Delighted Dynasty, Doctor Who audiences
Actress’s performance in soap opera role was a master class in melodrama
LONDON — Kate O’Mara was an actress whose cliff-high cheekbones, brooding glare and tough talk fuelled a successful international television career. O’Mara, who first came to prominence in cult British series Doctor Who, but found international fame as Joan Collins’s catty sister in the hugely popular U.S. TV show Dynasty, has died at the age of 74.
However, her onscreen persona — granite graced with lace — was often at odds with the more placid elements of her personality. “Recently I did The Graham Norton Show, which was very alarming,” she said in 2008. “He was being crude, and I’m not very good with crude. I like sophistication and elegance.”
As Cassandra “Caress” Morrell — the revenge-obsessed sibling of Collins’s Alexis Colby — O’Mara excelled in bouts of verbal sparring with her co-star over the course of 19 episodes in the mid-1980s. Cassandra is a jailbird with payback on her mind. Having been released from a Venezuelan prison — where she was jailed over an incident involving Alexis — she arrives in Denver, Colo., under the name Caress. Her plan is to make a fortune by writing an exposé on her sister’s dark, salacious past.
Alexis discovers the ploy, however, covertly buys up the publishing company and pulps the project. “I’ve come to ask you for your autograph. Congratulations, sister dearest, it’s a wonderful piece of fiction,” Alexis sneers. “Of course, I’ve read it. It doesn’t take very long. It’s like a comic book without the pictures.”
“We had a tremendous bitchy tension between us,” O’Mara said. “My character, Caress, was like an annoying little mosquito who just kept coming back and biting her.”
The performance was a master class in melodrama — delivering a roller-coaster ride of fictional success and trauma that was matched by her own life story. “I’m part of six generations of a theatrical family,” she wrote in her memoirs, Vamp Until Ready: A Life Laid Bare (2003).
“For over 40 years, I’ve done everything from Shakespeare to Hollywood soaps, from restoration comedy to cult television drama, from westerns to pantomime. I have been nothing if not diverse. My personal life, however, has been a disaster area. Rape, desertion, adoption, divorce and numerous relationships with very much younger men. And this for someone who sees herself as an intellectual and can’t be doing with sex at all. ... Oh well, the show must go on!”
Kate O’Mara was born in Leicester, England, on Aug. 10, 1939, the daughter of John F. Carroll, an RAF flying instructor, and actress Hazel Bainbridge. After boarding school, she studied at art school before becoming a fulltime actress (her younger sister, Belinda Carroll, followed suit). Her early TV appear- ances during the 1960s included roles in such series as The Saint, The Champions, The Avengers and Z-Cars.
In the early ’70s, she made a more salacious name for herself as the voluptuous figure of desire in erotic horror B-movies such as The Vampire Lovers. Equally dubious was Triangle, an early-’80s soap opera, which has often been cited as one of the worst pieces of television ever produced (although retrospectively, it drew admirers).
The move to Hollywood for Dynasty came with its own problems for a country girl from England. “I had a five- year contract on Dynasty, and after two months, I was thinking, ‘Goodness, how am I going to stand it out here?’ ” she recalled. “It’s just relentless sunshine. It’s a desert, at the end of the day. I love the seasons, I love winter and autumn and rain. The people were very charming, but I did find that it wasn’t terribly good for my soul.”
She was let go after one season. “The studio said: ‘Joan thinks it’s not a good idea to have another brunette on the show,’ ” O’Mara recalled. “I was quite relieved. I’d been asked to appear in King Lear back in Britain, and they said: ‘Oh, you go back and do your little play,’ which I thought was hilarious.”
O’Mara had a recurring role as the renegade Time Lord “The Rani” in the cult series Doctor Who. Appearing opposite both the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy incarnations of the Doctor, her scientifically minded, devilish character enslaved planets to experiment on their subjects. (During last year’s 50th-anniversary celebrations of the series, she expressed a wish to come back to the role as an older woman.)
In later years, she returned to familiar territory playing another character with a difficult sister — this time as second sibling to Joanna Lumley’s Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous. During the ’90s, she followed Joan Collins’s lead and turned her hand to writing, publishing two novels (Good Time Girl, 1993, and When She Was Bad, 1995) and two autobiographical volumes (Game Plan: A Woman’s Survival Kit, 1990, and Vamp Until Ready, 2003).
In 2012, her son, Dickon Young — formerly a stage manager for the Royal Shakespeare Company — was found hanged at the family home. He had had a history of mental illness. Late in life, she talked about how she had overcome her own bouts of depression, “particularly during my first marriage breakup 31 years ago. But I’ve since learned a cure for depression: listening to Bach and reading P. G. Wodehouse. This got me through the breakup of my second marriage 17 years ago. The great thing about Wodehouse is that his books are full of romantic problems and yet so hilarious that it puts things in perspective.”
A quiet country life in occasional retirement in Somerset suited her. “I’m not frightened of dying, but I love the countryside so much and I’m going to miss it. I’d like to be out in the wind and the trees for ever.”
Kate O’Mara married twice, first to Jeremy Young in 1961 (dissolved in 1976) and secondly in 1993, to Richard Willis (dissolved 1996). Her son, from a separate relationship, predeceased her.