In 1992, the Observer took a look at high-end on-screen nudity, talking to the young women ‘not afraid to bare all in the name of quality entertainment’.
‘Not afraid’? Maybe. Rudi Davies needed ‘a few stiff drinks’ before playing an 18-year-old involved with an older man in TV drama A Sense of Guilt. ‘There you are with three cameras and loads of people, all looking at your breasts.’ Others implied it was a necessary if not welcome career rite of passage; ‘a way to an Equity card’. For Tara Fitzgerald, star of The Camomile Lawn, ‘when you’re young and nubile you have to do these things’. After, she said, came a ‘barren period when no one wants you to undress anyway’ before eternal rest as a ‘character actress’. Jennifer Ehle agreed it was a business decision – ‘The good parts take their clothes off’ – but of her own often-unclothed role in The Camomile Lawn said: ‘I don’t particularly want to do it again.’
If you didn’t grit your teeth and strip, there might be consequences. Gina Bellman refused to get naked to play a 16-year-old hanging around her bedroom. ‘I said it was ridiculous because teenagers just don’t do that.’ The director wrote to her saying: ‘If you continue to be vain in your career it will count against you.’
Although the article claimed the actresses ‘do not seem perplexed or pressured’, iIt’s an uneasy picture of the industry long before #Metoo and intimacy coordinators. (Ehle even left a post-interview message to say she didn’t want to be described as a feminist.)
A table highlighted age gaps between male and female co-stars in recent steamy dramas – a whopping 60 years separated Gina Bellman and Michael Gough in Dennis Potter’s Blackeyes – and the argument that in-context nudity was artistically essential got short shrift. ‘What’s in context to a warm, fully dressed, probably male producer may not seem so appealing to an actress who is tired, cold and unsure whether her water retention is showing.’
