Jenny Laird

Jenny Laird, who has died aged 84, had a stage and screen career that lasted from the 1930s into the 1980s. Her work took in Alec Clunes's Arts Theatre Club in its 1940s and 50s heyday, Ealing Films, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) and Shoulder To Shoulder, the 1974 television series about the Pankhursts.

It was Clunes who brought Laird into the front rank. What the actor-manager sought for the little underground playhouse in London's Great Newport Street was an audience "eager for intelligent and entertaining plays". Laird's acting went from strength to strength in Farquhar, Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw and other modern plays.

Born in Manchester, Laird and her parents moved to the south, and she was educated at Maidstone grammar school and London University. She briefly worked in an advertising agency while studying acting. In 1937 she made her repertory debut in Brixton in A Bill of Divorcement. Her shapely legs and green eyes figured prominently in West End plays by Ivor Novello, NC Hunter and Robert Morley.

While at the Arts Theatre she periodically returned to "commercial" theatre. She played Rose in The Recruiting Officer (1943) and Nora in A Doll's House (1945). As Ellie, in the revival by Californian John Fernald of Shaw's Heartbreak House (1950), she revealed, one critic wrote, "an enchanting combination of youth and firmness. Her broken heart never ceased to glint through her mask of ice". She had married Fernald in 1947.

When the 1940s ended and Clunes left the Arts to star at the Westminster in the court-martial drama, Carrington, VC, Laird joined the cast as a WRAC officer. None of the critics faulted her acting, but an exasperated soldier did barge into her dressing room to tell her that her salute was wrong and her cap "a disgrace to the service". Laird took a short course of instruction in the first, and visited a Bond Street military outfitters for a cap made of felt instead of barathea.

Another Arts Theatre production, The Sun Room, displayed her unexpected gift for comedy and, in the long-running West End thriller The House by the Lake (1956), she revealed a sinister quality which she developed in several thrillers.

On screen, Laird debuted in Passenger to London (1937). She subsequently had leading parts in Charles Crichton's Painted Boats (1945), an Ealing drama about barge life; as Sister Honey in Black Narcissus (1947); and as Sister Constance in Conspiracy of Hearts (1960). Among her other films were Just William (1939) - she played the hero's sister Ethel - and Village of the Damned (1960).

When Fernald's decade as principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts ended in 1965, he moved to the United States to run his own Detroit-based company, and Laird returned to her beloved classics. Among her roles in the US were Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman (1967), Arkadina in The Seagull (1968), and Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard, which she also played on Broadway in 1970. On returning to England in the 1970s, she gained further classical credits as Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard (Newcastle-on-Tyne) and the Nurse in Strindberg's The Father (Bolton).

Laird, who sometimes directed Ibsen with her husband, never lost her interest in dramaturgy. As well as writing, with Fernald, the light West End comedy And No Birds Sing, she adapted several plays from the French, which toured without reaching the West End, and in 1977 wrote Mixed Economy (King's Head, Islington), a tale of impoverished English eccentrics, led by Margaret Rawlings and Laird's actor daughter Karen Fernald.

Her television credits included Lillie (1978), Inspector Morse (1987), The Onedin Line (1971), and All Creatures Great and Small (1978).

Laird is survived by her daughter.

·Jenny Laird, actor, born February 13 1917; died October 31 2001.

• Film
• obituaries

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKaVrMBwfo9paGimn6t8cn%2BOoKyaqpSerq%2B7waKrrpminrK0esWio6amlazA