Josette Simon

Josette Patricia Simon is a British actor. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and played the part of Dayna Mellanby in the third and fourth series of the television sci-fi series Blake's 7 from 1980 to 1981. On stage, she has appeared in Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) productions from 1982, playing Ariel in The Tempest, to 2018 when she was Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. The first black woman in an RSC play when she featured in 1982, Simon has been at the forefront of colour-blind casting, playing roles traditionally taken by white actors, including Maggie, a character that is thought to be based on Marilyn Monroe, in Arthur Miller's After the Fall at the National Theatre in 1990. Simon's first leading role at the RSC, the first principal part filled by a black woman for the company, was as Rosaline, in Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Barry Kyle, in 1984. In 1987, she appeared for the RSC again, in the lead role of Isabelle in Measure for Measure. Later leading roles for the RSC saw her as Titania/Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999–2000) and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (2017–2018). She has played numerous other roles across stage, television, film, and radio. She starred alongside Brenda Fricker in the two-part television series Seekers (1993), written by Lynda La Plante. Simon has portrayed senior police officers in Silent Witness (1998), Minder (2009), and Broadchurch (2017); and portrayed a defence lawyer in Anatomy of a Scandal (2022). Simon won the Evening Standard Best Actress award, a Critics' Circle Theatre Award, and Plays and Players Critic Awards for After the Fall, and two film festival awards for her part in Milk and Honey (1988). She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2000, for services to drama. Early life Josette Patricia Simon was born in 1960 in Leicester. Her mother, from Anguilla, and her father, from Antigua, had both moved to the United Kingdom in the 1950s and worked at Thorn EMI. Simon attended Rushey Mead primary school, followed by Alderman Newton's Girls' School. She became interested in acting after successfully auditioning, aged 14, with a friend for the choir for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Simon later appeared in pantomimes before finishing secondary school, and played Martha in a 1976 production of The Miracle Worker directed by Michael Bogdanov at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre.