Vivien Heilbron

Career

Heilbron, who was born in Glasgow, was a member of the company at Dundee Repertory Theatre in the mid-1960s. She achieved fame in her homeland when she appeared in the 1971 BBC Scotland television adaption of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song, in the lead role of Chris Guthrie. "The television programme was quite instrumental in raising Gibbon's publicity," she said. "It put him on the school curriculum where he had not been before."

In the early 1980s she appeared in its two sequels Cloud Howe and Grey Granite (the trilogy is known as The Scots Quair).

On film she played Catriona opposite Michael Caine in the 1971 film version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, and also appeared in Mysteries (1978), starring Rutger Hauer and Sylvia Kristel, and the 1998 comedy The Sea Change, with Ray Winstone.

She also appeared as Emm in Ace of Wands and as regular Det. Sgt. Louise Colbert in the BBC detective series Target. She received an Emmy nomination for her performance in The Moonstone. She appeared as a minor character Christine Pretis in EastEnders from 1989 to 1992.

Other television appearances include Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Taggart, The New Statesman, and Poirot.

On stage she has played Elizabeth in Richard III opposite Derek Jacobi and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. She more recently returned in An Evening With Grassic Gibbon, playing The Narrator.

She is Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, in Stratford-upon-Avon. Vivian is an Examiner for LAMDA examinations and also a teacher of private drama lessons.

Personal life

She is married to actor David Rintoul. She is the elder sister of actress Lorna Heilbron and the sister-in-law of Nicholas Clay.