She is best remembered for completely losing it as Sister Ruth, the nun sexually obsessed with David Farrar’s Mr. Dean in Powell and Pressburger’s 1947’s Black Narcissus. The problem with the part, Powell told her, was that she’d “never have such a good one again.” Another problem Powell didn’t mention, but which she no doubt could have intuited, is that it would wind up getting her typecast as various and sundry “bad girls” throughout the “quota quickies” era of British filmmaking. But the Archers knew her range, and they cast her, again opposite Farrar, in quite a different role for their 1949 wartime thriller The Small Back Room, a shot from which is seen above. In this film she plays Susan, the stalwart love of Farrar’s Sammy, a bomb expert struggling with alcoholism and feelings of inadequacy stemming from the loss of a leg. The film’s portrayal of a strong, loving couple trying to come to terms with forces that threaten to tear them apart is one of the most nuanced and sympathetic in perhaps all of cinema. It’s odd to see such a portrayal in a putative genre film…but hardly unexpected, on the other hand, to see it in a Powell/Pressburger one. Byron’s performance here is as much a marvel as her work in Narcissus, her human warmth only just masking—or rather, I should say, beautifully blending in with—a full-blooded sensuality.
It would seem she had an abundance of both in real life; in the second half of Powell’s autobiography the director makes a fleeting reference to her confronting him with a gun whilst entirely naked. Byron pooh-poohed the story in an entirely delightful fashion: “If I’d wanted to shoot him I certainly wouldn’t have taken my clothes off first.”
Either way: a woman you might not mind having a gun pulled on you by, and a truly memorable performer, Byron died yesterday at 88.
Aw, man.
Thanks for the lovely words and especially that photo. When I listed her as one of my “20 Favorite Movie Actresses” a short time ago as that meme went around – http://collisionwork.livejournal.com/172175.html – I felt compelled to use a picture of the deranged Sister Ruth, but I love her Susan for all the reasons you say, and hope that with the Criterion edition, she becomes as loved for Susan’s warmth as she has for Ruth’s menace (her Recording Angel in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH also mixes some of that warmth with a quiet, shy dignity).
She is one of the best actress for 1940’s. Her role as “Sister Ruth” her performance in that role is really great.
Thanks.
Kate
Wow, I was just watching her yesterday, in Matter of Life and Death, from that nifty little Powell double-feature DVD set that came out a couple of weeks ago. ‚Thanks for the fine words…and in addition to all the wonderful subtleties in those two performances you mention I’ll just add that on a more basic level I thought she was sexy as hell in The Small Back Room and one of the scariest people I’ve ever seen onscreen at that moment when she emerges from the door at the end of Black Narcissus to kill Deborah Kerr.
Oops, I just reread your tribute and realize that on first reading I just blipped right on over your far more evocative description of her sexier-than-hellness (sexier-than-hellosity?) in Back Room. Um, firmly seconded.