Haydn Gwynne was born in Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, on March 21 1957 to Rosamond (née Dobson) and Man Gwynne, who ran a printing firm.
On leaving Burgess Hill Faculty for Women, she studied sociology at Nottingham College, the place she acted in scholar productions, one among which they took to the Edinburgh Fringe Pageant.
With the college’s opera group, she gained good evaluations because the tragic Fenella in Masaniello, however steered away from making appearing her profession. “My father was a Barnardo’s boy and I used to be frightened he’d assume I used to be losing my abilities,” she defined.
As an alternative, she spent 5 years lecturing in English at Rome College. Then, after seeing some Broadway exhibits on a go to to New York, she wrote to theatres throughout Britain and landed her first job with the playwright-director Alan Ayckbourn on the Stephen Joseph Theatre within the Spherical, Scarborough, the place she made her debut within the not often staged Sandy Wilson satirical musical His Monkey Spouse in 1984.
However Haydn Gwynne was introduced right down to earth when she was solid as Billie Burke, second spouse of the real-life Broadway producer of the title, in Ziegfeld (London Palladium, 1988). The multi-million-pound manufacturing went by a string of disasters earlier than closing after 5 months: “That was pretty traumatic,” she mentioned. “On reflection, it toughened me up.”
Her tv breakthrough got here a 12 months later in David Lodge’s four-part adaptation of his personal novel, Good Work, winner of the Royal Tv Society’s 1989 award for Finest Drama Sequence. She stripped off to take a starring position as Dr Robyn Penrose, a feminist college lecturer shadowing Warren Clarke’s engineering agency boss. Different actresses had turned down the raunchy half, however Hayden Gwynne insisted: “The bare bed room scenes weren’t about intercourse. It was imagined to be very, very humorous. I assumed the completed outcome very humorous.”