Way back in 1961, British Actress Susan Hampshire had a bash at Hollywood. Or, as she called it, "the Land of the Bottom Pinchers," where all the men have "crocodile wives and ulcers and gold-and-diamond rings they twist around their hairy fingers. The big shots also had arms they kept putting around me that managed to be long enough to reach my left breast." Susan recalls telling them: "I don't have to do that. I can act." So she returned home to become an international star—her way.
Her latest acknowledgment came this year in the U.S., where she has emerged as, of all things, the first sex symbol of educational television (if one ignores Julia Child). Susan is Fleur, the exquisite arch-bitch of The Forsyte Saga, a role for which she last week won an Emmy Award as the best actress in a dramatic series. In most of the 40-odd other countries that have been enthralled by the greatest soap opera ever filmed, Susan is already a major star. In Norway a mob of 60,000 turned out to see her—in a town of only 10,000.
Dyslexia Praecox. Susan started out with what should have been an insuperable handicap for an actress. She had dyslexia, a congenital brain condition that hampers her ability to read aloud. She still aches at memories of trying to get through London's Hampshire School (founded by her mother). "I remember standing up in class trying to read Shakespeare, and I could hear all the other children sniggering and laughing, because I'd be literally making it up. I remember thinking: when I grow up, people are not going to laugh at me. So I thought, who do they respect now? Elizabeth Taylor or someone. I'll be an actress."
Finally, at age 16, she gave up school and went into repertory. She had learned to read silently and to remember her parts, but auditions and first readings were, as she says, "torture. The producer or playwright would think: Who is this cocky girl mucking up our masterpiece that we've been working on for years?" But 18 months, two companies, and more than 100 roles later, she finally arrived on the West End, playing a show-stopping cameo in Expresso Bongo with Paul Scofield.
BBC work, the Sidney Furie film During One Night, and Hollywood followed. By the end of her stay there, the bottom pinchers and a California crime scare had reduced her to sleeping with a tear-gas gun under her pillow. She was also scared off by the proffered parts, some of the available co-stars ("I had never acted opposite a brick wall before"), and the long-indenturing contracts proposed by two studios. After five months, she headed home with nothing to show but a 30,000-word journal, a real-life Nathanael West work that is too libelous to publish.
But once back in London, she was not above playing the starlet publicity game. Her main purpose was to try to free herself from the molasses morass of Disney pictures (The Three Lives of Thomasind) and from the "sweet, soppy, boring" debutante roles in which she was stuck. At one point, a columnist quoted her as saying she needed "somebody like Roger Vadim to bring me to full bloom."