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Actor who made her name during the early years of drama on television
As a captivating young ingenue in Shakespeare on stage, and Jane Austen on television, Daphne Slater, who has died aged 84, enjoyed a brilliant career for 10 years, followed by decent television work for the next 10, before withdrawing into family life almost completely by 1975.
At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1947, she appeared as a radical (for those days) young Olivia in Twelfth Night; both mother and daughter (Thaisa and Marina) in Pericles; Juliet in Peter Brook's beautiful Romeo and Juliet set in Verona ("a miracle of masks, mists and sudden grotesquerie," wrote Kenneth Tynan); and Miranda in The Tempest. Her Juliet, said Tynan, was rightly "excitable and impetuous, and she communicates this convulsive ardour until it becomes our panic as well as hers". Her future husband, John Harrison, played Benvolio, and their offstage romance continued during The Tempest, in which Harrison played Ferdinand, chopping up logs and promising, no doubt, a "brave new world".
But she was never powered by professional ambition, and, when Harrison was appointed director of the old Nottingham Playhouse in 1952, Slater departed the West End stage without great regret and refocused her career alongside her husband. She took television work when it suited her and concentrated on raising her two boys, becoming what is known in the business as a "term-time" actor. When she and Harrison divorced in 1964, she concentrated on television work, before marrying an Austrian businessman, Frederick Kolmar, and retiring completely in 1975, living thereafter in Germany and Switzerland.
She was small, blonde and beautiful, but not conventionally so ("Daphne Slater gives her wan little apple face a happy outing," said the admiring Tynan after her performance in Molière), with a light, quick voice and a particular love of good books and conversation. She regretted never having gone to university and was never happier, says Harrison, than after a first night, seated round a dinner table with the likes of the playwright Christopher Fry, Hugh Willatt of the Arts Council, or Michael Barry, her favourite BBC television producer.
Her parents were solid lower-middle class, living in Bedford Park, west London. Her father commuted to an office job in the City. Her mother, "a thwarted actress", according to Harrison, propelled Slater from Haberdashers' Aske's school to Rada on a state scholarship. She won the gold medal and, while a student, appeared in a BBC documentary I Want to Be an Actor (1946) alongside the drama adjudicator Irene Vanbrugh.
Slater was spotted by the film director Herbert Wilcox, who gave her a seven-year contract and a leading role in The Courtneys of Curzon Street (1947), a family saga set across three wars and four generations, starring Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding, with support from Coral Browne, Thora Hird and Michael Medwin.
The great success of the 1947 Stratford season exerted a pull away from the film studios, and Slater embarked on a series of classical roles at the Arts theatre in London, under the artistic direction of Alec Clunes. She appeared there in the first production of Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning, directed by Jack Hawkins, as well as in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Molière's Tartuffe.
The Molière performance noted by Tynan was in The Gay Invalid (Le Malade Imaginaire) at the Garrick theatre, with an extraordinary cast including Elisabeth Bergner, AE Matthews and Peter Cushing. In 1952, Cushing also played Mr Darcy to Slater's Elizabeth Bennet in the first BBC TV version of Pride and Prejudice, the same year as she appeared in an Old Vic King Lear as Cordelia.
Slater had already made her mark in Jane Austen as Harriet Smith in a 1947 television version of Emma, and she completed a BBC Austen hat-trick in 1960, when she played Anne Elliot in Persuasion. All of these performances have been superseded by subsequent film versions, but this was a rich period of British acting coming to terms with a comparatively new medium. She scored another great success as Jane Eyre, in 1956, with Stanley Baker playing opposite as Mr Rochester.
Slater's last major BBC TV role, in 1957, was as Prue Sarn, the girl with a cleft lip, in a six-part series based on Mary Webb's Precious Bane. The moral and Miltonic story of country life in Shropshire after the Napoleonic wars also starred Patrick Troughton (the second Doctor Who) and Paul Daneman.
At Nottingham, where Tynan indefatigably referred to Slater as "on her day, the best ingenue in the country", she played luminous versions of Rosalind and Viola in Shakespeare, as well as anything else going in Ibsen or Chekhov. There was a glimpse of her charm and quality in the small role of Portia in a 1959 BBC TV Julius Caesar, with Eric Porter as Brutus and Michael Gough as Cassius.
The rest is not silence, exactly, but the odd sighting throughout the 1960s – in Jackanory, The Man in the Iron Mask, Callan, Our Man at St Mark's (with Donald Sinden) – then as the Old Queen Mary in Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R (1971), in ITV's Sunday Night Theatre (1969-73) and finally in the series Shadows (1975).
Slater was predeceased by her brother and second husband. She is survived by Harrison, who remained a close friend, and their two sons, Stephen and William.
• Daphne Helen Slater, actor, born 3 March 1928; died 4 October 2012