Actress and star of Blake's 7

Born: December 20, 1943

Died: September 3, 2018

JACQUELINE Pearce, who has died aged 74, was an actress who made her name largely in British television series of the 1960s onwards, gaining a particular following for her cult and science fiction roles. She appeared in Doctor Who in the 1980s, two Hammer Horror films, one Carry On film, and other cult series including Danger Man, The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Pearce’s most enduring part, however, was as the villain Servalan in the British science fiction television show Blake’s 7, which ran for four series between 1978 and 1981.

Created by writer Terry Nation – also known for the television series Survivors and Doctor Who’s villainous Daleks – Blake’s 7 was a darker and more inherently British take on the tropes of the hugely popular Star Trek and Star Wars, as well as mission-led films like The Dirty Dozen and The Magnificent Seven, in which the Terran Federation, which oversees much of the galaxy 700 years in the future, is a totalitarian military regime. Using the spacecraft Liberator, Gareth Thomas’s Roj Blake (and later Paul Darrow’s Kerr Avon) leads a band of conflicted and amoral drifters in revolt against the authorities.

Introduced in the sixth episode of the first series, Pearce’s Servalan proved so popular with viewers and the show’s producers alike, that her initial one-off guest appearance was upgraded to a continuing role which lasted until the series’ end. The Supreme Commander of the Terran Federation, the character was both a definitive television baddie of the era and a style icon, her relentless, sociopathic pursuit of power and of Blake’s crew offset by a dark and chilling sexuality.

In a series with a strong visual aesthetic, Servalan looked outstanding, her severely-styled bob and Pearce’s striking features combining with a wardrobe of shining, reflective, disco-era robes, changing to black for the later series. With the era of Blake’s 7 coinciding with the election and first years in power of Margaret Thatcher, reviewers of the time made comparisons between Servalan and the new Prime Minister, both at ease with their femininity and the ruthless wielding of power. At the point she was cast as Servalan, Pearce was working in theatre in Vienna.

The actor later revealed that Nation, a writer who admitted he found female characters tricky, had conceived of Servalan as a man initially, and even after he chose to switch the character’s gender, had imagined her as a fairly stock military-uniformed general.

“I said 'well, if you dress her like that you might as well cast a man',” said Pearce in 1991. “I think it's much more interesting to go in completely the opposite direction and enhance rather than diminish the femininity. The predominantly white costumes I wore in the first and second season were my idea originally, because I felt that to be in black was too obvious. The baddies always wear black.”

Fans of Pearce’s cult work also knew her from the concurrently-shot 1966 Hammer Horror films The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile, the latter of which was notable for her role as a beautiful young Englishwoman who transforms by magic into a strikingly repulsive lizard creature. She also appeared as the dangerous Chessene in the 1985 Doctor Who adventure The Two Doctors, which paired then-holder of the title role Colin Baker with his predecessor Patrick Troughton. And there was a dual part in Helen Cresswell’s children’s drama Moondial (1988); and in later Doctor Who audio dramas which cast her alongside John Hurt and Sylvester McCoy.

She also had film roles in 1965’s Sky West and Crooked, which starred Hayley Mills and was directed by Mills’ father John and written by her mother Mary Bell; the Carry On film Don’t Lose Your Head (1966); Jerry Lewis’ London-set comedy Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (1968); the Kenya-set colonial thriller White Mischief (1987); Bruce Robinson’s Richard E. Grant-starring satire How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989); and the historical comedy-drama Princess Caraboo (1994), as well as television adaptations of David Copperfield (1974) and The Bourne Identity (1988).

Born in Woking, Surrey, in 1943, the daughter of working class Londoners from the East End, Pearce was raised by her father in Byfleet after her mother left while she was an infant. Convent-educated, she did not have a good experience in this strict environment, and has said “it took me many years, a lot of breakdowns and a very good psychiatrist to come to terms with it all”.

She studied at RADA and, following the break-up of a marriage at the age of 23, at the Lee Strasberg Actor’s Studio in Los Angeles, where she lived for three years. In later life Pearce worked as an artists’ model in Cornwall, where she lived; for a time, she also lived and worked at a monkey sanctuary in Africa, and had moved to Lancashire by the time of her death from lung cancer.

DAVID POLLOCK

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