Personal qualms aside, Billie comes off joyously monstrous in the movie as the Florence Nightmare of a nanny bedeviling Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. There was no problem in the shooting, Whitelaw says, because "you don't have a feeling of very much reality with that ketchup all over." As for oozing into such a seemingly antipathetic role, she explains, "I am just one step from an amoeba, doing everything from intuition."
That's, of course, a discountable self-put-down from a patently thoughtful 44-year-old talent, dubbed earlier "the thinking man's Venus" for a range of sizzling and intelligent performances—and a slightly sexaholic notoriety in the London tabloids. The one thing Billie wouldn't go to bed for, she says now, is a part. "That's where my North Country pride comes in." So it was pure artistry that led Lord Olivier to cast her as Desdemona opposite his Othello and to retain her for three seasons in his esteemed British National Theatre. Earlier on, she had starred in "angry young men" dramas in the West End. "We knocked people right back on their heels," Billie recalls, "with the audacity that you didn't have to speak like Noël Coward to play a love scene." She also won Britain's version of an Oscar and the National Society of Film Critics' Award in New York, stealing Charlie Bubbles from Albert Finney and Liza Minnelli.
Her current, and perhaps greatest, distinction is as absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett's chosen stage instrument. He inscribed her script of Footfalls, written especially for Whitelaw, "With love and wonderment." Rightly so: in it she was asked to perform for 35 minutes without blinking her eyes. Some extraordinary nights during the London run last spring, she almost managed it.
Nowadays Whitelaw barely blinks over her troublous past. It was an airman who almost raped her; later she had to be evacuated from her native Coventry during the Nazi bombardments that nearly destroyed the city. Sent to drama school at 11 to cure a stutter, she was within the month acting in the first of more than 500 BBC radio shows (always as a boy—her voice was croaky even then). At 16 she was in rep, and in 1951, after a four-week courtship, impetuously wed an actor her elder by a decade. As Billie now accounts for it, "I married my father, who died when I was 10—you don't need to be a psychiatrist to work that one out."
That led to what she calls "my late adolescence," which at one point included two simultaneous extramarital lovers. Then, in "a classic case of an actress overreacting," she hied herself to a Benedictine convent. A month's celibacy was not her salvation. In retrospect, she can now accept those years "with a certain amount of amusement and warmth—I had to learn through experience."
In 1966, after finally divorcing her first husband and meeting German-born critic-writer Robert Muller, says Whitelaw, she began to change from "free-wheeler to a deadly dull stay-at-home." Trouble was, Muller was still married. So when Billie bore his son out of wedlock nine years ago, she refused to name the sire—and caught Fleet Street flak for the four years it took Muller to marry her.
Today Billie and Robert live in a rambling, seven-bedroom Victorian house in London's tatty Camden Town, as loving but what she calls "exact opposites." She often scolds, "Will you stop being so tight-assed?" to which he'll return, "Will you stop being such a stupid little miffy?" Sexist sparring aside, Billie admits that around the house they have "a good division of labor." Since Robert, 50, is "the intellectual, a parody of your absentminded professor," Billie serves as family chauffeur and handy-person—replacing fuses and knocking up shelves. Robert compensates by running the kitchen. Not only is this a break from his scrivening, but, he says, "It would be churlish to ask her to make me a cup of tea after she comes home from a performance."
The Mullers, and especially Billie, stay resolutely off the London party circuit—" 'How to lose friends' is the way I live," she says. Whitelaw's current idea of a good time is to sketch, kick around a soccer ball with son Mathew and fall asleep to the radio. "I'm a bit of a recluse," she says, "very fond of my own company." And Robert's and Mathew's. She continues to reject movie offers that would take her on location and away from them, especially Mathew, who is still weakened from a severe attack of meningitis four years ago.
For now, Billie's mind is on a 15th-century cottage she and Robert are renovating, far from the madding crowd. There, she dreams, "My husband will be writing the great novel, and I'll be the Grandma Moses of Suffolk." Their place will also distance them from cinemas which may show the likes of The Omen. Would Whitelaw allow her son to attend the film? "Definitely not," she declares. Mathew "cannot bear to see pain and suffering." And Billie—whose own life has been part Feydeau and part Beckett—is determined to spare him.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
