Oscar Blogathon: Best Actress of 1963 - A Profile of Nominee Rachel Roberts

Welsh actress Rachel Roberts once said: "It is very difficult to be taken seriously when you're introduced at a party to somebody as the fourth Mrs. Rex Harrison." Despite winning the British equivalent of the Oscar three times, Roberts never achieved critical acclaim on the level of her contemporaries, such as Vanessa Redgrave and Julie Christie. Her nine-year marriage to Harrison ended in a 1971 divorce that took a toll on the actress, who battled alcoholism and depression even as her career flourished in the 1970s. In 1980, at the age of 53, she committed suicide. Roberts wrote a series of journals that documented the last three years of her life. It was published in 1985 as No Bells on Sunday: The Rachel Roberts Journals. In its review, The New York Times called it a "'sad book from which are missing her charm, effervescence and humor.''

Rachel Roberts was born in Llanelli, Wales, on 20 September 1927. She studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she won the Athene Seyler Award for Comedy. She made her professional stage debut as Ceres in The Tempest at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951. Her fellow performers included Richard Burton, Alan Badel, Michael Redgrave, Hugh Griffith, Barbara Jefford, and Ian Bannen (how's that for cast?).

Roberts made her film debut in 1954's Young and Willing, a drama about female convicts starring Glynis Johns. Throughout the 1950s, she worked steadily on the stage, in film, and in a television adaptation of Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (which co-starred a young David McCallum). She also met and married actor Alan Dobie in 1955; the couple divorced six years later.

Rachel Roberts' big career break came in 1961 with Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. She played an unhappy middle-class wife who has an affair with a younger man (Albert Finney) and becomes pregnant. Her searing performance earned her the Best British Actress award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was one of the first British New Wave films. This cinematic movement evolved from the convergence of late 1950s British "angry young man" stage dramas (e.g., John Osborne's Look Back in Anger) and documentary films focusing on the working classes. The British New Wave directors hailed from the theatre (Tony Richardson), the documentary field (Lindsay Anderson), and--like some of the French New Wave directors--film criticism (Reisz). The British New Wave films typically featured male working-class protoganists mired in grim surroundings with little chance of happiness. Portraying women with a cold exterior that masked a desperate need for passion, Rachel Roberts excelled as the nominal "heroine" in these films.

Lindsay Anderson cast Roberts as a widowed landlady who has an affair with a brutal rugby player in This Sporting Life (1963). Produced by Reisz, This Sporting Life made a star out of Richard Harris and earned Rachel Roberts her second BAFTA Best British Actress award. She was also nominated for her only Academy Award, but lost Best Actress to Patricia Neal for Hud.

Despite her critical acclaim, Roberts worked mostly in British television for the remainder of the 1960s. There were a few bright spots, such as co-starring with Dirk Bogarde in an adaptation of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit. In 1968, she starred with husband Rex Harrison, whom she had married four years earlier, in the film A Flea in Her Ear.

Around that time, Roberts moved to the U.S., where she starred in made-for-TV movies and guest starred on TV series such as Night Gallery and Marcus Welby, M.D. After she and Harrison divorced in 1971, her film career took off again. Lindsay Anderson cast her in O Lucky Man! (1973), a modern-day Candide in which Roberts played three roles. Indeed, most of the cast--including Helen Mirren and Ralph Richardson--played several characters (though star Malcolm McDowell did not). This imaginative satire, punctuated by Alan Price's terrific songs, earned Roberts her best critical praise in years.

In Murder on the Orient Express.

Rachel Roberts followed it with a supporting role in the all-star Murder on the Orient Express (1974), a starring role in Peter Weir's haunting Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and a featured role in Yanks (1979), a World War II romantic drama starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave. Roberts won her third BAFTA award, this time as Best Supporting Actress, for Yanks.

During this same period, she also appeared on the Broadway stage, in plays such as a revival of The Visit and the original farce Habeas Corpus. For the latter, she won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play.

Despite her steady work on stage and in film and television, Rachel Roberts never recovered from her divorce from Harrison. In deep depression, she committed suicide in her home in Los Angeles in 1980. Twelve years later, Lindsay Anderson spread the ashes of Roberts and her friend, actress Jill Bennett, in the Thames while Alan Price sang Is That All There Is? The scene appeared as a surprisingly upbeat tribute to life in Anderson's otherwise satiric 1995 documentary about himself, also titled Is That All There Is?

During the ceremony, with the actresses' friends throwing flowers in the river, Anderson said: "(Roberts and Bennett) both had great humor and great zest. I know-- up there--they'll be having a good laugh."

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All this week, you can enjoy the Oscar Blogathon: Best Actress of 1963, hosted by Classicfilmboy's Movie Paradise.

Tuesday, Feb. 22: Kevin's Movie Corner will present Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce.

Wednesday, Feb. 23: Classicfilmboy will cover Leslie Caron in The L-Shaped Room.

Thursday, Feb. 24: ClassicBecky's Film and Literary Review will examine Patricia Neal in Hud.

Friday, Feb. 25: Noir and Chick Flicks will look at Natalie Wood in Love With the Proper Stranger.