Diana Quick brings a useful impatience to the careful manners of Brideshead Revisited. We admire the firmness of her Lady Julia Flyte, and would resist making that aristocratic role the measure of everything she can do.
Fi1m perspective
In Brideshead Revisited (1981), Quick makes Julia's impatience register against the restraint around her. Lady Julia Flyte could easily have been another elegant presence in an adaptation full of them, but Quick gives her a will of her own. We were relieved when that impatience broke through, because the production's careful reserve can become exhausting. It is a firm performance that holds our attention without needing the drama to become louder or faster.
That role can make the career look more exclusively aristocratic than it is. Before Julia, Quick played Laura in Ridley Scott's The Duellists (1977) and Mona Grant in The Big Sleep (1978). She subsequently sought to avoid typecasting, continuing across classical theatre, supporting film parts and television. Her later screen work includes Polina Molotova in The Death of Stalin (2017), an ensemble credit worth remembering when Julia threatens to become the only part anyone mentions.
The directors of Brideshead Revisited, Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Charles Sturridge, give the actors time to make small changes count. Across this eleven-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel, embarrassment and self-command are allowed to occupy a scene without being underlined. John Gielgud's Edward ‘Ned’ Ryder makes discourtesy funny, while Nickolas Grace's Anthony Blanche provides a change from the prevailing restraint. Quick earns her place among them through the firmness that keeps Julia from becoming merely decorative.
The cost is a stately pace that sometimes becomes a trial, and no performance can quite remove that difficulty. We recommend the programme for its acting and its attention to small cruelties, with that reservation plainly attached. Quick's wish to avoid aristocratic typecasting makes sense when even this defining role gives us more to notice than composure and manners. Start with Julia, but do not make an aristocratic title a requirement for watching her again.
Biography
Diana Quick is an English actress. Born in London in 1946, she grew up in Kent and studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she became the first female president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. She made her professional stage debut in 1959 and has worked extensively in theatre with companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre.
Quick is best known for portraying Lady Julia Flyte in the 1981 Granada Television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, for which she received BAFTA and Emmy nominations. Her film credits include The Duellists (1977) and The Death of Stalin (2017). She has appeared in numerous television series such as Agatha Christie's Poirot, Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse and Father Brown.
Quick has also written a family memoir, A Tug on the Thread, published in 2009. Her daughter, Mary Nighy, is an actress.
