Jill Angela Henriette Balcon
(3 January 1925 – 18 July 2009)
Jill Balcon was an English actress of film and radio. She was known for her distinctive and beautifully-modulated voice and spent much of her career working in radio; but for most of her life her own fame was eclipsed by that of the famous men in whose shadow she lived: her father, the film producer Sir Michael Balcon, her husband Cecil Day-Lewis, the Poet Laureate, and her son, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. She made her film debut in Nicholas Nickleby (1947). Over the years she appeared regularly, though not extensively, on screen.
In 1951, she married the Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis was 21 years her senior and was married when they started their relationship. Day-Lewis broke with both his wife and his mistress to be with Balcon for the remainder of his life.
After her marriage to Day-Lewis, she made several more films in the late 1940s and 1950s before having her family. She continued to work mainly in radio, becoming, with her distinctive, honeyed voice, a supreme performer in plays and poetry readings. In 2003 the BBC commissioned Juliet Ace to write a play for her to mark her 60th anniversary on the airwaves, Deadheading the Roses, which featured her son Daniel Day-Lewis playing a friend of her character.
In later life she took cameo roles in two Derek Jarman films – Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1993) – and was an imposing Lady Bracknell in Oliver Parker's 1999 adaptation of An Ideal Husband alongside Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver and Rupert Everett.
RIP
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