Lila Kaye was good at playing women who expected to be obeyed. Her conflicted barmaid in An American Werewolf in London shows how much she could do when a small part gave that authority something to contend with.
Fi1m perspective
In An American Werewolf in London (1981), Lila Kaye’s barmaid tries to warn the visitors to a Yorkshire pub. Her concern and reluctance make the warning more unsettling than a simple instruction to be careful. We felt uneasy because she seemed to care what happened to these strangers, even as she struggled to tell them. Kaye gives us enough of the woman’s difficulty to make a small encounter matter in a film with considerably more conspicuous ways of frightening us.
Her early television work included Cathy Come Home (1966), while the Royal Shakespeare Company gave her substantial character parts on stage. She played Mrs Squeers and Mrs Crummles in the Broadway Nicholas Nickleby (1981), drawing on the sternness and sentiment that also suited her screen work. The American sitcom Mama Malone (1984), created by Terrence McNally, then put her at the centre as an Italian-American matriarch. Her accent persuaded many viewers that she was American. Comic timing and warmth were stronger reasons to watch, though the thin material limited what a leading part could offer.
Nuns on the Run (1990) returns her to a smaller job, playing Sister Mary of the Annunciation with a formidable manner. The casting makes sense, but it offers less of the uncertainty that makes her barmaid interesting. Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane are amusing in their disguises; Jonathan Lynn’s film struggles to sustain the farce and keeps interrupting it with car chases. We would not recommend it for Kaye alone, nor blame a supporting actor for a comedy that has too little to keep its leads occupied.
John Landis’s horror-comedy is the better place to start with Kaye, though its romance receives less care than its monster. The pub scene lets her be authoritative without making her indifferent to the visitors, and that matters to our sense of danger. Go for the painful effects and the dry jokes about Britain, but give the barmaid your attention before the monster arrives.
Biography
Lila Kaye (7 November 1929 – 10 January 2012) was an English actress. She spent several years working in the United States on Broadway and in television before returning to England.
She appeared in the film An American Werewolf in London (1981) as the Barmaid. Other film roles included See No Evil (1971), Nuns on the Run (1990) and Dragonworld (1994). On television she played Lillian Huxley in Cheers (1982), Teresa Mancini in Murder, She Wrote (1984), Mrs Mordecai Smith in Sherlock Holmes (1984) and Granny Jekyll in Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde (1998). She was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and appeared in its production of Nicholas Nickleby on Broadway in 1981.
