Susannah York arrived as the English rose and spent the rest of the 1960s trying to be cast as something else. She was best as the still, sane figure in a loud room, and later as women coming apart.
Fi1m perspective
In Tom Jones (1963) everyone around Susannah York is shouting. Hugh Griffith's Squire Western roars at his dogs and falls off things, Edith Evans purses her lips at the whole county, and Albert Finney grins his way through Fielding. York plays Sophie Western, the one sane person in the picture, with a straight back and a good deal of patience. It is the hardest job in the film. We found ourselves watching her rather than the crowd, because she is the only one behaving as though the eighteenth century were real and not a party.
That was her breakthrough, and for a while it fixed her as a type. She had begun on screen in 1960 with Tunes of Glory, and The Greengage Summer (1961) and Tom Jones between them made her the fair, blue-eyed English girl who is decent and put upon and waits for the hero to grow up. She did not see herself that way. "I always felt that I was a character actor, I never felt that I was a star," she said, and the parts she chose bear it out. Freud (1962) had already given her a patient rather than a sweetheart. After A Man for All Seasons (1966), where she played Margaret More, came The Killing of Sister George (1968), then They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), as Alice, a woman losing her grip at a dance marathon, and Images (1972), Robert Altman's film about an author who may be losing her mind.
The shape is plain enough. For a decade she was hired for her composure, and then, increasingly, for what happened when it broke. Tony Richardson used the composure. Altman used the break. The fair complaint about the early years is that the sweet parts were too small for her, and that it took until the end of the 1960s for anyone to hand her a woman with something wrong inside. When they did, the composure turned out to have been the interesting thing all along: it is more frightening to watch a steady person come loose than a nervous one.
Later there was Superman (1978), as Lara, Superman's mother, a part she carried into the sequels, and after that a good deal of stage work, television and writing for children. She died in 2011. Start with Tom Jones, where she is doing the quiet job in a loud film and doing it properly. Then go looking for Images, and see what she did when a director finally stopped asking her to keep still.
Biography
Susannah York was an English actress. She played Sophie Western in Tom Jones (1963). She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and made her screen debut in Tunes of Glory (1960).
York appeared in A Man for All Seasons (1966) as Margaret More, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) as Alice LeBlanc, and the Superman films (1978, 1980, 1987) as Lara. She received a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and won the Best Actress award at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival for Images.
