Over three productions I did with Sophie Winter, I grew to appreciate her true potential as an actress, her extraordinary capacity to convey innocence and vulnerability, plain, simple unselfconscious goodness. All of which was offset by her unique strand of humour. Winter was far closer to Buster Keaton than Orphan Annie. As with the great original clowns, the source of her humour was impossible to trace. Sophie Winter was a director’s, especially a comic writer/director’s joy. Anything you asked her to do she would try - a few ideas she might return to you later, with a modest, apologetic smile at her failure to make them work. But mostly she happily seized upon and, having viewed them through her own quirky, lunatic lens, returned to you freshly minted. I first worked with her when she played Mary in ’Love Off The Shelf’, then again on ’Two Weeks With The Queen’ in which she played Mum and Iris. Our last meeting was at The Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round in Scarborough where she was to play Gussie in my latest play, ’A Word From Our Sponsor’. The relationship between actor and director takes many forms. For some, over the course of a production, it’s an intimate, intellectual, spiritual, often passionate experience resulting in deep personal friendships, long after the show in question has been forgotten. At the other directorial extreme there is a preferred distant affair based on mistrust and uncertainty, even fear and downright antagonism. For me, as ever midway between, there’s a sort of happy medium. Outside the workplace there’s a mutually agreed distance between the two of you, actor and director, the sort a patient might enjoy with their GP say: yet within the rehearsal room itself a closeness, a trust and an understanding that resembles more a marriage than a working relationship. I suppose, extending that metaphor, that Sophie Winter and I were comparative newly-weds. Undeniably married, we had made a number of unwritten, unspoken vows to each other. With my talents, such as they be, I thee entrust. That sort of thing. An odd relationship to be sure, sharing, as we did, so much so intimately, being privy to her creative centre, gradually growing to understand her emotional working whilst at the same time knowing little or nothing about her public and certainly her private life. Hers was a talent I needed and loved. I had hoped that in return I could have had a part in encouraging and nurturing that talent through a few more plays together. I think we would have both enjoyed that.