Sue Longhurst

Sue Longhurst
Born (1943-01-27) 27 January 1943
Bognor Regis
Height 5 ft 5 in (1.65 m)

Sue Longhurst is an English actress, most famous for appearing in several X-rated sex comedies in the 1970s.

Personal life

Born on 27 January 1943, Sue trained at the Royal Academy of Music, and was initially a music teacher, but was soon posing for magazines, record sleeves, book covers & TV commercials, as well as spending 18 months advertising Player's cigarettes.

Career

She made her acting debut, aged 27, in 1971 in Hammer Horror's Lust for a Vampire, playing a schoolgirl at a boarding school. Longhurst also made an appearance in the 1971 film Straw Dogs, as an uncredited stunt double for actress Susan George during the dramatic fire scene. Her second major movie role came in the 1973 production The Secrets of A Door-To-Door Salesman, followed by Keep It Up Jack, directed by Derek Ford.[1][2]

Longhurst's first film of 1974 was The Over-Amorous Artist, but she also had supporting roles in comedy sketch shows with Dick Emery and Charlie Drake as well as small parts in sitcoms like Please Sir. For a brief time she was also a hostess on ITV gameshow The Golden Shot where she appeared with celebrity guests Barbara Windsor and Sid James, replacing "dizzy" Anne Aston. She also features briefly in the Hylda Baker sitcom Not On Your Nellie (1974), in an episode entitled “The Apartment” in which Baker’s character has to stay in the Chelsea flat of a famous model (Longhurst). While Longhurst’s character never actually appears in the episode, photos of her (specially taken for the episode) are used as props, and feature heavily in the apartment set.

Her next movie of 1974 was Can You Keep It Up For A Week? in which she played consultant psychiatrist Mrs Bristol. This was followed by Confessions of a Window Cleaner, in which, famously, her character takes the virginity of Timmy Lea played by Robin Askwith in a kitchen covered in foam.

In 1975, Longhurst appeared in Girls Come First, which also included a then-unknown Hazel O'Connor in the cast. Her second film of that year was probably her most popular international movie: What the Swedish Butler Saw, (also known as Champagnegalopp or A Man with a Maid or The Groove Room in the United States). In the movie, which is loosely based on the 1908 erotic novel The Way of a Man with a Maid, a young gentleman is desperate to win the love of his beloved, and greedy, Lady Alice Faversham (Longhurst) and forces her to submit to him. She spends much of her screen time in the nude.[3][4]

In 1976, Longhurst starred as Lady Cockshute in Keep It Up Downstairs, again alongside Diana Dors.[5]

Longhurst's penultimate film, and the biggest hit of her career[6] was the 1977 movie Come Play With Me, directed by George Harrison Marks.[7] Starring alongside Mary Millington and Suzy Mandel, Longhurst had a supporting role as Christina, the girlfriend of an inept gangster, played by comedy actor Ronald Fraser, whose gang is behind an influx of forged notes into the British economy. The movie ran for nearly four years in London's West End. Longhurst's final film was the minor 1979 release Can I Come Too?, which starred an aged Charlie Chester. After a spell of illness, she retired from acting in 1981.

However, in 1996, Longhurst returned to the camera for an interview in David McGillivray's BBC2 tongue-in-cheek documentary Doing Rude Things. Five years later she wrote the foreword to the first edition of Simon Sheridan's acclaimed book on the history of British sex films, Keeping the British End Up.[8] She now lives on the south coast of England.

Selected filmography

Further reading

Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema by Simon Sheridan (fourth edition) (Titan Publishing, London) (2011) ISBN 978-1905287543.

References

  1. ↑ María Luisa Amador, Jorge Ayala Blanco, Cartelera cinematográfica, 1980-1989, Colección Miradas en la oscuridad, UNAM, 2006, ISBN 970-32-3605-7, p.165
  2. ↑ David McGillivray, Doing rude things: the history of the British sex film, 1957-1981, Sun Tavern Fields, 1992, p.57
  3. ↑ Donald C. Willis, Horror and science fiction films II, Scarecrow Press, 1982, ISBN 0-8108-1517-6, p.161
  4. ↑ R. M. Hayes, 3-D movies: a history and filmography of stereoscopic cinema, McFarland, 1998, ISBN 0-7864-0578-3, p.205
  5. ↑ Elton Hawke, "Keep it up downstairs", Everest, 1976, ISBN 0-905018-07-9
  6. ↑ Simon Sheridan Come play with me: the life and films of Mary Millington, FAB Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-9529260-7-8
  7. ↑ Léon Hunt, British low culture: from safari suits to sexploitation, Routledge, 1998, ISBN 0-415-15182-1, p.171
  8. ↑ Simon Sheridan, Sue Longhurst, Johnny Vegas, Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema, 2011 (fourth edition) (Titan Publishing, London) ISBN 978-1905287543.

External links

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