Anne Heywood
Anne Heywood was born in 1932 in Birmingham. Her real name is Violet Pretty. She made her movie debut in 1951 in “Lady Godiva Rides Again” which has some of the future leading ladies of British films in the cast, Joan Collins, Diana Dors, Kay Kendall and Dana Wynter. As the 1950’s progressed, she graduated from featured roles to leading lady status. By 1959 she was the leading lady to Howard Keel in “Floods of Fear” and to Robert Mitchum in “A Terrible Beauty”. In 1968 she won terrific critical plaudits for her performance in an adaltation of D.H. Lawerence’s “The Fox”. She then was leading lady to Gregory Peck in “The Chairman”. She moved to the U.S. where she continued her career. Her last acting part was in an episode of Edward Woodward’s “The Equaliser”.
Her IMDB entry:
Befitting her original name (Violet Pretty), the knockout English brunette Anne Heywood won the coveted “Miss Great Britain” beauty title in 1950 at the young age of 17. Born on December 11, 1932, the daughter of a violinist, she originally trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She gained early experience on the stage with the Highbury Players in Birmingham and moved on to some TV work. The Rank Organization caught sight of her and offered the former beauty queen a seven-year contract. During that time, however, she was pretty much relegated to playing ‘nice girl’ types in the 50s and 60s.
In later career, her film appearances courted controversy and she seemed drawn toward highly troubled, flawed characters. Very popular with Italian audiences, Anne never endeared herself to American filmgoers although she did stir up some curiosity with one of her more noteworthy films, the pioneer lesbian drama The Fox (1967). Starring Anne with Sandy Dennis, the two were quite believable as an unhappy, isolated couple whose relationship is irreparably shattered by the appearance of a handsome stranger (Keir Dullea). At the height of the movie’s publicity, Playboy magazine revealed a “pictorial essay” just prior to its 1967 release with Anne in a nude and auto-erotic spread. The film won a “Best Foreign Film” Golden Globe Award (it was made in Canada) and Anne herself earned a “Best Actress” nod.
Despite being aggressively promoted in its aftermath by husband/producer Raymond Stross, who was instrumental in reshaping her image with such sexy, offbeat dramas asThe Night Fighters (1960), The Very Edge (1963), Ninety Degrees in the Shade (1965),Midas Run (1969), I Want What I Want (1972) and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979), Anne has remained a distinct European film product. Following her husband’s death in 1988, Anne remarried (to a former New York Assistant Attorney General) and begged away from the camera. The couple settled in Beverly Hills.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Her IMDB entry can also be accessed on line here.
The telegraph obituary in 2023.
Anne Heywood, the actress who has died aged 92, was a former Miss Great Britain who was brave in her choice of taboo-busting film roles, gaining her greatest fame for a lesbian scene in the 1967 adaptation of D H Lawrence’s novella The Fox.
With her husband, Raymond Stross, producing the low-budget Canadian movie, she and Sandy Dennis starred as two women raising chickens on a remote farm who end up making love after Anne Heywood’s character, Ellen, turns down a merchant sailor’s marriage proposal.
The actress had no qualms about performing the daring scene, telling the critic Roger Ebert in 1969 that it was done with “delicacy and taste” and adding: “Ellen isn’t a lesbian at all, in fact. She’s more of a modern, independent woman.”.
The film was released in the US just as Hollywood abandoned the Hays Code, which had prohibited the depiction of certain “sexual persuasions”. That did not stop a Mississippi court convicting a cinema owner of obscenity after screening the film, but Golden Globe judges named it Best Foreign Film (English Language) and nominated Anne Heywood as Best Actress. At the British box office it was the fifth highest-grossing release of 1968.
Although The Fox revived Anne Heywood’s career, she never became a Hollywood star, despite opportunities. In 1973 she played Rod Taylor’s fiancée, grappling with leeches and swamps on an MGM backlot in Trader Horn (1973), a flop remake of a 1930s yarn about a “great white hunter” in the African jungle.
Six years later, in Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, she was fearless again playing the virgin Kansas schoolteacher of the title who is raped by a janitor. In subsequent video releases it was salaciously retitled, variously, The Sin, The Shaming and Secret Yearnings.
“I’m attracted to strange parts,” she said, “because they are more complicated than those of straightforward persons. You have to dig deep to find out how they tick.” In I Want What I Want (1972) she played Roy/Wendy, a male soldier who feels like a woman trapped in a man’s body.
Her career took another turn when she starred in two Italian “nunsploitation” films. In The Awful Story of the Nun of Monza (1969), she ignored celibacy rules while plotting murder, and in The Nun and the Devil (1973), featuring nuns in both lesbian and heterosexual acts, she played a sister bent on succeeding a dying mother superior.
She was born Violet Joan Pretty in Birmingham on December 11 1931 to Edna, née Lowndes, and Harold Pretty, a factory worker who had played the violin in orchestras. When she was 12, her mother died.
Two years later, after her elder sister Doreen went away to work, she left Fentham Secondary Modern School, Erdington, to take over the care of her other three sisters and two brothers.
She earned money as an usherette at the ABC Cinema in Erdington, studied at the Birmingham School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, and performed at the Highbury Little Theatre in Sutton Coldfield.
From age 16 she won beauty contests, culminating in the 1950 Miss Great Britain title. This led her to be cast as such a contestant in the 1951 Launder and Gilliat comedy Lady Godiva Rides Again, in which Joan Collins also had a bit part.
She then toured theatres in the talent-spotter Carroll Levis’s “Discoveries” shows, often topping the bill, and sang in his TV and radio programmes. In 1955 she signed with the Rank Organisation, taking the professional name Anne Heywood..
From small parts in movies such as Doctor at Large (1957), she starred as the femme fatale in the crime thriller Depraved (1957) and had leading roles alongside Stanley Baker in Violent Playground (1958), Howard Keel in Floods of Fear (1958), Frankie Vaughan in The Heart of a Man (1959) and Michael Craig in Upstairs and Downstairs (1958).
Rank had dropped her by the time she appeared with Robert Mitchum in A Terrible Beauty (1960), produced by Stross, whom she married that year. Stross steered the next phase of her career and they eventually settled in the US.
Her other Stross-produced films included The Brain (1962), 90 Degrees in the Shade (1965), and (with Fred Astaire) the 1969 crime comedy A Run on Gold. In the same year, she starred opposite Gregory Peck in the espionage drama The Most Dangerous Man in the World.
Anne Heywood retired after Stross’s death in 1988. In 1991 she married, secondly, George Druke, a former New York assistant attorney-general, who died in 2021. News of her death has only just emerged. She is survived by the son of her first marriage.
Anne Heywood, born December 11 1931, died October 27 2023.