Morag Siller obituary
Actor who performed in the stage musicals Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables and was admired for her roles in TV series such as Emmerdale and Coronation StreetMorag Siller, who has died of breast cancer aged 46, was a prolific character actor who never left behind her Scottish roots but succeeded in taking her childhood acting ambitions to a wide audience in stage and screen productions.
On the 2006-07 world tour of the musical Mamma Mia!, she took the role of Donna’s best friend, Rosie – the character played by Julie Walters in the film version – and was seen on stage from Manchester to Israel and China. “Comic relief comes in the form of Morag Siller as the stereotypical overweight best friend,” wrote Broadway World. “What could have simply been comedy value becomes a joyful characterisation thanks to Siller’s natural ability to make you smile.”
Her longest television run was as Karen, the wayward and self-obsessed daughter of Vera Small, in both series of Ladies of Letters (2009-10). Lou Wakefield and Carole Hayman’s story of two suburban widows corresponding with each other had previously been published in book form and serialised on Woman’s Hour for BBC Radio 4.
For the TV version, Maureen Lipman played Irene Spencer, with Anne Reid as Vera. The pair meet at Karen’s wedding reception and start a letter-writing friendship in missives filled with snobbery, bitchiness and one-upmanship. Siller’s character gets on better with Irene than with her own mother and causes havoc for all with her drug-taking and pregnancies.
Morag was born in Edinburgh and, with her twin brother, Colin was adopted when she was three by Martin Siller, a cabinet-maker, and his wife, Ann, who also fostered children. They were reunited with their younger half-brother and two older half-sisters in the 1990s after searching for their family.
Siller went to James Gillespie’s high school in Edinburgh, where she performed in plays, having been inspired to act after seeing the TV drama Taggart being filmed as she walked home from school one day. A teacher encouraged her to follow her dream, and Siller took classes at Edinburgh Acting School. On leaving James Gillespie’s at 17, she moved to London, trained at the Sylvia Young theatre school and took a postgraduate course at Rada.
Her first screen role was a small part as a jitterbug dancer in the 1990 film Memphis Belle, produced by David Puttnam. She followed it with one-off appearances in popular TV series and as Lenny Henry’s driving instructor in the TV comedy-drama The Man (1999), and played Flora Kilwillie in the first series of Monarch of the Glen (2000).
There were also brief runs in soaps: Emmerdale (2002 and 2004), as Marilyn Dingle, cousin of the long-running character Zak Dingle; Coronation Street, as the Rev Esther Warren, whose 2013 christening of Lily Platt was foreshortened when a family argument erupted at the font; and EastEnders, in 2015, as Muriel Rhodes, who ran antenatal classes at Walford community centre.
She appeared in Casualty (2000-01), as Leona, who gives birth to an unheralded baby. Later, she reached a young audience when she starred as the hated headteacher Mrs Kilbraith in the children’s series Jinx (2009).
On stage, she played Madame Thénardier in Les Misérables, on a national tour (1997-98) and in the West End (Palace theatre, 1998). She brought comedy to the part of Putana, the tutor who encourages Annabella’s incestuous relationship with her brother, in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 2014). A year later, when playing Voltemand in Hamlet at the Barbican theatre – in the production starring Benedict Cumberbatch – she was seen by the largest global cinema audience to date for a National Theatre Live production – more than 225,000.
In 2005, she married Tim Nicholson, a classical musician, whom she knew at school and met again when he played the French horn in the orchestra on the Les Misérables tour. The couple planned to adopt, but were unable to when in 2011, three weeks before a baby girl was due to move in with them, Siller was diagnosed with her illness. She subsequently organised fundraisers for various cancer charities, particularly Genesis, of which she was a patron.
She is survived by her husband.
Morag Helen Siller, actor, born 1 November 1969; died 15 April 2016
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