Still from Black Narcissus (1947), Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell
Sister Ruth
Drowned beneath the fanfare of Obama’s upcoming inauguration festivities were the few obits sending off their polite barques for a curiously neglected actress from London, Kathleen Byron, dead at the age of 88 on January 18, 2009. For even the most ardent cinephiles, matching a film to her quaintly unremarkable name is a task. Though Byron’s prime years fell in an era when there was no such thing as overworking, she consented to a relatively limited filmography: an adjunct marm in a Spielberg film here, a mute lady of the gentry in a Jane Austen-destroying U.S. production there, mainly television and stage work from the early 60s on. She was a consummate filler, and nothing more.
But if you came across Byron’s aquiline, modern face in Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s semi-neglected 1947 masterpiece Black Narcissus, you would recall her immediately: the heretical Sister Ruth, a lustful ex-nun in a former seraglio high in the Lesser Himalyas, whose journey through madness, desire, and apostasy is the bloody heart of the film. Its leads, a porcelain Deborah Kerr and a musky David Farrar, are basically used as props to offset Byron’s (quite literal) fall from grace: a descent through the atmosphere (or as Kerr would roll, in her inimitable brogue, “the ehrrrr”) of ineffable, “exotic” lust that Anglicans are prone to suffer while far from home.
This still image of Byron applying her hypnotically garish lipstick is not only the primal axis of the movie, it serves also as the gateway to the eighteen-minute finale of bravura impropriety that permanently wedded the role to the identity of the actor. While Kerr’s self-denying Sister Clodagh was played adeptly but safely, Byron was given free rein to embody a character seemingly devoid of metaphysical limits, and crafted a stunning portrait of inescapable, irreligious malice: an ex-nun falling to her death trying to kill a quintessential Hollywood virgin, with the peak of Kangchenjunga looming in the background. The extreme close-up marks an act of final indiscretion, a harlot’s touch as an overture to modernity (there would be no singing of “Moon River” in the rest of Byron’s career). No matter how often I watch this scene, its freshness appears to me not just as camp, but as camp’s chapped-lipped, dirty-fingernailed genesis.
On every level, Sister Ruth’s was a suicidal role. Byron and Powell were lovers at the time of the film, and I can’t fathom whether she took the part as an actress first and lover second, or vice-versa—maybe it was the fog of authority that drove her to accept. Get thee to a nunnery. Powell offered her a caveat beforehand: it’s the best part in the movie, he told her, and one that he was virtually sure would ruin her career. It did. History notes she once pulled a gun on him, stark-naked in the bedroom a couple years after the film.
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James Bae is a contributing editor of Paper Monument.
In this ongoing series, writers choose and describe a single image.