Sweet Lorraine

Remembering Lorraine Ansell, indie film actress

There are certain actresses I can't see without thinking about her, as if, accidentally, they are mediums conjuring up her departed spirit: the two Annes - Baxter and Bancroft - and the one and only, Marilyn Monroe.

They fall into two distinct categories, as she, an actress I worked with for some fifteen years on stage, on TV and in independent movies, was very much two people: bubbly comic ingénue and mature, seductive woman.

There was a third dimension to her - a conservatism that might have cost her the thing she so desperately craved: attention on its largest scale. She could never fully devote herself to the property, could never, Stanislavsky-style, expose her rawest inner self to the masses whose applause, nevertheless, meant so much to her. It was a sense of propriety passed on by her British-born parents I always suspected, compounded, no doubt, by the fact that her father was a military policeman.

Still, she was good, always good; as accidentally alluring as Baxter, as pert and alive as Marilyn, as sly and certain as Bancroft.

Hers was not the big screen glory that they enjoyed - more a low-show business diet of amateur stage productions, dinner theatre, TV ads and indies - but my faith in cosmic justice is renewed now that she can be seen alongside Baxter, Bancroft and Monroe as part of a day's television viewing, as the films I wrote in which she appeared (Two's A Mob, House Of Luk, Kiss Of Debt) continue to pop up on movie channels.

She was 49 - just 49 - when she passed away last fall. Lorraine Ansell, local actress, dies. She had returned from her high school reunion, a triumphant affair, high on life. The next day, there was blood in her urine.

A beautiful woman - close-cropped copper hair, eyes like tea-colored marbles, an explosive little laugh - she lay in her coffin after a tough battle with cancer sickly-looking and still, for the only time in her existence badly miscast.

Ironic as it sounds, I sometimes dwell on that image to reassure myself that she is in her ideal element these days: the screen - in whole through the films I was happy to write for her, and in part, through the name-actresses she has taken her proper place, even if it had to be the hard way, alongside.