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The actress Anne Heywood, born Violet Joan Pretty
Violet Joan Pretty was born on 11th December 1931 in Handsworth.
Her father Harold was a former orchestral violinist, now working
in factories. The family was not well off. She joined St Mary's
School at the end of August 1938 from York Road School. The family
had moved into a new council house at 147 Shaftmoor Lane after
a year at 49 Lyncroft Road. During the War the family moved to
Erdington, to 197 Bleak Hill Road, where they stayed until c.1950.
Violet went to Fentham Road Secondary School. Her mother died
suddenly when she was a few months past her thirteenth birthday,
and she had to leave school at fourteen, in order to to look after
the younger members of her family. This frustrated her wish to
go on to art school. She worked for three months as an usherette
at the A.B.C. Palace cinema in Erdington at the age of fourteen.
In 1947 Violet joined Highbury Little Theatre in Sutton Coldfield,
remaining there for two years. In the same year she won Birmingham
University's Carnival Queen title. Among a dozen more beauty titles
the most prestigious one was in 1950, the National Bathing Beauty
Contest, held in Morecambe from 1945-1980, and which from 1956
was called Miss Great Britain. Interestingly, another Birmingham
girl, June Mitchell, had won three years earlier. As contestant
number 16 accepted her £1000 prize and a silver rose bowl
on 30th August 1950, who could have foreseen the amazing paths
her career would take? (We are grateful to Morecambe Library for
their help with this information).
In 1951 Violet had a part as a beauty queen in the film "Lady
Godiva rides again". In the same year she was signed up by
a Canadian compere called Carroll Levis, well known for his talent-spotting
ventures. She featured prominently in one of his Discoveries shows
for four years, touring at theatres around the country, and she
appeared on television three times with the show. Around 1955
she was spotted by a talent scout for Rank while playing the principal
boy in Aladdin at the Chelsea Palace. That year she changed her
name to Anne Heywood, and in 1956 was given a seven year contract
with Rank as an actress. In 1957 she had a part in "Doctor
at large", and a string of other films followed.
Probably the 1963 film "The very edge" gave a hint
of what was to come. In that film she won praise for her portrayal
of a wife who was assaulted in her own home by a psychopath (played
by Jeremy Brett). Her husband found himself unable to cope with
her troubled state. Her portrayal of the psychological bond she
had with her attacker, of her dramatic confrontation with him,
and of the assertiveness she needed to try to save her integrity
showed she had the ability to explore deeper, troubled parts of
the human psyche.
In the summer of 1964 filming started on the first Anglo-Czech
co-production, a film called "Ninety degrees in the shade".
Anne played a clerk involved in an intense physical relationship
with her boss, who was stealing from the business. Investigators
put pressure on Anne's character, who could not make herself reveal
her lover's crimes, and she took her own life. The film was praised
by Hitchcock, and won the International Critics' Prize at the
Berlin Film Festival.
Altogether Anne starred in over thirty films, in Italy and
in Hollywood as well as in Britain, many produced by her husband,
Raymond Stross, whom she married in 1960. She starred alongside
Robert Mitchum in A Terrible Beauty (1960, also known as The Night
Fighters) and Gregory Peck in The Chairman (1969), and starred
in The Fox (1967), for which she won a Golden Globe for Actress
in a Leading Role. In that film, adapted from a D.H. Lawrence
novella, she played Ellen March, a woman in a lesbian relationship
whose life is turned upside down by a rather silent and macho
man who comes between her and her lover.
"The Midas run" was filmed in Italy in 1969, and
Anne starred alongside Fred Astaire and Ralph Richardson. She
also sang in the film. The producer was Raymond Stross, her husband.
Fred Astaire was very annoyed that a revealing love scene between
Anne and Richard Crenna had been inserted into the film after
he had finished his contribution, in order to raise box office
appeal. "They've forgotten a seven letter word - decency...They
[sexual scenes] weren't in the script, or I wouldn't have done
the film. People wrote and said they were surprised I would appear
in such a film. I was as surprised as they were. I will not be
a part of something crummy. I wouldn't go to work if I had to
do something distasteful to me" (quoted in TV Guide, 11th
April, 1970). In the film "I want what I want", made
in 1970, Anne played a young man who wanted to be a woman, and
who had the surgery following self-mutilation. This is another
example of Anne exploring the anguish and suffering that can be
associated with sexuality.
In fact Anne Heywood will probably be remembered for two rather
different kinds of roles: nice girls, and then those exploring
themes which extended the boundaries of "acceptable"
content. Some of her films, like those involving nuns being tortured
and raped, earned her the criticism of being involved in "exploitation".
Anne herself was unapologetic about these kinds of roles. In 1969,
in the magazine Life, she said: "I'm attracted to strange
parts because they are more complicated than those of straightforward
persons. You have to dig deep to find out how they tick. Besides,
these are the kinds of pictures people want to see". Anne's
husband, in an interview in Films and Filming in 1971, spoke in
glowing terms about her contribution to the films: "Let me
say that she has one of the finest minds, and one of the most
enquiring minds, of any person I have met...She is dedicated -
to an extreme. She has no ego other than the will to do her best.
She is not prepared to give anything less than one hundred and
one percent the whole time. This goes to the minutest details".
Anne was the subject of a half-hour documentary broadcast on Sunday
26th November 1972 on BBC1. Michael Aspel told the story of the
former beauty queen who had made it in the big time as an actress,
and made a million along the way. Anne had overcome the handicap,
as it were, of being a beauty contestant to be taken seriously
as an actress.
It is interesting to mention local newspapers' approach to
Anne. One the one hand, she comes from Birmingham and is therefore
a local heroine, but the roles she has specialised in raise eyebrows.
Perhaps the best expression of this tension is the biographical
article in the Sunday Mercury in October 1992, written as Anne
was about to visit Birmingham as guest of honour at the Birmingham
International Film and Television Festival. The headline is: "Return
of a girl who shocked the world!", yet the article spends
half its time emphasising how Anne never used sex as a means to
get on, and how important marriage and motherhood are to her.
It is as if they assume that readers see screen roles as a simple
reflection of personal behaviour, and need to prove that their
heroine is not a sex-crazed person. At the same time, however,
they are only too happy to stir up interest with sensationalism.
Raymond Stross died in 1988, and Anne later remarried, to George
Druke, a former Assistant Attorney General of New York State.
She lives in Beverley Hills. Her life story has been described
as Cinderella or rags to riches, but those labels perhaps don't
emphasise enough her determination, her ambition, and the role
of fate. In 1974, in an interview for the Birmingham Mail, she
said: "Strangely enough, had I not left school early to help
with the family, I would have taken up a scholarship to the College
of Art, and never become an actress".
The best online list of her films is at the Internet
Movie Database site, but not all dates are reliable.
Anne Heywood's address and an autographed photo can be found
by searching the Star Archive
site.
The information for this page has been put together mainly
from resources in Birmingham Central Library. We do not know who may own the
rights to the images below: if anyone does and wishes to claim the rights we
will remove them from this page. We have no intention to infringe any copyright.
original source not known
Anne Heywood welcomed back at new Street Station, 6th February
1958 (original source not known)
Images of Anne Heywood can often be found at
Moviemarket and on the various
Ebay websites, and, of course, by doing image searches on search engines. |
