Actor who found her true calling as translator of the French dramatist Jean Anouilh
Lucienne Hill, who has died aged 89, was best known for her translations of the French dramatist Jean Anouilh. She won a Tony award for the Broadway production of Anouilh's Becket in 1961 and had been nominated for a Tony for her translation of his The Waltz of the Toreadors four years earlier.
Hill's Becket was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych theatre in 1961, directed by Peter Hall and starring Christopher Plummer and Eric Porter. It became a 1964 film with a feast of fine acting, not only from the two leads, Peter O'Toole (as King Henry II) and Richard Burton (as the eponymous saint), but also from John Gielgud, Martita Hunt, Pamela Brown, Siân Phillips and Donald Wolfit.
Her translation of The Waltz of the Toreadors was premiered in 1956 at the Arts theatre in London. John Guillermin's 1962 film had a new screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz and one of Peter Sellers's very best "straight" performances as a retired general haunted by his womanising past.
Tall, willowy and a great beauty all her life, Hill had a remarkable and unusual career. She grew up in a French-speaking household in London, started as an actor by understudying Mae West in Diamond Lil (but got the sack) at the Prince of Wales theatre in 1948, and began to translate Anouilh at the behest of Laurence Olivier, who had seen and admired the playwright's Ardèle ou la Marguerite in Paris.
That, in 1952, was her first Anouilh adaptation, with the title of Adele. She went on to translate 30 more of his works until fashions changed in the mid-1970s and Anouilh was no longer much performed. Hill herself had reacted against the more ornate translations of Christopher Fry, who did Ring Round the Moon and The Lark for Peter Brook. The Lark, starring Dorothy Tutin and Donald Pleasence at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1955, coincidentally marked Hill's last appearance as an actor. She wrote in her unpublished diary: "Fry's writing, poetic and lovely as it is, has missed, in my opinion, the sharp irony inherent in Jean Anouilh's dialogue."
When her agent sent the Ardèle translation to Anouilh, he replied by telegram: "This translation is remarkable, note the name." But the two of them did not really get on when they met. Hill never spoke highly of him, and she told her daughters in later life: "Whenever Anouilh writes a slut these days, he calls her Lucienne."
She was born Lucienne Palmer in Kilburn, north-west London, the only child of Arthur Palmer, a dental mechanic, and his wife, Louise (née Moutarde), who had come from France as a governess to the upper classes in Kensington and Mayfair. Louise's mother came too, and effectively ran the household, bringing up Lucienne and a cousin, Simone.
Hill was educated at Hendon county school and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied modern languages for two years, taking a "wartime" degree. She had been expected to be a teacher but, already deprived by her disapproving parents of the scholarship she had won to the Old Vic School, she was recruited from Oxford into the army's intelligence corps at Bletchley Park.
At the end of the second world war, she joined the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts in Northern Ireland and then acted in rep in Colchester, Sheffield and at the Birmingham Rep, the seedbed of so much postwar talent.
After the Mae West debacle, fortuitously, she understudied Siobhan McKenna in Fading Mansion, an adaptation of Anouilh's Romeo and Jeannette, at the Duchess theatre, another experience which fired her resolve to rewrite Anouilh herself. The stage and television adaptations followed thick and fast.
Aside from Anouilh, she co-wrote the libretto (with Frederic Raphael) for a Leslie Bricusse musical, Lady at the Wheel (1958); an adaptation of Françoise Sagan's Castle in Sweden in 1962; and, for the RSC at the Aldwych in 1964, a version of Victor, Roger Vitrac's surrealist 1928 drawing-room satire, in which a figure of Death, Ida Mortemart (played by an imperious Elizabeth Spriggs), broke wind throughout.
This last show – the flatulence was done by an offstage tuba player blowing the first bars of Beethoven's Fifth – opened in the middle of the "dirty plays" uproar initiated by an irate RSC governor, the impresario Emile Littler, and came in the wake of a "Theatre of Cruelty" season, flanked by David Rudkin's Afore Night Come and Brook's production of the Marat/Sade. The RSC founder Peter Hall won the day and the RSC was recognised as a serious, radical European theatre company.
Hill provided three Anouilh translations for Chichester Festival theatre during the John Clements and Keith Michell eras, but these star-laden, richly costumed parades seemed like leaden period pieces, even prompting Irving Wardle of the Times to suggest that Anouilh was "all circumference and no centre". In the middle one, Dear Antoine (1971), a dazzling play about the theatre directed by Robin Phillips, an 83-year-old Edith Evans gave up after three performances, to be replaced by an understudy.
In her later years, Hill, who lived for more than half a century in the same house in Wargrave, Berkshire, took up painting and sculpture, tended her garden and made clothes. Having undergone therapy herself, she ran psychodrama workshops as part of the NHS services in Wallingford.
She was married three times, first to the director James Hill, responsible for Born Free on film and Worzel Gummidge on television; then to the father of her children, the producer and businessman Andrew Broughton; and lastly to Robert Davies, an old friend from Oxford who manufactured brassieres and corsets. She was active to the end, completing a short radio play which she sent off to the BBC 10 days before she died.
All three husbands predeceased her. Hill is survived by her children, Marcus, Emma and Alexandra, and four grandchildren.
• Lucienne Marie Hill, translator and actor, born 30 January 1923; died 29 December 2012