Josette Simon

Josette Patricia Simon OBE is a British actress from Leicester, of Caribbean descent. She trained for the stage at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and played the part of Dayna Mellanby in the third and fourth series of the television sci-fi series Blake’s 7 from 1980 to 1981. On stage, she has appeared in Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) productions from 1982, playing Ariel in The Tempest, to 2018 when she was Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. She has been at the forefront of ‘colour-blind casting’, playing roles traditionally taken by white actresses, including Maggie, a character that is thought to be based on Marilyn Monroe, in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall at the National Theatre in 1990.

Her first leading role at the RSC, the first for a black actress, was as Rosaline, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Barry Kyle, in 1984. In 1987, Simon appeared for the RSC again, in the lead role of Isabelle in Measure for Measure. Later leading roles for the RSC saw her as Titania/Hippolyta in Titania/Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999–2000) and Cleopatra in Antony And Cleopatra (2017–18). She has played numerous other roles across stage, television, film, and radio.

Simon won the Evening Standard’s Best Actress award, a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award, and Plays and Players Critic Awards for After the Fall, and two film festival awards for her part in Milk and Honey (1988). She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2000, for services to drama.