“In the profession to talk about past achievements is just not on. It’s just a code...”

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Nicola Pagett's modesty flies in the face of most people's perception of thespians, but says much about the Cairo-born actor’s reserved nature. Famous for her fragile beauty and enigmatic persona, Nicola became a household name in the 1970s as Elizabeth Bellamy in the first two seasons of the BBC Edwardian costume drama Upstairs Downstairs. Having played opposite Vivien Leigh in Paul Osborne’s La Contessa, she followed in the footsteps of the Gone With The Wind-star (and also Greta Garbo) when she took on the title role in the BBC's ten-part adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in1977. This was another part with which she became synonymous. 

 

Initially famed for her looks, Nicola was a woman in a man's world, who often concealed her intellect behind a cool demeanour of detached indifference. It would take some time for her to come of age.  Beneath the glacial exterior, however, was a passion she  attributed to being born at the end of the Colonial-era:

 

I think I was an angry little girl. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was confused. I must be among the last children of a child of the Empire.

 

Born Nicola Scott in 1945, she attended the Saint Maur International School in Japan, and then the Beehive boarding school in Bexhill-on-Sea, where she was head girl. Her father was an oil executive, and the family traveled widely, including spells in Hong Kong and Egypt, before settling at Orchard House in Durrant Green, near Ashford in Kent.

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At seventeen, she went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and received conservatoire training for theatre, television, film, and radio. This was something she would utilize over a diverse career spanning more than thirty years. At nineteen she made her TV debut, alongside Peter Purves, as Barbera in The Girl In The Picture, an Armchair Theatre production written by Allan Prior Cast, and directed by Alvin Rakoff. Other TV parts playing ingenues ensued, including the role of Nicola in Dangerman, alongside Patrick McGoohan, and Adriana in Have Guns - Will Haggle, a 90-minute Avengers special broadcast in 1968. In the same year, she also appeared as Caesar's beautiful cousin Messalina in ITV's Claudius.

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The juxtaposition of Nicola's classical beauty with her unaffected, thoroughly modern style made her a face in the Sixties. Her first film role arrived in 1967, at the age of twenty-two. She played Talia in the Hammer Horror production The Viking Queen, a period piece set in Roman Britain. A less auspicious part was that of the 'girl from next door' in Some Like it Sexy with Christopher Mathews in 1969. More fitting was her performance as Princess Mary in Anne of a Thousand Days, starring Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold. The film won an Oscar for best costumes and Nicola was recognised for the vulnerability she brought to the part. A quality that would beguile critics in the years to come.

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Seventies Stardom

The Seventies saw Nicola oscillating between film work and TV. She captivated playing Lydia Tamarova, a Russian ballerina claiming political asylum, in Special Branch: Reported Missing.  Then, she worked with Peters Sellers in There’s a Girl in My Soup, written by Terence Frisby and co-starring Goldie Hawn. Historical drama included the role of alleged murderer Florence Maybrick in the drama series Wicked Women, while The Long Goodbye saw her working alongside Roger Moore and Tony Curtis in The Persuaders.

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In 1971 she got the part of Elizabeth Bellamy in the BBC series Upstairs Downstairs. It was an overnight sensation. While in later life Nicola would reflect upon the excitement of it being a hit, she left at the end of the second series, fearing she would become typecast. Speaking in 1985 she stated:

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​I was 26 and I look at the whole thing as a marathon. I desperately want to grow old in the business and I don't want to be labeled with anything... And also they were going to make a film of it, and I wasn't going to be in it, so I got a bit grand about that.

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Her next role could not have been more different, playing  Elizabeth Fanschawe in Frankenstein: The True Story, a TV movie made for Universal, with a screenplay by Christopher Isherwood.  In 1975 she wooed audiences as Anna Malinová in Operation Daybreak, with Anthony Andrews and Timothy Bottoms, set in Prague recounting the assassination of SS General Reinhard Heydrick.

 

The sojourn beyond the iron curtain prepared Nicola for her next role in the BBC's ten-part adaptation of Anna Karenina. Filmed in Hungary, it was screened in over thirty countries and was one of Nicola's biggest screen successes. On the abridgment of Tolstoy's eight hundred page novel, she was characteristically phlegmatic

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You have to kind of leave it behind. Or you break your heart. It is all a question of taste and of choice. I mean what I would have chosen is not perhaps what the adaptor Donald Wilson chose, but that's what he chose. And you can't argue with that.

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Ever the jobbing actress, Nicola was financially prudent, investing her earnings from Upstairs Downstairs in a cottage in the London suburb of Mortlake. She also augmented her income as an actor with occasional magazine features and quiz shows like Call My Bluff, Give Us a Clue, and That's Show Business. However, perhaps her finest extracurricular work came in the form of an advert for the soap brand Camay. 

 

Cross-cutting between scenes in which Nicola is draped in light grey fur, (recalling Anna Karenina) and maneuvering herself through what seems to be an upmarket airport lounge, she eventually accepts the "Camay Challenge", and washes her face with the Unilever product. When the voice-over pronounces that "because Nicola Pagett is an actress she really needs soft skin" she haughtily interjects: “Not because I’m an actress. I need soft skin because I am a woman”. The sequence concludes with Nicola incredulous that the product she has used is, in fact, Camay.

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In 1978 she went to America to play the role of Joanna Stone in the film Oliver's Story, starring Ryan O'Neal. The production was a sequel to the 1970 blockbuster Love Story, but it failed to live up to the commercial success of its predecessor. Disappointingly, Nicola's scenes were cut in the final third of the film, with numerous critics citing this as part of the project's failure. The experience left her scarred:

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There’s only one lot who never lie to you and that’s an audience. They’re always honest, and when you get a reaction from them, a silence or the laugh you’re after, it’s marvelous. On stage for two hours, I’m my own mistress.

I can’t be cut or stopped, or changed – or lost.

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Henceforth she pursued theatre work more ardently, but not before traveling to Australia to film This Timeless Land, an eight-part miniseries adapted from Eleanor Dark's historical novel documenting European settlement.

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Return to Theatre

Having first performed in the West End in 1968 in Boston Story, Nicola had come to the attention of Michael Codron in the early Seventies, who cast her as Elizabeth in John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father with Alex Guinness. It was when performing in Burnett’s A Family and a Fortune in 1975 that she met her future husband Graham Swannell, with whom she would have a daughter Eve in 1980.  However, her most ambitious work was a season of plays directed by Jonathan Miller at the Greenwich theatre in 1974: a triptych of roles that saw her take on  Ophelia in Hamlet, Regina the maid in Ibsen's Ghosts and Irina, and the fading diva in Chekhov's The Seagull.

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As the Seventies turned to the Eighties, she really hit her stride moving effortlessly between the small screen and stage, with the occasional foray into film. The decade began with the London-debut of Ayckbourn’s Taking Steps in which she starred opposite Paul Chapman, who would subsequently play her husband in David Nobb's A Bit of a Do. The play was set over three floors in a haunted house, Nicola's elfin-like frame lending itself perfectly to another Elizabeth, this time a retired dancer in a loveless marriage. Other stage work included the revival of  Frederick Lonsdale's 1923 play Aren’t We All? next to Rex Harrison at the Theatre Royal. 

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Her next major film role was with John Cleese in Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade. Location filming saw Nicola return to Southeast Asia, with the drama set around a military dance troop in the Malayan jungle. In the role of Sylvia Morgan, she channeled the inner-turmoil of her birth at the end of the Empire. Major TV work included the role of  Adele Fairley in an adaptation of  Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance (1984), which also starred Deborah Kerr, Jenny Seagrove, and Diane Baker. Scoop saw her play Julia Stitch in an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's newspaper satire, while A Shadow on the Sun posted Nicola to Kenya, in a supporting role as Emma Orchardsons in the biopic of pioneer aviatrix Beryl Markham. In the one-off drama, Hand in Glove, she then played Catherine, a woman who finds herself on the verge of madness after experiencing a premonition of her lover’s imminent death. 

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Innovative and Original

More avant-garde was her performance as another Elizabeth in Dennis Potter's The Visitors (1987), a one-off TV play for BBC 2 filmed in an Italian villa in 1986. The script began as the Sufficient Carbohydrate and focuses on the disillusionment of Elizabeth's husband Jack, played by John Standing. However, Nicola's performance stands out for its smoldering sexuality, something she would reprise in her role as Liz (Elizabeth) Rodenhurst in David Nobb's hit TV series A Bit of a Do in 1989. With an all-star cast that included David Jason, Gwen Taylor, and Stephanie Cole, the comedy of manners gave Nicola her biggest mainstream hit since Anna Karenina. 

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In A Bit of a Do Nicola's command of Nobb's playful use of language drew heavily upon her experience working with Harold Pinter. In a 1985 revival of Old Times, she had played opposite Michael Gambon in the London-run; however, in the Los Angeles version, the role of Deeley was played by Pinter himself. Though Nicola claimed in an interview at the time that 'Los Angeles throws you back on yourself', reviews were glowing:

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One of the best surprises in this unusually casted production was Miss Pagett, whose perfectly porcelain face revealed not her emotions or attitudes until they came spilling out in a tremendous monologue near the play's end. While Pinter and Ullmann were the drawing cards, Pagett -- both in character and acting -- stole the attention (Mary Kerner).

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She reprised the working relationship with Pinter in 1991, appearing in the premiere of Party Time at the Almeida Theatre. The taught thirty-minute piece was then filmed for Channel Four's Without Walls, screening in 1992. Nicola played the widowed femme-fetale Charlotte proving, at forty-seven, that Nicola was still every bit as alluring as she was in the Seventies.

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Other stage work during this period included a role as The Countess in a translation of French dramatist Jean Anouilh’s comedy The Rehearsal at the Almeida Theatre. She also starred alongside Red Dwarf's Chris Barrie in Totally Foxed, a comedy farce with science-fiction overtones, written by Justin Green and Steve Cooke. It was, however, a surprise when Nicola took a starring opposite former Doctor Who, Peter Davidson, as the straight-talking hairdresser Sonia Drysdal, in the BBC's  Ain't Misbehavin. Written by Roy Clarke, famous for Last of the Summer Wine and Keeping Up Appearances, it was disconcerting to see Nicola in a sitcom and to play 'down market'.

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The Denouement 

Nicola Pagett's final film role, as Dotty Blundell, saw her working with Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman in Mike Newell’s 1994 adaptation of Beryl Bainbridge's novel An Awfully Big Adventure. However, the best was yet to come. In 1995 she got the role of a lifetime as Mrs. Prentice in a revival of Joe Orton’s What The Butler Saw at the National Theatre: “I loved it more than any part I’ve ever played" she confessed, "I loved the language. The merciless, exquisite English that Orton used”. 

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Sadly, she would have to pull out of the production, due to series of manic-depressive episodes that would ultimately cut short a dazzlingly complex and contradictory career. ​‘Where did I go? I went where the air was too thin. I went up too high for too long' she reflected afterward 'I went where you don’t go.’ She spent over a year recuperating and then published a candid memoir, Diamonds Behind My Eyes, written with husband Graham Swannell. When it became known that the object of her romantic obsession, characterised in the book as "The Stranger", was in fact Tony Blair's press secretary Alistair Campbell, she was mortified and pulled out of a promotional tour.

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In the aftermath of this episode, Nicola seemed to pursue a quieter life and focused on her family and friends, as well as her lifelong passion for gardening. Her penultimate TV role saw her reunited with Upstairs Downstairs co-star Simon Williams in an episode of the  BBC’s Dangerfield series in 1997. Then, in 2000, she appeared for the last time in Up Rising, a sitcom written by Nick Vivian (Doc Martin), with Anton Rogers,  Michelle Collins, and Kevin McNally. As Sally Kegworth, the incredulous wife of a retired city banker marooned in a chocolate box middle England village, she sparkled.

 

In the last twenty years of her life, Nicola completely withdrew from the public gaze, in which she had lived most of her adult life. Retired, she was seemingly content with her two Persian cats, living in a quiet suburb of London, perhaps reflecting on some of those past achievements. One of the most mysterious and sublimely intelligent actors of the 20th Century, with her passing in March 2021, her enigma only grows.

 

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