THE ENGLISH ROSES (IV)


VIRGINIA MCKENNA


In her autobiography, Virginia McKenna states that ‘some of my best friends have tails’. That’s just as well, because her studio and her critics turned their backs on the girl who was called ‘the original English rose of English films’. By 1962 her film career was at a standstill and even after she had played gritty, unglamorous roles in Simba (1955), A Town Like Alice (1956) and Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), references to the delicate flower were still being made.

The media at the time continually informed the public that Virginia McKenna was a recluse with her husband Bill Travers, and that the Rank contract actress, who had won the Best Actress of the Year award for her performance in A Town Like Alice and had such rave reviews as Violette Szabo in Carve Her Name With Pride (the first woman to win the George Cross for her courage as an agent in occupied France), was now unlikely to make another film. Was she ‘doing another Garbo’? Nobody could get close enough to find out.

Anyway, she did make another film, the hugely successful Born Free (1966) and she followed this with seven more, five of them with animals in featured roles! Born Free happened at a time when she needed to be free herself, away from film contracts and the disciplined life of film-making. It’s doubtful whether this surprisingly good British actress realized that the caring and campaigning for wildlife was going to become more important to her than her career. But up until that point in her life she had, as she put it, ‘worked hard, had no family ties, made a few good pictures, as well as a few ghastly ones, and thoroughly enjoyed it all’.

Virginia McKenna came from an interesting family background – her great-uncle Reginald McKenna was a Liberal statesman of the Edwardian era, her great-grandfather Sir Morrell Mackenzie a famous throat specialist, and her brother Stephen McKenna a novelist – and she had a sharp mind. She was born in 1931, mother a jazz pianist, composer and cabaret performer while her auctioneer father’s relatives included actress Fay Compton and author Compton MacKenzie.

After studying drama, she performed repertory theatre in Dundee and had a few television roles before making her first film in 1952. Then in 1953 she played the young wren Julie (the ‘glamour pants at op’) in The Cruel Sea, an unrelenting and wonderfully made war film. She was also now a Rank contract artist and designated for some exciting leading film roles. At this time her career meant a great deal and the good parts took their emotional toll. Parts that other actresses longed for, were harrowing and traumatic for Virginia McKenna to play. On Carve Her Name With Pride, Odette Hallowes, GC, MBE, Legion d'honneur (who in 1950 had her own biography Odette filmed, which detailed her career as an agent for the British in war‑torn France and her capture and torture at the hands of the Nazis) was the technical adviser and worked closely with McKenna. She later stated to the press: ‘Virginia has the same strong will, she could have been one of us. She has courage and a mind of her own. If you’ve been through it, you can judge the mentality of the right people, and a woman knows things about another woman’.

Virginia McKenna always believed that it’s only through loving someone or something that there can be any perspective in life. Through her family, which at one stage included a husband, four children, four dogs, a cat. two rabbits, twelve tropical fish, four goldfish, a visiting squirrel and a prematurely-born deer, and through her later films which included Elsa the lioness in Born Free, Tarka the otter in Ring Of Bright Water (1969), Slowly in An Elephant Called Slowly (1970) and Christian in Christian the Lion (1976), she found perspective in her work as a film actress as well.