Rachel Roberts (3) (1927–1980)

Harrowing insight into the mind of brilliant actress Rachel Roberts through the diaries she kept in the last 18 months of her life and the words of her closest friends. Not remembered as she should be today -- and she's as much to blame for this as anything: how much time and talent did she waste in her life and untimely death? -- but she emerged as one of the most promising and respected actresses of her generation on the stage and in landmark British New Wave films Saturday Night & Sunday Morn...more Harrowing insight into the mind of brilliant actress Rachel Roberts through the diaries she kept in the last 18 months of her life and the words of her closest friends. Not remembered as she should be today -- and she's as much to blame for this as anything: how much time and talent did she waste in her life and untimely death? -- but she emerged as one of the most promising and respected actresses of her generation on the stage and in landmark British New Wave films Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, playing women of simmering sexual desire and lonely resignation with rare vitality and intensity. During the filming of This Sporting Life, she became Rex Harrison's fourth wife, and too much of her potential and sanity were lost to that relationship and the mark it left on her.

I dispute and rather resent the subtitle "A Fatal Passion of Unrequited Love" (omitted from my own edition, happily), because, aside from sounding quite tawdry, it's fair to neither party to suggest the divorce was the cause of all her problems or the whole reason she ultimately took her own life. The same drives and behaviors and fears existed before Harrison came into her life; she wonders and comes to various conclusions as to whether she would have ended in the same nightmare of alcoholism and incapacitating self-doubt with or without him.

In her writing -- lucid if increasingly desperate right up to the eve of her death -- it is clear she was also a wit and a talented writer: more than once she remarks that only her writing keeps her alive, and with the help she needed perhaps she could have been an accomplished novelist, too. With apparently an intention of having it published in some form, and partly as a therapeutic tool, she uses her journal to examine her life from birth with brutal honesty and almost completely devoid of accusation and defense. She recognizes her yearning for the fame and glamour her particular talents and looks never could have earned her; her need for love and assurance her inveterate promiscuity could not garner her; her wild behavior and desperation to be the life of the party, but more crucially, and harder for her to achieve, to feel "a part of things"; her ongoing hope, even as she acknowledges the impossibility, that life could be the idyll she once had and was later exiled from in Portofino -- all recounted in excruciating detail, exaggerated by an increasingly unstable and masochistic mind, distorted in memory by the filter of pills and alcohol. Well -- it's exhausting to read.

By the end, she gives up the therapeutic and more literary journal format in favor of keeping a contemporaneous diary. At the same time, she begins to speak more seriously and persistently about suicide. What comes before is difficult, but the writer seems essentially in control. The last few months are desperately sad, spiraling through past and present, increasingly certain of what afflicts her but also increasingly hopeless anything could save her from it. She searches for and is increasingly detached from the "little Ray" she was, the "Rachel Roberts, distinguished actress" she was. Even in these final days, her words are so clear one can almost understand how it might feel to, helpless but without self-pity, feel so entirely separate from life and self and others that going on is actually impossible.

Still, it is not easy to reconcile all this with the woman I've loved on the screen: so intense, so vibrant, passionate, powerful; nor to the woman her friends describe as infinitely giving and funny and energetic. Despite her problems, she fooled many -- and what remains, wonderfully and tragically, is the work of an astonishing actress. I wish this world could have given such a woman what she needed -- whatever that may have been -- to live in it, to feel finally a part of things, to thrive. What a sad thing, and what a waste, that there isn't more on the level of This Sporting Life to appreciate her in. She could have had that: but she denied herself that, she lost faith in that, she wasted that -- life, too, took that away from her. But I'm grateful for every moment that did come to life, and does survive, from this hauntingly sad, fascinating woman, from this almost peerlessly brilliant, almost forgotten actress.… (más)