From Mick Jagger to Crossroads: the pioneering career of Cleo Sylvestre

By Mark Lawson, The Guardian

Although named after a Shakespeare heroine, Cleopatra Sylvestre – more often known personally and professionally as Cleo – had to wait until very late in a long career to play one of the playwright’s women on a major stage. Last year, she was cast at Stratford-upon-Avon as Audrey in As You Like It, in a touching production using the conceit of older actors recreating a Royal Shakespeare Company show they appeared in decades before.

As the programme noted that this was the RSC debut of Sylvestre, who has died aged 79, it was clear the framing device was fake. And, given the talent and success of an actor who made her West End debut aged 19, the belated bestowal of such a role is a measure of the obstacles that actors of colour long faced in the UK.

The gaps are even more striking because Sylvestre’s career had initially seemed fast-tracked. The daughter of a Yorkshire dancer, she turned the family kitchen table in north London into her first stage, dancing on it as a child, and enrolled at the Italia Conti juvenile theatre school. Aged 16, she bunked off from double biology to record a song with the Rolling Stones. A cover of To Know Him Is to Love Him, it was released in 1964, under the name Cleo. This proved a false start artistically, but Mick Jagger reported being “so sad” at the death of his “old friend”, who stands in pop history as the first woman to record with the Stones.

There were also other striking early breakthroughs. In 1967, aged only 19, she acted alongside Alec Guinness in the London West End in Wise Child, the first play by Simon Gray. Two years later, she became the first black woman to play a lead role at the National Theatre – in Peter Nichols’ comedy The National Health – and, in the same period, achieved the equivalent of that breakthrough in a major TV soap opera, with a recurring role in ATV’s Crossroads.

The original article has the details about her career.

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