Yvonne Furneaux, actress who starred in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Polanski’s Repulsion

Born in France to British parents, she starred in Italian, French, German and Spanish as well as English films across many genres

Yvonne Furneaux, who has died aged 98, was an English actress born in France who appeared in films across Europe; the directors she worked with included Roman Polanski, Michelangelo Antonioni – and, most notably, Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita (1960).
In the Italian director’s flawed masterpiece she played the troubled Emma, the devoted fiancée of Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni); she makes her first appearance in the film having taken an overdose in despair at his serial infidelity, desperate for his undivided love.  
“You’re a miserable worm, you’ll end up alone like a dog,” she tells him later, having survived her overdose to fight another day. “You always say I’m crazy… but you’re the one who’s off course… Don’t you realise you’ve found life’s most important thing: a woman who really loves you, who’d die for you?”
She named Emma as her stand-out role, but when asked if she had any regrets, she replied: “Only that I didn’t continue with the stage.”
Elisabeth Yvonne Scatcherd was born on May 11 1926 in the French industrial town of Roubaix, near the Belgian border, to English parents. Her father Joseph, who worked at an overseas branch of Lloyds bank in the town, was from Yorkshire, while her mother Amy, née Furneaux, was from Devon.
The family moved back to England before the outbreak of war, and a few years later she went up to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, to read modern languages; she left with “poor results”, she said, but fluent in Italian as well as French. While there she had taken up acting, and she won a place at Rada, where her contemporaries included Joan Collins.
She graduated from there in 1951, and at that point Tessa Scatcherd combined her own middle name and her mother’s maiden name to become the considerably more exotic-sounding Yvonne Furneaux. She later maintained that the name-change was a mistake, as it militated against her securing British roles.
None the less, she soon made her professional stage debut, making sufficient impression to feature in Norman Parkinson’s photograph “The Young Look in the Theatre” in the January 1953 issue of Vogue.
By then she had also taken her first screen roles, in Meet Me Tonight, adapted from three one-act plays by Noel Coward, and the romantic drama Affair in Monte Carlo, aka 24 Hours of a Woman’s Life. She made several more films in 1953, including The Beggar’s Opera, adapted from John Gay, directed by Peter Brook and starring Laurence Olivier.
In the same year she was Errol Flynn’s mistress in The Master of Ballantrae, very loosely adapted from  Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, and starred as the heiress of a rich widow murdered with a poison arrow in the thriller The House of the Arrow. 
In 1955 she appeared in the Bristol Old Vic’s production of Jean Girardoux’s medieval romance Ondine. In the Telegraph, WA Darlington observed: “Yvonne Furneaux makes a bold beauty of the woman who is Ondine’s rival.”
The same year she was back working with Errol Flynn, by now portly and over the hill, in The Dark Avenger, about Edward, the Black Prince, and she also had her first foreign outings: in Michelangelo Antonioni’s first important film, Le Amiche (The Girlfriends), as Momina, who goes from affair to affair; and in Il principe dalla maschera rossa (The Prince with the Red Mask), Leopoldo Savona’s swashbuckler.
She spread her European wings further in 1959 in the Spanish comedy Carta al Cielo (“Letter to Heaven”) and the Italian wife-swap comedy Lui, lei e il nonno (“Him, her and the grandfather”). 
Of the latter, the critic Gary Allen Smith wrote: “Yvonne Furneaux has a striking presence which manages to transcend the meagre material on hand. The film’s best moment occurs when Furneaux as Helen reflects on the terrible consequences precipitated by her beauty.”
Back in Britain, that year she also co-starred with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the dual role of an archaeologist’s wife and an Egyptian high priestess in the Hammer horror The Mummy.
In the early 1960s she appeared in British, German and Italian films as well as the French neo-noir Le meurtrier (Enough Rope, 1963), an adaptation of the 1954 Patricia Highsmith novel The Blunderer that the author, unusually, approved of, calling it “jolly good”.
Then in 1965, in Roman Polanski’s psychosexual horror film Repulsion, one of his finest works, she played Catherine Deneuve’s sister – “dark and highly sexed”, according to the Telegraph’s Alan Stanbrook. Polanski, a relentless perfectionist, drove cast and crew hard, and on-set tensions often reached fever pitch. 
He was, Yvonne Furneaux recalled, “a little bastard” who subjected them all to “psychological torture”. When the executive director asked him why he was giving her such a hard time, he replied: “She’s too bloody nice. She’s supposed to be playing a bitch. Every day I have to make her into a bitch.”
Repulsion was her last significant part; there were a few television appearances and one or two foreign films into the 1970s, and her last appearance was in the title role of the poorly received 1984 comedy Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie, with Donald Pleasence as her nephew, Victor Frankenstein.
In 1962 Yvonne Furneaux married the cinematographer Jacques Natteau, and for many years they lived in Lausanne; Jacques died in 2007 and she is survived  by their son Nicholas, who became a film director.
Yvonne Furneaux, born May 11 1926, died July 5 2024