Rita Tushingham says funny things as afterthoughts. "I always seem to be pregnant," she comments, reviewing her tiny list of acting credits. "If I ever have children, they'll probably be padded ones."
The list is short, but Rita Tushingham, at 20, is the most acclaimed new actress in Britain for her performance in the film version of A Taste of Honey. Director Tony Richardson (Look Back in Anger), passing up all the established stars who wanted to do the part, put an ad in the paper and submitted to a tumult of unknowns. He picked Rita and drew from her a performance that moved critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and won for her the British film industry's award for the most promising newcomer of the year plus an equity in the six-way split of the Best Acting award in this season's festival at Cannes.
She has the looks of a spirited waif. She plays one in Honey—a little urchin abandoned by her mother and by a Negro sailor who has left her pregnant, later befriended by a pale, homosexual boy who prepares her for motherhood. She is freckled and mousy, with wide-spreading lips and eyes the size of deep-summer plums. But she is an actress, not a slum kitten picked up for verisimilitude.
She was educated in a convent in Liverpool, where her father is a grocer. Before she was cast by Richardson, her entire experience consisted of the role of a frog in a school play, the rear end of a horse in pantomime, and walk-on bits as an apprentice with the Liverpool Repertory Theater, whose alumni include Sir Michael Redgrave and Rex Harrison.
She learned quickly from Director Richardson. "He helped me over the hard bits," she says. "One of the hardest was learning to have the baby kick me. That's pretty hard to do if you've never had a baby. Learning to walk like a pregnant woman was not easy either. I didn't exactly go around staring at them, but whenever I saw one I'd try to notice how they walk with that big lump sticking out in front of them."
Unpadded, Rita Tushingham weighs about 120 lbs. and looks like a soft rubber toy. She is signed for five more pictures, but there are no scripts, and no one knows exactly what she will do. She has a problem because she is now a star and cannot do the small parts that she needs for experience, nor are there many starring parts for little female elves with big wide eyes.