Linda Bassett Tackles Dementia in Zeldin's 'Care'
SkimNews Take
Bassett's diverse roles, from mainstream television to experimental theatre, demonstrate a career strategy prioritizing artistic integrity and challenging material over commercial predictability.
Why it matters: Pairing Bassett with Zeldin — a writer of 'quietly devastating' domestic realism — lets a Churchill-trained actor draw on her own two-week care-home stay after a heart attack. Her self-described 'crap-free' CV and 12 years as Phyllis make this casting a quiet rebuke to the 'working-class actress' pigeonhole she says has kept her from classic roles.
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- Linda Bassett is rehearsing Alexander Zeldin's Care at the Young Vic, London, playing Joan — a woman showing signs of dementia after helping her family — running until 11 July, in a play she calls 'on the Shakespearean [scale], because she's raging against the world.'
- Bassett has been what the source calls 'a peerless interpreter' of Caryl Churchill, from Fen in 1983 to What If If Only in 2021; she describes Churchill in rehearsal as 'wonderful, completely non-invasive, but very generous.'
- The actress played stern nurse Phyllis in the BBC's Call the Midwife for 12 years and says she kept finding reasons to stay despite reservations, though the writers once 'suddenly made me an atheist' when she'd been playing a Unitarian Methodist in her head.
- Bassett spent two weeks recuperating in a care home in her Kentish village after a heart attack — an experience she says gave her 'an insight into what it's like when you become helpless,' directly feeding the Joan role.
- Her career began at age four when she stepped in for an older girl in a Sunday school Easter play in a daffodil hat, then took shape during two teenage years as an Old Vic usherette under Laurence Olivier — where she saw Peter Brook's Seneca's Oedipus and 'Ronald Pickup's messenger speech — people fainted every night.'
- Bassett says her CV is 'remarkably free of crap' and she's turned down many roles, but laments she hasn't done as many classics as she'd hoped: 'I think I'm seen as a working-class actress.'
