Joanna Bacon(1953-2025)

Joanna Bacon was a London-born character actress, initially trained as a ballet dancer under Leo Kersley and Janet Sinclair. She briefly worked for the Longman Publishing Company in Harlow, Essex, but terminated her job to commence drama studies at the Actor's Institute in London and with Uta Hagen at the HB Studio in Greenwich Village, New York. Jo made her stage debut as an original member of the newly established Harlow Theatre Company in 1978. Her subsequent theatrical career included stints with the Dukes Theatre in Lancaster, the Sheffield Crucible, the National Theatre and the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon.

On screen from 1991, Jo had small, but iconic roles in films like Love Actually (2003) (as the mother of Martine McCutcheon's character Natalie), A Quiet Passion (2016) (as the mother of poet Emily Dickinson) and Benediction (2021) (as socialite Lady Sibyl Colefax). She had frequent guest spots on television, providing sturdy support in popular shows like Minder (1979), Pie in the Sky (1994), A Touch of Frost (1992), Wire in the Blood (2002) and (most recently) Moonflower Murders (2024). She also played diverse characters in several episodes of The Bill (1984) and was lauded for her performance as Jackie, the mother of Paul Worsley (Martin Freeman), in all four seasons of the dark comedy series Breeders (2020). Jo died from cancer in June 2025.