Jeanne Lapotaire made a sensation as Edith Piaf – and a majestic actress you will never regret seeing on stage | stage

CAnne Lapotaire, who has died aged 81, will always be recognized for the title role in Pam James’s play Piaf. It opened at the other location in Stratford in 1978, then moved to the West End and Broadway, winning a Lapotaire Olivier Award and a Tony Award. Given her Gaelic origins – born to a French mother and raised by English parents in Ipswich – Lapotaire seemed born to play Edith Piaf, but her performance went beyond impersonation. What she showed us was a woman whose art depended on her fierce loyalty to her working-class origins: a woman who called herself “just a piece of the slum trash.” Above all, with her wide-open smile, she depicted Piaf’s ramshackle life, her emotional generosity and her indomitable good nature.

It was a gift of the role that Lapotaire truly enjoyed. But his success obscured the fact that Lapotaire was that relatively rare creature: a true classical actor akin to Shakespeare, Sophocles, Ibsen, or Chekhov. She’s done her fair share of television — indeed, she featured in a TV series about Marie Curie — but it’s on stage that she reveals her instinctive intelligence and the precision of her voice.

Having learned her craft at the Bristol Old Vic, she was part of Olivier’s National Theater Company and a founder member of Frank Dunlop’s Young Vic, where she played Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, Isabella in Measure for Measure and Jocasta in Ronald Pickup’s Oedipus. But it was at Stratford in 1974 that I realized what an authentic actress Lapotaire was, when she appeared as Sonia in a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, directed by and starring Nicol Williamson, in The Other Place. Because the character is defined by her unrequited love for Astrov, she is often played as frustratingly old-fashioned, but Lapotère makes her a sensible, practical girl so steeped in the rituals of domestic life that she cannot see a tabletop without dusting it off. At the same time, her adoring eyes followed every moment of Astrov’s eventual departure, making her return to the toil of accounting all the sadder.

Surprisingly, much of Lapotaire’s best work was done in the ridiculous shanty that was the original setting. Fifteen years after Piaf opened there, she returned to play Madame Alving in a stunning production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, directed by Katie Mitchell. With Simon Russell Beale as Oswald and John Carlyle as Reverend Manders, the strength of the production lies in the casting and Lapotaire is nothing short of brilliant as Mrs Alving. She gave us the character’s free thinking and advanced ideas, but there was also something herbivorous in her nature, so she began to understand why Reverend Manders retreated when she threw herself at his mercy.

Lapotaire responded well to some directors. For Peter Gill, she played Shakespeare’s Viola and Rosalind, as well as Belvidera in the National Theater’s production of Otway’s Venice Preserv’d co-starring Ian McKellen and Michael Pennington. I remember how she adhered to the heroic style required in the play by extending the backs of her hands over her forehead to indicate tearful emotion.

In 2000, Lapotaire’s career was inevitably derailed when she suffered a massive brain haemorrhage, but she returned and worked several times with Gregory Doran at the RSC, where in 2013 she played the silver-haired, iron-willed Duchess of Gloucester in David Tennant’s Richard II. To the end, Lapotaire was a powerful presence on stage: he had the inherent grandeur and clarity of the outline of a swan on the water.