Topsy Jane

She was in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and was cast as Liz (the role eventually played by Julie Christie) in the 1963 film Billy Liar but was forced to pull out owing to mental health issues.

[1] Her father was a committed Communist and later was to be a major influence in the political awakening of her husband, the British film and television producer and actor Tony Garnett.

Her husband, Tony Garnett, later wrote of her: "Leaving school at fifteen, Topsy was not academic, although she read voraciously, loving Tolstoy and almost any nineteenth-century English or French novel she could lose herself in.

Her roles included: Rosie in The Fanatics (1960); the rich young widow Dame Pliant in the television production of The Alchemist (1961) by Ben Jonson; Peggy in The Wind of Change (1961); Con in the TV movie Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring (1961); Céline in Maigret (1961); Stella Fairly in A Chance of Thunder (1961); in Shadow Play (1961); Amanda opposite Edith Evans in the BBC production of Time Remembered (1961) by Jean Anouilh; Mavis Wayne in Emergency Ward 10 (1962); Jane in Crying Down the Lane (1962), and Mona in Mix Me a Person (1962).

[8] Tony Garnett, in his autobiography The Day the Music Died (2016), relates how Topsy Jane returned home several weeks after filming for Billy Liar commenced: "... unrecognisable.

I called Robin Fox, our agent, who said that John Schlesinger had sacked her and recast with Julie Christie because the camera could read nothing in Topsy.

"[1] Her illness, from which she never fully recovered, seems to have been some form of schizophrenically-induced torpor[2] diagnosed as simple-type schizophrenia, dismissed by Garnett as a "dustbin diagnosis".

[14] Topsy Jane Garnett née Legge died aged 75 on 4 January 2014 at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham of lung cancer.