Eleanor Bron's screen work is a run of small, exact parts played by a woman who knows more than anyone else in the scene. The satire boom gave her that authority; the films of the late 1960s used it well, and later ones too rarely.
Fi1m perspective
Watch her in Alfie (1966). Michael Caine is laid up in hospital with a bad chest, already sizing up the nurses, and Eleanor Bron's doctor tells him he needs rest. She means rest. He hears the word convalescence and thinks of leisure. We laughed at that exchange, and on reflection more of the laugh is hers than his: she plays it as plain medical advice and leaves him to do the mishearing. It is a few minutes of a 114-minute film, and it is the Bron method in miniature. She is the sane one in the scene, and the comedy comes from everyone else failing to notice.
That sanity was learned in the satire boom. She began in the 1959 Cambridge Footlights revue The Last Laugh alongside Peter Cook, and went on to the BBC in programmes such as Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, working in sketches with John Fortune. Film arrived in 1965 with the Beatles picture, in which she played Ahme, and for four years she was busy: Alfie, then Margaret Spencer in Bedazzled (1967), the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore satire, Two for the Road the same year, and Hermione Roddice in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969). Two of those were for Stanley Donen, which suggests at least one director knew what he had.
The parts share a type. She is the intellectual, the society figure, the woman with a qualification or a title or a firm opinion, and she is funny because she never plays the opinion as a joke. Critics have noticed the same thing for sixty years: sharp timing in ensembles, an authority that can tip into eccentricity, and the ability to carry a dramatic supporting role when a film is serious enough to give her one. That is a gift and it is also a ceiling. After the early 1970s the film roles thinned while stage and television kept her occupied, and the screen work became a matter of turning up, altering the temperature of a scene, and leaving.
Television has treated her better than cinema since. As Patsy's mother in Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2004) she had a recurring part built on the timing the films stopped asking for, and there have been guest turns in Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War. Theatre has been constant throughout, with National Theatre and West End credits, and she writes. If you are new to her, start with Alfie, which is the one we have reviewed and rate, and watch what she does with two minutes and a diagnosis. Then wonder, as we did, why so few directors gave her a third.
Biography
Eleanor Bron (born 14 March 1938) is an English actress and author. She was born in Stanmore, Middlesex, and educated at the North London Collegiate School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read Modern Languages. She began performing with the Cambridge Footlights in the late 1950s.
Bron's film roles include Ahme in Help! (1965), the Doctor in Alfie (1966), Margaret Spencer in Bedazzled (1967) and Hermione Roddice in Women in Love (1969). On television she has appeared in Doctor Who, Yes Minister and as Patsy's mother in Absolutely Fabulous (1992 onwards). She has also written for stage and screen.
