Katrin Cartlidge, the actress who died on Saturday aged 41, excelled at playing complicated, provocative and vulnerable women on the stage and in 25 films; because she favoured ensemble, low-budget projects, she never gained the public recognition her talent deserved. She reached her widest audience as Sophie, the addled dopehead stranded somewhere between hippie and Goth, in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), and as defiant, uptight Hannah in his Career Girls (1997). In between, as the down-to-earth nurse Dodo in Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), she was a steadying counterbalance to the fey wildness of Emily Watson. Katrin Cartlidge was also one of the few British stars in Before the Rain, the first feature film from the Macedonian film director Milcho Manchevski, which was a joint winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1994.
. . . her real break came in 1982 when she was cast for the first episode of the Channel 4 soap Brookside as “that stroppy cow” Lucy Collins; she was chiefly notable for hitting people with her hockey stick and as the first character in a British soap to date a black man. . . . Her later performances included the Oscar-winning No Man’s Land (2001), the first film of the Bosnian director Danis Tanovic, in which she played a justice-seeking journalist. She was due to start working this month with the Mexican director, Alejandro Inarritu, in a film co-starring Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn. Droll, sharp, perceptive, and never twitchy about the performances of others, Katrin Cartlidge was once described as “the ultimate ensemble actress.”
From today’s L.A. Times: “Cartlidge died Saturday at a London hospital of what was believed to be blood poisoning and pneumonia. According to friends, Cartlidge had dinner with friends Friday evening in London, but woke up during the night with the belief that she had food poisoning. She was taken to a local hospital and died three hours later, according to Bingham Ray, who distributed the Leigh films that Cartlidge appeared in for United Artists.”
I was very sad to hear about this. Katrin was one of my very favourite actresses, and I thought she was immensely talented. Very sad indeed. Thank you Katrin, for all your excellent work, and for the pleasure and satisfaction you gave to movie-lovers everywhere. Your films will be shown for a long time to come, and provide a fitting tribute to your talent and art. Rest in peace. That’s a wrap, folks.
Oh dear, that’s very sad. I always wanted her to play Lucy Snowe in Villette one day. She was great in Breaking the Waves – even outshone Emily Watson occasionally.