“After a screening not long ago, one German woman said, ‘Why do you think rape is funny?’ I don’t at all. “I’m always taken to task for that aspect of the film,” she says. ‘I can understand why people were offended’ … Tushingham in the film version of The Knack. But the levity with which the film treats rape, not to mention Nancy’s weird hysteria, is bound to make modern audiences a little queasy. She won a Bafta and a Golden Globe, while the film took the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Then she emerges in a robe, giving the impression it’s Colin she really fancies. She runs back to the flat and strips naked. Later, Nancy faints and when she comes round falsely claims she was raped – and slashes the tyres of Tolen’s motorbike. There, Tolen makes advances on Nancy and tells her: “No one’s going to rape you – girls don’t get raped unless they want it.” She helps him and his womanising drummer friend Tolen bring a huge new bed to their flat. Michael Crawford plays Colin, a sexually frustrated teacher who meets innocent but feisty northern girl Nancy, played by Tushingham. The 1965 sex comedy is rather painful to watch now. Tushingham also starred in Richard Lester’s film version of The Knack. “I didn’t have any lines, but I did cut off Oliver Reed’s leg with an axe!” She was the orphan beauty, Oliver Reed the rough-hewn beast whose leg needs amputating. In The Trap the following year, she played a mute living with French-Canadian fur trapper Jean La Bête. Tushingham became the go-to girl for doe-eyed innocence, playing the daughter of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in 1965’s Doctor Zhivago. I didn’t have any lines in The Trap – but I did cut off Oliver Reed’s leg with an axe!Īcross the decades, those eyes – now behind glasses as she sips a decaf latte in a demure dark suit – still captivate. A New York Times reporter who met her described her as “a slip of a girl, her uncosmeticised face framed in straight dark hair, wearing a sweater and jeans, with those enormous eyes incessantly expressive even when the rest of the small face disappeared behind a big yellow coffee cup”. On screen, she starred in 1963’s cult gay film The Leather Boys and was the eponymous Girl with Green Eyes in the adaptation of Edna O’Brien’s novel.
On stage, she played Nancy in The Knack and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She met Elizabeth Taylor, too, and hung out with pop stars.
“I’ve never smoked or drunk alcohol, so I observed.” Danquah introduced Tushingham to a struggling artist called Francis Bacon. When the city started to swing, the former convent girl joined in, albeit mutedly. “Then I was wide-eyed in London, not quite believing what had happened to me.” “I quit as assistant stage manager at Liverpool Playhouse,” says the actor, who had been earning £1 a week and getting the occasional walk-on role. Tushingham was 17 when she played Jo, getting the part after replying to a newspaper ad. Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey when she was 19. Not only did Tushingham win a Bafta and a Golden Globe, her haunting looks became iconic. “A lot of the reaction was, ‘People like that don’t exist’ – by which they meant homosexuals, single mothers and people in mixed-race relationships. For this and other supposed outrages, A Taste of Honey was banned in several countries including New Zealand. “I only learned later that Paul and I did the first interracial kiss on screen.” It’s a big claim: certainly, it was seven years before Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura kissed in Star Trek, and a year before the earliest known interracial kiss on British TV, in the ITV drama You in Your Small Corner. “We shocked audiences without intending to,” says Tushingham. ‘We did the first interracial kiss on screen’ … Tushingham with Paul Danquah in A Taste of Honey.
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