Rachel Roberts: Ruff, Ruff, Ruff

There used to be more than one definition of the word sexy. It’s come to mean sexually attractive, or attractive full-stop. Long ago, maybe a century ago or thereabouts, it was sometimes used in another sense, to mean someone who was sexually inclined, who had a sexual appetite, which, in a way, is sort of the opposite. In order to GET sex such people often adorn themselves in gear designed to send the signal that that’s what they’re about, but that doesn’t necessarily equal beauty. As often as not, it registers as ridiculous or grotesque, and certainly obvious. But it’s equally true that enough people want sex that they are far from deterred by such slutty gear, and so the world goes ’round. (I never use the word slutty derogatorially, btw. Sluttiness is next to Godliness in my personal system of weights and measures. A few feet away maybe, but next to it). Anyway, prior to the sexual revolution and for a good while after, people who were up front about their animal drives were fairly rare. Certainly, they were ostracized and even persecuted for centuries. By the mid 20th century, they were merely subjects of pity or insult or ridicule. This lengthy intro, of course, is by way of background, for many of the characters that Rachel Roberts (1927-80) used to play. Roberts was not a beautiful woman in the traditional sense, but many of her characters were sexy in this older way. She was excellent at playing lustful gals.

One suspects that in doing so Roberts was expressing aspects of her own nature. She is said to have balked at the restrictions of her strict Baptist upbringing in small-town Wales. She studied at RADA and was acting in regional repertory theatre in Swansea by the time she was 23. The names of her early roles in films, and the movies themselves, tell the story of her screen persona: a barmaid in The Limping Man (1953), Pat the Pregnant Inmate in The Weak and the Wicked (1954), a prostitute in Our Man in Havana (1959). She won BAFTA awards for her performances in kitchen sink dramas like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and This Sporting Life (1963). She was also a prostitute in the Lionel Bart’s West End musical Maggie May (1964).

In 1960 Roberts married Rex Harrison. The pair appeared opposite each other in the 1968 screen adaptation of the naughty French farce A Flea in Her Ear with Louis Jordan and Rosemary Harris. But Harrison and Roberts had a rough and tumble time of it thanks to a shared enthusiasm for the bottle, resulting in embarassing public dust-ups, and lots of jaw-dropping behavior on Roberts’ part. There are many tales of her getting so plastered at parties that she would begin doing dog impressions (on all fours, like Howard Morris in High Anxiety). Shw would also launch into mortifying verbal tidal waves of abuse against Harrison. One can only take so much. They were divorced in 1971.

Harrison went on to two other wives, but Roberts however was not so fortunate in her personal life. She continued to be given to bouts of drinking and depression for the rest of her life. Ironically, this is the period during which Americans will know her work best, for she moved to Hollywood and made that her new base of operations. Among other things, she played a madam in The Wild Rovers (1971), and was also in Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1965), then was cast as a regular on The Tony Randall Show (1976-78), then went on to roles in Foul Play (1978, picture above, maybe her best known role?), the modern horror classic When a Stranger Calls (1979), et al. Roberts was also in several Broadway plays. She won a Drama Desk award for he performance in Habeas Corpus (1975), partial recompense for the fact that her Oscar and Tony nominations had not been wins.

Still, it couldn’t console her for the loss of Harrison, whom she continued to love and fixate on. In 1980, she made her exit from this mortal platform in the most dramatic way possible by drinking lye or Drano or some other similar caustic substance, then crashing through a plate glass window in her home as she ran through the house in agony. The coroner also found what would have been a lethal amount of barbiturates and alcohol in her system, just in case the alkali and shards of glass hadn’t done the job. The woman wanted to be dead.

To cite the reckless aphorism, I don’t know if Roberts drove fast, but she can’t have left a sexy corpse. Her remains were, unsurprisingly, cremated. A decade after her death, her close friend Jill Bennett, ex-wife of playwright John Osborne, also committed suicide, with pills. In 1992 director Lindsay Anderson, scattered the ashes of both women over the river Thames in a filmed boat party attended by many of their professional friends. Anderson had directed Roberts in such films as This Sporting Life and O Lucky Man (1973).

Roberts’ last film Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen was released posthumously in 1981. Her diary was published in 1984 as No Bells on Sunday: The Memoirs of Rachel Roberts.