R.I.P. Anne Heywood

[Reza]

Anne Heywood, British star of the sizzling DH Lawrence film adaptation The Fox.

She won a string of beauty contests, including Miss Great Britain 1950, which led to her being cast in the comedy Lady Godiva Rides Again.

The Telegraph - Obituary

Anne Heywood, the actress who has died aged 92, was a former Miss Great Britain who was brave in her choice of taboo-busting film roles, gaining her greatest fame for a lesbian scene in the 1967 adaptation of D H Lawrence’s novella The Fox.

With her husband, Raymond Stross, producing the low-budget Canadian movie, she and Sandy Dennis starred as two women raising chickens on a remote farm who end up making love after Anne Heywood’s character, Ellen, turns down a merchant sailor’s marriage proposal.

The actress had no qualms about performing the daring scene, telling the critic Roger Ebert in 1969 that it was done with “delicacy and taste” and adding: “Ellen isn’t a lesbian at all, in fact. She’s more of a modern, independent woman.”

Shortly before The Fox’s release, Playboy featured a five-page pictorial of stills from the “tale of primordial passions”, including steamy scenes of Anne Heywood in the bathroom.

The film was released in the US just as Hollywood abandoned the Hays Code, which had prohibited the depiction of certain “sexual persuasions”. That did not stop a Mississippi court convicting a cinema owner of obscenity after screening the film, but Golden Globe judges named it Best Foreign Film (English Language) and nominated Anne Heywood as Best Actress. At the British box office it was the fifth highest-grossing release of 1968.

Although The Fox revived Anne Heywood’s career, she never became a Hollywood star, despite opportunities. In 1973 she played Rod Taylor’s fiancée, grappling with leeches and swamps on an MGM backlot in Trader Horn (1973), a flop remake of a 1930s yarn about a “great white hunter” in the African jungle.

Six years later, in Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, she was fearless again playing the virgin Kansas schoolteacher of the title who is raped by a janitor. In subsequent video releases it was salaciously retitled, variously, The Sin, The Shaming and Secret Yearnings.

“I’m attracted to strange parts,” she said, “because they are more complicated than those of straightforward persons. You have to dig deep to find out how they tick.” In I Want What I Want (1972) she played Roy/Wendy, a male soldier who feels like a woman trapped in a man’s body.

Her career took another turn when she starred in two Italian “nunsploitation” films. In The Awful Story of the Nun of Monza (1969), she ignored celibacy rules while plotting murder, and in The Nun and the Devil (1973), featuring nuns in both lesbian and heterosexual acts, she played a sister bent on succeeding a dying mother superior.

She was born Violet Joan Pretty in Birmingham on December 11 1931 to Edna, née Lowndes, and Harold Pretty, a factory worker who had played the violin in orchestras. When she was 12, her mother died.

Two years later, after her elder sister Doreen went away to work, she left Fentham Secondary Modern School, Erdington, to take over the care of her other three sisters and two brothers.

She earned money as an usherette at the ABC Cinema in Erdington, studied at the Birmingham School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, and performed at the Highbury Little Theatre in Sutton Coldfield.

From age 16 she won beauty contests, culminating in the 1950 Miss Great Britain title. This led her to be cast as such a contestant in the 1951 Launder and Gilliat comedy Lady Godiva Rides Again, in which Joan Collins also had a bit part.

She then toured theatres in the talent-spotter Carroll Levis’s “Discoveries” shows, often topping the bill, and sang in his TV and radio programmes. In 1955 she signed with the Rank Organisation, taking the professional name Anne Heywood.

From small parts in movies such as Doctor at Large (1957), she starred as the femme fatale in the crime thriller Depraved (1957) and had leading roles alongside Stanley Baker in Violent Playground (1958), Howard Keel in Floods of Fear (1958), Frankie Vaughan in The Heart of a Man (1959) and Michael Craig in Upstairs and Downstairs (1958).

Rank had dropped her by the time she appeared with Robert Mitchum in A Terrible Beauty (1960), produced by Stross, whom she married that year. Stross steered the next phase of her career and they eventually settled in the US.

Her other Stross-produced films included The Brain (1962), 90 Degrees in the Shade (1965), and (with Fred Astaire) the 1969 crime comedy A Run on Gold. In the same year, she starred opposite Gregory Peck in the espionage drama The Most Dangerous Man in the World.

Anne Heywood retired after Stross’s death in 1988. In 1991 she married, secondly, George Druke, a former New York assistant attorney-general, who died in 2021. News of her death has only just emerged. She is survived by the son of her first marriage.

Anne Heywood, born December 11 1931, died October 27 2023