WHEN Barbara Shelley left us this week aged 88, the cult world lost one of its finest ever leading ladies. In a career stretching back to the 1950s, she graced some of the finest science fiction and horror titles in British film history and lit up many of the greatest and most beloved television series ever made.
Those cult TV appearances in everything from The Avengers to Doctor Who and even Eastenders are worthy of a column in their own right, but it's her celluloid CV that we'll focus on here.
From unforgettable sci-fi fables to Gothic horror favourites she cut a stylish swathe through genre cinema in an era when strong female roles were hard to find. She could play the damsel in distress figure like the very best of the buxom Hammer starlets of the age and she gave good scream when a be-fanged Christopher Lee was baring down on her, but she was always much more than just another 'scream queen' from the golden age of horror.
Her striking looks – she started her professional life as a model –may have helped her grab those leading lady roles, but her cool, cultured onscreen demeanour allowed her to dig a lot deeper into them than most of her contemporaries. Check out the restrained, almost aloof dignity she brings to her key performance in director Terence Fisher's dreamlike work of Gothic beauty The Gorgon from 1964, or the considered and nuanced role she plays in Wolf Rilla's 1961 adaptation of John Wyndham's novel Village Of The Damned.
In The Gorgon she shifts between demure nurse to the human form of the mythical monster who can turn her victims to stone (although the actual Gorgon of the title was played by Prudence Hyman) with ease, while she adds an affecting air of sadness and loss to her Village Of The Damned performance as a unsuspecting mother of one of those scary blond haired children from another world.
Her performance in Dracula Prince Of Darkness (1966) is another career high point, with Shelley crafting an astonishing performance that sees her character lurch from repressed Victorian tourist to rabid vampire with an insatiable carnal lust once old Chris Lee bites down on her. The sequence where she is restrained by a team of monks as they drive a stake through her heart to 'release' her from her torment is one of the greatest in horror cinema history.
Her final genre role of the 60's remains possibly her finest however. As Barbara Judd in the mighty Quatermass And The Pit (1967), she plays a palaeontologist's assistant who falls under the influence of the aliens and channels their memories, with shocking results. She would mostly divert herself away from horror and science fiction after that highlight, perhaps fearing the shadow of type casting, and rarely returned to such fare, despite her willingness to appear on the fan circuit in later years.
Like everything else Shelley did in her onscreen career though, that Quatermass appearance embodied all that was good about her work. A strong, believable and dignified onscreen presence, she will be sadly missed.
