Jane Lapotaire: sensation as Piaf and a majestic stage actor

Jane Lapotaire, who has died aged 81, will always be identified with the title role in Pam Gems’s play Piaf. The production opened at Stratford’s the Other Place in 1978, moved to the West End and Broadway, and won Lapotaire an Olivier and a Tony. Born to a French mother and raised by an English foster parent in Ipswich, she seemed born to play Edith Piaf, yet her performance went beyond impersonation to show a woman whose art sprang from a ferocious loyalty to her working-class origins, self-deprecatingly calling herself “just a bit of slum rubbish”.

The success of Piaf often overshadowed a wider achievement: Lapotaire was a genuinely classical actor most at home in Shakespeare, Sophocles, Ibsen and Chekhov. She did notable television work, including a series about Marie Curie, but it was on stage that her instinctive intelligence and vocal precision were most evident.

England, Ipswich

jane lapotaire, piaf, pam gems, edith piaf, stratford, west end, broadway, olivier, tony, shakespeare