Angela Pleasence

Angela Daphne Anne Pleasence was born on 17 September 1941 in Chapeltown, near Sheffield, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Her parents were both actors: Miriam Raymond (born Miriam Walker) and Donald Pleasence, who would become internationally famous for The Caretaker, The Great Escape, You Only Live Twice and the Halloween films. Her mother was the first of Donald's four wives, and he had five daughters across his first three marriages.

She later said that she was not really aware of what her father was until she was 15 or 16. "I just thought he was great, that's all," she recalled. "It wouldn't have mattered if he'd been a dustman, he'd have been a great dustman."

She went to school in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire. Four years passed between leaving school and deciding to act. In that time she enrolled at a technical college to begin a pre-nursing course, which she left after a year, and then worked in Paris as an au pair.

On returning to England she auditioned successfully for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) by performing a Victorian street ballad. She was painfully shy as a student: "It wasn't until my very last term that I actually started speaking, and then it was to play old ladies, so that I could bend over and mumble." RADA records her graduating with the Acting (RADA Diploma) in 1965.

Stage. She made her professional debut in 1964 as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. At the Edinburgh Lyceum, Richard Eyre directed her as a psychiatric patient in The Ha Ha (1967), a performance The Scotsman called perfect, and as Irena in Three Sisters (1968). In 1970 she played Miranda in Jonathan Miller's The Tempest and the title role in Shaw's Saint Joan, both at the Mermaid Theatre in London. Harold Pinter directed her in The Hothouse at Hampstead Theatre in 1980. Her agency also listed National Theatre and West End credits including Ghetto, The Hothouse and The Cherry Orchard, and she played Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days in Edinburgh in 1995.

Television. Early roles included Monica Sutton in Coronation Street (1968), Peter Terson's The Last Train Through the Harecastle Tunnel for The Wednesday Play (1969, directed by Alan Clarke) and Catherine Howard in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970). She went on to Play for Today, Dixon of Dock Green, Les Misérables (1978, as Fantine), The Walls of Jericho (as Elsie Inglis), The Barchester Chronicles (1982), Mansfield Park (1983), A Christmas Carol (1984), Silas Marner (1985), Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna, Casualty, The Bill, Crime Traveller, Midsomer Murders, Cider with Rosie, Agatha Christie's Marple, Doctors, Doctor Who (2007, as Elizabeth I), Agatha Christie's Poirot, The Sarah Jane Adventures, Whitechapel (2013) and Happy Valley (2016).

Film. Her film work ran from Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968) and The Love Ban (1973) through Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), From Beyond the Grave (1974), Symptoms (1974), The Godsend (1980), Stealing Heaven (1988), The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish (1991), The Search for John Gissing (2001), Gangs of New York (2002), The Gigolos (2006) and Your Highness (2011).

In 1964 she married the actor Michael Cadman. They had one son, Pascoe, and divorced in 1970. She bore such a striking resemblance to her father that one newspaper joked the only way they could work together was to play father and daughter, which they did twice: in From Beyond the Grave (1974) and in The Barchester Chronicles (1982). Little else about her private life was made public.

Pleasence spoke candidly about the limits of a famous name, saying that being Donald Pleasence's daughter did not help her escape being turned down in thousands of auditions. She was famously uneasy with the spotlight itself: after taking a solo curtain call as Saint Joan in 1970 she explained that she had never been left alone on a stage before and was embarrassed by it all. No public political or religious views are documented.

Pleasence is remembered as a uniquely unsettling and ethereal screen presence, particularly in British horror. The critic and author Barry Forshaw, in British Gothic Cinema, described her as an "unconventional femme fatale" radically different from the usual nubile temptress. Her lead in Symptoms (1974), later released on DVD by the BFI, has drawn renewed critical admiration. Her agency summed up her contribution to the British industry as "a distinctive and much-admired part of her legacy". She also features in Holly Hill's 1993 book Playing Joan: Actresses on the Challenge of Shaw's Saint Joan.

No major individual acting awards are documented in the sources consulted. She graduated from RADA, and The Six Wives of Henry VIII, in which she played Catherine Howard, was a BAFTA-nominated production.

Her Catherine Howard, her Coronation Street hippie Monica Sutton and her Elizabeth I in Doctor Who remain her most widely seen roles. In 1978 she voiced Ophelia in a BBC radio production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. She affectionately parodied her own 1970s horror persona in Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001).

Angela Pleasence died on 6 April 2026, aged 84. Her agency, Waring McKenna, announced the news on Instagram on 10 April, and obituaries followed in The Telegraph (14 April), The Times, The Guardian (15 April) and The Stage. The place and cause of death were not made public. She was survived by her son, Pascoe.