In March 1979, the actress Judy Loe was in hospital recovering from a minor operation. Her husband, the sitcom star Richard Beckinsale, came to visit her with their five-year-old daughter, Kate. Later, Loe vividly recalled standing at the door of her room watching her husband walk down the corridor after the visit was over. It was the last time she saw him. The following day, a doctor had to break the news to her that 31-year-old Beckinsale had died in the night of a heart attack.
“Immediately it was like being in a long tunnel,” Loe recalled. “I was in a vacuum. All I could hear was my heart pounding, pounding, pounding.” Barely able to absorb the news, she had to steel herself to tell Kate about her father’s death. In the awful weeks to come, she was buoyed by her daughter and by the hundreds of letters she received from fans of Richard. She determined that she must be positive and not let widowhood define her.
Judith Margaret Loe was born in Urmston, Lancashire, in 1947, the only child of Norman Loe, a travelling salesman, and his wife Nancy (née Jones), a department store worker. A bright child, she attended Urmston Grammar School for Girls from 1958 to 1964, and was head girl for her final year. She also showed talent as a performer. According to a local newspaper review of the school’s 1963 production of Hansel and Gretel: “Any doubts one might have had of the school’s ability to stage the opera effectively were dissipated as soon as fifth former Judith Loe (Gretel) had stepped onto the stage and burst into song … Throughout the performance she displayed supreme confidence and great promise.”
Judy Loe with her husband Richard Beckinsale and their daughter Kate in 1978
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Uncertain if she wanted to commit to acting, Loe studied drama and English at the University of Birmingham, reasoning that she could teach if she decided against a stage career. In 1968, after completing her degree, she joined a repertory company being assembled by Ted Craig, the new artistic director at Crewe Theatre.
The recent Rada graduate Richard Beckinsale was another of Craig’s recruits. Beckinsale’s wife had recently left him and his friend told Loe that he needed someone to talk to. It was not love at first sight; at least, not for Loe. Beckinsale was “an Eric Morecambe clone”, she told Radio 4’s Great Lives. “He was a sort of shambling kind of a guy with thick, heavy, horn-rimmed glasses.” However, they started talking, became friendly and then “it all got a bit difficult because I started to fall in love with this man”.
The young actors became an item. Despite Loe’s initial reservations about his appearance, Beckinsale did not lack female admirers and was thought quite the catch. However, the elegant Loe was also considered a beauty. They were an attractive couple and appeared together in a number of productions, even playing newlyweds in All in Good Time.
When the rep season ended, work separated the pair and they were restricted to meeting at weekends. While working at Chester’s Gateway Theatre, Loe successfully auditioned for a role in the West End musical Hair, notorious for a brief scene in which the cast appeared naked. She and Beckinsale started living together in a run-down bedsit opposite Holloway prison.
Mother and daughter at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards in 2008
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In 1970, after a nine-month stint in Hair, she landed a part in a new children’s fantasy series called Ace of Wands, ITV’s answer to Doctor Who. She played Lulli, the assistant to Tarot, a psychic magician with whom she shared a telepathic connection. According to the show’s press release, Lulli was “young, beautiful, intelligent” and had studied philosophy at Oxford but the part was largely “decorative”, Loe recalled. “I was allowed some intelligence, but was always having to be rescued by the man.”
Loe became pregnant in 1972. The couple were in no hurry to marry, aware that people would consider it a “shotgun marriage”. “We were getting on so well,” Loe told Woman magazine. “Our love was developing so beautifully. Marriage couldn’t make it better.” Their daughter, Kate, was born in July 1973.
By this time, Beckinsale’s television sitcom career had started to take off with The Lovers (1970-71) which was also made into a film. Shortly after Kate’s birth came Rising Damp and Porridge (both 1974-77). Loe took her foot off the gas with regard to her own career. The couple had a quiet register office wedding in the spring of 1977.
They were trying for another baby and Loe was in hospital for fertility treatment when Beckinsale died. As a young single mother, she had to reignite her career. Six months after her husband’s death, she returned to the stage in Middle Age Spread at the Lyric Theatre. ‘‘This play is vitally important for me,” she told an interviewer. “I’m now a woman on my own with my six-year-old daughter Katie to look after and I’ve damned well got to be ambitious and make good.
Loe in Ace of Wands in 1971 with an owl named Fred Owl, who played the part of Ozymandias
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“I have never been a domestic wife who believes that I must give up all for home and husband but at the same time I felt Richard needed a secure home. He hated it when I was away for long and of course Katie needed a stable home life so I didn’t push my career as hard as I shall have to do now.”
In fact, there was little pushing required. She was popular in the business and with audiences and much in demand. Her television work included Missing From Home (1984), a thriller series in which she played a woman whose husband goes out one day and doesn’t return. She was in Singles, a sitcom about the patrons of a singles bar (1988-91). She played the GP wife of Tim Piggott-Smith’s chief constable in The Chief (1989-91). She was Commander Kathryn McTiernan, in charge of a multinational crew on the space station Unity in the Sky sci-fi series Space Island One (1998), and had a recurring role in the hospital drama Casualty and its spin-off Holby City.
In 1999 she took a role in Sitting Pretty, a play by Amy Rosenthal, at the Chelsea Centre, London. The director Jake Murray recalled: “It was a fringe show that paid very little. An actress of Judy’s calibre didn’t need to do a fringe show, nor did she have to read for an unknown director, but she did. She had no ego, no vanity and didn’t use her reputation or status as a weapon in the rehearsal room. She was superb to work with, utterly professional, highly intelligent and superlative on stage.”
Loe as Adele Cecil in Inspector Morse with John Thaw
SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL
She played Adele Cecil, the love interest of the lead character in two late episodes of the celebrated crime series Inspector Morse. It is Adele who works out that Morse’s first name is Endeavour — a long-kept secret in the show. Loe’s final television appearance was a small role in the Harlan Coben thriller Fool Me Once (2024).
In 1997, she married her long-term partner, the television director Roy Battersby. He died last year. Loe’s own death was announced by her film star daughter Kate, to whom she was very close. On Instagram, Beckinsale posted that her mother was: “the compass of my life … my dearest friend”.
Judy Loe, actress, was on born March 6, 1947. She died of cancer on July 15, 2025, aged 78