Although her first renown on television was in tough-talking professional roles – the fierce and cynical news editor in the first two series of Drop the Dead Donkey (1990-91); no-nonsense doctors in Peak Practice (1999) and Dalziel and Pascoe (2005); and as Superintendent Susan Blake in the first series of Merseybeat (2001-02) – there seemed to be no limit to the talent of Haydn Gwynne, who has died of cancer aged 66.
The impression that she could be drop-dead funny, as she was in Drop the Dead Donkey, was consolidated by more recent royal family forays in Channel 4’s The Windsors (2016) in which, not to be outdone by Harry Enfield’s crude impersonation of Prince Charles, she played Camilla as Cruella de Vil – or “as if she were Joan Collins in a soap called Balmoral”, she said. More sedately, she applied a twinkling composure to Lady Susan Hussey, woman of the royal bedchamber, in the fifth series (2022) of The Crown on Netflix.
