Angela Mortimer, a British tennis champion who dealt with dysentery and partial deafness during a career in which she won three Grand Slam singles titles, including her last, at Wimbledon in 1961, died on Monday in London. She was 93.
Her death, from cancer in a hospital, was confirmed by Robert McNicol, the historian of the All England Club, the home of Wimbledon.
Mortimer was 29 and near the end of her playing days in tennis’s amateur era when she faced a fellow British player, Christine Truman, in the Wimbledon women’s singles final.
After winning the first set and leading in the second, Truman was hampered by a fall and a leg cramp. Capitalizing on her opponent’s misfortune, Mortimer won the second and third sets.
“Astute court craft and ability to penetrate searchingly against opposition weakness, superb driving control and command of length, these are the merits of Miss Mortimer’s lawn tennis,” Lance Tingay wrote in The Daily Telegraph after her victory. He described her as a lonely, introverted figure, but “also a much-loved one.”
She was shy because of her hearing loss, which few people knew about at the time, and which impeded her ability to hear questions from reporters in noisy news scrums.
“I never heard the ball hit my opponent’s racket, and it amuses me when players say they need that sound,” she told the tennis historian and journalist Bud Collins for an article in The Boston Globe in 1993, when she was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
“I didn’t hear the crowd,” she added. “But I think that was good for my concentration.”
Mortimer’s deafness helped her during matches she played with a loquacious partner, Anne Shilcock, with whom she won the 1955 Wimbledon women’s doubles championship.
In the All England Club’s tribute to Mortimer, McNicol wrote that Shilcock “had a habit of annoying some partners by continually commenting and issuing instructions throughout a match. Mortimer, however, was untroubled by this as she could not hear anything Shilcock said.”
Florence Angela Margaret Mortimer was born on April 21, 1932, in Plymouth, England, to Florence (Beard) Mortimer and John Mortimer, a property developer.
She started playing tennis in her early teens and was later coached by Arthur Roberts, the tennis pro at the Palace Hotel in Torquay, in southwestern England. When she first approached him, he turned her away because she was too old, at 16, and lived too far away.
But Roberts told her to hit a ball against a wall while he went for lunch.
“When he came back I was still hitting it, and he said, ‘If you’re that bloody-minded, I guess you’ve got some chance,’” she told the newspaper Torbay Today in 2020. “He helped me from then on.”
She won her first Grand Slam tournament, the French Championships (now the French Open), in 1955 by defeating Dorothy Knode, an American, 2-6, 7-5 and 10-8, on an intensely hot day in Paris. With the score tied, 8-8, in the final set, she later recalled in interviews, she knew she would win when she heard Knode ask for a brandy.
She was the first British woman to win a Grand Slam championship in 18 years.
Mortimer returned to the French final in 1956 but was beaten, 6-0, 12-10, by the trailblazing Black American player Althea Gibson. After the loss, Mortimer played in a tournament in Egypt, where she contracted a form of amoebic dysentery, which weakened her for about two years. She returned to form at the 1958 Australian Championships (now the Open), winning the title, 6-3, 6-4, over the Australian Lorraine Coghlan.
She faced Gibson again at the 1958 Wimbledon final but lost, 6-8, 2-6.
Winning at Wimbledon was all she could think of. She told The Telegraph in 2011 that if she had lost again, “I’d have gone on trying and trying until I was about 86 because I was so bloody-minded.”
When she finally won, in 1961, she danced the fox trot with the Australian Rod Laver, the men’s singles winner, at the Champions Ball.
Mortimer, who rose to become the top-ranked player in women’s tennis in 1961, retired from singles play in 1962 but continued to play doubles for a few more years. In addition to her Grand Slam titles, she won 108 singles tournaments.
She also played for the British women’s team that defeated the United States in the 1960 Wightman Cup, an annual tournament between the two nations. She was later captain of the team from 1964 to 1970.
In 1967 she married John Barrett, a former British Davis Cup captain, with whom she played mixed doubles. Barrett was also a BBC tennis commentator and entered the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2014. Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi are the only other couple inducted into the hall.
In addition to her husband, Mortimer is survived by a daughter, Sarah Jane Le Vesconte; a son, Michael; and four grandchildren.
Mortimer, who had worn a plain top and shorts while playing, unexpectedly moved into the fashion business when she started working for the tennis clothing designer Ted Tinling in a series of jobs starting in the early 1960s.
“I feel very strongly about preserving the English look,” she told Sports Illustrated in 1969. “A tennis player should always be immaculate. No one would use tennis to display fantastic-looking dresses. Teddy at least has very good taste.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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