Judith Furse was the woman British cinema put in a habit, a nurse's uniform or a villain's chair for thirty years because of how she looked. She did the work well, and we wish more directors had asked her for anything else.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Black Narcissus (1947) for its performances, as we recommend, and you will probably not come away talking about Sister Briony. That is the point of her. Furse plays one of the nuns who hold the convent together while the film's attention goes to the women falling apart, and the dossier's word for it, steadfast, is the right one. A supporting actor of her kind is meant to be furniture that breathes, and she breathed.
She had trained at the Old Vic in the early 1930s and was on stage by the end of that decade, and her films run from 1939 to 1972, nearly all of them in support. The early parts are the gentle ones. In Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) she is Flora, the travelling companion to Greer Garson, and there is a warmth there the later work rarely asked for. Then the casting settled. Heavy-set, with what the trade euphemistically called masculine looks, she was handed the overbearing and the authoritative: Nurse Gamage in The Man in the White Suit (1951), Mrs Williamson in The Browning Version (1951), and in time the comic villain Doctor Crow in Carry On Spying (1964).
It saddened us a little, going back through the list, to see how completely a face decided a career. Furse was plainly capable of the sympathetic and the austere, since she did both in films we rate, and the industry decided she was funny to look at and built parts around that. The Carry On films were not cruel about it, exactly, but they were not curious either. Her final film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), has her as Claude, a drag king, which reads as the joke finally said aloud.
We cannot tell you she was a great actor, because British cinema never gave her a part big enough to prove it one way or the other. We can tell you she was a reliable one, and that in Black Narcissus and Goodbye, Mr. Chips she is part of why the worlds hold. If you want to see what she could do with a real part, you will be looking for a very long time; the films did not make one for her.
Biography
Judith Furse (4 March 1912 – 29 August 1974) was an English actress. She was the daughter of Lieutenant-General Sir William Furse and the sister of Roger Furse, a stage designer and painter who also worked in films.
She was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and studied theatre at the Old Vic in the early 1930s. She began her stage career by the end of the decade and appeared in films from 1939. Her roles included Flora in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Sister Briony in Black Narcissus (1947), Nurse Gamage in The Man in the White Suit (1951) and Mrs Williamson in The Browning Version (1951). She also appeared in several Carry On films, including Carry On Regardless (1961), Carry On Cabby (1963) and Carry On Spying (1964). Her final screen role was in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972).
