THE ENGLISH ROSES
INTRODUCTION
Of course, the condescending expression ‘English Rose’ was never a real film term. It was a cheap media catchphrase, thrown at Britain’s most attractive and talented leading actresses, that finally wilted away in the 1960s. Until then it irritated and sometimes infuriated the ‘roses’ themselves.
In 1953 Deborah Kerr was quoted in a national newspaper: ‘Film people concluded I wasn’t a woman but a “lady”, consequently anaemic, prissy, frigid and given to wearing Victoria unmentionables.’ That same year she made From Here To Eternity, playing a turbulent adulteress and indulging in a famous love-making on the beach scene with Burt Lancaster. Yet since that film, and although she played a wide variety of characters on a broad emotional range and was nominated for an Oscar six times, an English newspaper in 1963 still reported: ‘Whether she likes it or not, and I suspect she doesn’t, Deborah Kerr is still considered the sweetest English rose this country has ever exported.’ Twenty three years later, in the TV programme Deborah Kerr: Not Just an English Rose, she confessed to still being irked by the image – ‘I played nymphomaniacs as well as nuns you know.’
So did all Britain’s female stars from the late 1930s to the late 1950s. Well, not all played nymphomaniacs, but they all played nuns at some point or other, and yes, they also played their share of the ‘girl next door’ and ‘innocent abroad’. However, underlying all the work they did there was an undeniable ‘I am in charge’ quality which audiences appreciated. So much so that during the 1940s Britain’s biggest star was undoubtedly Margaret Lockwood. The ‘wicked lady’ of the cinema was already a star through The Man In Grey and Love Story when she made The Wicked Lady, a film universally panned by the critics as ‘salacious and bawdy’, but which she simply described as ‘a rollicking old romp’ and through which, much more successfully than Deborah Kerr, she was able to throw off the English Rose tag. She even made certain her beauty spot remained on her left check thereafter, reminding audiences that this actress with the flashing, liquid eyes controlled a passion that was anything but rose-like.
As with Phyllis Calvert, who in 1945 urgently wanted to play the ‘split-personality’ role Rosanna / Madalena in Madonna of the Seven Moons. Needing to get away from one ‘goody’ part after another, she forced the studio photographer to capture both personalities as test shots. She got the part, and audiences were swayed away from the sweet, loving actress who, until that moment both on and off the screen, had behaved impeccably and who had served the hype so efficiently. Her family and private life, out of choice, created an on-off film career, which meant, in her own words, that she was happy to ‘play a couple of mums a year’ and was reported ‘not to have deserted the garden… she goes straight out to water the beans, cut and pack lettuces on returning from the studio’. She may have been irritated by being called a rose, but she certainly didn’t help her case.
Nor did Patricia Roc, though in her case there was absolutely nothing at all she could do about it. Sometimes there could be discerned an ‘I am in charge’ quality when she was being ‘brave in love’ (Love Story) or ‘martyr to the cause’ (When The Bough Breaks) roles, but her characters tended to constructed as the archetypal girl next door. Every mother would like her son to marry her and – as she is quoted as saying – ‘And the sons wouldn’t have minded either!’ She had a quality the camera devoured. Yet in Patricia Roc’s case the media should have labelled her a European rose, for she also made films in France and Italy, and was fluent in both languages.
In the case of Virginia McKenna, there is every reason to have expected the label to have been crushed with some purposefully unglamorous roles, the fact that she went through a well-publicized divorce, and that at one period she had a reputation as our ‘British Garbo’. But however tough films and lifestyle became, she has somehow always reflected home-loving (especially after Born Free) styles which continually confirmed the rose stereotype.
It would seem that one British star did succeed in totally de-rosefying herself, although Jean Simmons was helped in her case by Rank Studios, who in 1950 sold the remaining eighteen months of her contract to RKO in the U.S. She had no say in the deal and was quoted as saying: ‘It does seem rather like selling a lump of meat, doesn't it?’ After an unhappy start in Hollywood, she ended up as the first real British star to become internationally known in the post‑war period. She might well have become more of an English Rose than even Deborah Kerr, but love and marriage, Hollywood success and becoming an American citizen ended all that.
These six actresses made both good and bad British films, usually under contract and with little choice, while also battling for their own personal lives. They took great pride in their achievements, both on and off the screen, and perhaps they should, in the final analysis, be known instead as Rank’s Indestructibles.
PHYLLIS CALVERT