Jennifer Hilary was a beautiful actress of elegance, charm, innocence and ethereal magic. She made her name in plays on the West End stage of the 1960s and 1970s that called out for real acting and got it. Later in the Eighties and Nineties, except for Philip Prowse’s rediscovery of her at the Glasgow Citizens’ in his 1999 revival of Coward’s Cavalcade, she seemed inclined to fall back more and more on television and the cinema.

Born at Frimley, Surrey, and educated at Elmhurst Ballet School near her Surrey home, she spent her early childhood in Cairo, where her father worked in the aircraft industry. After growing too tall for a ballet career, she joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she won the Bancroft Gold Medal in 196l. At Liverpool Playhouse she secured strong roles in the classics, including her first appearance on the stage as Nina in The Seagull, Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal and Cicely in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Moving to Birmingham Rep as Miranda in The Tempest, the chilly Lucile in Giraudoux’s Duel of Angels, Alison in Look Back in Anger, the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland and a sensual Cressida in Troilus and Cressida came the chance of her Broadway debut. With Coral Browne and Keith Michell in Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal, she played the governess Lucile.

Just as stirring was her West End debut in Christopher Taylor’s version of Henry James’s The Wings of a Dove (1963) when she took over from Susannah York as Milly Theale. The same year she gave another fine performance in James Saunders’s A Scent of Flowers (in which she had wistfully to watch her own funeral against Timothy O’Brien’s striking steel sets).

As Vera, the young ward, in Turgenev’s exquisite play A Month in the Country with Michael Redgrave as new director of the Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford, and matching Ingrid Bergman’s jealous but bored Natalya, she gave a brilliant performance. Already committed to Broadway as Sasha, the wife, in Chekhov’s Ivanov, she could not stay for a West End run of A Month in the Country, though when Sir John Gielgud’s production came to London it did not have the same success. In 1967 at the Duke of York’s Theatre she and the young Richard Briers gave the elder stars Celia Johnson and Michael Hordern a run for their money in Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking.

Back on Broadway, Hilary played in Samuel Taylor’s Avanti! as Alison Ames, a young Englishwoman who gets involved with a local charmer. Meanwhile, she toured as Jennet Jourdemayne in Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning; and also played Milly in Bodywork (1972) at the Phoenix, Leicester. In the West End Hilary then played Gillian in Denis Cannan’s family comedy Dear Daddy (1976), opposite Nigel Patrick as the father. Among other London appearances was Priestley’s time play I Have Been Here Before; though she fared better in the astringent new comedy by Dennis Potter, Sufficient Carbohydrate (1983).

Philip Prowse cast Hilary in two Oscar Wilde plays as Mrs Alloby in A Woman of No Importance and as the Duchess of Berwick in Lady Windermere’s Fan. At the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, Hilary was even more affecting as Noël Coward’s matriarch of the Marryot family in Cavalcade (1999).

Hilary worked often in television from the year she left RADA: in Michael Frayn’s Alphabetical Order, Pie in the Sky, Midsomer Murders, The Tenpenny Scandal, The Woman in White, Journey into the Unknown, The Gold Robbers, Happy Ever After, the trilogy Exiles and in 1988 Double First, with Michael Williams as N. V. Standish, the former brilliant Oxford scholar whom others want to rescue from an apparently failed career. Her films included Becket, The Heroes of Telemark, The Idol and One Brief Summer.

More recently she developed a flourishing second career as a specialist flower arranger, commissioned regularly to devise arrangements for first nights and other occasions.

Jennifer Hilary, actress, was born on December 14, 1942. She died on August 6, 2008, aged 65