Sheila Allen

Sheila Allen (22 October 1932 – 13 October 2011) was an English actress, who was best known to the wider public for her role on television as Cassie Manson in Bouquet Of Barbed Wire and its sequel Another Bouquet (1976–77). From 1966 to 1978, Allen was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Early life and stage work Allen was born in Chard, Somerset, to Dorothy Essex (née Potter) and William Allen. She was educated at Howell’s School, Denbigh and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) from 1949 to 1951. From the 1950s, Allen appeared in plays by Shakespeare. Her first leading role was that of Katherine ("the shrew") in The Taming of the Shrew for the Arena Company in Birmingham (1954–56). Among many other Shakespearean roles, she played Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Bristol Old Vic Company, a production that moved to London (1957–58) and Portia (The Merchant of Venice, Old Vic, London, 1962). She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Aldwych in 1966. Her roles included Lady Percy (Henry IV, Parts I and II) (RSC, Stratford, 1966), Lady Macduff (Macbeth, RSC, Stratford and London, 1968), Lady Capulet (Romeo and Juliet, RSC, Stratford, 1967), and Helen (Troilus and Cressida, RSC, Stratford, 1968). For the RSC, she played Goneril in King Lear twice, in 1968 and 1974, for respectively Trevor Nunn and Buzz Goodbody. At the Shaw Theatre, London in 1973, she played Lady Macbeth, with Tom Baker as Macbeth. Allen appeared in new plays as well, such as Pam Gems Queen Christina which debuted at the RSC's Other Place in 1977. In his obituary of Allen in 2011, Michael Billington considered it "the role of a lifetime and enabled her to inspire comparisons to [Greta] Garbo in her ability to capture the cross-dressing monarch's sexual ambivalence and inner contest between desire and duty."