fri 29/03/2024

Celebrating Angela Scoular, 1945-2011 | reviews, news & interviews

Celebrating Angela Scoular, 1945-2011

Celebrating Angela Scoular, 1945-2011

Not just the bubbliest of Bond girls, she epitomised exquisite young languor

In Clive Donner’s 1968 Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, which was released on DVD earlier this year, Barry Evans plays Jamie, a Stevenage sixth-former whose rush to lose his virginity leads him into a series of muted misadventures with girls. They are played by the likes of Adrienne Posta, Judy Geeson, Sheila White and Vanessa Howard. Jamie is randy but sweet, scarcely a rake, and Donner’s jocular film transcends its Swinging Sixties sex comedy label by getting under the skin of teenage doubt and desire. Geeson, playing the luscious blonde Jamie idealises, is the nominal female lead, but the most captivating performance was given by the delicately featured Angela Scoular, then 23 - and exquisite.

Her character, Caroline Beauchamp, is the supposedly sybaritic daughter of upper-class fools (Denholm Elliott and Maxine Audley). Jamie meets her in a pub where she’s playing a fruit machine in a pair of enormous spectacles and repeatedly drawling the one word, “Soopah!” They subsequently have a golfing date and another at a clothing store where Caroline preens adorably for the camera, dressed and accessorised in DayGlo Carnaby Street fashions. It’s not so much acting as spectacularly mannered posing, but Scoular carries it off with near-Surrealistic aplomb. Geeson's Mary may be Jamie’s dream girl, but Caroline is a girl from a dream.

In an intimate moment by the tennis court at the family pile where she has invited him for the weekend, Caroline indicates with the gleam in her eye that tonight will be the night for lucky Jamie. Amid much nocturnal wandering by her parents, brother and the German au pair, Jamie finds his way into the right room, where “Capable Caroline”, as she misleadingly calls herself, lurches suddenly from slinky to skittish to childish, then falls into a drunken stupor.

Scoular.McShane_in_Wuthering_HeightsThere’s no reason to impute overt seriousness in this detumescent farce, but there’s a touching truthfulness about Scoular’s portrayal of a girl who thinks she wants to have sex and intends to go through with it, but who is either too jaded or too scared.

Jamie is philosophical about it. She drives him to school the next day as if nothing has happened and then disappears (except for a shot at the end that discloses she became a croupier). Evans is charming throughout, but after Scoular leaves, the film's energy drops. By the time Jamie has sex with one of the others and finds himself alone with the willing Mary, he finds his ardour has cooled and that he’s hankering for a relationship with someone like Diane Keen’s Claire, the “nice class of person” he glimpses on the street at the end.

But where’s Caroline, one wonders, and why didn’t she become the lovely girlfriend he would visit in Chelsea on his university holidays? Then the realisation sinks in: she's out of his league and too neurotic.

Her signature role would be her beloved Ruby Bartlett, curly-haired vamp of James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Scoular_in_BondScoular committed suicide last week after a two-year battle with colon cancer. She had lost the will to live, said her husband, the actor Leslie Phillips - a tragic ending for a delightful actress who could, in one deft, daft turn, communicate such complicated pleasure. Caroline wasn’t her signature role. That would be her beloved Ruby Bartlett, curly-haired vamp of James Bond (George Lazenby - the pair pictured above) in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969); her first Bond girl was Agent Buttercup, who bathes with David Niven in Casino Royale (1966).

Films like Doctor in Trouble (1970, with Phillips), Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976, which reunited her with Evans, Geeson and Posta) and Adventures of a Private Eye (1977) only cemented her posh-totty image.

If this sounds like so much trivia, Scoular was also a winning Juliet in a filmed 1965 RADA production, a feral, bratty Cathy Earnshaw (and a demure Catherine Linton) opposite Ian McShane (the two pictured top right) in the BBC’s 1967 Wuthering Heights. She appeared with Marlon Brando in A Countess From Hong Kong (1967) and Jeanne Moreau in the 1968 film of Shaw’s Great Catherine. On TV, she was in Coronation Street (1972), Beryl’s Lot (1974) and Penmarric (1979), and much more. Her stage work included Black Comedy (1968-69), Hamlet (1971), Absurd Person Singular (1974) and Little Lies (1983-84). As well as Phillips, whom she married in 1982, she leaves a son from a previous relationship.

Scoular maintained her trademark amused smile as the adulterous Lady Agatha Shawcross in 18 episodes of Jimmy Perry and David Croft's You Rang, M’Lord? (1988-93), in which Caroline Beauchamp lived again in lustful middle age, albeit in the 1920s. Scoular may not have been a Moreau or a Dench, but when it came to espousing sexy, soignée languor, she had no peers.

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