Renée Asherson spoke more clearly than anyone near her and spent most of her working life on stage, not on set. What film kept of her is a French princess learning English in a garden, and that one scene makes the case for her.
Fi1m perspective
A princess sits in a garden with her lady-in-waiting and tries out English words for the parts of the hand, getting most of them wrong. Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) is a picture-book film built around one man who is never allowed to be mistaken, and this is the scene where somebody is allowed to be. Renée Asherson's Katherine plays it as a bright girl enjoying her own errors. It is the funniest scene in the film and the gentlest, and we laughed at it and then found, slightly to our surprise, that we were fond of her in a way the film had not earned for anyone else. The reason is simple: she says every syllable as though it matters and does not signal the joke.
That clarity was a stage habit. Asherson began in 1935 as a walk-on in John Gielgud's Romeo and Juliet, went to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and was playing Shakespeare at the Old Vic from 1940. Katherine was her first major film part, and she was candid about how she came by it: "It had been intended that Vivien should play the Princess but, after Gone with the Wind, her agents didn't think it was a big enough part for her." The same year she was Marjorie Gillingham in Carol Reed's The Way Ahead (1944). She then worked often with Robert Donat, on stage and on screen, in The Cure for Love (1949) among others.
What she did well is easy to name. A husky voice, an open face, and a way of speaking verse so that the sense arrives before the metre does. Period parts asking for poise suited her, and the camera, when it was pointed at her, had nothing to do but listen. The reservation is the one every obituary makes in passing: after Henry V she chose the theatre, and the cinema never gave her a second part of that size. Six decades of supporting and character roles followed, in film and on television, Tenko (1981) among them, and most of them are smaller than she was.
Her last screen appearance is in Alejandro Amenábar's The Others (2001), a house with the curtains drawn and a mother at the end of her patience, fifty-seven years after the garden. The part is small and we will say nothing about where it sits in the story. It is a strange bookend for an actor whose best film moment is all daylight and mispronounced English. If you want to see what she could do, start with the garden; it is a short scene, and nobody else in the film gets one like it.
Biography
Renée Asherson was an English actress, born Dorothy Renée Ascherson on 19 May 1915 in Kensington, London. She trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and made her first stage appearance in 1935 in a John Gielgud production of Romeo and Juliet. Much of her theatrical career was spent in Shakespearean plays at venues including the Old Vic, the Liverpool Playhouse and the Westminster Theatre.
Her first major film appearance was in The Way Ahead (1944). She played Princess Katherine in Henry V (1944). Asherson was married to actor Robert Donat from 1953 until his death in 1958. Her last film appearance was as the Old Lady in The Others (2001). She died on 30 October 2014 in Primrose Hill, London, aged 99.
