British actress and producer Hilary Heath has died of complications from the novel coronavirus. Godson Alex Williams confirmed the news in a moving Facebook tribute. She was 74.
The actress and producer who is best known for her work in Witchfinder General and Wuthering Heights, died at the age of 74 last week.
Heath’s godson, Alex Williams who penned down a tribute to her on Facebook wrote;
“We lost my wonderful Godmother Hilary Heath to Covid-19 last week. Hilary had many careers, starting out as a screen and stage actress in the 1960s and 1970s, and then re-inventing herself as a producer in the 1990s, making films like Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman) and An Awfully Big Adventure (Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman).
“Her most remarkable re-invention came in her mid-60s, when she won a master’s degree from Oxford in psychology and became an addiction counsellor, specialising in CBT. She worked at clinics all over the world, often for free, often with very deprived and distressed individuals, and she regarded this as her most valuable work by far. She was a force of nature, and I can’t bear it that she is no longer with us.”
Hilary Heath (originally known as Hilary Dwyer) began acting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which she starred in a number of horror films from American International Pictures.
Notwithstanding her movie vocation, Dwyer showed up in a few TV shows including The Avengers, The Challengers, Man at the Top and Space: 1999.
Hilary Heath is survived by her son, Big Eyes composer Daniel Heath and her daughter, Laura. Plans for a memorial service of any kind have not been announced at this time.
