Laura Liddell; Member of Traveling Acting Family

Laura Liddell, 83, whose adventures with her acting family inspired the film “Shakespeare Wallah.” With her husband, Geoffrey Kendal, Miss Liddell toured Britain acting in a wide repertory of plays, but it was in India beginning in the 1940s that the family achieved renown bringing the works of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, among other greats, to what was then a British colony. The Kendals’ itinerant life prompted the acclaimed 1965 film “Shakespeare Wallah.” The movie, which starred the family, was the first major collaboration between director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, who went on to make such films as “A Room With a View” and “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” Geoffrey Kendal wrote about the family’s thespian journeys in his 1986 autobiography, “The Shakespeare Wallah.” In London on Feb. 5 after a series of heart problems.