BELINDA LEE |
Of all the actresses who came to a tragic early end, Belinda Lee is the most interesting. She
emerged at the right time - the 1950s - but in the wrong country - the U. K. - whose film industry
was dominated by decision-makers who had little idea of what films to make and, seemingly, little
idea about women.
Belinda Lee was very, very attractive with the kind of looks that the world was impressed by in the 1950s. She had an extremely photogenic face, with a gently curving nose, high cheek bones and unusually shaped eyes. She also had exceptionally elegant legs, which were much appreciated by photographers and magazine editors.
Belinda was born in Devon, the south-west corner of England, in 1935. Nineteen years later, after having allegedly trained at the Royal Academy Of Dramatic Arts, she played a dumb blonde in "The Runaway Bus" opposite Frankie Howard, Margaret Rutherford and Petula Clark(!) for which she received good notices. She was then Amanda, one of the nubile and naughty schoolgirls in "The Belles Of St.Trinians".
After two years - sometimes above the title - in movies that are so undistinguished that they appear neither on television nor in Halliwell's "Film Guide", she was given a contract with the Rank Organisation.
At that time Rank, bewildered by the decline in cinema attendances and mesmerised by the old Hollywood, believed its best policy was to mimic the major Hollywood studios. Apparently Rank had not noticed that Hollywood was also suffering, was re-thinking many ideas and was changing as fast as it could. Rank decided that it too would have starlets, and Belinda Lee was to be one of them.
As a starlet, Belinda was duly photographed and her pictures were
sent to magazines which, unsurprisingly, were happy to print them,
sometimes on their front covers. Belinda also supplied the press with trivia
about herself. For example, in the aftermath of Ava Gardner's performance in
"The Barefoot Contessa", Belinda let it be known that she too liked
to wander about barefoot. Today such tittle-tattle is easy to ridicule, but
at the time it was the stock-in-trade of ambitious starlets. However Belinda was luckier than
most starlets: she was given parts in movies. Indeed the single most
consistent feature of Belinda's career is that she never stopped
working. She may have been publicised as a glamour girl with
hypnotic legs, but in fact she was a work horse.
Unfortunately most of the work was playing chaste and sympathetic young women whose highest ambition is to comfort a fumbling inadequate, played by the likes of Norman Wisdom or Ian Carmichael. In British films in the mid-1950s, good-looking girls were not allowed to have strong emotions or a healthy sex drive, were not expected to have career ambitions or even a desire to travel the world. Belinda avoided these saccharine roles as much as possible, and in her films with both Wisdom and Carmichael, she played the villainess. However she could not avoid them altogether.
Belinda was a sufficiently good actress to bring to these roles the mixture of warmth, compassion, modesty and good humour that Rank believed filmgoers wanted. She also brought far more glamour than other actresses, and this produced a divided response from journalists and the public. Some people adored her playing of nice girls. Others, not recognising that Belinda was impeded by screenplay and studio, felt she was antiseptic. (One columnist, itemising his hopes for movies in the year ahead, included a wish to "see Belinda Lee well and truly kissed"!)
In view of her work rate and the direction her career was to take, it is likely that Belinda was fully aware of the shallowness of Rank's view of women. It is probable that she longed to play a different type of woman.
In 1957 Belinda graduated
from aspiring starlet to authentic star. In that year Rank made two attempts to create real
women with normal instincts.
Neither attempt was done well, neither screenplay was competently structured, but they were major steps in the right direction. In between these two films Belinda
traveled to Rome for her first foreign movie and became involved in a romance
that, possibly, changed her life and career.
In "Dangerous Exile" Belinda played a spirited young woman looking after the refugee heir to the French throne. Lushly lit by Geoffrey Unsworth but hampered by the dialogue - she calls the boy "Honey" (!) - Belinda was womanly and forceful. For many, this was a revelation. There was much press comment on how Belinda had suddenly matured on screen from a well-scrubbed sixth-form girl into a full-grown woman, despite wearing thick crinoline dresses and playing opposite a thirteen year old boy.
Belinda then went to Rome to play the female lead in "La Venera Di Cheronea" (a.k.a. "The Goddess Of Love"). While in Rome, Belinda met Prince Filippo Orsini, and soon the media was reporting that an adulterous romance was in full swing. (Both Belinda and Orsini were married.) As the Orsini family had links to the Vatican, this was the stuff of scandal, and quickly Belinda became a major European celebrity.
Belinda returned to England for "Nor The Moon By Night" (a.k.a. "Elephant Gun"), a very thin story, in which she was even allowed to suggest sexual desire! Playing a young woman caring for a hypochondriac mother while conducting a pen-letter love affair, she goes to Africa to marry a man she has never met but finds herself falling for his brother. Again Belinda's screen presence was strong enough to hold the audience's attention despite the weakness of the material.
At this point, when she had firmly established that she was more than just a good-looking starlet,
Belinda left the British film business and moved to Italy. Did she jump or was she pushed? There were rumours that she had attempted suicide and that Rank, terrified of a
possible scandal, had dropped her. There
were other rumours that she had gone to Italy to fulfill her emotional life.
After
all these years, does
anyone know the truth?
Belinda's career thereafter was completely different. The parts she played, the colour of her hair, her publicity photographs: all were in marked contrast to her British period. No longer a refined English rose, she was presented coarsely, often unflatteringly, sometimes in dubious taste, and projected a sullen carnality that alarmed many of her British fans. Letters were written to the fan magazines in protest, but to no avail. Belinda Lee did not come home.
Freed from the constraints of The Rank Organisation, Belinda adopted the same strategy in choosing roles that Elizabeth Taylor was now using in Hollywood. Strong, sexually driven women, harpies and harridans even, who controlled and manipulated men, these were the parts that kept Belinda busy. A blackmailing whore in Germany or an unfaithful wife in Italy, Lucrezia Borgia or Messalina, Belinda churned out one film after another; two in 1958, four in 1959, five in 1960 and finally three in 1961 until her untimely death. Most of these films have been unavailable for years and it is now difficult to assess her work. Derek Elley's excellent book, "The Epic Film", praises Belinda's work within that genre and makes its unavailability all the more frustrating. Perhaps the DVD boom will restore Belinda's work to the public domain. (A DVD of Belinda's last movie "Constantino Il Grande" (a.k.a "Constantine And The Cross") is offered continuously on Ebay. However its origin is questionable, established DVD traders avoid it, and no positive feed-back about its quality has yet emerged.)
Her death was
hideous. Belinda was traveling as a passenger by car in California when her vehicle
was involved in a crash. She was thrown from the
car and within
minutes was dead.
Belinda Lee remains a interesting star, partly because she was
a genuinely glamorous actress who died in her mid-twenties, partly because her
work ethic contrasted with her public image, and partly because there are so many unanswered
questions about her. How did she obtain her first part with no
experience when there were dozens of other young actresses
better qualified? How did she manage always to be working
while her rivals struggled to find work? Did she really
attempt suicide? What caused her to leave Rank? Did she like
the parts she played in Italy and did she enjoy the transformation of her public
image? How much was she earning? What did she want from life and her career? Most of
all, what
kind of person was she?
The greatest mystery about Belinda Lee is that today there is no interest in her, while there are
cults about other, less attractive, less talented actresses.