Patti Love, actress who gave a stunning performance in the play Mary Barnes and upbraided Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday – obituary

Patti Love, the actress, who has died aged 75, emerged from provincial obscurity to become a player of distinction with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and found film fame in The Long Good Friday (1980) starring Bob Hoskins, with whom she lived for a time.

A petite 5ft 2in with striking dark looks, mane of tangled hair and toothy smile, she generated enormous nervous energy, producing the kind of spellbinding performances which, as one critic noted, quoting Yeats’s memorable phrase, “delve deep into the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.

When she appeared in David Edgar’s play about baby snatching, Baby Love (Soho Theatre, 1973), she presented him with a copy of a book about a diagnosed schizophrenic woman cured by therapy, and persuaded him to adapt it for the stage.

She took the title role when his play Mary Barnes opened at Birmingham Rep in 1978 before transferring to the Royal Court in London the following year, playing opposite Simon Callow as her psychiatrist and turning in a stunning performance of uncompromising honesty, passion and danger.

The critic Milton Shulman marvelled at how someone with so small a frame could generate such demonic fury; another declared that Patti Love could seize an audience by the throat like no one else of her generation.

Patti Love took other leads at the Royal Court, notably in Sarah Daniels’s Masterpieces (1984), about the prevalence of porn. “In a strong cast,” noted the Telegraph’s John Barber, “the performance of Patti Love is outstanding.” For David Edgar, her monologue about using Coca-Cola as a contraceptive was among the funniest speeches he had ever witnessed. In 1980 she toured with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2.

Her film roles included an appearance with David Essex and Ringo Starr in That’ll be the Day (1973) and in Jack Gold’s television film Escape From Sobibor (BBC, 1987)

She starred in Nell Dunn’s Steaming at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East and appeared in Joseph Losey’s 1985 film version alongside Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles and Diana Dors.

At the National Theatre in 1981 she played Christine Carpenter, a medieval anchorite bricked up in a cell, in Arnold Wesker’s Caritas. Delivering a performance of “blazing, wide-eyed conviction”, in the final scenes she ornamented an excoriating monologue by baring and caressing her own breasts.

When Baby Love was filmed on television as a Play for Today in 1974, Patti Love impressed this newspaper’s reviewer with a performance to tingle the nerve ends, “all fierce animal passion one moment, the next as vulnerable as a butterfly”.

An only child, Patricia Margaret Love was born on August 18 1947 in Glasgow, and endured what she called a displaced childhood. Her father had been in the Army, interned in a Japanese PoW camp, and died after 20 years of ill-health when she was still in her teens. She grew up in Scotland, Yorkshire and Norfolk.

She trained at the radical Drama Centre in north London before joining the Glasgow Citizens’ theatre company, playing Olivia in Twelfth Night and Shaw’s Saint Joan, winning Best Actress in the Scottish Drama and Theatre Awards. As Kattrin in Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children (1970), she was tipped in The Stage newspaper as “a young actress to watch”.

After appearing at the Edinburgh Festival, she worked with Tom Conti at the Hampstead Theatre in the comedy The Black and White Minstrels (1974), about wife-swapping in Glasgow, and worked at the Old Vic with Peter Hall.

Repeated roles as a distressed woman took its toll. As Carol in The Long Good Friday opposite Bob Hoskins as an East End crime boss (“You’re a bastard, Harold Shand, a vicious bastard”), she played the woman in the cemetery who, having lost her husband in gangland warfare, is told by Hoskins she will be looked after by “the Firm”. She also appeared in another cult gangster movie, The Krays (1990).

Patti Love was cast in a glamorous part in Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money (Wyndhams, 1987), and for several years she enjoyed a number of similar roles. On stage she devised her own one-woman show, Colette, based on the life of the French writer (Lyttleton, 1982), and in 1985 took her first job as a director, staging David Hare’s all-female Slag in a student production at Chalk Farm in north London.

In later life Patti Love experienced prolonged periods of joblessness, weathering the lean times with uncomplaining humour.

She had several relationships, including a lengthy one with Bob Hoskins. She was once asked with whom she would choose to have an affair and picked the young Marlon Brando.

Latterly she suffered from dementia; friends including the actress Dame Harriet Walter secured her a place at Denville Hall, the actors’ retirement home, in whose care she had lived since late 2020.

Patti Love, born August 18 1947, died February 17 2023