Spellbinding British actress and frequent muse to playwright Samuel Beckett, Billie Whitelaw, has died at age 82.
“I could have easily have become a nun, or a prostitute, or both,” Billie Whitelaw is quoted in The Guardian as saying. Instead, she claimed that acting had allowed her to use both these sides of herself in a career that included theater, films, television – and a special place in the affection and inspiration of Samuel Beckett.
By the time the playwright died in 1989, Whitelaw had established herself not only as one of his favourite interpreters, if not the favourite, but also as one of his trusted confidantes.
Her voice had a big an effect on Beckett. When he saw her in his work Play at the Old Vic in 1964, he determined to write especially for her.
The result was Not I, a 16-minute monologue for a jabbering mouth plucked out in a dark void. Although Jessica Tandy played the first performances in New York in 1972, Whitelaw’s pell-mell, pent-up words of a lifetime were a sensation at the Royal Court theatre in London the following year. She called the experience “the most telling event of my professional life”.
Beckett then directed her in the premiere of Footfalls (1976), a rapt dialogue for a woman and her unseen mother; also in a revival of Happy Days (1979) – in which the post-nuclear Winnie is seen buried up to her waist, then her neck – both at the Royal Court. When Winnie sang her love song to the waltz of The Merry Widow, she did so just as Beckett had sung it to her, in a frail and quavering voice.
One of the attractions of Whitelaw for Beckett was her intellectual innocence. There was no attempt to justify the work. She performed what he wrote and became, much to her own surprise, a lecturer on the American college circuit, though she only ever talked about the plays she knew and had appeared in. “Like many men,” she said, “the older he got the more attractive he became – at least as seen through a woman’s eyes.”
Watch Whitelaw as that “jabbering mouth plucked out of a dark void” in Not I, below.
And who could forget her diabolical turn as Mrs Baylock, the devilish nanny, in The Omen?
She was always a personal hero of mine. Sad to see she’s gone.
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