Jacqueline
Dutoit – Actress
Born, June
19, 1959; died March 2, 2020
Jacqueline
Dutoit, who has died aged 60, was an actress of gravitas and style, whose many
performances at Pitlochry Festival Theatre were possessed with the authority of
an elder states-woman of the stage. This was the case over fifteen years
working at Perthshire’s ‘theatre in the hills’ alongside her life-long partner
and PFT’s artistic director, John Durnin. The presence and power Dutoit carried
with her onstage was evident from the fact that she twice won the Leon Sinden
Award for best supporting actress, voted for by the Pitlochry audience.
The awards
were for Dutoit’s performances as overbearing snob, Lady Pontefract, in A Woman
of No Importance, and as the equally upper crust Duchess of Berwick in Lady
Windermere’s Fan, both written by Oscar Wilde. The two roles were telling of
Dutoit’s penchant for playing high class eccentrics, which allowed her to
indulge her own wicked sense of humour.
In lead
parts too she brought a largesse to proceedings that was nevertheless rooted in
reality. This was probably most evident on the Pitlochry stage in Alan
Bennett’s autobiographical play, The Lady in the Van, in which Dutoit played
the title role of Miss Shepherd, the elderly vagrant parked on Bennett’s
doorstep. It was a part that could have been written for Dutoit.
Jacqueline
Hamilton Dutoit was born at Epsom Hospital in Surrey, the youngest of three
children to Winifred and Jack Hamilton Dutoit. Both she and her sister Michele
and brother Stephen went to Burlington Road infant and junior school in New
Malden, Surrey before Dutoit went to the Tiffin Grammar School for Girls in
Kingston upon Thames. Drama became her passion as a teenager, and she studied
drama at Manchester University.
Dutoit’s
first acting job after graduation was at the Library Theatre, Manchester. This
was significant not just for opening the door on a wide and varied career that
would follow over the next three decades, but for her meeting a young deputy
stage manager called John Durnin, who had also started working at the Library.
For the next thirty-six years the pair were inseparable, and worked together
extensively, both at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, and at Pitlochry until 2017.
Dutoit and Durnin were married at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee in 2019. Durnin passed
away two weeks before Dutoit.
Prior
to this, Dutoit spent time with the Royal National Theatre, and appeared in the
world premiere of David Edgar’s post-Berlin Wall play, The Shape of the Table. In
Exeter, Dutoit was at the centre of the theatre’s open-air Shakespeare in the
Gardens initiative developed by Durnin. She was Katherine in The Taming of the
Shrew and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as playing Maria in
Twelfth Night and Audrey in As You Like It. She also appeared as Oedipus’
mother, Jocasta.
In
Pitlochry, Dutoit clocked up more than forty appearances, that saw her command
the stage with the full diversity of her range that PFT’s repertory structure
afforded her. She played Gertrude in Hamlet, was wicked as Ivana DeVille in
Cinderella, and stole the show as comic housekeeper, Martha, in White
Christmas. One of Dutoit’s great gifts was that of making character parts by the
likes of Ayckbourn and Coward her own in a career that brought magnitude and a
sense of fun to everything she did.
Dutoit
is survived by her father, Jack, sister, Michele and her brother, Stephen.
The Herald, April 11th 2020
ends
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