A nice little chat with Rita Tushingham

Tushingham in Zhivago. Screen cap from the DVD Beaver review. 

As I dis­cussed in last week’s Topics, etc. at The Auteurs’ Notebook, there’s a lovely new Blu-ray edi­tion of David Lean’s 1965 Doctor Zhivago com­ing out…today. Last week I spoke not only with Ned Price of Warner Home Video, but with act­or Rita Tushingham, who plays title char­ac­ter Zhivago’s unknow­ing daugh­ter, cred­ited simply as “The Girl,” who hears the film’s story from Alec Guinness’ Yevgraf in a frame nar­rat­ive. The role came at a peak in Tushingham’s fame. She was not even 25 at the time, but had achieved near-iconic status sev­er­al years earli­er for her por­tray­al of Jo in the film ver­sion of  Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey. The Angry Young Man of British lit­er­at­ure, theat­er and film of the mid-to-late ’50s and early ’60s had its oppos­ite num­ber, of a sort, in Resilient Waif, and Tushingham’s Jo was really one of the most mem­or­able of them. (See also Leslie Caron in The L‑Shaped Room.) Tushingham went to work for the redoubt­able Lean after hav­ing acted for some of the most ener­get­ic Britain-based dir­ect­ors of the day: Tony Richardson, Sidney J. Furie, Richard Lester. She was one of the poster girls for newly Swinging London, and here she was doing a peri­od piece for a ven­er­ated old school mas­ter. At least that how we critics/pseudo-historians see it. As a work­ing act­or, Tushingham saw it rather differently. 

“I think it was…luck, to be able to get A Taste of Honey,” Tushingham told me last week. “But
also it was a break­through, I guess because it was some­thing more notice­able; all of a sud­den act­ors were play­ing dif­fer­ent kinds of char­ac­ters, more every­day people, but not the type of every­day people that you had in most plays or films, who were just back­ground. And
there began to be stronger roles for women. These char­ac­ters, even if they
seemed for­saken in some sense, were strong and they did find their ways. They
didn’t fade into the background.

“As for Zhivago, yes, it was a won­der­ful oppor­tun­ity to be part of, and it was a dif­fer­ent kind of thing, but at the
time, you don’t neces­sar­ily think of it like that. You think, ‘Oh it’s nice I’m
doing this film!’ But obvi­ously, the standout dif­fer­ence here was the budget, it
was a very dif­fer­ent budget from the films I was used to work­ing on. So there
was, among oth­er things, more time to do things, and there wasn’t a need to
rush and scramble to get it all done. They got made quite quickly in the ‘60s,
although some would sit on the shelf. I know The Leather Boys [her film with Furie, released in 1964] sat for about a
year, nearly two years before it was released.”

Although she play’s a cru­cial part in Zhivago, her char­ac­ter does­n’t fig­ure as a part of the film’s lar­ger nar­rat­ive; she is, in one sense, an audi­ence sur­rog­ate. I asked about how she approached the role and its par­tic­u­lar per­spect­ive. “Obviously I knew the story,” Tushingham said—Zhivago was of course adap­ted from a world-wide best-selling nov­el by Russian poet Boris Pasternak— “but you have to be at arm’s
length from that, because the char­ac­ter truly doesn’t know. She had no know­ledge of who she really is, and, more import­ant, of what it is that Yevgraf is ask­ing for. So I tried to make myself inhab­it that feel­ing of ignorance.”

The pic­ture was a remark­ably frus­trat­ing one for Lean; he had to shoot in Spain, which he did­n’t see as the ideal loc­a­tion in which to repro­duce Revolution-era Moscow, and he could­n’t shoot in his pre­ferred format of 65mm. According to Tushingham, he did­n’t make his frus­tra­tions known to his cast. “The stress didn’t show at all. I sup­pose the thing is, in
the end, the fact that you’re going to do it and you’ve got the script, you’ve
got the act­ors, so you get on and do it. If you look at Bridge or Lawrence,
they’re all massive, aren’t they? Huge films, huge loc­a­tions. Zhivago worked…it didn’t have to be in Moscow, he was able to cre­ate the illusion…because so
much of it is real. He couldn’t get the loc­a­tion, but today, you know, if they
need to show an army, they can shoot massive scenes with hardly any people in
them and then CGI the army in…but it shows, doesn’t it? And I don’t like it
when I hear people say, ‘Oh, we can fix it in the edit­ing.’ I don’t think that
ought to be said. I know some­times you’re run­ning against a clock. But the
craft is…you should be able to do it. People could do it years ago, so why
can’t you do it now? And that was some­thing Lean nev­er said, and if there was
any­one who actu­ally knew how to fix things in the edit­ing, it was he; editing
was where he star­ted. And he would have a very good idea of what he wanted, and
he would shoot to get it. Whereas, work­ing with Richard [Lester], you almost
felt that he more or less edited as he went along.”

As she beat me to bring­ing up Lester, I thought I’d pur­sue that, and asked if she still stayed in touch with the now-retired dir­ect­or. “All the time, he and his wife are my closest friends…” I men­tioned that of all the dir­ect­ors out there who ought to retire, it’s a shame that Lester is one who actu­ally did, because we could use him back. I then brought up Getting Away With It, the Steven Soderbergh book which threads a long Lester inter­view with a frank diary of Soderbergh’s career trav­ails of the pre-Limey ’90s, and Tushingham very nearly leapt out of her chair. “I would love to work with him,” she said, going on to note that yes, Steven and Richard remain in touch with each oth­er. “He’s getting
films made that are import­ant films. I think he’s amaz­ing. He reminds me of
what we had in the ‘60s, that energy, that vitality…I think he’s fantastic.” 

And, well, at that point I men­tioned that I myself had worked with Steven, on The Girlfriend Experience, and then it came out that Tushingham her­self was pre­par­ing to make a film using the digit­al RED cam­era, and the talk turned into an S.S. love­fest and dis­quis­i­tion on work­ing with the RED, which was nice for the two of us but prob­ably would­n’t be too great for you to read. So I nev­er got around to ask­ing Tushingham if she was aware of hav­ing been some­thing of a bête noire for the legendary crit­ic Manny Farber, whose essay “Pish-Tush” excor­i­ates Rita, Jeanne Moreau and Giulietta Masina for, among oth­er things, “swell[ing] their pro­por­tions with giant­ism with ges­tures and décor.” I’m not sure I would have had the heart to bring it up even if I’d had the time. 

I should also note spoke pri­or to the passing of Lynn Redgrave, who had been a friend and a col­league (they cost­arred in 1964’s Girl With Green Eyes and 1967’s Smashing Time), or else Redgrave would have surely been the main top­ic of discussion.