‘Piaf’ Star on Broadway, the West End Was 81

Jane Lapotaire, the British stage veteran whose “heart-stopping” turn as the tragic French singer Édith Piaf won her Tony and Olivier awards, died March 5, The Guardian reported. She was 81.

Lapotaire performed with the Bristol Old Vic, the National Theatre (under founder Laurence Olivier), The Young Vic — which she co-founded in 1970 — and the Royal Shakespeare Company during her long career.

She was appointed CBE last year and attended the investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle on Feb. 17.

Lapotaire was starring as Maria Callas on a British tour of Terrence McNally’s Master Class when, on a break in Paris in early 2000, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.

Recovering after time in intensive care and two major operations, she wrote a memoir, Time Out of Mind, published in 2003. (Her first memoir, Everybody’s Daughter, Nobody’s Child, came out in 1989.)

She made it back to acting in 2004 and rejoined the RSC in 2013 for a turn as the Duchess of Gloucester in the David Tennant-starring Richard II. The next year, she appeared as a Russian aristocrat in the Downton Abbey Christmas special.

She then played Princess Alice of Greece on two episodes of Netflix’s The Crown in 2019; showed up in a new version of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca that starred Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas; and appeared in the 2023 Paramount+ miniseries The Burning Girls.

Lapotaire spent six months learning how to sing to star as Piaf, first on an RSC stage, then in the West End, where she won the 1979 Olivier for best actress, and then on Broadway in 1981, when she received her Tony.

In The New York Times, reviewer Frank Rich wrote, “Miss Lapotaire’s performance burns with such heart-stopping intensity that one never questions her right to stand in for the ‘little sparrow.’”

After her Broadway triumph, she elected to remain in the U.S. for a couple of years, hoping to break into the movies, but she would call that “a mistake. I hadn’t realized how completely Hollywood devoted itself to physical perfection. At 40 I was suddenly very aware of not being ‘glamorous’ in the accepted sense,” The Telegraph noted.

Born on Dec. 26, 1944, in Ipswich, Suffolk, Lapotaire was raised by her teenage mother’s French foster mom, Grace. After being turned down by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she studied acting at the Bristol Old Vic for two years, then joined Olivier’s National Theatre in 1967.

At the Young Vic in London, she starred in The Taming of the Shrew, Oedipus and Measure for Measure before being accepted by the RSC in 1974. Over the years, she starred in productions of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, A Room With a View, Hamlet (opposite Kenneth Branagh), Henry VIII and Henry V.

She also starred in a one-woman show, Shakespeare as I Knew Her.

Her film résumé included Antony and Cleopatra (1972), Trevor Nunn’s Lady Jane (1986), James Ivory’s Surviving Picasso (1996) and Shooting Fish (1997).

Survivors include her son, screenwriter-director Rowan Joffé. Her second husband was Oscar-nominated director Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission); they were married from 1971 until their 1980 divorce.