(2 of 2)
That is a good description of Jean Marsh. Born in a northeast London basement room, Jean was scarred by the blitz. Terror paralyzed her legs when she was seven. Her barmaid mother, who was nicknamed "Opera Pop" by her husband because she sang all the time, refused to give up. She enrolled her in a local dancing school. Jean hated it: "I wanted to go to a proper school." At 14, feeling an ugly failure, she had another nervous seizure; the left side of her face was paralyzed. The disease was diagnosed at the time as Bell's palsy.
The condition was temporary. When she recovered, Jean went out to work —in a repertory company. At 16 she was a leading lady ("My type—Audrey Hepburn—was coming in," she says) and getting bit parts in movies (Tales of Hoffmann, Where's Charley?). After a brief marriage at 19, she entered into a stormy ten-year relationship with Actor Kenneth Haigh. In 1957 when he starred on Broadway in Look Back in Anger, Jean came with him. "Some of his fame rubbed off on me," she says. Enough, at least, to win her a Broadway debut as Hero in Much Ado About Nothing and later, the role of Octavia, wife to Richard Burton's Antony, in the film Cleopatra. Unfortunately, off-camera scenes stole that picture.
No decisive success shaped her career, and when she split from Haigh she was at sea professionally as well as emotionally. However, a brief entr'acte with Albert Finney was followed by a break: the lead in a TV series The Informers, in which Jean played a new role for her: a gangster's moll. The director was Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who in 1970 made the Beatles movie Let It Be). For the past six years he and Jean have lived together. Says she: "He has given me confidence, steered my career. He was the first person to think I was funny."
Only a Maid. After the final Upstairs, Downstairs series is taped this winter, Jean will star as the eccentric detective Miss Silver in a movie adaptation of several Patricia Wentworth thrillers of the '30s. She also wants to write more: an outline for a TV series is in her head, and she might try a novel.
Upstairs, Downstairs has brought international acclaim, but only a modest payoff. Last year the series earned her £12,500—about what Valerie Harper collects for two weeks on the Rhoda set. At 39 she is a star at last, but her parents are baffled. "My mother has no respect for my career at all. She is furious that I am playing only a maid."
Then there is her ever restless conscience. Born a Protestant, she now regularly attends a Roman Catholic church: "There have been times when I was desperate, and I now feel that there was someone watching over me then." She is a strong believer in the inevitability of retribution and reward. "I really think because I hated my face at school, it punished me with the paralysis." She learned to like it eventually; in fact she remembers just when. In 1959 Gore Vidal saw her in Much Ado and wrote in a review, "Jean Marsh is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful." Three times, Jean emphasizes, assuming the satisfied expression Rose adopts when she has silenced the servants' hall with one of her rare but perfect putdowns.