Margot Boyd; OBITUARY.

WHEN Hollywood star Claudette Colbert sheepishly told Noel Coward that she "knew her lines backwards yesterday", the master famously raged: "That's just the way you're saying them today".

Actress Margot Boyd, who has died, aged 94, found an altogether older and much mellowed Coward directing her in his play, Waiting in the Wings.

On arriving for rehearsal, he told the cast: "You're all worried in case you dry up.

But I don't give a damn. If you forget a line, I'll shout it from the box." She stayed two years in the play, which also starred grande dame Sybil Thorndike.

In spite of having her own BBC TV series way back in 1957, starring as Mary Pemberton in Our Miss Pemberton and playing alongside screen legend James Stewart in the London stage revival of Harvey in 1975, she was best known latterly as Mrs Antrobus, in Radio 4's The Archers.

True to her vintage and with 70 years in the business, she could pitch every word with crystal clarity, said critic Eric Shorter, "as if she were addressing the back row of the gallery".

From a theatre-loving family who enjoyed recitations, she attended Rada, won a gold medal and was directed by George Bernard Shaw, whom she described as "wonderful and very encouraging". Half a century later, aged 71 and a veteran of the BBC radio drama company, she was asked to play a guest speaker addressing the Ambridge Over-60s Club on "the colourful world of the Afghan hound". She admitted "never actually having listened" to The Archers. Such was her success that she was a regular character over the next two decades.

Of the invitation, she said: "The script was one of the funniest things I'd ever read. In my 70s, I'd have been mad not to take it on."

A native of Bath, where her father was an estate manager, she recalled "every other woman was a Mrs Antrobus, it was full of ex-colonial people who were all very horsey and doggy."

As The Archers' oldest cast member, she arrived at BBC Pebble Mill on her 90th birthday to record scenes and was treated to a surprise party, with her favourite lunch of egg, chips, whisky and soda.

Margot Boyd, actress; born September 26, 1913, died May 20, 2008