Joy Parker obituary
Actor who shared the stage with her husband, Paul Scofield

Michael Coveney
The Guardian, Friday 30 November 2012 09.26 EST, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/nov/30/joy-parker

Slim, dark, quick-moving and pretty, the actor Joy Parker appeared at the Birmingham Rep in her early 20s and, in 1942, played an Ophelia "of gentle, bewildered pathos", according to one critic. There, she met Paul Scofield, who was playing Horatio. The couple married in 1943 and were rarely separated in more than 65 years. Long-lasting marriages are not completely unknown in the theatre, but theirs was one of the most famously enduring.

Parker, who has died aged 90, always said that Scofield was a much better actor than she could ever have been, and that she had no sense of "having given up a startling career that would have ended in Cleopatra". Nevertheless, she played leading roles at Stratford-upon-Avon and in the West End.

While busy in Stratford, and caring for her first child, she wrote a children's book, The Story of Benjamin Scarecrow (1946), which she illustrated with her own intricate drawings. The scarecrow ran away from the countryside to be an actor.

Joy was the only child of Henry Parker, who served in the army in the first world war and later worked in the City of London, and his wife, Evelyn, a teacher of mathematics and French. She was born in Sidcup, Kent, and educated in Surbiton before enrolling as a student at the Birmingham Rep, where she was directed by Peter Brook.

In 1946 she followed Brook, Scofield and Scofield's best friend, the actor (and later director) John Harrison, to Stratford, where she played Miranda in The Tempest; a balletic Ariel in the same play – "all blue and silver and Kurt Jooss," said Harrison; Katharine in Brook's famous Watteau-esque Love's Labour's Lost; followed by Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (her lovelorn Lorenzo was Donald Sinden) and the Queen in Richard II.

Parker's West End engagements included an appearance alongside Leslie Banks and Irene Worth in JB Priestley's Home Is Tomorrow (1948), an ambitious, prophetic plea for international co-operation in the early years of the United Nations; and the role of a barbarian chief's daughter in Terence Rattigan's Adventure Story (1949), in which Scofield, as Alexander the Great, played a macabre wooing scene with his own wife, clutching a wedding ring in one hand and a knife in the other in order to kill her if she refused him. Silently, she chose the ring.

Parker virtually retired from the stage in 1952 when, with their two children, she and Scofield moved from Esher in Surrey to a large Victorian house in Balcombe, West Sussex. Domesticity now ruled her life, but she often appeared with Scofield in poetry readings over the years. In 1961, before Scofield repeated his West End success as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons on Broadway, they appeared together in Stratford, Ontario, in Love's Labour's Lost. In 1973 she made a surprise, and generally acclaimed, return to the stage as Olga in Chekhov's Three Sisters, directed by Robin Phillips at the Greenwich theatre, London, alongside Mia Farrow and Gwen Watford.

She never admitted to renouncing the stage, rather to "loosening the holds". In Sussex, she converted an old coal-house into a study, where she worked on her drawing and produced, in 1988, the illustrated fable of a mole called Henry. All the grasses and plants in the mole's habitat were taken from the island of Mull, where she and Scofield spent their holidays in a farmhouse.

They stayed in Sussex for the rest of their lives, shunning the media circus and the red-carpet glamour to which Scofield's status could fairly lay claim. He never accepted a knighthood, although it was Parker who was far more opposed than he to the notion of the accolade. Their home, garden and family life together provided the peace and security, the lair, perhaps, from which the titanic actor could prowl so heroically on to the stages and film sets of the world, a man of magical mystery and deep-buried secrets, he always seemed to be.

Parker had been working on a third book, about a theatre cat called Boris who becomes an opera singer. "All I want to do is draw," she told one interviewer, but life became difficult for her after Scofield's death in 2008.

She is survived by their children, Martin and Sarah, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

• Joy Mary Parker, actor, born 22 February 1922; died 7 November 2012