Cléo Silvestre, who has died aged 79, was the first black woman to play a leading role at the National Theatre and, from 1970, the first black actress to have a regular role in a major British television drama. She also sang with the Rolling Stones and appeared in shows such as Doctor Who and Grange Hill, but many people, including herself, believe she would have been an even bigger star if it weren’t for the colour of her skin.
Her first notable performance came in 1964, when, aged 19, she befriended the unknown Rolling Stones at a blues night in Soho. She was particularly close with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, and her mother would often cook meals for them in the kitchen of their north London council house. Others who dined there included members of The Hollies and Jimmy Page, who was then a session guitarist.
The Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, suggested that she record a cover version. Phil SpectorJones performed on the song “To Know Him Is to Love Him” ​​from the group. The group served as Jones’s backing musicians, and Jones is credited as the first female vocalist to sing with them. When Jones later left the Rolling Stones, he tried to convince Cléo Silvestre to join his new band, but she had decided to focus on acting.
She had previously appeared in Ken Loach’s shocking social dramas Up the Junction (1965) opposite Nell Dunn and Jeremy Sandford, Cathy Come Home (1966) and Poor Cow (1967). She had small roles in Coronation Street and appeared as a belly dancer in an episode of Doctor Who.
This surprised the BBC’s make-up department, who had little experience working with black actors: “I settled on a ‘light Egyptian look,'” she recalls. At the time, there were few professional black actors in Britain, and although most had grown up in the Caribbean, she had a London accent.
She made her West End debut in 1967. Simon GrayHer first play, Wise Child, was at Wyndham’s Theatre, where her character, Janice, worked in a hotel that housed a criminal played by Jock Masters. Alec GuinnessThe cast included Gordon Jackson and Simon WardCléo Silvestre was nominated for the award for Most Promising Newcomer.
After one performance, Laurence Olivier came into her dressing room and complimented her acting, and two years later she appeared in National Health (1969). Peter Nichols It was produced at the National Theatre at the request of Olivier and Kenneth Tynan, who was then the head of the company.
Nicholls became a popular writer after the critically acclaimed The Day Joe Egg Died (1967), and National Health, an ambitious drama about the state of the nation, as its title suggests, one of whose themes was the emergence of a multi-ethnic Britain.
Set in the wards of a dilapidated northern hospital, the action is satirically interspersed with scenes from medical soap operas such as “Doctor Kildare,” where everything has a happy ending.
The fictional drama was called Nurse Norton. The story revolved around Cleo Norton, a West Indian nurse played by Cleo Silvestre, who becomes romantically involved with Scottish Dr Boyd. The cast included Jim Dale, best known for his role in the Carry On films, Isabel Lucas (who later appeared in the black British sitcom The Fosters), Charles Kay, Robert LangTom Baker appears as an extra.
Olivier was initially sceptical about the ability of black actors to play the roles, suggesting that they might be “blackened” as his wife Joan Plowright had done in Othello, but despite its relatively short run, National Health became the National Theatre’s biggest hit since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead three years earlier, winning the Evening Standard Award for Best New Play.
Nearly 50 years later, Cléo Silvestre appears as an elderly patient in Alleluia!, a companion film to Alan Bennett’s 2018 The National Health, which tells the story of a geriatric ward in a Yorkshire hospital under threat of closure.
In August 1969, the day after appearing in Some Women, a BBC dramatization of prisoner life, Cléo Silvestre was invited to join the cast of the TV soap Crossroads. “Enoch Powell had given his awful ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which was causing racial tensions across the country,” she recalls. In response, the show’s producer, Reg Watson, decided to create a black character called Melanie.
Cléo Silvestre made a memorable appearance at the Crossroads Motel, headed by the fearsome redhead Meg Richardson (Noelle Gordon). When the receptionist asked Melanie who was calling, the reply she got was “Tell them it’s her daughter.” The theme tune played. It turned out that Melanie was Meg’s adopted daughter, who had been in France until then. The Cléo Silvestre character appeared regularly in Crossroads storylines for the next two years.
However, when it came time to make a film of National Health in 1973, Cléo Silvestre, like many of the original cast and the original director, was not in it. Michael BlakemoreOne reason for this was that the American studio, Columbia, wanted a name they knew.
But for Cléo Silvestre, as she later put it, this became a pattern: “Nothing went forward.” Unlike her contemporary Helen Mirren, National Theatre roles did not translate into West End plays, and union meetings made her feel inferior to her white counterparts.
Seeking work, she wrote to every theatre company in the country, receiving three replies, the gist of which was that if they were to stage a production of The Crucible, they would keep her in mind for the role of a black slave.
Cleopatra Mary Silvestre was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire on 19 April 1945. Her mother, Laureen, had a difficult upbringing: herself of mixed race and illegitimate, abandoned by her white mother and brought up in an orphanage in Yorkshire during the First World War.
After becoming a dancer, she worked at the Sim Siam Club, a Soho jazz club frequented by the likes of Edwina Mountbatten in the 1930s. Cleo’s godparents included the sleazy MP and journalist Tom Driberg and the composer Constant Lambert (the inspiration for Hugh Moreland in Anthony Powell’s The Music of the Hours). Lambert and Laureen had a long relationship until his untimely death in 1951; his son Kit subsequently became The Who’s manager.
Cleo grew up believing that her father was Loreen’s husband, Owen Silvestre, whom she married in 1944. A native of the West Indies, Silvestre served as a Lancaster bomber pilot for Britain during the war and was awarded the DFM.
However, finding employment with an airline in peacetime proved impossible, and she became addicted to gambling. Cleo’s parents divorced, and she was brought up by her mother in Euston, London.
She received regular letters from an “Uncle Ben” in Sierra Leone, but when her daughter Zoe Palmer visited Freetown in 2007, she discovered that the letters were actually from Cleo’s biological father, a lawyer.
Cleo was educated at Camden Girls’ School and attended the Italia Conti Academy of Dramatic Arts, where her first stage performance was under her mother’s kitchen table, but her teachers warned her that there were few roles for black actors.
Cleo vividly remembers once hearing footsteps coming up the road behind her and her mother and a cry of “Nig! Nig! Wait!” It was a neighbor woman, apologizing and saying she didn’t know what else to call Laureen.
In the 1970s Cleo Silvestre toured with David Yip for several seasons at the Young Vic, after which she appeared in many regional theatre productions and TV shows including Z-Cars, Till Death Us Do Part, The Bill and New Tricks. She played a social worker in Grange Hill and more recently Anne Chapman in All Creatures Great and Small, which was filmed near where her mother grew up, and was also a presenter in Play School.
Her film roles include Sammy and Rosie’s Sex (1987) and a cameo in Paddington (2014). On stage, she appeared in ID (Almeida, 2003). Anthony ShahIn 2007 she performed in Racine’s Pydre at the Edinburgh Fringe and in 2010 in Medea at Northern Broadside. She is perhaps best known for her one-woman play The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole, for which she helped raise funds for a statue of the 19th century nurse.
Cléo Silvestre has served on the boards of Equity and the Young Vic, and for 20 years was co-artistic director of the Rosemary Branch theatre, an incubator for new writers in Islington, north London. She was also the inspiration for the character Honey in Zeb Soanes’s children’s play Gaspard the Fox.
She was appointed an MBE in 2023. Last month she appeared on Antiques Roadshow with memorabilia from her life, including a Christmas card that Jimmy Page handcrafted for her.
Cleo Silvestre married Ian Palmer in 1977. He died in 1995, leaving her with a son and two daughters.
Cléo Silvestre, born April 19, 1945, died September 20, 2024
