LENOX — Tina Packer, the visionary co-founder of Shakespeare & Company, will be celebrated at a memorial service this spring for her leadership as the guiding light for the acclaimed theater troupe that she opened on a shoestring in 1978 at The Mount in Lenox with actor, director and vocal trainer Kristin Linklater.

Packer, 87, of Stockbridge died at Berkshire Medical Center of natural causes on Friday evening. She had stepped aside as artistic director and president in 2009 to focus on an active slate as an actor, director, author and educator while remaining on the theater’s board of trustees up to her death.

The memorial service will be at 1 p.m. May 31 at the Kemble Street campus, said Elizabeth Aspenlieder, an actor at the theater company for 30 years and also the director of community relations.

“It will be a full-day celebration of Tina’s life and legacy, with much reveling, Elizabethan dancing, and storytelling as Tina would have wanted it,” Aspenlieder told The Eagle. “It will be star-studded from all over the world.”

Although Packer has faced multiple health challenges, her death on Friday was sudden.

“She had always pulled through, so we thought it was going to be one of those times, but it just wasn’t in the cards," said Aspenlieder, who described Packer as her “mentor, confidante, artistic collaborator, co-conspirator and my gal-pal. She was my inspiration who helped shape who I am as an artist and as a person over the last 30 years. I plan to carry Tina’s torch and the forward momentum she ignited 49 years ago. I am honored to help support her legacy; it’s a privilege.”

Packer worked until the day before she died. “She was in her glory, her element, doing what she loved,” Aspenlieder pointed out, “teaching at the monthlong Shakespeare acting intensive that originated nearly 50 years ago and presiding over master classes. That brought her so much happiness and joy.”

By Clarence Fanto

[email protected] @BE_cfanto on Twitter

Current Artistic Director Allyn Burrows, who joined the troupe in 2016 after a period of upheaval in the leadership ranks, described Packer as an inspirational long-time colleague on stage and off stage since 1988.

"We spent a lot of time laughing together," he told The Eagle on Monday. "I really enjoyed making her laugh, she was very mischievous and that was really delightful."

He called her "an actor's director," allowing performers full self-expression and freedom. "As an actor, I always felt she would let me find my way in rehearsal. I think a lot of people felt that."

Burrows cited her performance in "Antony and Cleopatra" at Shakespeare & Company in 2007 as especially memorable. And her ability to bounce back after innumerable health issues was "a testament to her fighting spirit," he said. "She was really a woman of will. She had so much work she still wanted to accomplish. She was truly indefatigable."

Commenting on his appointment as artistic director in 2016 as the sole finalist in a field of 15 applicants, Packer praised Burrows for his “extensive experience as an actor, a director and in leading an organization. His knowledge of Shakespeare is deep. Many of us have collaborated with him in the past and found his work inspiring. He brings new energy and we all look forward to working with him.”

Burrows and the board of trustees recently led the regional theater into financial stability for the first time since its founding.

To honor Packer's legacy, the company has set up The Tina Packer Legacy Fund to support the future of Shakespeare & Company and “sustain her founding vision as an integrated program of performance, education, and training that unites rigorous commitment to language with a spirit of artistic inquiry.”

The fund is designed “to support the ongoing creation of classical and socially resonant work,” according to an announcement from the company’s leadership. “By investing in artists, educators and audiences across generations, the fund ensures that classical theater remains relevant and alive — spoken boldly, lived fully and made for the world of today.”

Kate Maguire, artistic director and CEO of the Berkshire Theatre Group, first worked with Packer at the Boston Shakespeare Company before it merged into Shakespeare & Company. "She introduced me to the Berkshires, it was a big deal and changed my life. She was a mentor towards me."

Maguire cited her "fierce determination and her sense of responsibility toward Shakespeare & Company. She was devoted to her belief in what theater could do. And she was fierce in her determination."

As the theater’s founding artistic director, Packer directed most of Shakespeare’s nearly 40 plays, acted in seven, and taught classes devoted to The Bard at Harvard and Columbia as well as at MIT. From the start, the troupe’s actors also served in managerial and administrative roles.

Packer’s mission has also included presentation of contemporary plays, creation of a leading training center for actors, a touring education program for schoolchildren and the annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare for productions by students from area high schools in the Berkshires and adjacent New York state.

Now, with more than 40,000 visitors a year, the campus includes the Tina Packer Playhouse, the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre and outdoors, the Rose Footprint Theatre, the Roman Garden Theatre and the Arthur S. Waldstein Amphitheater.

Reconstituted last year as a condominium association, the property is undergoing redevelopment for renovated housing to augment theatrical studios, costume and design shops, classrooms and administrative offices.

Christina Packer, born on Sept. 28, 1938, in Wolverhampton, a city in the West Midlands of England, was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and appeared in the BBC show “Doctor Who” and in an eight-episode series based on Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield.”

After her first job at a magazine, Packer decided to pursue acting because "I suppose I'm a natural born exhibitionist,” she told The Guardian Journal, a Nottingham newspaper, in 1964.

Arriving in the U.S. in 1974, Packer conceived of starting a theater company to combine “the power suits of British actors and American actors: the spoken word and the physical body.”

That year, she received a one-year grant from the CBS Foundation and the Ford Foundation to form an experimental theater company of British and American Shakespearean actors. She named it after a bookstore of the same name that she had frequented while living briefly in Paris.

But it didn’t take off, and after the initial funding ran out, Packer restarted it in Lenox.

"What happened was my whole thinking really took off when I got to America," she told The Eagle in 1978 as the troupe set up shop in cramped quarters at The Mount, the estate where Edith Wharton lived from 1902 to 1911. "The openness of mind and the Americans’ willingness to experiment was exciting,” Packer said.

The first performances she directed were staged outdoors, including a memorable “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and then moved into The Stables while Wharton’s mansion was undergoing restoration.

Packer’s productions gained favorable attention in New York City and in Boston, where author Helen Epstein published a book, “The Companies She Keeps: Tina Packer Builds A Theater,” and public TV station WGBH aired a documentary about her.

In the Boston area, she directed "Hamlet” at North Shore Music Theatre, set in West Africa and performed by a predominantly Black American cast.

Seeking a more spacious setting and ownership rather than tenancy following acrimony with The Mount’s leadership that led to the company’s eviction in 2000, Packer purchased a sprawling campus on Kemble Street.

At the time, it was 63 acres with 22 buildings that had hosted the ill-fated National Music Foundation and earlier, The Bible Speaks religious organization.

The $4.1 million purchase price included a $3 million mortgage, part of ballooning debts that topped out at $10 million in 2009. A gala in 2012 celebrated the end of a fundraising campaign that raised $6 million.

Packer maintained an active career in her native land as an associate artist with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She performed at multiple theaters in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and other regional sites.

Her 2015 book “Women of Will: The Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays” was based on the two-person. five-part play she wrote and performed in during tours of the U.S. and abroad.

The book and performance piece represented “a vision that completed the arc of Shakespeare’s maturation as an artist and, at the same time, signified a triumph of the feminine and imaginative spirit,” according to a laudatory review in The New York Times.

Packer is survived by her son, actor Martin Jason Asprey, from her first marriage to actor-photographer Laurie Asprey in 1962. They divorced 20 years later.

In 1998, she married her long-time partner Dennis Krausnick, a former Jesuit priest who became an actor, director, writer and educator as well as a co-founder of Shakespeare & Company, who died in 2018.

She received the state’s prestigious Commonwealth Award in 2000. The recipient of six honorary degrees, she won a Parents’ Gold Medal Award for her children’s book, “Tales from Shakespeare.”

"Her indelible creativity will be carried forward by countless artists, students, colleagues, admirers, and friends, and her influence on the world of Shakespeare will be enduring," Shakespeare & Company’s statement concluded.