Hildegard Neil, actress who played Cleopatra to Charlton Heston’s Antony and married Brian Blessed – obituary
Hildegard Neil, who has died aged 84, was a South Africa-born actress who made her career in Britain and became the second wife of the rumbustious thespian Brian Blessed.
Most famously she played Cleopatra to Charlton Heston’s Antony in the 1972 film, the Telegraph critic Patrick Gibbs finding her to be “not so far behind Vivien Leigh, the most alluring in my memory”. The tragic lovers, he felt, came “right up to scratch”, although this was “more than can be said of the picture generally”.
Other film roles included Roger Moore’s wife in The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), Basil Dearden’s take on the Jekyll and Hyde story, and the wife whose adulterous husband (George Segal) has an affair with Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class (1973). The same year she played the lover of a German financier (Peter Finch) in England Made Me (1973).
Hildegard Neil confessed that, when she starred as Cleopatra, she did not think she was formidable enough to do the role justice. It was her marriage to Brian Blessed that gave her “focus and freedom”.
They met in 1968 on the set of an ITV drama called Double Agent, also starring Leonard Rossiter. Hildegard Neil was not instantly attracted to Blessed, then basking in his fame as PC Fancy Smith in Z Cars. “He was big and handsome but he was still revelling in those Z Cars actor laddish days and there was a slight harshness about him,” she recalled. In 1974, however, when they met again on the set of a children’s television series, Boy Dominic, she found him “much cuddlier and quieter – really rather lovely”.
They married in 1978 after divorcing their respective spouses, and Hildegard was the first to admit that their relationship had its ups and downs, once describing it as “a long battlefield”. In particular she had to get used to her husband’s mountaineering escapades, which saw him risk death at least three times in a quest to conquer Mount Everest.
Yet they were devoted to each other and, although they pursued their individual careers, often worked together. As Blessed’s directing career took off, she toured as Amanda Wingfield, a faded southern belle living on invented memories, in his 1998 production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and was the dotty Lady Angkatell in his 2016 production of Agatha Christie’s The Hollow, in which their daughter Rosalind played a sculptress.
She also played Fool to his King Lear in a 1999 film version of the Shakespearean tragedy which Blessed also directed, and Eleanor of Aquitaine to his Henry II in The Lion in Winter (Haymarket Theatre, Basingstoke, 1994). In lighter fare she played the Wicked Witch of the West to his Cowardly Lion and Mrs Darling to his Captain Hook.
Meanwhile, declaring that she was “not the kind of wife who sits at home knitting while her husband is away”, during her husband’s absences in the mountains, when not acting, she kept herself busy looking after a menagerie of animals at their home in Surrey which in 1998 consisted of “five Shetland ponies, 80 ducks, a cockerel, a few hens, four dogs and three cats”.
She was born Hildegard Hope Zimmermann in Cape Town on May 20 1939 to Carl Zimmermann, a police superintendent, and his wife Josephine, née Seddon. She worked as a library assistant and typist before arriving in Britain to train at Rada. Adopting Neil as her professional name, she first achieved critical acclaim in the late 1960s with the Everyman theatre company in Liverpool in roles such as Rosalind in As You Like It and Hedda Gabler.
Her television appearances over some 50 years were mainly character roles, ranging from action series to dramas and sci-fi, her last being in the BBC drama series Doctors in 2012. More substantial roles included those of Colette Hyde in The Early Life of Stephen Hind, the BBC miniseries based on Storm Jameson’s novel (1974); Virginia in A Spy at Evening (1981); and Margaret Coleman, wife of a gem merchant boss in the ITV series Diamonds (1981).
She had a 1969 season with the Royal Shakespeare Company playing a variety of roles including Gertrude in Hamlet and, among dozens of other stage roles, played Lady Macbeth to Alan Dobie’s Macbeth (Greenwich Theatre, 1971), the Telegraph critic observing that she gave “that fearsome consort a refreshingly seductive manner which casts new light on the Macbeths’ marriage”.
Hildegard Neil’s first two marriages, to Barry Wenn and John Cartmel-Crossley, were dissolved. She is survived by her husband Brian Blessed and by their daughter.
Hildegard Neil, born May 20 1939, died September 19 2023
