I am ten years old and I know the difference between the literal and the metaphorical. But the woman I’m looking at does not. Metaphorically, she has blood on her hands, but she thinks it is literal. She’s screaming at her hands. She’s gone bonkers: I can see them clearly and they are completely clean. She looks a bit like my mother, who is sitting next to me, but she behaves completely differently. I vow never to do anything really wicked, because it comes back to haunt you. And Rule One in life must be to not kill the guests.

This was 1957, it was in Manchester and it was probably in the Palace Theatre though I didn’t recall its name afterwards and probably never knew it. The actress was Barbara Jefford; I knew her name and I knew that she was twenty seven years old and considered to be a very good actress. I don’t think I knew the names of anyone else on stage and certainly didn’t remember them. It was my first sight of professional actors though I had been to the theatre to see amateur productions. For example, I had seen a play about a Soviet delegation visiting our town. Every time one of them was asked his name he said “Bugarov”. Hilarious (when you’re ten).

I am a Shakespeare buff having seen all possible attributions at least twice and some of the more popular ones a dozen times or more. “The Scottish Play” is not a favourite; that is partly because of its innate structural weaknesses (despite some wonderful speeches and dramatic moments), but is also because of Barbara Jefford. Other actresses play Lady Macbeth; she was Lady Macbeth. And in rating her so highly I am reluctantly being very conventional. Everybody rated her. Peter Brook put her on stage as Isabella in Measure for Measure alongside John Gielgud and Harry Andrews in 1950 when she was barely out of her teens and she was never short of offers of classical parts. She appeared in fifty four Shakespearean productions and in all but four of Shakespeare’s plays. She won surprisingly few theatrical awards, but her status as a bastion of English theatre was recognised in 1965 when she became the youngest civilian to be awarded an OBE.

She was one of those actors – in a later generation I would cite Antony Sher and Alexandra Gilbreath as good examples – who are far better on stage than on screen. Her second string was voice work on radio, CDs and so on. Generations of schoolchildren were taught Macbeth using the BBC audio version in which she plays Lady Macbeth. Of course, it is not the thing to do the play in Scottish accents so this is “received pronunciation”. In fact she was a passable mimic and you can still see and hear online her respectable attempts at Russian, German and Irish accents among others, but her real vocal strength was the sheer quality of her voice which was precise, direct and emotionally powerful. She was well aware of her talent, remarking in later years, “So often you will see very young actors who look divine. Then they open their little traps. You think, oh dear.” As a theatre goer of seven decades standing I can only concur. She was also the commander of silence who in that first production of Measure for Measure was asked by Peter Brook to remain still and silent for two minutes while Isabella decides whether to pardon Angelo. It was considered to be a triumph.

Actually, to talk of Jefford’s screen career in the singular is completely misleading because there were two and they were entirely different. On television she had a number of medium-sized roles in solid popular dramas such as Play for Today and many of the more substantial crime series like Midsomer Murders in which she appeared in a number of episodes. But she was never in the kind of leading roles that made the likes of Thora Hird or Helen Mirren “household names”. Nor was she ever in really popular programmes like the soaps or The Bill or Casualty. There seems to be no evidence on the questions of whether she ever aspired to this or was ever close to achieving it. It was a middle-of-the-road television career.

But her record in films was as weird and controversial as her stage and television careers were conventional. First there is the question of the Bond girls. Immediate response: Barbara Jefford was never a Bond girl. Except that she was. When Tatiana Romanova (not the most imaginative Russian name) asks James Bond in From Russia with Love (1963) to promise that he will make love to her all the time wnen they get to England it is Jefford you are listening to. The actress you are looking at is the Italian Daniela Bianchi. This was the second Bond film and the first I ever saw – I think it remains one of the best. In retrospect and on reflection I think it is blindingly obvious that Miss Bianchi must have been dubbed. She was barely out of her teens and was runner up in the Miss Universe contest and there was no record of her ever saying anything in English let alone in a Russian accent. But the studio were not prepared to credit Jefford and I don’t know anyone who realised. She did the same later in Thunderball and The Spy Who Loved Me for actresses who looked better than they sounded.

Her largest screen role could scarcely have been more controversial. It was in Joseph Strick’s film of James Joyce’s Ulysses, released in 1967. Strick was an American who knew of Jefford because he had directed theatre in England. Opinion of the film varies from dismissing it as an unfilmable subject to regarding it as disgusting though some regard it as a work of genius. (I am more inclined to the latter view.) The facts are that it is a black and white film of a lengthy 1922 novel about a spring day in Dublin in 1904 though in the film the action (there is no plot) is updated to the 1960s. It is surrealist in that we slip frequently from the streets of Dublin into the daydreams, nightmares and masturbatory fantasies of the characters. The main character in the novel is Stephen Daedalus who is played in the film by Maurice Roeves, but he is rather upstaged by Milo O’Shea playing Leopold Bloom.

Jefford plays Bloom’s adulterous wife, Molly. As it happens she says very little for the first three quarters of the film, but in the last half hour whatever is shown on screen is accompanied by a monologue from Molly. It’s about sex, love and gender and is extremely explicit. Whereas the director did not require Jefford to do anything that would excite the censor what she says was bound to cause controversy. So another Jefford record is for the film banned for the longest time in Ireland, 1967-2000. I’m prepared to credit her with a third record: longest monologue in a movie. There is no official sanction for this, but if you look up the longest monologues in movies it is not mentioned , but those which are mentioned are much shorter. Incidentally, she looks really sexy in the film and her face is nicely poised between the rather sharp features of her youth and the matronly appearance of her later years. (She was in her mid-thirties at the time.) She says the lines beautifully, of course, in a lilting brogue. I’m not sure it’s a convincing Dublin accent, but I am sometimes rather pedantic about that sort of thing, whereas other people are not so bothered. It’s certainly a better attempt than Roeves (who was born in Sunderland and grew up in Glasgow) and at least as good as T.P.McKenna (Cavan).

She also managed to be in a film as divisive as Ulysses in her later years. In Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999) she plays the German Baroness Kessler, a woman who “fell in love with the devil at first sight” and who is consulted by Johnny Depp. Like Ulysses The Ninth Gate has been declared to be both complete rubbish and a work of genius. It is as if Jefford saw cinema as an opportunity to be a completely different kind of actor from her stage persona.

Barbara Jefford’s last Stratford appearance was in All’s Well that Ends Well in 1992. I missed it, by which I mean not just that we didn’t go, but that I was never aware of it. I have no particular reason, but it was the middle of life and, though not a crisis, I was busy to a degree I can hardly comprehend now. But I did see her again. In the summer of 2008 I was teaching (and staying) in King’s College, Cambridge, across the road from the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Peter Hall’s (“2007”) production of Shaw’s Pygmalion was on and we bought tickets. Tim Piggott-Smith played Professor Higgins and Michelle Dockery was Eliza Doolittle. (Like most people. I hadn’t heard of her, but we have now as she was soon to play the imperious but complicated Lady Mary in Downton Abbey.) I hadn’t read the programme properly so that I merely reacted to the actress playing Professor Higgins’ mother as someone impressive in her holding of the stage but faintly familiar. Of course it was Barbara Jefford, now seventy eight, more than half a century on.

(Barbara Jefford 1930-2020, the real deal.)

Lincoln Allison October 2025

This article is the first of a series of ten about the best live performances I ever saw. This will be put together with ten essays on the most memorable sporting events I ever attended and ten on the most interesting meals I ever ate to form a book to be finished in 2026 called (provisionally) The Best of It. It is offered as a taster.