The actor Joanna Dunham, who has died aged 78, played Mary Magdalene in the Hollywood blockbuster The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), directed by George Stevens, with Max von Sydow as Jesus and Charlton Heston as Pontius Pilate. She had been recommended to Stevens for the role by Marilyn Monroe, who had seen her performance as Juliet on tour with the Old Vic in New York in 1962, after she had taken over from Judi Dench in Franco Zeffirelli’s production.
Her stage career, confined mainly to the 1960s and 70s, included the occasional indelible role, such as Perdita in Frank Marcus’s comedy of adultery and free love, The Formation Dancers (1964), in the West End of London, co-starring Maxine Audley and Robin Bailey; her irresistible young ward Vera in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country one year later, with Ingrid Bergman and Michael Redgrave, at the Cambridge theatre; and a notable season at the Oxford Playhouse in 1970, when she played Elena in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Kean, opposite Alan Badel, and a deeply affecting Desdemona in Othello.
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