Colette O’Neil obituary

Colette O’Neil, who has died aged 85, was an actor whose career was almost over before it began. In 1963, while playing Inez in the Jean-Paul Sartre play Huis Clos at the newly opened Traverse theatre in Edinburgh, she was accidentally stabbed by a fellow actor.

In the final scene, Rosamond Dickson, as Estelle, had to lunge at her with a paper knife. When it became entangled in the folds of O’Neil’s evening gown, the tussle to free it resulted in the knife piercing her abdomen.

Before taking a bow and collapsing in a pool of blood in her dressing room, O’Neil managed to deliver her final line: “You can’t kill me – I’m already dead.” She spent three weeks recovering in hospital after emergency surgery.

“I thought I had been punched in the stomach,” she told the Herald newspaper in 2000. “But Rosamond looked at me in horror and we both realised something was wrong. It was cold in the theatre and I think it was the cold that caused the slip.”

However, the incident proved to be good publicity – sending ticket sales soaring – for the “experimental” theatre company with a mission to continue the spirit of the Edinburgh festival all year round and encourage new writing.

O’Neil survived to act on stage in the West End of London and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as on screen.

Three years later, she was appearing in television’s most-watched programme when more blood was spilled. She had a three-month run in Coronation Street as Ruth Winter, a social worker appointed to open a community centre at the Glad Tidings mission hall, whose caretaker, Ena Sharples, was horrified at this transformation – especially after Ruth started running a nursery, film class and pub quiz-style contest. When a dance got out of hand and two thugs started vandalising the hall, Ruth sprang into action, utilising her martial arts skills to give one of them a nosebleed. The community centre was eventually moved elsewhere.

O’Neil then brought a simmering sexuality to the role of a publican who turns out to be a witch among satan-worshippers in a quintessential English village for a 1966 episode of the telefantasy series Adam Adamant Lives! When the coven captures Gerald Harper’s revived Edwardian gentleman adventurer, she is instrumental in plotting his grim death, which he thwarts.

The programme was produced by Verity Lambert following her launch of Doctor Who, in which O’Neil appeared two decades later as Tanha, the mother of the heir to the federator of the planet Manussa, the latter played by Martin Clunes, in an early TV role. In the 1983 adventure Snakedance, Tanha tries to impress on him the importance and responsibilities of the role.

She had a longer run as Sheila Warner for most of the two-year run (1975-76) of the marriage-guidance daytime soap Couples, and starred as the news editor, Felicity Grant, in The Standard, a 1978 drama series about an ailing Scottish newspaper.

Colette was born in Glasgow, to Mary (known as Maisy, nee Ellis), a member of the support staff at a special needs school, and Neil McCrossan, a headteacher. On leaving Notre Dame high school, she started studying for a science degree at Glasgow University with the idea of becoming a pharmacist, but abandoned it after being offered a juvenile lead role with a Bournemouth rep company when she was spotted taking part in an elocution competition.

She took O’Neil as her stage name in memory of her father, who had just died, and made her debut at the Palace Court theatre, Bournemouth, in 1956 as Monica Twigg in the JB Priestley comedy Mr Kettle and Mrs Moon. Two years later, she was on the London stage playing Anne, one of Govan’s fiery Gascoyne sisters, when a Glasgow Citizens theatre production of George Munro’s tragicomedy Gay Landscape transferred to the groundbreaking Royal Court.

In Scotland, she took the title role in Hedda Gabler at the Pitlochry Festival theatre (1963), while her West End parts included May Beckett in the Keith Waterhouse-Willis Hall comedy Celebration (Duchess theatre, 1961) and Anne, wife of the alcoholic university lecturer, in Simon Gray’s Butley (Criterion theatre, 1971). With the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon, she played Lady Percy and Lady Bona in its momentous 1964 Wars of the Roses production.

O’Neil made her television debut as Maisie, the daughter, in two series of BBC Scotland’s The McFlannels (1957-58), about a family previously featured in a popular radio serial of the same title. Subsequent parts ranged from Beth Warrington in The Spoils of War (1980-81) to a thieving Catholic nun for a short run in the prison drama Bad Girls in 2005 and Bella in the third series (2016) of Shetland.

She also enjoyed a 61-year career in BBC radio (1957-2018), mostly in drama, but also as a popular story reader for Woman’s Hour from 1974 to 1994.

O’Neil’s marriage to Michael Ellis (1960-73) ended in divorce. She is survived by their three children, Dominic, Lara and Natasha.