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Jean Marsh, the striking British-born actress who was both the co-creator and a beloved Emmy-winning star of \u201cUpstairs, Downstairs,\u201d the seminal 1970s British drama series about class in Edwardian England, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 90.<\/p>\n
The cause was complications of dementia, the filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg<\/a>, her close friend, said.<\/p>\n \u201cUpstairs, Downstairs<\/a>\u201d captured the hearts, minds and Sunday nights of Anglophile PBS viewers decades before \u201cDownton Abbey\u201d was even a gleam in Julian Fellowes\u2019s eye.<\/p>\n The show, which ran from 1971 to 1975 in England and from 1974 to 1977 in the United States, focused on the elegant Bellamy family and the staff of servants who kept their Belgravia townhouse running smoothly, according to the precise social standards of Edwardian aristocracy. Ms. Marsh chose the role of Rose, the household\u2019s head parlor maid, a stern but good-hearted Cockney.<\/p>\n The New York Times review, in January 1974, was affectionate. John J. O\u2019Connor described the show as \u201ca charmingly seductive concoction\u201d and a \u201cfrequently marvelous portrait.\u201d He praised Ms. Marsh for playing Rose with \u201cthe perfection of a young Mildred Dunnock<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By the time the show ended its American run, it had won a Peabody Award and seven Emmys. Ms. Marsh herself took home the 1975 Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1989, 13 \u201clost episodes,\u201d which had never been shown on American television, made their PBS debuts. The London critic Benedict Nightingale<\/a>, writing in The New York Times, called that the TV-series equivalent of \u201cbelatedly discovering that Beethoven wrote the \u2018Eroica\u2019 as well as his other eight symphonies.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked by The Telegraph in 2010 why the British were still so fascinated by the past and the master-servant dynamic, Ms. Marsh gave two reasons: \u201cBecause if you rose out of your class, you knew you had done well. And we like it because the past is not as worrying as the news.\u201d<\/p>\n Jean Lyndsay Torren Marsh was born on July 1, 1934, in London. She was the younger of two daughters of Henry Marsh, a printer\u2019s assistant and maintenance man, and the former Emmeline Bexley, who worked as a maid in her teens before becoming a bartender and eventually a dresser for the theater.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Jean was 6 when the Blitz<\/a> (the Germans\u2019 concentrated World War II bombings of London) began. At 7, she entered ballet classes <\/span>and soon showed talent in acting and singing as well as dance. Rather than pursuing a traditional education, she attended theater school, which her parents considered a practical career move.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you were very working class in those days, you weren\u2019t going to think of a career in science,\u201d Ms. Marsh explained to The Guardian in 1972. She summed up her options: \u201cYou either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworth\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n She made her screen debut at 18 in a British television movie, \u201cThe Infinite Shoeblack\u201d (1952), based on Norman Macowan\u2019s stage drama, and her feature film debut a year later as the landlady\u2019s daughter in \u201cThe Limping Man\u201d (1953), a British mystery thriller that starred Lloyd Bridges as an American war veteran.<\/p>\n In 1959, Ms. Marsh went to the United States, primarily to be in John Gielgud\u2019s Broadway production of \u201cMuch Ado About Nothing.\u201d She played Hero, the virtuous young woman who fakes her own death for a noble reason.<\/p>\n That same year, she made a handful of American television appearances, ranging from a network production of \u201cThe Moon and Sixpence,\u201d with Laurence Olivier, to an episode in the first season of \u201cThe Twilight Zone<\/a>,\u201d in which she played an alluring brunette robot created as a companion for a prisoner (Jack Warden) on an asteroid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the 1960s, she stayed busy with television, stage and the occasional film. She had a tiny part in the Elizabeth Taylor version of \u201cCleopatra\u201d (1963) as Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony (Richard Burton).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The idea for \u201cUpstairs, Downstairs\u201d was born, Ms. Marsh recalled in a 1992 interview<\/a> with The New York Times, when she and the actress Eileen Atkins were house-sitting in the South of France for a wealthy friend.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d love more of this,\u201d Ms. Marsh announced one day, poolside. Ms. Atkins replied, \u201cThen write down the idea,\u201d referring to a concept they\u2019d talked about for a series contrasting the lives of a wealthy Edwardian family and their servants. Ms. Atkins\u2019s father had also been \u201cin service,\u201d working as a butler.<\/p>\n The series made its debut in 1971.<\/p>\n In the early 1990s, Ms. Marsh and Ms. Atkins teamed up again on a new series, \u201cThe House of Eliott<\/a>.\u201d A drama about two young women aspiring to be fashion designers in 1920s London, it was a modest success. They also worked together on the 2010-12 \u201cUpstairs, Downstairs,\u201d a sequel of sorts to their original creation. <\/p>\n There was some consternation about the timing of \u201cDownton Abbey<\/a>,\u201d a British series about an aristocratic Edwardian British family and their servants, which arrived with great fanfare around the same time (2010 in England) as the new \u201cUpstairs, Downstairs,\u201d and covered much of the same ground. \u201cIt might be a coincidence,\u201d Ms. Marsh said in an interview that was reported worldwide. \u201cAnd I might be the Queen of Belgium.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Before and after the original \u201cUpstairs, Downstairs,\u201d Ms. Marsh\u2019s career was wide-ranging, although Broadway was little more than a blip on her path.<\/p>\n After her debut in \u201cMuch Ado,\u201d she returned in 1975 (at the height of her American television fame) to star in \u201cHabeas Corpus,\u201d a farce by Alan Bennett. Her final appearance was four years later as Tom Conti\u2019s doctor in \u201cWhose Life Is It Anyway?,\u201d<\/a> directed by Mr. Lindsay-Hogg, but she did continue to perform in regional theater in the United States. Her London stage appearances included \u201cThe Bird of Time\u201d (1961), \u201cThe Chalk Circle\u201d (1992) and \u201cThe Old Country\u201d (2006).<\/p>\n One of her most memorable films was Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s \u201cFrenzy\u201d (1972), in which she played a bespectacled secretary who finds her boss strangled and blames the wrong man. She also appeared in \u201cWillow<\/a>\u201d (1988), a fantasy, as an evil sorceress, and \u201cReturn to Oz\u201d (1985), as an evil princess. <\/p>\n Aside from \u201cUpstairs, Downstairs,\u201d she was probably best remembered on the small screen for her early appearances on \u201cDr. Who.\u201d Her final television appearance was in an episode of the British series \u201cGrantchester\u201d that aired on \u201cMasterpiece Mystery\u201d in 2015. Her character, a cantankerous invalid, is found dead within the story\u2019s first 15 minutes.<\/p>\n