Stage and screen actress known best as the mother of film star Kate Beckinsale. Her television credits include roles as Jan Goddard in Casualty, Pamela in Singles, and Kathryn MacTiernan in Space Island One.
Before making her English television debut in the early 1970s, she performed in the original London production of the popular musical Hair.
She had a cameo role as a vampire in Underworld: Awakening, a 2013 film in which her daughter starred as Selene.
She and her first husband, television actor Richard Beckinsale, welcomed their soon-to-be their daughter, Kate, in 1973. Nearly two decades after Richard Beckinsale's 1979 death, she married English television director Roy Battersby.
She and fellow English actress Victoria Wood both studied drama at the University of Birmingham.