Kathleen Byron makes an exchange of looks feel dangerous without turning distress into a spectacle we can comfortably enjoy. Her force in Black Narcissus earns its reputation, but the quieter intelligence of her acting deserves attention too.
Fi1m perspective
In Black Narcissus (1947), Kathleen Byron makes an exchange of looks feel unsafe. We were frightened by her, and it was the hard concentration of her gaze as Sister Ruth that did it. Her intensity makes sense beside the more controlled acting around her. She also makes Ruth’s distress too immediate for us to regard her simply as a problem for somebody else to manage.
Her appearance as an angel in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) came during the early run of work with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. They gave her the parts that most clearly show what she could do, from that ethereal presence to Ruth and then Susan in The Small Back Room (1949). Opposite David Farrar, she brings intelligence and warmth to the more restrained leading role of a long-suffering partner. That performance is worth remembering whenever Ruth’s threatening intensity is treated as the only thing Byron had to offer.
Her disagreement with Powell about how to play Ruth helps explain why the performance holds. He wanted her to overstate the madness; Byron argued that Ruth did not know she was mad. The film still sometimes approaches a crude division between a sensible woman and a hysterical one, which is a real weakness in something we otherwise admire. Byron keeps the suffering clear enough that we cannot settle for the label, even when the film seems close to doing so.
After Ruth, she was too often asked to play neurotic women. A Hollywood part in Young Bess (1953) was followed by a return to Britain, mostly B-films and, from the mid-1950s, increasing television work. It is a dispiriting use of an actress who had already shown such warmth as Susan; the problem was not a shortage of things she could do. Start with Black Narcissus, then try The Small Back Room before deciding that Ruth tells the whole story.
Biography
Kathleen Byron was a British actress. Born Kathleen Elizabeth Fell on 11 January 1921 in Manor Park, Essex (now part of London), she trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and began her career on stage and in film in the late 1930s.
She appeared as an angel in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and as Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus (1947), both directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Her later screen work included roles in The Elephant Man (1980), Emma (1996), Les Misérables (1998) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), as well as television appearances in series such as Midsomer Murders and The Avengers.
