Cleo Sylvestre, who has died aged 79, was the first black woman to appear in a leading role at the National Theatre and from 1970 the first black actress to play a regular character in a major British television soap opera; she also sang with the Rolling Stones and featured in programmes such as Doctor Who and Grange Hill, yet there were many, not least Cleo Sylvestre herself, who thought that but for her colour she would have been a bigger star still.
Her first performance of note came in 1964. Then 19, she had become friendly with the unknown Rolling Stones at a blues night in Soho. She was particularly close to Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, for whom her mother would often make meals in the kitchen of the family’s council flat in north London. Others who ate there included members of the Hollies and Jimmy Page, then a session guitarist.
Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager, suggested she record a cover version of Phil Spector’s song, To Know Him Is to Love Him. The group acted as her backing musicians, and she is credited as the first female vocalist to sing with them. When Jones later left the Stones, he tried to persuade Cleo Sylvestre to be in his new band, but she had decided to concentrate on acting.
She had by then been seen in all the shocking social dramas that Ken Loach had made with Nell Dunn and Jeremy Sandford – Up the Junction (1965), Cathy Come Home (1966) and Poor Cow (1967). She had had a small part in Coronation Street and been cast as a belly dancer in an episode of Doctor Who.
This caused consternation in the BBC’s make-up department, which had little experience of working with black actors. “I settled on ‘Light Egyptian’”, she recalled. There were then few professional black actors in Britain, and most had grown up in the Caribbean, whereas she had a London accent.
In 1967, she made her West End debut in Simon Gray’s first play, Wise Child, staged at Wyndham’s Theatre. Her character, Janice, worked in a hotel where a criminal, Jock Masters, played by Alec Guinness, had holed up. The cast was rounded out by Gordon Jackson and Simon Ward, with Cleo Sylvestre earning an award nomination as most promising new actress.
After one show, Laurence Olivier stepped into her dressing room to offer his congratulations on her performance. Two years later, she was cast in The National Health (1969), written by Peter Nichols for the National Theatre at the behest of Kenneth Tynan and Olivier, then running the company.
Following the acclaim given to A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967), Nichols was hot property. The National Health, as its title indicated, was an ambitious state-of-the-nation play, with the emergence of a multi-racial Britain being one of its themes.
The setting was a ward in a decrepit northern hospital, with the action intercut for satirical purposes with scenes from a medical soap opera along the lines of Dr Kildare, in which everything turns out happily.
The fictional drama was entitled Nurse Norton’s Affair. Its plot had a West Indian staff nurse, Cleo Norton – played by Cleo Sylvestre – romanced by Dr Boyd, a Scot. The cast included Jim Dale, most associated with the Carry On films, Isabelle Lucas (later seen in the black British sitcom The Fosters), Charles Kay and Robert Lang, with Tom Baker as an extra.
Olivier was originally sceptical about the ability of black actors to play their parts, suggesting that perhaps his wife, Joan Plowright, might “black up”, as he had done in Othello. Yet although it had a relatively short run, The National Health proved the National Theatre’s biggest hit since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead three years before, and won Best New Play at the Evening Standard awards.
Nearly 50 years later, Cleo Sylvestre was to be found as an elderly patient in Allelujah!, Alan Bennett’s 2018 companion piece to The National Health, about the geriatric ward of a Yorkshire hospital facing closure.
In August 1969, the day after her role in Some Women, a gritty BBC dramatization of prisoners’ life stories, Cleo Sylvestre was invited to join the cast of Crossroads, the television soap. “Enoch Powell had been making those terrible ‘Rivers of Blood’ speeches, which resulted in a lot of racial tension up and down the country,” she recalled. Reg Watson, the programme’s producer decided accordingly to create a black character, Melanie.
Cleo Sylvestre made a memorable entrance into the Crossroads motel, presided over by the formidable, flame-haired Meg Richardson (Noele Gordon). When the receptionist asked Melanie who she should say wanted Meg Richardson, back came the reply: “Tell her it’s her daughter.” Cue the theme music. Melanie proved to be Meg’s adopted child who had hitherto been in France. Cleo Sylvestre’s character featured regularly in Crossroads’ storylines for another two years.
Yet when a film came to be made of The National Health in 1973, Cleo Sylvestre was not in it, like much of the original cast and its first director, Michael Blakemore. In part this was because the American studio, Columbia, wanted names it knew.
But for Cleo Sylvestre, as she later observed, this was to become a pattern: “Nothing led anywhere.” Unlike her contemporary Helen Mirren, a part at the National Theatre would not yield a West End play. At union meetings, she was made to feel secondary to the white actors.
Looking for work, she wrote to every repertory company in the country. She had three replies, the gist of each being that they would keep her in mind for the role of the black slave should they stage The Crucible.
Cleopatra Mary Sylvestre was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, on April 19 1945. Her mother, Laureen, had had a difficult upbringing. Herself of mixed race and illegitimate, abandoned by her white mother, she had been raised in a children’s home in Yorkshire at the time of the Great War.
After becoming a dancer, she worked at the Shim Sham Club, a jazz venue in Soho frequented in the 1930s by the likes of Edwina Mountbatten. Cleo’s godparents included the louche MP and journalist, Tom Driberg, and Constant Lambert, the composer (and model for Hugh Moreland in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time).
Lambert and Laureen had a long affair which lasted until his premature death in 1951. His son, Kit, was subsequently manager of another iconic Sixties rock band, The Who. Cleo was brought up to believe that her father was Laureen’s husband, Owen Sylvestre, whom she had married in 1944.
Originally from the West Indies, Sylvestre had answered Britain’s call during the war and had become a Lancaster bomber pilot, winning the DFM. He found it impossible to get work with an airline in peacetime, however, and became hooked on gambling. Cleo’s parents divorced and she was raised by her mother in Euston, London.
She would regularly receive letters from an “Uncle Ben” in Sierra Leone, and in 2007, on a visit to Freetown, her daughter Zoe Palmer learned that this was in fact Cleo’s biological father, a lawyer.
Cleo was educated at Camden School for Girls and attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. Her first stage was one she fashioned under her mother’s kitchen table. A teacher warned her, however, that there were few roles for black actors.
Cleo had vivid memories of once hearing footsteps pacing down the street after her and her mother and a voice crying: “Nig! Nig! Wait!” It was a neighbour, who apologised, saying she did not know what else to call Laureen.
In the 1970s, Cleo Sylvestre spent several seasons touring with the Young Vic, alongside David Yip. She appeared at many regional theatres subsequently and was seen on television in programmes such as Z-Cars, Till Death Us Do Part, The Bill and New Tricks. On Grange Hill, she played a social worker, and latterly she had been Anne Chapman in All Creatures Great and Small, filmed near to where her mother had grown up. She also presented Play School.
Her film appearances included Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and a cameo in Paddington (2014). On stage, she was in ID (Almeida, 2003), with Anthony Sher, Racine’s Phaedre at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007 and Medea for Northern Broadsides in 2010. She was perhaps best-known for her one-woman show, The Marvellous Adventure of Mary Seacole, and she helped raise money for a statue of the 19th-century nurse.
Cleo Sylvestre sat on the board of Equity and the Young Vic and for two decades was joint artistic director of the Rosemary Branch Theatre in Islington, north London, which fosters new writing. She was also the inspiration for the character of Honey in Zeb Soanes’s children’s books about Gaspard the Fox.
She was appointed MBE in 2023. Last month, she appeared on Antiques Roadshow with memorabilia from her life, including a Christmas card hand made for her by Jimmy Page.
Cleo Sylvestre married, in 1977, Ian Palmer. He died in 1995, and she is survived by their son and two daughters.
Cleo Sylvestre, born April 19 1945, died September 20 2024
