Nell Campbell has one performance almost everyone knows and a screen career made of small parts arranged around it. As Columbia she gives The Rocky Horror Picture Show its tap-dancing pulse; nothing since has asked her for anything so specific.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through 'The Time Warp', Columbia breaks away from the chorus and taps. It is a solo, brief and exact, and it is the one stretch of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) where somebody is doing something difficult rather than something outrageous. We have seen the film more times than is sensible, and that is still the moment we sit up for, because Campbell is a trained dancer and the steps are real, and everything around her is dressing-up.
She had the part before the film did. Jim Sharman cast her as Columbia in the original 1973 stage production at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, having spotted her working as a soda jerk; before that she had been busking in London, tap dancing and singing 1930s songs. The film followed, and then a run of British work that suited her: Sandra in Rock Follies of '77 (1977), Crabs in Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978), Nurse Ansalong in Shock Treatment (1981), which put her back with Richard O'Brien and Sharman, and Beth in The Killing Fields (1984). Then the parts thin out. She spent most of the eighties and nineties running a nightclub in New York, and the screen roles since have been occasional: Great Expectations (1998), Palm Beach (2019).
What she does well is movement and presence in a crowd. She is a performer who registers in ensembles, particularly the cult and punk-adjacent ones, and Jubilee is a better film for having her in it. What she has rarely been given is a part that needs her to sit still and be looked at for a scene at a time. In Great Expectations she plays Erica Thall, and our review, which scored the film 62, found no reason to mention her; that is a fair measure of the role rather than of her.
She has been called Australia's most famous unknown actor, and the label is unkind but not wrong. It is also, by her own account, partly her doing. "I say yes to everything; I'm up for anything," she has said, and a career built on saying yes to whatever is nearest tends to look like hers: lively, scattered, and remembered for the one time the nearest thing happened to be a part that fitted her exactly. If you want to know what she can do, there is one film, and you probably already know the dance.
Biography
Nell Campbell, also known as Little Nell, is an Australian actress and singer. Born Laura Elizabeth Campbell on 24 May 1953 in Sydney, she trained in ballet, modern dance, tap and singing from the age of ten. After moving to London at 18, she worked as a busker before being cast as Columbia in the original stage production of The Rocky Horror Show.
She reprised the role in the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show and appeared as Nurse Ansalong in the 1981 sequel Shock Treatment. Other film roles include Beth in The Killing Fields (1984) and Erica Thrall in Great Expectations (1998). She also played Sandra in the television series Rock Follies of '77.
Campbell released an EP, The Musical World of Little Nell, in 1978 and opened the New York nightclub Nell's in 1986, which she ran until 2004. Her sister is the artist Cressida Campbell.
