Fritha Goodey | Film | The Guardian

Fritha Goodey

The actor Fritha Goodey, who has died aged 31, was conspicuously and classically beautiful, but it was clear that her talent ran deeper than outward show. She was blonde, willowy, graceful, entrancing; perfect casting, as she proved at the National Theatre in 2000, for Proust's alluring Odette in Remembrance Of Things Past, a stage version of Harold Pinter's un-filmed screenplay.

At the time of her death, she was preparing to appear in a revival of Terence Rattigan's Man And Boy, directed by Maria Aitken, at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, opposite David Suchet.

Named after the girl in Paul Gallico's story The Snow Goose, Goodey was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, and went to secondary school at Grey Court, Ham. After attending a local drama school, she was accepted at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda). While there, she suffered from anorexia, but after three years was well enough to finish the course.

Following some radio work, she took her first television job, in Roger, Roger (1998), after which she appeared with Joanna Lumley in Dr Willoughby, and in Randall & Hopkirk Deceased (both 1999). Her screen career - far more varied than might, at first, be assumed - included About A Boy (2002), in which she was one of Hugh Grant's former girlfriends. She will be seen in the forthcoming remake of Alfie, starring Jude Law.

She also had character roles as a low-life Londoner in Hearts And Bones, as an Irish terrorist in an American mini-series and as a foul-mouthed, horrid ballerina in the short film Table Twelve. She had a lovely voice and, worked extensively on radio.

Goodey's was a successful career just waiting to burst into the big time; one special role would have done it. As it was, she made her mark over five years with Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint touring company, firstly in Mark Ravenhill's Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), the follow-up to his controversial success, Shopping And Fucking.

She played Nadia, a sexy nightclub dancer who sounded as though she had fallen off the self-help shelf in a pop psychology section. "You're OK, I'm OK," she would chant, mantra-like, a deluded victim of her own low self-esteem, who saw the sexual violence committed on her as a vague positive in a world where "nothing means anything".

In 2002, again with Out of Joint, she played a delightful Constance Neville in She Stoops To Conquer, and a very funny, gorgeous Mrs Garrick, keeping an eye on her great actor husband in April de Angelis's A Laughing Matter, a new companion piece to Goldsmith's comedy, and performing an exquisite little dance in the entr'acte.

Stafford-Clark said Goodey was a joy to work with, and often wrote to him with ideas for projects. "In the circumstances, I'm glad I replied to her on at least one occasion. An actor's life can be miserable, always waiting for other people to define your existence for you. Her beauty was a blessing, and also the reverse, as her looks often determined her parts."

Last Saturday, Goodey visited rehearsals of Stafford-Clark's new production of Macbeth; she had become a close friend of Monica Dolan, who is playing Lady Macbeth. Dolan attested to Goodey's extraordinary range of knowledge in painting and literature, and her ability to read any social situation: "She knew immediately how people were feeling and she loved watching rehearsals, even when she wasn't involved."

In Stephen Poliakoff's The Lost Prince on television, a little boy crouching beside a garden gate sees a fleeting vision of a beautiful young woman. This was Fritha Goodey, and the tragedy of her death (she left a suicide note in the Notting Hill apartment where she was found) reinforces the poignancy of her too brief and more than promising career.

She is survived by her parents and an older sister.

· Fritha Jane Goodey, actor, born October 23 1972; died September 5 2004

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