Vivien Heilbron

Glaswegian actress Vivien Heilbron left her home town at the age of seventeen to commence studies at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). Following her graduation, she joined the ensemble of the Dundee Repertory Theatre. Between 1965 and 1968, Vivien appeared in several plays for the Nottingham and Salisbury Playhouse. At the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, she later headlined as Blache Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire and as the tormented Bella Manningham in Gaslight, respectively, in 1986 and 1994.

Her appearances on the screen have been largely confined to television, a notable exception being her role in Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure Kidnapped (1971) (co-starring opposite Michael Caine as Catriona Stewart, the main female protagonist). Vivien has been lauded in her native Scotland for her role as Chris Guthrie in the miniseries Sunset Song (1971), based on a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Her performance in a 1973 BBC adaptation of the classic Wilkie Collins romance/mystery The Moonstone (1972) (as Rachel Verinder, the central character) gained her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. Vivien was also part of the principal cast of the short-lived police action series Target (1977) (as Det. Sgt. Louise Colbert) and has had guest spots on various popular TV shows, including Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1995), Poirot (1989) and Midsomer Murders (1997). Her final screen credit dates to 2014. An Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, she has latterly taught practical Shakespeare at Cambridge University.