Actress Susannah York dies aged 72

Guardian News and Media/London

Susannah York, the British actress whose gamine looks and demure persona made her an icon of the swinging 60s, has died of bone marrow cancer at the age of 72, the media reported late Saturday.

York won acclaim for her roles in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? the 1969 film role for which she was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe as well as A Man For All Seasons in 1966 and as the feisty section officer who took on Kenneth More in the stirring World War II epic Battle of Britain in 1969.

She also had an extensive and critically acclaimed stage career, which included roles in The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs and Henry James’s play Appearances, and continued to act late into her life. She was also a children’s author, penning two fantasy novels.

Her son, actor Orlando Wells, described her as "an absolutely fantastic mother, who was very down to earth”.

"She loved nothing more than cooking a good Sunday roast and sitting around a fire of a winter’s evening. In some senses, she was quite a home girl. Both Sasha (his sister) and I feel incredibly lucky to have her as a mother,” he said.

Playwright Sir Tom Stoppard also played tribute to York, recalling his first meeting at the dawn of the 1960s with a woman who was to win a legion of male admirers.

Born Susannah Yolande Fletcher in London in January 1939, her father was a merchant banker and her mother the daughter of a diplomat. Her parents divorced when she was five and after her mother remarried a Scottish businessman the family moved to Scotland.

After training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she won the Ronson award for most promising student, York began her film career in 1960 when she appeared in Tunes of Glory, co-starring with Alec Guinness and John Mills.

In the same year she met and married Michael Wells, with whom she had two children, before they divorced in 1976.

The 1960s proved to be a golden period for her, during which she was to become one of the decade’s most memorable faces. A string of successes culminated in her best-known role, starring with Jane Fonda in the Sydney Pollack-directed They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, for which she won a Bafta and an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.

Critics also praised her performance as Childie, the young lesbian in Robert Aldrich’s film adaptation of Frank Marcus’s hit play The Killing of Sister George (1968), a role that was said to have demonstrated her versatility.