which he also directed — his first choice for the part was Diana Rigg. She turned him down. The problem was that whoever was brave enough to take on the role of the Egyptian queen would be doing so after Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor, Hollywood giants who had made the role their own on the silver screen.
In the end Heston settled felicitously on Hildegard Neil, who had established herself as one of the most desirable actresses of the day after playing Roger Moore’s wife in Basil Dearden’s 1970 thriller The Man Who Haunted Himself and had the further qualification of having just spent a season with the RSC.
After Moore and Heston she went on to be the leading lady to George Segal, playing his wife in the Oscar-nominated 1973 film A Touch Of Class, and to Peter Finch, whose lover she played that same year in Peter Duffell’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s England Made Me.
However, her true “leading man” was Brian Blessed, to whom she was married for 45 years. They met in 1969 when they appeared in a television drama, Double Agent, in ITV’s Playhouse series. However, both were married at the time and their romance did not take off until they were cast together again in Yorkshire TV’s 1974 children’s series Boy Dominic set in the years after the Napoleonic wars.
Possessed of striking looks with startling grey-green eyes and raven hair, she settled naturally into heavyweight roles from Shakespeare to Ibsen. “I was never a juvenile and couldn’t play the dizzy blonde,” she observed. “I’ve been trading in a certain maturity since I was about ten.”
Hildegarde made a few more movies and appeared in guest roles for TV series but seems to have settled for happy domesticity with Brian Blessed, who she called “a primitive” but who she fretted over whenever he was on one of his “adventures”.
Actor Brian Blessed marries Hildegard Hope Blessed (Hildegard Neil) at Woking Registry Office
A lovely lady who, in my opinion, should have been seen more in movies … 
Hildegard Neil, actress, was born on May 20, 1939. She died of cancer on September 19, 2023, aged 84