Pioneering British actor and first black woman to take a leading role at the National Theatre

Cleo Sylvestre, who has died aged 79, was a trailblazing British black actor and one of the first performers of colour on television soaps – Coronation Street in 1966, then Crossroads for two years – and the first black woman to play a leading role at the National Theatre, in Peter Nichols’ acerbic The National Health or Nurse Norton’s Affair (1969). Cleo was staff nurse Norton.

Until she arrived as a regular in Frank Dunlop’s Young Vic company in the early 1970s, alongside actors including Jim Dale, Denise Coffey and Nicky Henson, her roles were invariably those of social underlings. She doggedly held her ground even in small parts, notably in two early and significant Ken Loach films – Up the Junction (1965, about factory workers in Battersea, south London), and Cathy Come Home (1966, a lacerating drama about homelessness that led to the foundation of Shelter), both on the Wednesday Play strand on BBC TV.