FOUND A GRAVE

The daughter of a GP, Susan Margery Jeaffreson Lloyd was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. She attended Edgbaston High School in Birmingham and studied dance as a child, attending Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. As her height (5 feet 8 inches (1.73 m)) increased, her possibilities for a career as a dancer diminished, and she became a showgirl and model, and, briefly, a member of Lionel Blair’s dance troupe. She was one of the last two debutantes to be presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace in 1958; the final such ceremony. She made her film debut in two espionage themed films released in 1965. Lloyd was a foil to Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer in the spy thriller The Ipcress File and had a role in The Return of Mr. Moto. In the same year Lloyd played the regular role of secret agent Cordelia Winfield, alongside Steve Forrest in the 1965-66 British ITC television series The Baron. Originally Lloyd’s character only appeared in the pilot episode with Steve Forrest’s sidekick played by Paul Ferris. Pressure from the American television network who were to screen the show replaced Ferris with Lloyd. In 1971, Lloyd starred in a stage version of the TV series The Avengers playing John Steed’s sidekick, Mrs Hannah Wild. She also appeared with several other stars in the 1976 Lindsay Shonteff imitation James Bond film No. 1 of the Secret Service. She made many guest appearances on several popular shows of the 1960s and 1970s including The Saint, Department S, Jason King, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Persuaders! and The Sweeney. Other film credits include Corruption, Revenge of the Pink Panther, The Stud and The Bitch. On her Twitter page Joan Collins said that she and Lloyd had to get drunk prior to their nude scenes. She reunited with Michael Caine in Bullet to Beijing (1995), one of the later Harry Palmer films. She is probably best known, however, for her long-running role as Barbara Hunter, née Brady, in the soap opera Crossroads, beginning in 1979, and she remained in the role until 1985 when Lloyd and her on-screen and future real-life husband, Ronald Allen, were sacked from the series. To the surprise of many (he had lived with Brian Hankins for most of his life until Hankins’s death from cancer), she married Allen, six weeks before his own death from cancer on 19 June 1991. Sue Lloyd died on 20 October 2011, aged 72, from cancer.