There is a huge raft of exceptional British stage actors who merit commemoration even though they never hit the “big time” in a film franchise or a television soap. Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who has died aged 88, was one of the best of them.
On stage, it was a classic progression from the Bristol Old Vic – “Oh, how I wish I could convey the excitement those words engendered in me as a young girl,” she said – to the West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National – over several decades.
