Gudrun Ure

Finding fame late in life as the tartan-clad crime-fighting Super Gran, Gudrun Ure attracted a cult following on children’s television as the nemesis to Iain Cuthbertson’s villainous Scunner Campbell. It ran for 27 episodes from 1985 (the first series winning an International Emmy) to 1987 by which time Ure was 61.

Before her unexpected stardom, Ure was a veteran of stage, radio and television, having begun acting in her teens as a regular contributor to BBC Radio Scotland’s Children’s Hour.

The daughter of a draughtsman and iron foundry owner, Ure was Born in Milton of Campsie, Stirlingshire (now East Dunbartonshire) and raised in Glasgow. Her working life began as a teacher although early acting experience with the touring children’s theatre company led by Bertha Waddell spurred her to turn professional, making her debut with Perth Theatre.

With the Glasgow Citizens, she made her first London appearance in Duncan Macrae’s reworking of Molière, Let Wives Tak Tent, at the Embassy, Swiss Cottage in 1949 when The Stage noted her as “a delightfully innocent Scots maiden”. An invitation to join a Bristol Old Vic company that included Donald Pleasence and Stuart Burge followed. There, she quickly made her mark as a “wild-eyed and very charming” Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal in 1951.

That performance caught the eye of Orson Welles, who cast her as Desdemona opposite his own Othello the same year, giving Ure her West End debut at the St James’s Theatre. Welles also persuaded her to change her stage name to Ann Gudrun, a soubriquet she used for much of the rest of the decade.

She was seen at London’s Old Vic in An Italian Straw Hat in 1952, and returned to the Citizens in 1961 for Hedda Gabler. Her burgeoning television career included playing Lady Macbeth in a three-part dissection of the play made by Encyclopaedia Britannica (1964).

The 1970s were a lean time on stage, although she was seen in Medea at the Greenwich Theatre at the start of the decade, in Tennessee Williams’ Something Unspoken at the King’s Head, Islington (1974) and I Am a Camera at the Cambridge Theatre (1976). Having spent much of 1983 with Farnham Rep, the success of Super Gran led to a run of panto appearances, eventually returning to Farnham as Charlotte in Louise Page’s Salonika in 1998.

Her stage swansong was Olive Harriet Smythe (replacing Carmel McSharry) in the second tour of the Churchill Theatre Bromley’s revival of John Chapman and Ray Cooney’s Move Over Mrs Markham in 1990.

A veteran radio actor from the 1950s, she was heard as Frith with Laurence Olivier’s Narrator and Philip Rhayader in a 1954 adaptation of Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose.

Having made her uncredited screen debut voicing Suzanne Cloutier’s Desdemona in Welles’ 1951 film version of Othello, Super Gran boosted her flagging profile with appearances in Streets Apart, the family fantasy T-Bag and the Pearls of Wisdom, and the pilot of Jonathan Lynn’s Life After Life in 1990.

Guest roles in Second Thoughts, Midsomer Murders, the BAFTA-nominated The Crow Road, and the fairytale fantasy The 10th Kingdom followed. Her last screen role was her third appearance in Casualty in 2009.

Gudrun Henderson Ure was born on March 12, 1926, and died on May 14, aged 98. She is survived by her stepson, Gordon.