Washington University lost a dear and loyal friend when it was announced that the celebrated Tony-Award winning actress Jane Lapotaire had died at her London home on March 5th at the age of 81. Ms. Lapotaire, who was an Honorary Associate Artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company and began her acting career with Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company (she played the role of Shylock’s daughter Jessica to Olivier’s Shylock in 1970), had only recently received the award of CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) and attended her investiture at Windsor Castle in February 2025 just weeks before her death. Among many prestigious acting awards, she received both the Olivier and Tony Awards for her portrayal of French singer Edith Piaf in Piaf in 1981.
Ms. Lapotaire was not only a legendary and extraordinarily versatile actress, she was an accomplished writer, and published several books, including Everybody’s Daughter, Nobody’s Child, written in 1989, a memoir about her childhood born out of wedlock to a French teenager (she surmised that her real father was an America GI), and Time Out of Mind (2003), a memoir about the cerebral hemorrhage which nearly ended her life and threatened to prematurely end her acting career.
In a career that spanned more than five decades, Jane played nearly every major female lead in the classical repertoire, including Viola in Twelfth Night, Rosalind in As You Like It, Joan in St. Joan, Katherine in Taming of the Shrew, Jocasta in Oedipus, Maria Callas in Master Class, and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. More recently, she took on more mature Shakespearean roles, from Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh’s stage production of Hamlet to the Duchess of Gloucester in David Tennant’s Richard II. Although her great love was the theatre, her career included numerous roles in film and television. She first came to the attention of the wider public as the eponymous heroine in the BBC mini-series Madame Curie (1977), and later had significant roles in such international successes as Downton Abbey and The Crown.
Ms. Lapotaire’s unquenchable passion for the theatre, combined with her intelligence and pedagogical skill, also made her a truly legendary teacher. It was in that capacity that many students at Washington University in St. Louis got to know and love her. She taught at WashU as Artist-in-Residence for an entire semester on several occasions, and participated annually as a special Guest Artist at WashU’s Shakespeare’s Globe Summer Program from 1993 through 2020.
Ms. Lapotaire’s classes on Shakespeare at the Globe Program were the stuff of legend and inspired countless students to hone their craft. Always demanding, yet loving and compassionate, her classes offered students an appreciation for text and spoken word from the perspective of one of the greatest Shakespearean interpreters of our age. Asking them to come to class with a prepared speech or sonnet, Jane painstakingly drew students’ attention to the importance and complexity of words and lines, noting how important antitheses were in interpreting the text, and that by responding to apparently miniscule but pivotal moments in the text, not only stage delivery but memorization and even stage movement all became easier and more natural. Her students emerged from her classes revitalized and suddenly realized that they no longer found Shakespeare’s language difficult or tedious. Now the lines of the text were exciting and brimming with vibrancy.
Read the full tribute to Jane, written by Professor Emeritus Henry Schvey, here.
