The actor Joanna Dunham, who has died aged 78, played Mary Magdalene in the Hollywood blockbuster The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), directed by George Stevens, with Max von Sydow as Jesus and Charlton Heston as John the Baptist. She had been recommended to Stevens for the role by Marilyn Monroe, who had seen her performance as Juliet on tour with the Old Vic in New York in 1962, after she had taken over from Judi Dench in Franco Zeffirelli’s production.
Her stage career, confined mainly to the 1960s and 70s, included the occasional indelible role, such as Perdita in Frank Marcus’s comedy of adultery and free love, The Formation Dancers (1964), in the West End of London, co-starring Maxine Audley and Robin Bailey; her irresistible young ward Vera in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country one year later, with Ingrid Bergman and Michael Redgrave, at the Cambridge theatre; and a notable season at the Oxford Playhouse in 1970, when she played Elena in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Kean, opposite Alan Badel, and a deeply affecting Desdemona in Othello.
She was born in Luton, Bedfordshire, the daughter of Peter Dunham, an architect, and his wife, Constance (nee Young). She was educated at Bedales, the progressive co-educational public school in Petersfield, Hampshire, and won a scholarship to study stage design and painting at the Slade School of Art in London, where her tutors included Thomas Monnington and Lucian Freud. She played the witch girl, Barbara Allen, in a 1955 London University production of The Dark of the Moon alongside a young Tom Courtenay, and that led to a Leverhulme scholarship to train for the stage at Rada.
She made a professional debut at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1958, as Sister Thérèse in The Deserters, a second world war play, and a London debut in 1960 at the Westminster as Ellen in Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet, followed by an appearance as Hilde, the sister of Vanessa Redgrave’s Bolette, in a famous Queen’s theatre production of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1961).
On television, in 1958, she played the flirtatious maidservant Louka in Shaw’s Arms and the Man, opposite Stanley Baker, and began, in 1961, a fruitful collaboration with the television director Joan Kemp-Welch. With her first husband, the architect Harry Osborne, who later designed Alan Ayckbourn’s new Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough, she had two children, Abigail and Benedict, the latter named after the character she was playing at the time, Sister Benedict in Sanctuary, a long-running late-60s television series about nuns, starring Fay Compton. In 1971, she appeared with Rex Harrison in a television version of Chekhov’s early play Platonov, directed by Christopher Morahan.
The previous year, she had played a sadistic Victorian murderer, Alice Rhodes, in Wicked Women, an episode of ITV’s Sunday Night Theatre. Much enthralled by her cane-wielding performance, the critic Kenneth Tynan tried to inveigle her into a pornographic film he was planning with Robert Stephens and Romy Schneider; luckily, it was never made.
Having divorced Osborne in 1972, she lived for a time with the great stage designer Ralph Koltai, and was busy with over a hundred television appearances in this period. Her major series included Love Among the Artists (1979) and she played Barry Foster’s French wife, Arlette, in the third series of Van der Valk. She had a starring role in Peter Duffell’s horror movie The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and was Lady Astor in Michael Caton-Jones’s Scandal (1988), about the Profumo affair. Her later TV movie roles included Lady Catherine in Leslie Megahey’s The Hour of the Pig (1992), with Colin Firth and Nicol Williamson, and Raine Spencer in Diana, A Tribute to the People’s Princess (1998).
When acting parts started drying up, she resumed her first love of painting, mostly landscape and still life, at her home in Sternfield, near Saxmundham in Suffolk, where she lived with her second husband, the playwright and novelist Reggie Oliver, whom she married in 1992. She created a gallery in a converted farm building and mounted numerous exhibitions there, as well as showing at the New English Art Club in London and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
She is survived by her husband and children, and five grandchildren.
• Joanna Elizabeth Dunham, actor, born 6 May 1936; died 25 November 2014
• This article was amended on 8 December 2014. It originally stated that Charlton Heston played Pontius Pilate in The Greatest Story Ever Told. In fact he played John the Baptist; Telly Savalas took the role of Pontius Pilate. This has been corrected. This article was further amended on 12 December 2014 because an earlier version said that Vanessa Redgrave played Ellida in a 1961 production of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. Redgrave played Bolette in that production, but did play Ellida in later productions of the play.
