Topsy Jane

Topsy Jane (2 December 1938 – 4 January 2014) was a British actress of the 1960s. She was in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and was cast as Liz (the role eventually played by Julie Christie) in the 1963 film Billy Liar but was forced to pull out owing to mental health issues.

Early life

She was born as Topsy Jane Legge in Erdington in Birmingham in 1938, the daughter of Anna Maud née Gumbrell (1907-2006) and Albert Harry Legge (1894-1961), a dairy-man and by 1939 a telephone engineer for the GPO. Julie Christie was instead cast in the role.

In 1963 she married Tony Garnett, whom she met aged 15 and he was 17 while performing in amateur theatre at Highbury Little Theatre in Sutton Coldfield where they took the leading roles in William Saroyan's 1941 play The Beautiful People. They had a son, William (1964–), and later divorced. Jean Watts in John Paddington (1965), and Daphne Dawson in United! (1965).

Illness and death Tony Garnett, in his autobiography The Day the Music Died (2016), relates how Topsy Jane returned home several weeks after filming for Billy Liar commenced: "... unrecognisable. Fat, dishevelled, her hair lank, she walked and talked in slow motion. She only vaguely reminded me of my Topsy. I called Robin Fox, our agent, who said that John Schlesinger had sacked her and recast with Julie Christie because the camera could read nothing in Topsy. Her eyes were dead." which produced a "functional lobotomy". They later divorced.

She died aged 75 on 4 January 2014 at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham of lung cancer. She had a private family funeral in Sutton Coldfield and was buried in Sutton New Hall Cemetery.