Jane Elizabeth Marie Lapotaire (née Burgess; 26 December 1944 â 5 March 2026) was an English actress from Suffolk.
Her performance in the title role of Marie Curie (1977) first brought her to wide attention. In 1978, she performed the title role ÃÂdith Piaf for Pam Gems's play Piaf for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London. Two years later, the show moved to Broadway where Lapotaire won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. In 2013, she played the Duchess of Gloucester in Richard II with David Tennant in the title role. This was followed in 2015 by a role as Queen Isobel in Henry V. Lapotaire won the Laurence Olivier Award for Actress of the Year in a New Play for Piaf in 1979 and was nominated for the Actress of the Year Award in 1990 for Shadowlands. Additionally, Lapotaire was twice nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress for Marie Curie and Sea Tales: The Return (1977) and Blind Justice (1988).
Lapotaire also wrote three memoirs. Lapotaire was married twice, latterly to director Roland Joffé. Their son is the screenwriter and director Rowan Joffé.
Lapotaire was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, on 26 December 1944. Her mother, Louise Burgess, was French but had been abandoned as a baby in England and brought up in foster care in Ipswich. She was nineteen and single when Lapotaire was born, and never revealed the identity of her daughter's father. From the age of two months, Lapotaire was raised as a foster child by a widowed pensioner, Grace Chisnall, who had also been her birth mother's foster mother. It was a working-class, impoverished childhood, but, when Lapotaire won a place at the local grammar school, Northgate Grammar School, her horizons were broadened with an introduction to art, music and literature. When Lapotaire was about 12, her birth mother made a bid to reclaim her, but she chose to remain with her foster mother in Ipswich, although she spent holidays with Burgess, by then married to a Canadian oil worker and living in North Africa. She later took her birth mother's married name, Lapotaire. Grace Chisnall died in 1984 aged 96 and Louise Lapotaire died in 1999.
Lapotaire studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from 1961 to 1963. At that time, the programme was a two-year course, unlike today's three-year course. Lapotaire had earlier auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London, but failed to get in. She joined the Bristol Old Vic theatre company in 1965 and the National Theatre in 1967. She was also a founding member of The Young Vic Theatre in 1970/1971 and moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974.
Her performance in the title role of Marie Curie (1977) first brought her to wide attention. In 1978, she performed the title role ÃÂdith Piaf for Pam Gems's play Piaf, directed by Howard Davies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London at the Warehouse Theatre, Covent Garden in 1979. Two years later, the show moved to Broadway. Lapotaire won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play that year.
She returned to the Royal Shakespeare Company in OctoberâÂÂNovember 2013 as the Duchess of Gloucester in Gregory Doran's adaptation of Richard II with David Tennant in the title role. This was followed in OctoberâÂÂDecember 2015 as Queen Isobel in Henry V. On Christmas Day in 2014, she appeared as Princess Irina Kuragin in season five, episode nine of Downton Abbey.
Lapotaire wrote a number of memoirs: Grace and Favour (1989), Out of Order: A Haphazard Journey Through One Woman's Year (1999), and Everybody's Daughter, Nobody's Child (2007), which includes an account of her childhood growing up in Levington Road, Ipswich.
Lapotaire was married to director Roland Joffé from 1974 to 1980; they had one son, screenwriter and director Rowan Joffé (born 1973). Following their divorce, she was for a time the partner of actor Michael Pennington.
On 11 January 2000, while preparing to teach a course on Shakespeare at the ÃÂcole Internationale in Paris, Lapotaire suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Four days after her collapse, she underwent a six-hour operation and spent the next three weeks largely unconscious. She wrote about her recovery in Time Out of Mind.
Lapotaire died on 5 March 2026, at the age of 81.
Lapotaire was honorary president of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Club, and was president of the Friends of Shakespeare's Globe.
Her stage credits include:
In April 2018, Lapotaire became the 29th recipient of the prestigious Pragnell Shakespeare Birthday Award and gave the 454th Shakespeare Birthday Lecture on 20 April 2018.
Lapotaire was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2025 Birthday Honours for services to drama.
|- ! scope="row" | 1978 | Marie Curie (1977) | British Academy Television Award for Best Actress | |- ! scope="row" | 1989 | Blind Justice (1988) | British Academy Television Award for Best Actress |
|- ! scope="row" | 1981 | Piaf (1978âÂÂ1981) | Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play | |- ! scope="row" | 1983 | Piaf (1978âÂÂ1981) | CableACE Award for Actress in a Theatrical or Non-Musical Program |
|- ! scope="row" | 2020 | The Crown (2019) | Gold Derby TV Award for Drama Guest Actress |