“I don’t think the sight of a naked body ever harmed anyone,” reasoned Anne Heywood when asked, for the hundredth time, about her erotic appearance in The Fox, a 1967 adaptation of a DH Lawrence novella about two women on a struggling chicken farm in rural Canada. “Nudity can be beautiful — and beauty is but the spirit breaking through the flesh.”
Heywood played the tough and reserved Ellen March, who has an affair with the more garrulous and skittish Jill Banford — played by Sandy Dennis — then agrees to marry a handsome sailor (Keir Dullea) who turns up at the wintry farm in search of his grandfather. Starring in a lesbian sex scene at a time when such content was almost non-existent never fazed Heywood, even when she was hounded by the press after Playboy splashed stills from the film in a feature entitled “The tale of primordial passions”. “I felt the controversial scenes were done with delicacy and taste,” said the Birmingham-born actress. “It means nothing to simply be sensational. Life has to be molded into art.”
It was produced by her husband Raymond Stross, who was 16 years her senior and just as nonchalant about the nudity, explaining: “I am never embarrassed by good taste — only by pornography.” He lobbied for The Fox for more than a year but producers were wary, despite the fact that Hollywood had the year before rejected the Hays moral code, a set of censorship guidelines in place since the 1930s which discouraged, among other things, “sexual perversion” on screen.
Heywood was determined because she believed in the character and the story, and the lesbian scenes, she said, were only a small part of that. “In the last paragraph, when Ellen marries the man and goes away, Lawrence writes that she would remain her own woman,” she reflected. “That’s Ellen! She was concerned with the autonomy of the human being. She was a wife, but also a woman and an individual. She demanded the respect which women have fought for and are eventually beginning to win.”
Despite the moral outrage — one court in Mississippi convicted a cinema owner of obscenity after a screening of the film — The Fox won best English-language foreign film at the 1968 Golden Globes and Heywood was nominated for best actress, shooting her to fame as both a serious actress and an international sex symbol. “It was always there, I always wanted to play full-blooded sexual women, but I never got a chance in England,” she said. “I don’t know what the producers saw when they looked at me.”
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Heywood’s time in the limelight was, however, brief, in part because she was drawn to troubled characters rather than the fluffy roles Hollywood had in mind. She played a tortured transgender soldier in I Want What I Want (1972); a Latin teacher who is fired after being raped by a janitor in Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979); and starred in a series of “nunsploitation” films including as a violated, murderous abbess in the $2.5 million production of The Lady of Monza (1969) and a sister struggling with her vows of celibacy in The Nun and the Devil (1973), in which she made her second appearance in an erotic scene with another woman. “I’m attracted to strange parts because they are more complicated than those of straightforward persons,” she said. “You have to dig deep to find out how they tick.”
She was born Violet Joan Pretty in 1931 in a council house in Birmingham, one of seven children to Harold, a toolmaker and orchestral violinist, and Edna (née Lowndes), who died when she was 12. In bringing up her younger siblings, Violet had to abandon an early ambition to go to art college.
During the war she worked in an armaments factory in Coventry and aged 15 left Fentham Secondary Modern School in Erdington to work as an usherette at her local ABC cinema, kindling an interest in acting. Her early success, however, was as a beauty queen: she placed first in the Morecambe and Heysham bathing beauty competition and after winning more than 14 titles, and a total of £1,800, was crowned Miss Great Britain in 1950. “My motives were completely mercenary,” she admitted. “I wanted to be a film star. So I decided to get as much money and publicity as I could. The film business is like any other — you’re much more likely to get the job if you don’t need it.”
Finding work on the big screen was harder than Heywood had envisaged but she was savvy and ambitious and after training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art she joined the Highbury Players in Birmingham then toured Britain with Carroll Levis’s Discovery Show.
In 1955 the Rank Organisation spotted her playing the (male) lead in Aladdin at the Chelsea Palace and she was offered a seven-year contract: in The Depraved (1957) she was as an adulterous wife who plots to kill her abusive husband, and in Violent Playground (1958) she played, with some verisimilitude, a working-class girl bringing up her family in poverty in Liverpool. She changed her name to Anne Heywood because “nobody believed it was real”, she told one interviewer, and “Violet is all wrong for me, don’t you think? I’m not the shrinking type and I hope I wasn’t born to blush unseen.”
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It was while filming A Terrible Beauty, which focuses on an IRA unit in Northern Ireland in the Second World War, that she met and married Raymond Stross, the film’s producer, in 1960. They moved to Zurich and started their own production company. He reportedly paid annual premiums to Lloyd’s of London for a policy to insure her eyes, which were, he said, her greatest asset. “They can change from brown to hazel to blue-grey and even an occasional purple.”
After The Fox — there were rumours of a fist fight between Stross and Dullea, who felt she was being favoured by the producer — he cast her in the sci-fi thriller The Brain (1962), Ninety Degrees in the Shade (1965), about a love affair in communist Czechoslovakia, and Midas Run (1969), a comedy about an aircraft heist featuring Fred Astaire in one of his final roles. She is understood to have changed the script so much that the screenwriters took out ads in the paper to thank her and had their names removed from the credits. That year she also appeared opposite Gregory Peck in the spy drama The Chairman.
In 1972 Stross produced another adaptation of a novella by DH Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away, set on the plains of Mexico. “We are filming in a very rugged terrain,” Stross said at the time. “I must make sure Anna is pleased with the accommodations. If not, I may have to retitle the movie to The Woman Who Drove Away.”
Two years after Stross’s death in 1988 she remarried George Druke, a former assistant attorney-general in New York, and retired from the camera. Druke died in 2021. She is survived by a son, Mark, from her first marriage.
A lifelong disciple of the Stanislavsky method, in which “acting comes from inner feeling”, Heywood would tell blushing interviewers that the erotic scenes from The Fox materialised from within. “You can’t really act sexy,” she said. “You have to feel it and then everyone gets the message from the look in your eyes.”
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Anne Heywood, actress, was born on December 11, 1931. She died of cancer on October 27, 2023, aged 91