Anna Massey

London's Nervous Gaze

Anna Massey did not have a face for conventional romance. Her sharp-angled features and large eyes conveyed a fragility that could break or turn sinister in an instant. In 1955 she made her stage debut in The Reluctant Debutante and earned a Tony nomination at just eighteen years old. She came from a line of acting royalty, but her style was far drier than that of her predecessors.

The daughter of Raymond Massey and Adrianne Allen, she grew up in an environment where prestige was measured by diction and stage presence. In 1958 she worked under the direction of John Ford in Gideon's Day. That experience was the prologue to a career that would always avoid the easy path to commercial stardom.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1960 she starred in Peeping Tom under the direction of Michael Powell. The film was savaged by British critics and nearly destroyed the director's career due to its brutality. Massey played Helen Stephens, the neighbor of a killer who filmed his victims as they died. It was a restrained performance amid a national scandal that would take decades to be recognized as a masterpiece.

The method of coldness

Alfred Hitchcock called her in 1972 for Frenzy. The director was looking for a naturalness he could not find in the Hollywood stars of the time. Massey accepted the role of Babs Milligan, a waitress with a fatal fate in a truck full of potatoes. The shoot was technical and cold. She recalled that the director barely gave her any direction because he blindly trusted her ability to convey panic.

But film was not her only refuge.

British television allowed her to explore far more complex and less physical characters. In 1986 she starred in Hotel du Lac, and her performance as Edith Hope earned her the BAFTA Award for Best Actress. She managed to convey a devastating loneliness without resorting to the usual tricks of television drama. Her economy of gesture became her personal signature during the 1980s.

Because her voice could suggest a threat or utter vulnerability without moving a single muscle. Casting directors therefore sought her out for roles as aristocratic, repressed or outright dangerous women. In 1992 she took part in the adaptation of Emily’s Ghost and kept taking on projects nonstop.

Writing and Silence

She published her autobiography in 2006 under the title Telling Some Tales. In this book she recounted, with cutting honesty, her difficult relationship with her mother and the failure of her first marriage to Jeremy Brett. She did not adopt a self-pitying tone. She simply laid out the facts with the same precision she brought to her stage scripts.

In 2004 she shot The Machinist alongside Christian Bale in a production that demanded a dark, oppressive tone. Even over the years, she kept her ability to unsettle the audience with a single look. Her screen presence was always a guarantee of technical rigor above any other aesthetic consideration.

Before filming, she would read the script until she had memorized the pauses of the other actors. In 2008 she appeared in the series Tess of the D'Urbervilles playing Mrs. d'Urberville. It was one of her last jobs before her health definitively declined.

She died in London on July 3, 2011, from breast cancer at the age of 73.