On the Life, Death, and Shameful Blacklisting of Lynne Frederick

 Lynne Frederick (1954 - 1994)

 Portrait by Terry Fincher (c. 1974)

I. 

 

Let's get straight to the point: the treatment that the English actress Lynne Frederick received, following the death of her husband Peter Sellers in 1980, was shameful. 

 

The abuse and ridicule meted out by the press and public was bad enough; but the behavior of the Hollywood set who, in a display of grotesque moral hypocrisy and spitefulness, blacklisted her was even worse - but then there's no people like show people ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Lynne Frederick was born in Middlesex, in July 1954. Her parents separated when she was just two years old and she never knew her father or had any connections with his side of the family. Her mother was a casting director for Thames Television. Raised in Leicestershire, she was later schooled in London and had ambitions of becoming a science teacher.  

However, when Frederick was fifteen fate - in the form of actor and film director Cornel Wilde, a famous friend of her mother's unfairly described by some as a poor man's Tony Curtis - intervened and put the teenager on the road to stardom. Wilde had been searching for a young unknown to star in his movie adaptation of the best-selling sci-fi novel The Death of Grass (1956). 

 

Wilde was instantly besotted with the beautiful and charismatic teen and so, despite Frederick having no previous acting experience, he offered her the role (sans audition). Whilst the film - released in 1970 as No Blade of Grass - received mixed reviews [2], Frederick became an overnight sensation, much loved by the same British public who would turn on her ten years later.          

As well as establishing an acting career that included a number of TV commercials for soap and shampoo, Frederick regularly featured in fashion magazines as a model and cover girl. In one famous spread for Vogue (Sept 1971), she was photographed by Patrick Lichfield. She was, in short, the fresh-faced girl of the moment; young women wanted to be her and men of all ages wanted ... well, we can all imagine what they wanted ...     

III.

 

During the mid-late '70s, Frederick's career as an actress and model continued to develop and she began to evolve a more sophisticated style and image, no longer content to simply play the girl next door or young innocent. Thus, in 1976, for example, she happily took a role in a BBC Play for Today as a sexually enigmatic character who falls for a lesbian artist [3]. She also starred in Pete Walker's slasher-horror movie Schizo, now regarded as a cult classic amongst fans of the genre.   

 

Meanwhile, her A-list Hollywood agent, Dennis Selinger, was preparing Frederick for global stardom in more mainstream film and television, as he had previously done with Susan George. Sadly, however, things were about to go very wrong - both professionally and personally - for Frederick, following her fateful marriage to sociopathic goon Peter Sellers in February 1977. She was 22 and Sellers, who had already married and divorced three wives, was 51.

 

The couple had met at a dinner party the year before, shortly after Frederick had finished making Schizo. He proposed to her two days afterwards, but she sensibly turned him down. However, she not-so-sensibly agreed to date and a year later they married. Initially, things went well and they formed a popular red carpet couple. But things quickly turned sour and rumours began to circulate of drug abuse, infidelity, and domestic violence. As his health deteriorated, Frederick was forced to put her own career on ice in order to look after him.    

 

Whilst they separated several times, Frederick always returned to care for Sellers until he died of a heart attack on 24 July 1980 (the day before her 26th birthday). Although Sellers was reportedly in the process of excluding her from his will shortly before he died, the planned changes were never legally finalised and so Frederick inherited the entire estate, worth an estimated £4.5 million. 

To which I say: Good for her! Unfortunately, that wasn't the reaction of his children from earlier marriages (who only received £800 each); nor was it the reaction of the press and public, or his Hollywood chums. 

 

Accepting unsubstantiated claims made by her stepson, Michael Sellers, it was almost universally decided that Frederick was a deceitful and cunning young woman who had only married for the money and to increase her own fame: the term used over and over again was gold digger - one that is not only derogatory, but misogynistic, as it is invariably applied to young women [4].       

Attempts to restart her film career post-Sellers were unsuccessful; she was effectively blacklisted by Hollywood, although she continued to live (reclusively) in California until her death in 1994, aged 39 [5]. 

 

Whilst I don't wish to go into details of her tragic final years - which involved seizures, alcoholism, and depression - I'm pleased to say that in the decades since her death, Frederick has gained a posthumous following of loyal fans and that even some of those who had been unfairly critical of her were prepared to concede that she had been poorly treated. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Famous names who voiced unfavourable opinions of Frederick include Roger Moore, Spike Milligan, and Britt Ekland. One person who always stood by her, however, was the actor David Niven, whom she had met whilst filming in 1974. Frederick regarded him not only as a close friend, but as a trusted father figure.   

 

[2] No Blade of Grass also generated disquiet amongst some critics due to a controversial abduction and gang rape scene involving Frederick as 16-year-old Mary Custance. The graphic nature of the sexual violence - lasting for several minutes on screen - was regarded as gratuitous at best. Although the rape sequence was cut in length when the film was released on video, the full scene was restored when issued on DVD.    

 

[3] Admittedly, the fact that she married former lover David Frost just a few months after the death of Peter Sellers didn't help matters. Nor did the fact that she divorced Frost after 17 months and then married a Californian heart surgeon shortly afterwards.   

 

[4] To her credit, Frederick was an outspoken advocate for same sex relationships and gay rights in a time when this was not so fashionable or morally and politically de rigeur. 

 

[5] Frederick was found dead by her mother in her West Los Angeles home on 27 April 1994. Whilst foul play and suicide were quickly ruled out, an autopsy failed to determine the cause of death. 

 

 

The Vamp: In Memory of Theda Bara

I am a vamp, I am a vamp

Half woman, half beast
I bite my men and suck them dry
And then I bake them in a pie

I.

When young, I used to have a hand-painted t-shirt with a picture of an insanely beautiful and beautifully insane-looking woman dressed like Cleopatra. Reinforcing the idea of an ancient Egyptian queen whose name spelt trouble for many a man, were the words Death Arab.

I had no idea who she was; nor that Death Arab was, in fact, an anagram ...

II.

With her heavily kohl-lined eyes and outrageously revealing costumes, Theda Bara was one of Hollywood’s greatest silent film stars who first came to prominence as a seductress in the risqué 1915 production A Fool There Was (dir. Frank Powell); a movie that was refused a cinematic release in the UK by the British Board of Film Censors due to its illicit sexual theme.

In the above, Edward José plays a wealthy Wall Street lawyer and devoted family man, who, upon meeting Bara's vampish femme fatale on board a ship bound for England, falls completely under her spell.

All attempts by friends to persuade him to return to the straight and narrow are in vain and he plunges ever further into vice and blissful degradation: she ruins his career, wrecks his marriage and slowly drains him of his spunk; that vital mixture of masculine virtue and courage.


III.

Despite her exotic image, Theodosia Burr Goodman was not born in the shadow of the Sphinx, but, rather, in the American Midwest. Contrary also to what her publicists would have us believe, her father was not an Italian sculptor with an obsessive love of the female form, but a Jewish tailor originally from Poland.

After moving to NYC in 1908, Bara took up acting and between 1915 and 1919 she was the Fox studio's biggest star - even whilst she grew increasingly tired of being typecast. Sadly, however, an attempt to find a new role for herself in the theatre didn't pan out after her Broadway performance in The Blue Flame (1920) was savaged by the critics.

She made her final film, Madame Mystery, a short comedy for Hal Roach, directed by Stan Laurel, in 1926. In it, she parodied her own image as an occult-fixated vampire-woman, but by this stage the joke was over and if audiences laughed at all they were laughing at, rather than with Miss Bara.

The golden rule of showbiz is a simple one: Always give the public what they want. And, ideally, give it to them when they want it in a recognisable format. Then they'll keep on cheering and keep on buying tickets. But start to take yourself and your craft too seriously, and nine times out of ten you can look forward to a long retirement living in obscurity: To be good is to be forgotten, as Theda herself acknowledged.


IV.

A planned return to the movies in the mid-1930s, came to nothing. And a proposed biopic, starring Betty Hutton, that producers expressed an interest in making in 1949, also never materialized. Bara died six years later.

She was posthumously rewarded with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. But, by this date, most of her work on film was either lost or destroyed; of the 40+ movies she made between 1914 and 1926, complete prints of only six still exist.

Nevertheless, her image is forever ingrained within the cultural imagination and her influence on cinema - particularly its enduring obsession with the femme fatale - cannot be overestimated.

Notes 

Lyrics quoted beneath the photo of Theda Bara (and friend) are from the song I Am a Vamp (1998), by Ute Lemper: click here to listen on YouTube. 

Anyone interested in watching a makeup tutorial presented by Talia Felix, in which she instructs viewers exactly how to achieve the Theda Bara look in all its horror sex vampire bat bite perfection, should click here.