Television: The Hampshire Saga

Way back in 1961, British Actress Susan Hampshire had a bash at Hollywood. Or, as she called it, “the Land of the Bottom Pinchers,” where all the men have “crocodile wives and ulcers and gold-and-diamond rings they twist around their hairy fingers. The big shots also had arms they kept putting around me that managed to be long enough to reach my left breast.” Susan recalls telling them: “I don’t have to do that. I can act.” So she returned home to become an international star—her way.

Her latest acknowledgment came this year in the U.S., where she has emerged as, of all things, the first sex symbol of educational television (if one ignores Julia Child). Susan is Fleur, the exquisite arch-bitch of The Forsyte Saga, a role for which she last week won an Emmy Award as the best actress in a dramatic series. In most of the 40-odd other countries that have been enthralled by the greatest soap opera ever filmed, Susan is already a major star. In Norway a mob of 60,000 turned out to see her—in a town of only 10,000.

Dyslexia Praecox. Susan started out with what should have been an insuperable handicap for an actress. She had dyslexia, a congenital brain condition that hampers her ability to read aloud. She still aches at memories of trying to get through London’s Hampshire School (founded by her mother). “I remember standing up in class trying to read Shakespeare, and I could hear all the other children sniggering and laughing, because I’d be literally making it up. I remember thinking: when I grow up, people are not going to laugh at me. So I thought, who do they respect now? Elizabeth Taylor or someone. I’ll be an actress.”

Finally, at age 16, she gave up school and went into repertory. She had learned to read silently and to remember her parts, but auditions and first readings were, as she says, “torture. The producer or playwright would think: Who is this cocky girl mucking up our masterpiece that we’ve been working on for years?” But 18 months, two companies, and more than 100 roles later, she finally arrived on the West End, playing a show-stopping cameo in Expresso Bongo with Paul Scofield.

BBC work, the Sidney Furie film During One Night, and Hollywood followed. By the end of her stay there, the bottom pinchers and a California crime scare had reduced her to sleeping with a tear-gas gun under her pillow. She was also scared off by the proffered parts, some of the available co-stars (“I had never acted opposite a brick wall before”), and the long-indenturing contracts proposed by two studios. After five months, she headed home with nothing to show but a 30,000-word journal, a real-life Nathanael West work that is too libelous to publish.

But once back in London, she was not above playing the starlet publicity game. Her main purpose was to try to free herself from the molasses morass of Disney pictures (The Three Lives of Thomasind) and from the “sweet, soppy, boring” debutante roles in which she was stuck. At one point, a columnist quoted her as saying she needed “somebody like Roger Vadim to bring me to full bloom.”

To land the Forsyte role, Susan arranged her initial meeting with Producer Donald Wilson at a French restaurant in London. She arrived early and managed to be deep in fluent conversation with the maitre d’hotel when he arrived. “She knew,” says Wilson, “that Fleur was half French. I thought that was an intelligent girl. And at once I was caught by her tremendous vivacity and the fact that she was very much a ’20s figure, which was very important for Fleur.” His casting choice was impeccable, for in every way she held her own in that top-class company. “The Saga,” says Co-Star Eric Porter, “was her first opportunity to show her true merit and full range—love, hate, envy, remorse and so on—and she showed that she can be a sensitive, intelligent and deeply revealing actress.”

After she finished Saga, Susan found her Frenchman. He turned out to be Pierre Granier-Deferre, who directed her first nude scene (with Charles Aznavour) in Paris in August and then married her. She now shuttles between a couple of cottages in Chelsea and an apartment in suburban Paris. France is for weekends and vacation, because it is about the only civilized country in the world where Susan has any privacy —Saga has not played there yet.

Now 29, Susan is temporarily retired while awaiting her first child. After that she would like to do a season with the British National Theater, and make serious films. In her TV and movie roles since Fleur she has been typecast once more. But this time Susan Hampshire likes it. “I love playing what people call bad characters,” she says. “They’ve got so much character.”