R.I.P. Joy Parker

[Reza]

Joy Parker obituary

Actor who shared the stage with her husband, Paul Scofield

Michael Coveney The Guardian, Friday 30 November 2012 09.26 EST

Slim, dark, quick-moving and pretty, the actor
Joy Parker appeared at the Birmingham Rep in her
early 20s and, in 1942, played an Ophelia "of
gentle, bewildered pathos", according to one
critic. There, she met Paul
Scofield, who was playing Horatio. The couple
married in 1943 and were rarely separated in more
than 65 years. Long-lasting marriages are not
completely unknown in the theatre, but theirs was
one of the most famously enduring.

Parker, who has died aged 90, always said that
Scofield was a much better actor than she could
ever have been, and that she had no sense of
"having given up a startling career that would
have ended in Cleopatra". Nevertheless, she
played leading roles at Stratford-upon-Avon and in the West End.

While busy in Stratford, and caring for her first
child, she wrote a children's book, The Story of
Benjamin Scarecrow (1946), which she illustrated
with her own intricate drawings. The scarecrow
ran away from the countryside to be an actor.

Joy was the only child of Henry Parker, who
served in the army in the first world war and
later worked in the City of London, and his wife,
Evelyn, a teacher of mathematics and French. She
was born in Sidcup, Kent, and educated in
Surbiton before enrolling as a student at the
Birmingham Rep, where she was directed by Peter Brook.

In 1946 she followed Brook, Scofield and
Scofield's best friend, the actor (and later
director) John Harrison, to Stratford, where she
played Miranda in The Tempest; a balletic Ariel
in the same play "all blue and silver and Kurt
Jooss," said Harrison; Katharine in Brook's
famous Watteau-esque Love's Labour's Lost;
followed by Jessica in The Merchant of Venice
(her lovelorn Lorenzo was Donald Sinden) and the Queen in Richard II.

Parker's West End engagements included an
appearance alongside Leslie Banks and Irene
Worth in JB Priestley's Home Is Tomorrow (1948),
an ambitious, prophetic plea for international
co-operation in the early years of the United
Nations; and the role of a barbarian chief's
daughter in Terence Rattigan's Adventure Story
(1949), in which Scofield, as Alexander the
Great, played a macabre wooing scene with his own
wife, clutching a wedding ring in one hand and a
knife in the other in order to kill her if she
refused him. Silently, she chose the ring.

Parker virtually retired from the stage in 1952
when, with their two children, she and Scofield
moved from Esher in Surrey to a large Victorian
house in Balcombe, West Sussex. Domesticity now
ruled her life, but she often appeared with
Scofield in poetry readings over the years. In
1961, before Scofield repeated his West End
success as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All
Seasons on Broadway, they appeared together in
Stratford, Ontario, in Love's Labour's Lost. In
1973 she made a surprise, and generally
acclaimed, return to the stage as Olga in
Chekhov's Three Sisters, directed by Robin
Phillips at the Greenwich theatre, London,
alongside Mia Farrow and Gwen Watford.

She never admitted to renouncing the stage,
rather to "loosening the holds". In Sussex, she
converted an old coal-house into a study, where
she worked on her drawing and produced, in 1988,
the illustrated fable of a mole called Henry. All
the grasses and plants in the mole's habitat were
taken from the island of Mull, where she and
Scofield spent their holidays in a farmhouse.

They stayed in Sussex for the rest of their
lives, shunning the media circus and the
red-carpet glamour to which Scofield's status
could fairly lay claim. He never accepted a
knighthood, although it was Parker who was far
more opposed than he to the notion of the
accolade. Their home, garden and family life
together provided the peace and security, the
lair, perhaps, from which the titanic actor could
prowl so heroically on to the stages and film
sets of the world, a man of magical mystery and
deep-buried secrets, he always seemed to be.

Parker had been working on a third book, about a
theatre cat called Boris who becomes an opera
singer. "All I want to do is draw," she told one
interviewer, but life became difficult for her after Scofield's death in 2008.

She is survived by their children, Martin and
Sarah, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Joy Mary Parker, actor, born 22 February 1922; died 7 November 2012