Sue Longhurst
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Sue Longhurst is an English actress, most famous for appearing in several saucy x-rated comedies in the 1970s. Born in 1943, she trained at the Royal Academy of Music, and was initially a music teacher, but egged on by her model sister, she was soon posing for magazines, record sleeves, book covers & TV commercials, as well as spending 18 months advertising John Player's cigarettes.
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.
Longhurst's first film of 1974 was The Over-Amorous Artist, but as well as movies she had supporting roles in comedy sketch shows with Dick Emery, Charlie Drake, and Sid James, as well as small parts in sitcoms like Please Sir. For a brief time, she was also as hostess on ITV gameshow The Golden Shot, replacing "dizzy" Anne Aston. Her next movie of 1974 was Can You Keep It Up For A Week? in which she played consultant psychiatrist Mrs Bristol. Though it was her role as nymphomaniac housewife Jacqui Brown in Confessions of a Window Cleaner which brought her to the attention of cinema-goers. In the film she takes the virginity of naive, sex-mad Timothy Lea, played by Robin Askwith. The movie eventually became the highest grossing British film of 1974.
In 1975, she 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 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 US). In the movie, young Jack Armstrong (Ole Soltoft) is desperate to win the love of his beloved, and greedy, Lady Alice Faversham, played by Sue. All his attempts fail, despite the advice of local brothel owner Madame Helena (Diana Dors). However when Alice's rich fiance Sir Cecil Spentwicke dies from a heart attack, just as Jack inherits his late uncle's estate, he again starts courting Lady Alice. In the meantime, Jack has bought a former madhouse and converted it into a "love nest" - and entices the lovely Lady Alice back to his "lair", where the seduction begins! The movie was shot on location in Denmark.
In 1976, Longhurst starred as Lady Cockshute in Keep It Up Downstairs, again alongside the legendary Diana Dors.
Longhurst's penultimate film, and the biggest hit of her career was the 1977 movie Come Play With Me, directed by George Harrison Marks. Starring alongside Mary Millington and Suzy Mandel, Sue had a supporting role as Christina, the girlfriend of a 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, Longhurst retired from acting in 1981.
However, in 1996, Longhurst returned to the camera for a 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. She now lives on the south coast of England.
As a bizarre point of trivia - obscure British actor Stephen Longhurst, a regular in the low-budget horror films of Michael J Murphy (Invitation to Hell, The Last Night, Bloodstream), erroneously claimed he was distantly related to Sue. However, in 2008, he was proved wrong as Longhurst is not actually Sue’s birth name.
References
- <Simon Sheridan Keeping the British End Up (Reynolds & Hearn Books) Third Edition 2007 - ISBN 978-0952926078
External links
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