After boarding school and Rada, she started work in rep, and met her first husband, the actor Roland Curram, with whom she had two daughters, Lou Gish and Kay Curram, both actors. In the course of a peripatetic postwar childhood, she stayed in an SS officer's house in the rubble of Dusseldorf, and saw child beggars in Egypt and Sudan. Sheila Gish was born in Lincoln, the daughter of an army officer. Even the eye-patch seemed like an extravagantly good idea. Gish did glamour as well as anyone, and her performance, stately as a galleon, was gorgeous with self-esteem, elegant and irresistibly vain. Within weeks, she was rehearsing at the Chich ester festival theatre, where she opened as the over-the-hill actor Arkadina, in Phyllis Nagy's sprightly new version of Chekhov's The Seagull. Gish emanated physical strength and tenacity, even when afflicted by a cancerous tumour and losing her right eye in an operation to remove it in 2003. "Imagine a vampire drinking its own blood," said Benedict Nightingale, "or a ghost haunting itself." I had never seen a Phaedra from whom life was so visibly draining, but the production was generally counted a failure. The constant incestuousness was now becoming a bit of a cliché. Working with Fettes again in 2002, Gish played Racine's Phaedra at the Riverside studios. Her hair was lacquered and coiled "like a lion's mane after an expensive visit to the salon," said one critic she resembled "some garden district Lucrezia Borgia in regal purple," said another. Again, her character was obsessed with her own son. With the same director, she delivered a rampaging Mrs Venable - opposite a ravishing Rachel Weisz - in another Williams hothouse drama, Suddenly Last Summer, at the Comedy theatre in 1999. Gish was ideal casting in such rabidly reprehensible roles as Joe Orton's man-eating Mrs Prentice, in What The Butler Saw (in an otherwise tame 1990 revival), and the raddled, incestuous Yvonne (besotted with her young son, played by Jude Law) in Jean Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles, directed to the decadent hilt by Sean Mathias at the National theatre in 1994. Her Blanche, said Nicholas de Jongh, made a final exit as "a glazed version of Marlene Dietrich, quite mad but serene". Both roles wallowed in helplessness and physical need, and Gish, the very opposite of a dumb blonde, with her tigerish technique, voluptuousness, energy and physical prowess on stage, gave unbeatable tragic performances. Her daughter, Lou, also died of cancer less than a year after her mother.The critics hailed an actor justifying a long, simmering claim to star status. She is Scottish actor Ewan McGregor’s aunt through her marriage to Lawson, his uncle. ] By this time she had been diagnosed with cancer and had lost an eye as a result of surgery. While filming That Uncertain Feeling for BBC2 in 1985, she met actor Denis Lawson, who was to become her second husband. She had two daughters: the actresses Kay Curram and Lou Gish (1967–2006) by her first husband, the actor Roland Curram. She was born Sheila Anne Gash in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and made her stage debut with a repertory company. One of her last stage roles was as Arkadina in the Chichester Festival Theatre’s production of The Seagull in 2003. Gish received the Olivier Award for Best Supporting Role in a Musical for her performance., last accessed FebruIn 1999 she played Miss Venable in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, directed by Sean Mathias with Rachel Weisz at the Comedy Theatre, London. In 1996, Gish played the role of Joanne in Stephen Sondheim’s Company at the Donmar Warehouse directed by Sam Mendes.
She is also known for her appearance in the 1986 film Highlander as Rachel Ellenstein. She rarely appeared on film, her most notable performances being as Anna in the Merchant-Ivory film Quartet (1981) and as Mrs Norris in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1999).
She continued to be best known for her stage work, but she also appeared in many television dramas, from The First Churchills (in which she played Mary of Modena) to the successful adaptation of Love in a Cold Climate (2001) in which she played the eccentric and outrageous Lady Montdore. Her first starring role in the West End was as Bella in Robert and Elizabeth. Sheila Gish (23 April 1942 – 9 March 2005) was a British stage and television actress.
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