New Faces: The ’61s

The 1961 girl vintage looks promising. It has some of the heavy and full-bodied characteristics of the ’52s and ’57s (Monroe, Bardot), a hint of the dry classicism of certain ’37s (Vivien Leigh), and may even show some of the sparkling ambition of the ’53s (Grace Kelly). Sample tastes :

∙ SUSANNAH YORK, Alec Guinness’ freckled daughter in Tunes of Glory, will certainly reach stardom on her own in Loss of Innocence, the film version of Rumer Godden’s novel The Greengage Summer, which Columbia Pictures will release in the U.S. in the fall. With a trim, sylvan body, winter-sky-blue eyes and jonquil hair. 22-year-old Susannah is one of the few English girls who can seem equally natural nibbling strawberries in a May-fairy frock in The Players Restaurant at Wimbledon or sprinting eastward in a bikini on the beaches of the Mediterranean. Born in London and raised in Scotland, she met Actor Michael Wells at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, married him, now lives in a dusty flat in an unfashionable part of Chelsea among half-dead flowers and half-dry socks. “I’m scruffy by nature,” she admits, but she is also an expert actress whose look and gesture redeem her ingenuousness with a suggestion of bitchcraft. Her next role should give her ambivalences full play. In John Huston’s Life of Freud, she will be the young, tormented Cecily, Subtile Sig’s first patient.

∙ BRIGID BAZLEN, who first won fame at 14 as the lightly tripping, Peabody-awarded Blue Fairy of a Chicago kiddies’ TV program, is now 17 and has come quite a distance from the imitation mushrooms of the Loop’s Blue Forest. Black-haired and hazel-eyed, Brigid went to Spain last summer and, without veils, took the role of Salome in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s King of Kings (ready for October release). With a creditable performance in The Honeymoon Machine, released last week, she has moved on to Paducah, Ky.. to play a tough-talking frontier girl in How the West Was Won, the first Cinerama film with a plot. Daughter of Chicago American Gossip Columnist Maggie Daly Bazlen, Brigid is compared by flacks to Elizabeth Taylor and described by associates as a “woman-child” with “something inside her that is 30.” In How the West Was Won, she ends up hanging from a tree limb because she lures Old Trapper Jimmy Stewart into a cave, goes for his pelt and tries to kill him. When she is really 30. she’ll probably get her man.

∙PAULA PRENTISS, 5 ft. 9¼ in. and perhaps, at 22. still growing, is turning in consistently fine performances with all the easygoing, offhand grace of a basketball center, which she used to be. She has too many deep-eyed good looks to be an all-the-way comedienne and too much height for a standard ingenue, so she has balanced herself neatly between the two — in Where the Boys Are, with Brigid Bazlen in The Honeymoon Machine, and in Bob Hope’s Bachelor in Paradise, scheduled for release in November. While at Lamar High School in Houston, Paula sold a poem to the Atlantic Monthly, went on to Virginia’s Auntie Bellum Randolph-Macon College, became something of a campus rebel (“They cling to a tradition that doesn’t exist”), protested against her election to exclusive Pi Phi by announcing: “I don’t want any girl to be my sister or mother.” Later, at Northwestern’s famed acting school, Paula impressed an M-G-M scout, who was hunting young talent for Writer-Director Joe Pasternak and Where the Boys Are. Paula flew west — “and there,” she recalls, “was itty-bitty Pasternak. The first thing he said was ‘Take something off.’ I said: ‘Listen, I can outrun you.'” She will.

∙CLAUDIA CARDINALE is a new sex bomb, deliciously ticking. With an Italian father, a French mother, a Tunisian birth place and a Sicilian girlhood, she is a 22-year-old gift from the Mediterranean Sea. with dark hair, burnt-olive skin, perfect white teeth and a profile that drops exquisitely across her Palladian nose, mouth and chin, then pours forward boldly before it plunges past an urn of hips to the floor. Daughter of a railroad worker, she has been to all the right schools: a Sicilian beauty contest, the Venice Film Festival, the cover of Paris Match. French critics saw her in an Italian film called La Viaccia, and the fellow on L’Express won the ensuing contest with “A great actress? Perhaps net yet. But beneath the glycerine tears, what a lovely face, what carnal splendor, what a future!” Opening this month in a new Franco-Italian film called Le Bel Antonio, she is currently working as a gypsy opposite Jean-Paul (Breathless) Belmondo in a picture called Cartouche, now being shot in Languedoc. Along the way, she has even developed a professional philosophy: “If only one spectator were to see me. I would die of shame; but I have no modesty before dozens of thousands.”