Josette Simon

Josette Patricia Simon OBE (born 1959 / 1960)^[1] is a British actor. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and played the part of Dayna Mellanby in the third and fourth series of the television sci-fi series Blake's 7 from 1980 to 1981. First performing as a 14-year-old, in the choir for the world premiere of the finalized Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, she has continued a career in stage productions, appearing in 50 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) productions, from the single press night performance as a featured character in Salvation Now at the Warehouse theatre in 1982, through to playing Cleopatra in a six-month run of Antony and Cleopatra at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 2017. The first black woman in an RSC play when she appeared in Salvation Now, Simon has been at the forefront of colour-blind casting, playing roles traditionally taken by white actors, including Maggie, a character that is thought to be based on Marilyn Monroe, in Arthur Miller's After the Fall at the Royal National Theatre in 1990.

Simon's first leading role at the RSC, the first principal part filled by a black woman for the company, was as Rosaline, in Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Barry Kyle, in 1984. In 1987, she appeared for the RSC again, in the lead role of Isabelle in Measure for Measure. Later leading roles for the RSC saw her as Titania/Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999–2000) and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (2017–2018). She has played numerous other roles across stage, television, film, and radio. She starred alongside Brenda Fricker in the two-part television series Seekers (1993), written by Lynda La Plante. Simon has portrayed senior police officers in Silent Witness (1998), Minder (2009), and Broadchurch (2017); and portrayed a defence lawyer in Anatomy of a Scandal (2022).

Simon won the Evening Standard's Best Actress award, a Critics' Circle Theatre Award, and Plays and Players Critic Awards for After the Fall, and two film festival awards for her part in Milk and Honey (1988). She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2000, for services to drama.