Helen Fraser spent the 1960s as the ordinary woman standing next to the extraordinary one, the colleague who chatters while Catherine Deneuve stares at a crack. It took television, and eight years in the same pair of lace-ups, to give her the centre.
Fi1m perspective
There is a moment early in Repulsion (1965) when Catherine Deneuve stops on the pavement to stare at a crack, and the woman beside her keeps talking. That is Helen Fraser as Brigitte, Carol's colleague at the salon, going on about a boyfriend while the film's whole weather changes next to her. Polanski needs someone in the frame who is having an ordinary day, so that we can measure how far Deneuve has drifted from one, and Fraser is that someone. We remember being grateful for her, and then uneasy about it: her cheerful chatter is what makes Deneuve's silence so hard to sit through, and the film knows it.
That was her trade in the 1960s. She had broken through two years earlier as Barbara in Billy Liar (1963), opposite Tom Courtenay, and went on to play Lulu in the film of Pinter's The Birthday Party (1968). Friends, colleagues, the woman at the next desk: the parts were supporting, and there were a great many of them before anything larger came along. Television took her for the next three decades, in drama and in comedy alike, with Dick Emery, in Rising Damp, in The Likely Lads, as a doctor in One Foot in the Grave (1990). We have reviewed none of that and will not pretend otherwise.
The part that made her recognisable in Britain came late. From 1999 to 2006 she was Sylvia Hollamby, the prison officer the inmates of Bad Girls called Bodybag, across 91 episodes. The role began small and grew the way a long television part only does when the actor keeps feeding it: a home life, a sideline in ballroom dancing, the physical habits of a woman who has walked the same wing for years. "I made her my own in that I wore the same uniform for eight years, I refused to change and I wore the same shoes, in fact, I wore them out walking up and down the wing, they had to be resoled, my lace-ups." She took the part to the West End musical version in 2007. There has been voice work since, in Minions (2015), and then retirement.
Set the two ends of the career side by side and the same thing is there. Brigitte is on screen for a few minutes and is entirely a person: a job, a boyfriend, an opinion. Hollamby was on screen for eight years and Fraser built her out of one uniform and a pair of resoled shoes. Ordinariness is harder to play than madness, because nobody notices when it is done well. If you are choosing tonight, Repulsion is the one to click through to; when the camera leaves Deneuve's face, watch the woman beside her having a perfectly reasonable day.
Biography
Helen Fraser is an English actress. Born Helen Margaret Stronach on 15 June 1942 in Oldham, Lancashire, she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
She made her film debut in the early 1960s and gained notice for her role as Barbara in Billy Liar (1963). She appeared as Brigitte in Repulsion (1965) and later played Sylvia Hollamby in the television series Bad Girls (1999–2006). Other credits include A Kind of Loving (1962), From Beyond the Grave (1974) and One Foot in the Grave (1990). She reprised her Bad Girls role in the 2007 West End musical adaptation.
Fraser was married to recording engineer Peter Handford from 1964 until his death in 2007.
