Topsy Jane

Topsy Jane (2 December 1938 – 4 January 2014) was a British actress of the 1960s. She was in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and was cast as Liz (the role eventually played by Julie Christie) in the 1963 film Billy Liar but was forced to pull out owing to mental health issues. Early life She was born as Topsy Jane Legge in Erdington in Birmingham in 1938, the daughter of Anna Maud née Gumbrell (1907-2006) and Albert Harry Legge (1894-1961), a dairy-man and by 1939 a telephone engineer for the GPO. Her father was a committed Communist and later was to be a major influence in the political awakening of her husband, the British film and television producer and actor Tony Garnett. Topsy Jane was educated at Paget Road School before going on to study at Garrett's Green College. Initially, she intended to train as a children's nurse, but while appearing in amateur theatre at the Varley Players at Pype Hayes Church, the Birmingham Drama Group, and the Highbury Little Theatre she realised she had a talent for acting. Her husband, Tony Garnett, later wrote of her: "Leaving school at fifteen, Topsy was not academic, although she read voraciously, loving Tolstoy and almost any nineteenth-century English or French novel she could lose herself in. We shared a love of poetry. She loved Keats and I liked Shelley. She would listen as I held forth, no doubt pretentiously, on some matter, using ill-digested political jargon. Then she would ask a penetrating, naive question, using simple Anglo-Saxon words, leaving me spluttering. It was done with no edge. Her love was so guileless, so complete, I never doubted it. No one had loved me so totally since I was five. She became everything to me, emotionally, although I still kept a tough exterior. Our emotional intimacy was without barriers. We trusted each other." Acting career Garnett and Topsy Jane moved to London together where she began to carve a career in television and film.