7 after being talent-spotted while still at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Simon played Mellanby in the third and fourth series, originally broadcast between January 1980 and December 1981. The character was an expert combatant and highly knowledgeable about weapons. Royal Shakespeare Company, and Royal National Theatre Simon has performed frequently with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre. After taking part in a reading of Salvation Now by Snoo Wilson in 1982, she was cast as one of the three "weird sisters" in Macbeth alongside Kathy Behean and Lesley Sharp later that year. In the same RSC season, she had roles in Much Ado About Nothing, as a spirit in The Tempest and as Iras in Antony And Cleopatra. She was with the RSC for two consecutive two-year season cycles, and in the second cycle her roles included Nerissa in The Merchant Of Venice and starring as Dorcas Ableman in Golden Girls. In 1997 she told academic Alison Oddey that what she learnt from working with Michael Gambon and, particularly, Helen Mirren for Antony And Cleopatra had been an early influence on her career. Simon was the first black woman to appear in a Shakespeare play at the RSC. She has been at the forefront of 'colour-blind casting', playing roles traditionally taken by white actresses. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, a time when it was unusual for black women to feature as leads in leading Shakespeare plays, Simon played several major roles for the RSC. Her first leading role, and the first for a black actress at the RSC, was as Rosaline, in Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Barry Kyle, in 1984. Jami Rogers, in her book British Black and Asian Shakespeareans (2022) commented that in Kyle's production, where the women were dressed in Belle Époque-style silk dresses, Rosalie's clothing "immediately marked her as a woman of high status ...For the first time on a major British stage, an African-Caribbean woman portrayed an intelligent, witty and strong leading Shakespearean character." Rogers described the reviews of the production as "glowing". She noted that some reviewers and academics "treated Josette Simon's casting ... as a novelty", criticising the description of integrated casting as an "experiment" as "deeply problematic as it infers the practice is an aberration rather than what it was [by 1990], a common practice". Simon told Oddey that , despite being conscious of discussions