Catherine Woodville was born in London in 1938. She featured in many television series in Britain in the 1960’s. In the late 60’s she went to Hollywood and made the terrific Western “Posse” with Kirk Douglas. She has guest starred in several of the U.S. television series. She was at one time married to the actor Patrick Magee of “Avengers” fame and was married for several years to the late actor Edward Albert. She died in 2013.
Her “Times” obituary:
The actress Catherine Woodville was an attractive presence on television and in the cinema. She was in the first episode of The Avengers in 1961 and made a glamorous one-off appearance as the priestess Natira in Star Trek.
She was born in London in 1938 and started acting at the age of 16 in a touring production of T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. Her first important television role was Helena Landless in the 1960 adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and she appeared with Ian McShane, John Hurt and Samantha Eggar as university students in the 1962 film, The Wild and the Willing.
In 1961 she was in the first episode of the secret agent spoof, The Avengers, opposite the bowler-hatted Patrick Macnee, and her character’s death helped to launch the series. She had a small part in a later episode and in 1965 she became Macnee’s second wife, though the marriage lasted barely a year and ended in divorce after four.
She was busy in television through the 1960s. She played Estelle opposite Harold Pinter (one of his occasional acting roles) in a BBC adaptation of Sartre’s In Camera and had guest spots in popular series including Z-Cars, Danger Man, The Saint and No Hiding Place. Her other films included the thriller, The Informers, the political drama The Crooked Road, with Robert Ryan and Stewart Granger, and the frontier adventure, The Brigand of Kandahar.
During her British career she was credited as Catherine Woodville and on moving the US in 1967 she changed her professional name to Kate Woodville. She made an early mark on American television playing Natira, the priestess who rules the people of the asteroid Yonada and falls in love with Dr McCoy, in the 1968 Star Trek episode, For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.
Other American television credits included Mission: Impossible, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Little House on the Prairie and Wonder Woman. She played Betty Gow, nurse to the family, in the TV movie, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, with Cliff de Young as the aviator and Anthony Hopkins as Bruno Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. In 1975 she returned to the cinema in the western Posse, starring and directed by Kirk Douglas. She became a life member of the Actors Studio.
In 1979 she married the actor and environmentalist, Edward Albert, son of the actor Eddie Albert. She gave up acting and started a business breeding and training horses.
Edward Albert died in 2006, aged 55, and she is survived by their daughter, Thaïs, a poet and songwriter.
Katherine Woodville, actress, was born on December 4, 1938. She died of cancer on June 5, 2013, aged 74
