Jean Marsh, the creator and star of the beloved 1970s series “Upstairs, Downstairs,” died Sunday of dementia at her home in London. She was 90.
Marsh’s close friend Michael Lindsay-Hogg confirmed her death and its cause to the New York Times.
“Upstairs, Downstairs” aired from 1971 to 1975 in England and 1974 to 1977 in the United States. The show was about the Bellamy family and the staff that kept their elegant townhome running. Marsh starred as Rose, the head parlor maid.
In 2010 Marsh decided to return to the show by way of a reboot. “At first, I wasn’t sure if it was a retrograde thing to do,” she told the Telegraph at the time. “But then I thought: am I being pompous? It was a wonderful part. I think Rose got into me as much as I got into Rose.”
The reboot took place only six years after the show’s original timeline of 1904-1930, but Marsh herself had naturally aged quite a few decades. When asked how the show intended to explain her clear jump in age, Marsh simply said, “Let’s not go down that road.”
Marsh came of age in a London that was war-torn and tired; as she told the outlet, her family lived in a home made up of two rooms (and none of them was a bathroom or a kitchen). “It was always cold and damp. We washed with a cold cloth and were always boiling a copper kettle. I have friends who live in sweet places in Islington but I have a morbid fear of going back, even though they are very fashionable now. The places we lived in were crumbly. They carry a pall for me,” she explained.
Her mother worked as a housemaid and ultimately served as the inspiration for Rose, something Marsh said she “automatically” did without question.
As a child Marsh took ballet classes and expressed an interest in acting; she went to theater school instead of regular classes and made her cinematic debut in 1952’s “The Infinite Shoeblack.” After starring in a few British productions she went to the US in 1959 and added an episode in “The Twilight Zone” to her resume.
The idea for “Upstairs, Downstairs” came after several conversations with Eileen Atkins. “We came from the same background, a working-class background, and we were thinking idly about trying to create something , maybe a television series, maybe a film, we weren’t quite sure,” she told the AV Club in 2012.
“And the idea gelled through two different experiences: One was watching ‘The Forsyte Saga’ that was made sometime in the ’60s, and we thought, ‘Well, that’s all really wonderful, but who washed the clothes? Who ironed them? Who’s cleaning the boots? Who’s doing all the work?” And we thought, “Gosh, it’s so unfair you never see the real workers.’ That was one seed. We had chips on our shoulders,” she continued.
Atkins found a photo of her mother “with a group of servants standing by a horse-drawn bus for a servants’ outing,” she continued, “so we thought, ‘Let’s write about downstairs people.’”
The popular series won a Peabody Award and seven Emmys before its conclusion.
Jean Marsh was born July 1, 1934. She enjoyed a stage career on Broadway in a 1959 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” before she made her way to London’s West End, where she starred in “Bird of Time” in 1961.
She was briefly married to Jon Pertwee in her 20s and had known relationships with Albert Finney and Kenneth Haigh. She and Lindsay-Hogg were in a relationship for 10 years.
