Ms. Whitelaw provided the ghostly voice speaking as if from the subconscious of a lone man in a barren bedroom in Beckett’s “Eh Joe.” In a revival of his two-act play “Happy Days,” she played a woman buried in a mound of earth up to her neck.

She made her New York theater debut in 1984 in an Off Broadway evening of Beckett pieces that included “Footfalls,” a piece about a woman talking to her infirm mother, in which the character, May, is confined to pacing incessantly and with an uncomfortable gait in a tiny rectangle of light, and “Rockaby,” in which she played a woman dying in a rocking chair. The character has only one live spoken line — the word “more,” which she says a handful of times — but on tape she spills forth her anguished final thoughts. Then the rocking stops, a dim spotlight shines on the character’s face, and the life in it flickers and goes out.

“During the long silence, the actress doesn’t so much as twitch an eyelash,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times. “And yet, by the time the darkness is total, we’re left with an image different from one we’d seen half a minute earlier. Somehow Miss Whitelaw has banished life from her expression; what remains is a death mask, so devoid of blood it could be a faded, crumbling photograph. And somehow, even as the face disintegrates, we realize that it has curled into a faint baby’s smile. We’re left not only with the horror of death but with the peace.” Mr. Rich added, “It’s possible that you haven’t lived until you’ve watched Billie Whitelaw die.”

Billie Honor Whitelaw was born to working-class parents in Coventry, England, near Birmingham, on June 6, 1932. A stutterer as a girl, when she was 9 her mother sent her to a local theater in the hope of improving her speech, and she soon began performing in radio plays. She worked in regional theaters in Britain, and in the 1950s, as the tide turned in English theater from the courtly and highbrow to the kitchen sink, her North Country accent brought her work.

Her first major stage success in London’s West End came in 1959, in “Progress in the Park” a contemporary drama about an ill-fated love between a Protestant boy and a Roman Catholic girl in Liverpool. . Ms. Whitelaw’s first marriage ended in divorce. She married Robert Muller, a writer, in 1967. He died in 1998. In addition to their son, she is survived by four grandchildren.

Ms. Whitelaw’s last film, a crime comedy, was “Hot Fuzz,” in 2007. After Beckett died, she stopped performing his work, though she often lectured about the plays of his in which she had appeared. In an interview with The Times shortly after his death, she described their relationship with vibrant metaphors.

“I’m like the canvas who has lost the paintbrush,” she said, adding: “He needed me to complete his vision. I was the trumpet, and he blew it.”