Mary Hignett

Mary Hignett (31 March 1916 – 16 July 1980) was a British actress best known for her role as Mrs Edna Hall in the television series All Creatures Great and Small.

In All Creatures, she played the role of the cook and housekeeper in the first three series, which ran from 1978 to 1980. Other credits include the Hammer film Prehistoric Women (1967), the horror movie The Corpse (1971), and the 1972 Hammer Horror film Demons of the Mind (in which fellow All Creatures actor Robert Hardy played the role of Zorn).

Hignett was married to the actor Michael Brennan, who survived her. She died shortly after the third series of All Creatures was filmed, her final scene being the seeing off to war of James Herriot (Christopher Timothy). Scheduled to have a hip replacement, she was convinced by her doctors to have a riskier double hip replacement rather than the single. This is believed to have led to her death.

"I remember there was an episode in the third series where Mary, in real life, was very ill and in a lot of pain," recalled Carol Drinkwater, who played the first Helen Herriot in the series. "It was before her hip operations, the operations which finally killed her. We had a director — I can't remember who it was — who hauled us in every day to rehearsals in Acton whether we were needed or not. Mary had to come from Brighton or Eastbourne — she lived down on the south coast — and she could hardly walk. Mary must have said, 'I'm not in any of the scenes tomorrow – do you mind if I don't come in?' And this director said he wanted her there. He could see she was in pain, but she struggled in the next day, but when she said she really would need the next day off, the director said, 'No, I want all of you here all of the time, because it creates a certain bonding.' Being the Young Turk that I was, I got absolutely furious with this director, saying he had no right to make her do this, and in the end he did let her have the day off. It was an example of how tightly knit we were. If someone came in and tried to change things, one of us, one way or another — usually Robert Hardy — would hold it together and make sure it wasn't destroyed."

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