Everything's Coming Up Rose

Class barriers are tumbling at the Bellamys'. Lady Marjorie is hardly dead in the Titanic disaster, and ne'er-do-well Son James is planning to marry his father's typist. Upstairs is distraught; downstairs, aghast. Pale green eyes narrowing in her pretty vixen's mask, head Houseparlormaid Rose Buck voices the general anxiety: "A stranger has been in my linen closet. I don't know if I'm still wanted here."

Rose's fear is enough to strike dread into the Bellamys, who know their patrician comfort depends on a skilled corps of servants. Eaton Place may be home to the Bellamys, but it belongs to their servants: Mr. Hudson, Mrs. Bridges, Footman Edward and, of course, Rose, whom Actress Jean Marsh has made into the most fetching cockney sparrow since George Bernard Shaw detached a rib called Eliza Doolittle.

Marsh is in fact responsible for some far-reaching social commotion. Upstairs, Downstairs, the show she created with Actress Eileen Atkins, is in its fourth season on English TV and its second on PBS. It now has 50 million fans round the world. A Broadway musical is planned. CBS has bought the show's U.S. rights, and plans to transpose the location to a 1920s Boston family's Beacon Hill house with a black male "Mr. Bridges" at the range.

Bottoms Pinched. Not 'arf bad for a series dreamed up over a casual Sunday lunch during which Marsh and Atkins discovered they both had parents who had been "in service." They were sick of seeing servants portrayed as scene transitions: "You know, 'here's your hat, sir,' or having their bottoms pinched." Neither woman did anything to rectify the situation until a year later, when an actress boasted to Jean that she had landed a plum part. "I was furiously jealous," says Jean, who immediately called a producer friend. "What do I do with an idea for a TV series?" she asked. "You bring it to me," was his reply.

The outline for the first series was based partly on the stories of Eileen's parents, an underbutler and a needlewoman in the Edwardian era, and partly by Jean's reading preferences. She wanted the servants to talk with the uncontaminated candor of Ivy Compton-Burnett's oracular children. The close, conspiratorial relationship between Rose and Sarah, the rebel maid, was inspired by the two maids in Henry Green's novel Loving (belowstairs in a country house). Remembering how one of those maids found her mistress in bed with a lover, Jean says: "I always wanted to walk in on Lady Marjorie like that and scream: 'Ow, she's in bed with the wrong man!' " That line never got spoken. Instead, Jean based much of the cockney dialogue on her mother's pungent expressions.

Neither actress wanted a role within the Bellamy family. Eileen wanted to play Sarah to Jean's Rose, but stage commitments got in the way. Jean admits to a little jealousy of the fame won by Sarah (Pauline Collins) in England, but Rose's enigmatic quality was more successful in America. Says Jean: "She wants more but doesn't know what."

That is a good description of Jean Marsh. Born in a northeast London basement room, Jean was scarred by the blitz. Terror paralyzed her legs when she was seven. Her barmaid mother, who was nicknamed "Opera Pop" by her husband because she sang all the time, refused to give up. She enrolled her in a local dancing school. Jean hated it: "I wanted to go to a proper school." At 14, feeling an ugly failure, she had another nervous seizure; the left side of her face was paralyzed. The disease was diagnosed at the time as Bell's palsy.

The condition was temporary. When she recovered, Jean went out to work --in a repertory company. At 16 she was a leading lady ("My type--Audrey Hepburn--was coming in," she says) and getting bit parts in movies (Tales of Hoffmann, Where's Charley?). After a brief marriage at 19, she entered into a stormy ten-year relationship with Actor Kenneth Haigh. In 1957 when he starred on Broadway in Look Back in Anger, Jean came with him. "Some of his fame rubbed off on me," she says. Enough, at least, to win her a Broadway debut as Hero in Much Ado About Nothing and later, the role of Octavia, wife to Richard Burton's Antony, in the film Cleopatra. Unfortunately, off-camera scenes stole that picture.

No decisive success shaped her career, and when she split from Haigh she was at sea professionally as well as emotionally. However, a brief entr'acte with Albert Finney was followed by a break: the lead in a TV series The Informers, in which Jean played a new role for her: a gangster's moll. The director was Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who in 1970 made the Beatles movie Let It Be). For the past six years he and Jean have lived together. Says she: "He has given me confidence, steered my career. He was the first person to think I was funny."

Only a Maid. After the final Upstairs, Downstairs series is taped this winter, Jean will star as the eccentric detective Miss Silver in a movie adaptation of several Patricia Wentworth thrillers of the '30s. She also wants to write more: an outline for a TV series is in her head, and she might try a novel.

Upstairs, Downstairs has brought international acclaim, but only a modest payoff. Last year the series earned her -L-12,500--about what Valerie Harper collects for two weeks on the Rhoda set. At 39 she is a star at last, but her parents are baffled. "My mother has no respect for my career at all. She is furious that I am playing only a maid."

Then there is her ever restless conscience. Born a Protestant, she now regularly attends a Roman Catholic church: "There have been times when I was desperate, and I now feel that there was someone watching over me then." She is a strong believer in the inevitability of retribution and reward. "I really think because I hated my face at school, it punished me with the paralysis." She learned to like it eventually; in fact she remembers just when. In 1959 Gore Vidal saw her in Much Ado and wrote in a review, "Jean Marsh is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful." Three times, Jean emphasizes, assuming the satisfied expression Rose adopts when she has silenced the servants' hall with one of her rare but perfect putdowns.

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