Joanne Campbell

Actress capable of dazzling stage performances

Joanne Campbell, actress and singer: born Northampton 8 February 1964; died London 20 December 2002.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the actress Joanne Campbell rose to fame with a dazzling array of stage performances. These included two productions at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East: a revival of Errol John's Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1986) and This is My Dream (1987, in which she played Josephine Baker). She also appeared at the Donmar Warehouse in 1988 in Trinidad Sisters, a Tricycle production of Mustapha Matura's version of Chekhov's Three Sisters, as well as the West End musical The Cotton Club (1992). Off-stage, Campbell forged another career as a drama therapist, a job that gave her much personal satisfaction.

Joanne Campbell was born in Northampton in 1964 to a Trinidadian mother and Jamaican father. Educated at the Northampton High School for Girls, she successfully auditioned for and was admitted to the Arts Education College in London. In the course of her studies, Campbell was invited to join the comedy duo Cannon and Ball on their national tour. Another early break came when she played the lead in Channel 4's The Record (1984), Caryl Phillips's drama about a teenager who wants to become a pop singer, but faces opposition from her tyrannical father.

For several years, Campbell successfully alternated television and stage roles. On the small screen, she appeared in a variety of programmes. As a presenter she proved a hit with the under-fives in Alphabet Castle and she guested in such top-rated drama series as The Bill. For four years she was Richard O'Sullivan's witty secretary Liz in London Weekend Television's popular sitcom Me and My Girl (1984-88). Campbell said,

I had to tell the director that black women like to look good. I fought off the original idea of having the stereotype secretary in a low-cut top, mini skirt and big earrings.

She also played the lead in the first series of the BBC's gentle family comedy Us Girls (1992) with Mona Hammond.

At the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, the east London community theatre, Campbell took part in pantomimes and Sunday-night variety shows and it was there that she enjoyed her biggest stage success with the lead in Henry Livings's This is My Dream. This ambitious musical biography of the legendary Josephine Baker, who took Paris by storm in the 1920s, was directed by Philip Hedley. Campbell gave a bravura performance, convincingly playing Baker from the age of 10 to 68. Reviews of the show were mixed, but critics were unanimous in their praise of Campbell, who successfully captured Baker's magnetism.

Sticking with nostalgia, Campbell played the lead in the feel-good musical The Cotton Club, which ran for six months at London's Aldwych Theatre in 1992. Later that year, Campbell joined the cream of British show business at the Lyric Theatre in London to pay tribute to the singer Elisabeth Welch in the Crusaid concert "A Time to Start Living". Campbell performed Josephine Baker's theme song "J'ai Deux Amours".

In the documentary Sophisticated Ladies, a celebration of black women in British entertainment from the 1850s to the 1950s, which I scripted for BBC Radio 2 in 1997, she read from the memoirs of such women as Baker, Welch, Florence Mills and Adelaide Hall. Her other stage work included the West End musical Someone Like You (1990) with Petula Clark, James Berry's Song of a Bluefoot Man (1993) and Yazmine Judd's Unfinished Business (1999).

One of her most satisfying experiences in the theatre was forming the Bibi Crew in 1991, a female production company that included six other black actresses: Judith Jacob, Janet Kay, Suzette Llewellyn, Josephine Melville, Beverley Michaels and Suzanne Packer. The Bibi Crew produced high-quality new writing from an African-Caribbean perspective, and introduced the black British experience to a larger, cosmopolitan audience.

Campbell had been a member of the board of directors at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, for the past 10 years and will be seen in the BBC interactive children's drama series UGetMe, which began on Monday.

Stephen Bourne