Sarah Lawson, actress best known for the Hammer Horror cult classic The Devil Rides Out – obituary

Sarah Lawson, who has died aged 95, was the actress best known for the cult classic The Devil Rides Out (1968), considered one of the greatest of all Hammer Horrors, second only to Dracula (1958).

Auburn-haired and high-cheekboned, with a beauty described as “copper and cream”, Sarah Lawson was cast as Marie, hostess of the claustrophobic mock-Tudor Home Counties mansion in which the cast are attacked by a Satanic cult.

Marie’s poised wholesomeness, established as she serves sandwiches on the lawn and tucks up her daughter Peggy, is the perfect foil to the evil of Mocata (played by a velvety-voiced Charles Gray), the mesmeric, Aleister Crowley-esque cult leader with whom Marie has a battle of wills – and unexpectedly takes centre stage to defeat in the (somewhat underwhelming) finale, with little help from her ineffectual husband, played with impeccable comic timing by Paul Eddington.

Hammer was, by the late 1960s, synonymous with 19th-century Gothic, after their hit Dracula and Frankenstein franchises. The Devil Rides Out was thus a daring departure, being a supernatural thriller about Satanists in recognisably 1960s clothes, adapted from a 1934 Dennis Wheatley novel.

The studio was persuaded to option it in 1964 by Christopher Lee, who was earmarked for the part of the Mocata, but petitioned to be allowed to play the hero, the (bizarrely spelt) Duc de Richleau, an amateur occultist who recurs in 11 of Wheatley’s novels. The project was kept on ice for four years until censorship rules – which forbad depictions of Satanism – relaxed.

The result was a masterpiece. Lee delivered one of his finest performances, matched in charisma by Gray. Their chemistry, and Terence Fisher’s direction, made it one of the rare Hammer Horror films to be celebrated even by critics of the day, instead of acquiring grudging recognition in retrospect.

Lawson’s big scene comes when she receives Gray in her large drawing room, absent-mindedly picking up her daughter’s doll as they argue. As she orders him out of her house, he puts her under his spell with his hypnotic voice and cornflower eyes. Then her daughter bursts in, the trance is interrupted, and Gray leaves, with the famous parting shot: “I shall not be back, but something else will.” Later, Lawson watches as a tarantula the size of a Shetland pony menaces her daughter, in a set piece celebrated despite its amusingly ropey special effects.

The Devil Rides Out also features her husband, Patrick Allen, albeit invisibly. Allen, star of the television hit Crane and an early contender to play James Bond, was brought in to dub over the actor Leon Green, who plays Rex van Ryn. (“He sang his lines and they just felt it could be improved upon,” explained Allen later). The husband and wife had already shared a screen earlier that year, in another Christopher Lee-Terence Fisher collaboration, The Night of the Big Heat, Lee’s science fiction debut, in which Allen and Lawson play a couple who run a pub on an island invaded by aliens that looked – as Lee put it – “like fried eggs”.

Sarah Lawson was born in Wandsworth, south London, on August 8 1928, the youngest of three children to Edith (née Monteith) and Noel Lawson, a naval officer, son of the Victorian artist Francis Wilfred Lawson. She was brought up in Horsham, West Sussex, and attended ’s Ghyll Roman Catholic School, then the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Aged 19, she went to the 1947 Edinburgh Festival, and asked by Perth Rep to play Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal – “the sort of part you don’t usually get the chance of doing until you’re 40,” she said.

Her big break was opposite Fay Compton in a Cocteau play called Intimate Relations in the West End in 1951. She was spotted by film-makers Sydney and Muriel Box, who cast her in Street Corner (1953), a drama about three policewomen. The Rank Organisation then signed her as a starlet, casting her as a Wren opposite Donald Sinden in the Technicolor satirical Cold War farce You Know What Sailors Are (1954).

By 1965, she had made, by her estimate, over 300 television appearances, in everything from The Avengers to The Saint, with meatier roles, such as Christabel Pankhurst in a BBC biopic. She had settled down as a crime specialist, appearing in Department S (1969), The Persuaders! (1971), Callan (1967), Father Brown (1974) and Bergerac (1981).

From 1978, she starred as the prison governor in Within These Walls, succeeding Googie Withers and Katharine Blake, a part for which she prepared by visiting HMP Holloway. “If you are living in the unbalanced world of a prison,” she concluded, “humour is particularly important. I inject bits of fun... I try to keep the conferences chirpy.” She was such a success that people on the street used to stop her to ask for legal advice.

In 1960, Sarah Lawson married Patrick Allen, whom she had met in 1955 when she went backstage at his play The Ark. As well as appearing in films such as Dial M for Murder and The Wild Geese, he was a successful voiceover artist, becoming in 2005 the voice of the television channel E4. He died in 2006; she is survived by their two sons.

Sarah Lawson, born August 8 1928, died August 18 2023