Born: 8 November, 1929, in Dornoch.
Died: 24 May, 2009, in Baltimore, US, aged 79.ELSPETH Mary was born in Dornoch and raised at Balblair, Bonar Bridge. She was sent to school in Inverness, where she developed her lifelong in
terest in music, art and the theatre. She initially studied drama but later switched to speech pathology and speech therapy.
As a young graduate, she studied at RADA and later worked at Bangour and the Western General Hospitals in Edinburgh, where she studied under Professor Norman Dott, one of the founding fathers of modern neurosurgery. Whilst there, she met the extraordinary Dr George Udvarhelyi, then a refugee from Hungary. They were married at Rosslyn Chapel in 1956 and, after several attempts to get a visa, they moved to Baltimore, where he took up a post at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.
After raising her family, she began volunteering with the women's board of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, Young Audiences and Pointe on Strings, a ballet company she helped to organise in Baltimore.
In 1975, she joined the Maryland Ballet Company as director of development and was the company's general manager for the 1978-79 season. The next year she became the first director of development for Arena Stage, a theatre company in Washington, a position she held for 11 years. After retiring she was director of development at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
She was a tireless fundraiser for artistic enterprises large and small and had a superhuman talent for persuading donors to fund plays, courses, performances and projects in all sorts of theatre and performance work. In later life she was honoured by the American Association of Fundraisers for her work.
In the early 1990s, Sam Wanamaker proposed building a replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames. Elspeth was shy of the project and sceptical that it could ever be completed. But she was persuaded to join the team and, after many years of battling with architects, local planners and the construction industry, this amazing monument to Shakespeare rose from the ground, being completed in 1997. Today it attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year.
Her love affair with the Globe was total; she became its first director of development and acted as general manager in 1998, living in London for large parts of the year. Ever alert to the risk of outstaying her welcome, she retired only in 1999, at the tender age of 69. She was an astonishingly hard worker, putting in long hours when everyone else had gone home and always being prepared to challenge and argue every point. She was never known to understate her case.
She had an unshakeable belief in the need for theatre and performance art as a force for good in society and she took her work to the poorest areas of Baltimore just as readily as to the smartest corners of her adopted country.
Her immense frustration with conservatism, fundamentalism, all forms of bigotry and hypocrisy and even with normal commercial caution often showed itself in her distaste for politics and politicians, banks and boards of trustees. Yet she was a remarkable diplomat and a subtle player when she wanted a result.
Beyond even the Globe and the smell of greasepaint, Elspeth loved Sutherland and, each year until 2008, she returned to Balblair and Corriemulzie, near Oykel, where her father and brother had farmed and where she grew up. Nothing – not even the plagues of midges – stood in the way of her and the brown trout of Lochan Sheumais and Loch a' Choire Mhor, or the salmon of the rivers in the Kyle catchment area. And she could fairly fish; as she discovered how ill she really was, she ignored the pain and disability and struggled out to remote places just for the love of the place and the surroundings. Her contentment was total when she had a rod in her hand, the wind at her back and the trout jumping round about her.
To show all this natural inheritance off to some of her grandchildren was, she said, one of her dearest wishes. Heaven will welcome her, but they are in for a restless time up there.
Elspeth is survived by her husband, George, their three children and ten grandchildren, all of whom live in the US, and her two sisters, who live in New Zealand.
