV roles were as women haunted, whether in the old-fashioned spooky sense of the word, or more rationally as the victims of mental affliction. It was in the latter capacity that she first came to prominence, in the 1967 BBC Wednesday Play, In Two Minds.

This was written by David Mercer, who still bore the scars of his own schizophrenic breakdown, but directed by Ken Loach rather than Mercer's usual champion, Don Taylor. Loach, who had won fame the previous year with Cathy Come Home, loved to make drama look like documentary. He opened this play with Cropper addressing the camera directly, as if being interviewed on an earnest medical programme. The eminent critic TC Worsley, while not altogether won over, praised the skill of the production and the honest and "true" performances it drew.

Three years later, Robin Redbreast (also BBC) plunged Cropper into rural superstition and things that go bump in the night. She had impressed the writer John Bowen when performing his work on the stage. Now he had written for her this sublimely creepy piece. It cast her as a townie who has moved into a remote cottage to escape an unhappy love affair and, when she acquires a local admirer, runs up against the malevolence that can lurk in country folklore.

The third of her hauntings, and most openly dependent on the supernatural, came in the BBC's excellent Dead of Night anthology series of 1972. One of the contributors was Don Taylor, now operating as a writer-director with a special passion for 17th-century history. His piece, The Exorcism, featured smart townsfolk of today descending, with friends, on their newly renovated weekend cottage. When Cropper, as the wife and hostess, ladles out the dinner-party cassoulet - horrors! - the food tastes of fire and filth, the wine turns to blood. They are haunted by the starving widow and children of a farm-worker hanged for taking part in a Levellers' rising.

It was perhaps our first socialist ghost-story, with an admittedly rather sermon-like ending. In a bitter-sweet postscript, the play was adapted for the stage, and opened at the Comedy Theatre in 1975 with Mary Ure in the part. Tragically, she died after the first performance and Cropper stepped in to save the show.

A dentist's daughter, she was born in Brierfield, Lancashire. After drama training at the Central School she played in repertory in Nottingham, and continued to work in the theatre and films. But it was television, and to a lesser extent radio, which kept her in the public eye. After Balzac's Père Goriot (1968) for TV, she excelled in Schmoedipus (BBC 1974), one of Dennis Potter's plays turning on the arrival of a stranger knocking on the door, and had parts in Granada's renowned serialisation of The Jewel in the Crown (1984) and the BBC's version of Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils (1992).

She made guest appearances in many popular TV series, including Nanny (BBC 1980-81), ITV's Heartbeat (in 1993), The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1991) and two Agatha Christie series as well as Coronation Street, in which her husband, William Roache, played Ken Barlow.

She and Roache had a son - Linus Roache, the actor - and a daughter, Vanya, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1974. Cropper settled into a home of her own in Tangmere, Sussex, and latterly spent more and more time in her holiday house in Turkey.

Anna Cropper, actor, born May 13 1938; died January 22 2007