Diana Olsson; actor (great obit)
Hyfler/Rosner
Consummate radio actor
12 November 2003
<independent>
Diana Clare Katrina Olsson, actor: born London 12 February 1929;
married 1948 Roland Skarberg (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved
1971); died Edinburgh 11 October 2003.
Though Diana Olsson was always ready to act on stage, and did so frequently
when the work was offered, her real love was the radio, and she was born in
time to participate in radio drama's greatest, most creative period.
During most of the 1950s through to the 1990s she was a member of the
celebrated Drama Repertory Company, the BBC's in-house troupe of actors
trained to take on absolutely any role that might come up - in Olsson's
case, from a back-street tart coughing out information to a copper over a
morning fag, through W.G. Grace's mother (to Timothy Spall's "WG"), to a
member of the upper crust disabusing, in cut-glass tones, her husband of his
notions of woman-as-property over the breakfast devilled kidneys. And a few
thousand other parts in between, along with the rather more fantastic, even
grotesque, roles you might be given on the Third Programme or schools radio
(a chair leg, a baby hedgehog, the Spirit of the West Wind, a disgruntled
dung-beetle).
Of all styles and types of acting, that for the wireless is without doubt
the most demanding, disciplined, creative and downright gruelling, since of
course all that radio actors have is their voice.
Olsson was a consummate radio actor (she detested the word "actress") who
moved to radio work as soon as she could, in her twenties, during the 1950s.
And though she certainly did other work (even including the odd voice-over
years later), she rarely left the medium for very long, swiftly learning not
stagecraft but studio-craft - when to step back from the microphone, when to
talk "away" from it, how to talk "away" from it, how to keep going when an
FX-girl is shaking clacking castanets in your left ear, blowing a whistle in
your right (which might be aural shorthand for the Relief of Mafeking, the
running of the bulls in Pamplona, or a riot in the Old Kent Road).
Diana Olsson was born in 1929 in Hampstead, north London. Her father, with
Scandinavian forebears, was the journalist and war correspondent Carl
Olsson, who died suddenly on VE Day. She badgered her mother to let her go
on the stage, and was taken on at the Central School of Speech and Drama,
from which she graduated with distinction in 1947.
In 1948 she married Roland Skarberg, an American, and travelled to New York,
later finding work both on and off Broadway, and elsewhere (at one stage she
modelled for Elisabeth Arden). Though it produced a daughter and a son, the
marriage did not last, the couple separating in 1954, although they did not
finally divorce until 1971.
Olsson returned to England and, after work on the stage, gravitated towards
the BBC. She was spotted by the legendary, and brilliant, radio producer
R.D. "Reggie" Smith (among many other things husband to the long-suffering
novelist Olivia Manning, and "Guy" to Manning's "Harriet" in her celebrated
"Balkan Trilogy"). Her first stint "on the Rep", as those invited to join
the BBC Drama Repertory Company invariably referred to their engagement, was
in the late 1950s and lasted well into the 1960s.
She was lucky with thrillers and suspense serials, usually broadcast on the
Light Programme. One of her headline roles was as the private eye Philip
O'Dell's "right-hand gal", Heather, in a succession of serials by the
mystery maestro Lester Powell, including the final O'Dell thriller of all,
Tea on the Island (1961: tracking down a drug tsar on the American/Canadian
border), with the tough-toned Canadian actor Robert Beatty as O'Dell.
The previous year she had also been in the cast of one of Julian
Maclaren-Ross's typically offbeat chillers, The Doomsday Book (1960), a
superior British Gothic stuffed with sinister and freakish characters in a
plot with more switchbacks to it than a Swiss mountain route. At the same
time she could take on much lighter roles, such as one of the sisters in
Henry Cecil's Daughters-in-Law (1961, director H.B. Fortuin), mixing with
comic talents such as Cecil Parker and Naunton Wayne.
She played opposite Kenneth Dight in R.C. Sherriff's A Shred of Evidence
(1960); was in Felix Felton's and Susan Ashman's riveting adaptation of
Margery Allingham's Look to the Lady (1961) with Richard Hurndall, then the
almost obligatory actor for "young, dashing 'tec hero", as Albert Campion,
and Peter Claughton (erstwhile Toytown's "Ernest the Policeman"),
gloriously, as Magersfontein Lugg; and was a whining tart in Jeffrey Ashford
(i.e. Roderic Graeme)'s Counsel for the Defence (1961).
And of course there was Shakespeare, Sheridan, Jonson and the rest of the
classics for both the Home Service and Third Programme, as well as more
contemporary fare such as Michael Bakewell's memorable early-1960s
production of Jennifer Dawson's The Ha-Ha, a challenging and eerily
atmospheric drama about schizophrenia in which Olsson took on the role of
the heroine's "evil psyche" (to Elizabeth Proud's "good psyche").
In 1969 she was offered a position in the "Schools rep", a smaller band of
radio thesps who could be asked, as she was, to play everything from someone
travelling back through time to watch the dinosaurs (plenty of scope for
blood-curdling roaring as well as the gruesome sound of lesser beasts' bones
being crunched up, courtesy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop), through
reading short stories and poetry, to making the announcements on Music and
Movement ("Now children, when the music stops I want you all to hop up and
down like fleas!").
Olsson's second stint as a full-time member of the Rep occurred during the
1970s, arguably radio drama's finest hour. She turned up as one of the
semi-regular players in the earlier Dr Finlay's Casebook radio series, under
the producer Trafford Whitelock, but now, on Radio 3 as well as Radio 4, she
was getting meatier roles, even if some of them might only take a few
minutes of airtime per week - in Jane Graham's superb production of Evelyn
Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (1974, adapted by Barry Campbell into 11
hour-long instalments), she was Guy Crouchback's sister Angela Box-Bender, a
wonderfully sardonic foil to Jeffrey Segal's booming Arthur Box-Bender.
There were many more Saturday Night Theatre roles, although these were now
stronger: she was in John Galsworthy's Loyalties, with a sterling cast which
included Keith Michell, John Justin and Rolf Lefebvre, and in Robert
Traver's worldwide hit Anatomy of a Murder (1971), with Cyril Shaps and
Peter Marinker; and she played the naggingly negative wife in Laburnum Grove
(1971), J.B. Priestley's slightly caustic tale of a pillar of the community
(beautifully played by Bernard Archard) who turns out to be anything but.
She joined John Carson and the redoubtable Margaret Robertson in Martin
Ransohoff's The Sandpiper (a radio adaptation of the 1965 movie with Richard
Burton and Elizabeth Taylor); Freddie Jones and Hilda Schroeder in Lydia
Ragosin's monarchical drama Bertie (1974: Olsson played Jones's Edward
Prince of Wales's long-suffering wife, Alexandra, with Schroeder as an
exasperated, and dying, Victoria); and Richard Briers in Oscar Wilde's Lord
Arthur Savile's Crime (1974).
But just to show she could still prowl down contemporary mean streets with
as much verve as before, she took on the role of the scheming, murderous
wife in one of R.D. Wingfield's typically ingenious, though intensely
misogynistic, thrillers, Cleft Stick (1973, with Douglas Blackwell and
Vernon Joyner), and joined Clive Swift and Bryan Pringle (the latter
sounding as splendidly thuggish on radio as he contrived to look on
television) in John Kirkmorris's gripping Deadweight (1975).
Television was not Olsson's medium, although she appeared on it and, late in
her career, was Mrs Galbraith in the Scottish soap Take the High Road (20
years before, she had actually been in the cast of the archetypal British
radio soap, The Dales, as Janet Dale). In the 1980s (before she was
diagnosed as having MS) there was a good deal of theatrical work - a season
at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, A Ragged Pair of Claws with the RSC, work
in Glasgow and Edinburgh, a highly regarded performance in William Saroyan's
Don't Go Away Mad at the Donmar in 1989.
She did of course have other lives. For a good deal of her radio career she
stayed with friends in the profession in London while working at
Broadcasting House, then travelling up to Edinburgh at the weekends and
slowly renovating the house she had bought there some years before. She was
fascinated by history, particularly the era of Mary, Queen of Scots, about
which she wrote on occasions for The Scotsman, taking as a pseudonym her
Scandinavian grandmother's name, "Kate Nielsen".
A woman of great enthusiasm and vivacity, with a mane of reddish-blonde
hair, Olsson once, at a party, caught the eye of Louis MacNeice, as she
whirled around in a gorgeous, showy red dress. "Look," muttered the poet to
a fellow actress. "Ophelia on fire."
Out of the thousands of parts she played, both on stage and on the air, it
would seem to be absurd to single out any one performance. And yet no one
who has heard Diana Olsson in Stewart Conn's production of Muriel Spark's
strange and unsettling The Party Through the Wall (1989) could ever forget
her extraordinary, high-octane performance as the wittering, whingeing Miss
Carson, pursued and vindictively haunted to the verge of madness, then far,
far beyond, by the sinister Dr Fell - who isn't there (a particularly
diabolical James Cairncross).
Like all really good actors she had no coyness when it came to a role she
could sink her teeth into, and at the play's climax her screeches of baffled
rage, frustration, then terror are utterly harrowing - even embarrassing:
the mark of an exceptional talent.
Jack Adrian