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She appeared in a helicopter, landing in the Peak District, for the medical drama Peak Practice, playing Joanna Graham, who joins the GPs at the Beeches surgery in fictional Cardale after leaving a surgeon’s job behind. “It could be seen as brave or foolish,” said Haydn Gwynne, but “at the time, I was only being offered Alex-clone roles.”Īfter sparkling on the West End stage, spending 18 months with the Royal Shakespeare Company and having her first baby, it would be eight years before she was on the small screen again. While the Bafta-winning Drop the Dead Donkey continued for a further four runs, she was keen to return to theatre, for fear of typecasting on TV.

It was a phenomenon Haydn Gwynne had satirised brilliantly 30 years earlier in Drop the Dead Donkey – “a parody on the tabloids and newsrooms in general”, as she put it – set in the studios of the GlobeLink News TV channel, newly bought by a never-seen Rupert Murdoch/Robert Maxwell-type media mogul.Īs the duty news editor, constantly harassed and frustrated by indecisive management, Haydn Gwynne played one of the more sane characters in a series that also featured David Swift as a lecherous, drunken news presenter, Stephen Tompkinson as a ruthless reporter and Jeff Rawle as her boss, the news editor frequently on the verge of a nervous breakdown.īut the actress dropped her own breaking – and shocking – news on the sitcom by pulling out after the first two series (1990-91). She played Lady Susan Hussey, Queen Elizabeth II’s Woman of the Bedchamber, who – outside the drama – had recently left royal service after her remarks to a black charity founder caused a media storm.

Haydn Gwynne took a more subservient role in a royal saga when she had a cameo in the historical drama The Crown in 2022. In 2021, Enfield revealed he had been told that Charles, then Prince of Wales, regarded The Windsors as “very cruel”.

“Given that she started series one by trying to blow up the royal family, I can’t say she’s got any worse,” said Haydn Gwynne. She played the Duchess as a “soap opera villainess that we know and perhaps love” from The Windsors’ start, in 2016, until this year’s coronation special, in which Charles (played by Harry Enfield) fumes at Rishi Sunak’s idea of a budget coronation, and Camilla is transformed into a Cruella de Vil lookalike when she accidentally smears ink over half of her blonde hair. Haydn Gwynne, the actress, who has died of cancer aged 66, made her name on television as the sardonic Alex Pates, duty news editor, in the popular Channel 4 sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey – and later brought the present Queen (then the Duchess of Cornwall) – to the screen in the same channel’s wicked satire The Windsors.