Life’s a Scream

Hammer Films’ publicity department decided to go to town: ‘The new face for the Seventies!’, ‘Queen of Horror’, ‘The most beautiful Ghoul in the World!’ I was thrilled and wallowed in it. I probably should have been cool and cynical. Unfortunately when they handed out attitudes, cool and cynical wasn’t – and isn’t – in my bundle.

Jimmy Carreras, Michael Styles and Harry Fine – producers of The Vampire Lovers – were fantastic to me and Tudor Gates’s brilliant script combined with Roy Ward Baker’s solid, imaginative and tasteful direction made The Vampire Lovers the best of all the many adaptations of Le Fanu’s short story.

Roy was fabulous to work with. Before filming actually started we met a number of times at my mews house and discussed the way I should play the part of Carmilla. Roy patiently guided my thinking until we both knew exactly what we were aiming for. After that, filming was a doddle.

The film involved nude scenes. I’d never done the full-frontal bit before but I was proud of my body and not too reluctant to show it. Madeleine Smith, who played my second victim, had also kept her gear on in front of the cameras so far. She was a little more apprehensive but saw the relevance and agreed to get it off. Nevertheless, we both had reservations, especially as we weren’t too familiar with the producers, so I spoke to Jimmy and asked him if we couldn’t have a closed set: the producers and other non-essential personnel could go to London and see rushes. He agreed at once.

When the day came for me to shoot the scene in the bath, I came out of my dressing-room clad in nothing but a white towelling dressing-gown held loosely in place over my naked body. As I walked down the corridor Harry Fine and Michael Styles, the excommunicated producers, were coming towards me. They looked so depressed and miserable that I felt guilty for having robbed them of their fun. We were just about eyeball to eyeball when they looked up, and I knew what to do: ‘Whee!’ I threw my robe open to let them see what they were missing. They certainly went off with a renewed spring in their step. It’s so easy to make men happy.

I discovered that when you’re naked on set everyone is terribly nice to you and looks after you beyond the call of duty. This is particularly the case when you’re doing a bath scene, which I seemed to do a lot of at Hammer. Is the water hot enough? Is the water too hot? Are the towels in the right place? How about the light? Are people leering? Would you like some cognac? They’re terrified you might lose the mood or – God forbid – want to get dressed. Jimmy had sent champagne to the set, and Madeleine and I indulged ourselves.

Not everything went smoothly filming The Vampire Lovers. When the time came to kill the Kate O’Mara character, who believed I loved her and was unaware of my vampire tendencies, I first slung her on to the floor, knelt to take her in my arms and smiled down at her. As the camera moved in close and I displayed my fangs inches from her neck, suddenly out popped the fangs, straight into her cleavage. Time and again we had to do the scene and the bloody things sprang out like exocet missiles homing in on her breasts. I could feel myself beginning to lose the mood but, determined to be a pro, I told Kate I was going to kill her with or without fangs. That didn’t help the situation much. Kate was helpless with laughter. Roy was unbelievably patient but I wanted to get it in the can. I’d seen the clapper boy chewing gum so I called him over, took it out of his mouth, stuck the fangs in with it and killed her – clean, quick – and she laughed no more.

I met Peter Cushing for the first time on the set of The Vampire Lovers. I was having my wig fitted when the hairdresser warned me that Cushing was doing terrible things to me on the set at that very moment. In spite of the red light I stormed into the studio and saw, way over in the distance, a man holding something like a cabbage in one hand and swinging a sword in the other. ‘Swish’ it went – and I realised I had just had my head cut off. The censor cut this scene from the film but it was a hell of a way to stage an introduction. I let out a startled yelp and Peter rushed over to me and introduced himself.

We became great friends after that. On my father’s hundredth birthday I had champagne brought to the set to celebrate. When Peter heard what the party was about he invited me to dine with him and his wife Helen in the Thatched Barn. After dinner the maître d’ brought a cake, covered with candles, on which was written in icing sugar ‘For Ingrid’s Papa’.

Helen knew Russian quite well and we used to write short letters to each other after that, using Peter as postman. Then, all of a sudden, she fell terribly ill. The illness – it was cancer we found out later – raced through her poor thin body with such force that in three months it was all over. Peter seemed never to recover from her death. Some time later I met him by chance in Whitstable. That afternoon in a café he told me that he couldn’t go on living without Helen. I thought I had to talk him out of doing harm to himself, although I know if it happened to me I’d feel the same. What is the use of living without love?

The House that Dripped Blood was another film for 1970, a vintage year for me. It was made by Amicus, Milton Subotsky and Michael Rosenberg, a sort of ersatz Hammer. In fact, one of the best known photographs of me as a vampire is from the film. It was in four parts. I had wanted the first, but after a lunch with Peter Duf fell, the director, and Jon Pertwee (whom I knew from a Dr Who episode ‘The Time Monster’), Jon talked me into doing ‘The Cloak’. He made it sound such fun that I immediately said yes. ‘The Cloak’ was the last story in the film and a comedy. It was great to see the audience leave the cinema with a giggle.

When I heard that they were setting up a new film I was all ears. I discovered it was to be a film about Elizabeth Bathori, the biggest female serial killer of all time and a relative of Vlad Tepes – the Impaler. That was enough for me and I called James Carreras immediately. ‘Now, Jimmy Darrlink!’ I said. ‘I must have the part of Elizabeth Bathori. Please, give it to me and you won’t look back!’

Everything about Countess Dracula was perfect. The script by Jeremy Paul was excellent, giving the old Countess a lot of depth, and I was sure I would shine in the role. I made my mother come and stay, and I studied her way of speaking as she had the kind of voice and intonations I thought the Countess would have had. I gave her the sort of croakiness that Eastern Europeans have when they smoke and drink a lot of vodka. After each take I would rush to the sound man and listen to the play-back. I was happy with the result.

Sasdy and Alexander Paal were less so. They had terrible rows in Hungarian on the set. The atmosphere was almost unbreathable at times. In the end I couldn’t stand the constant bickering any more so I got a friend of mine, a fellow countryman of theirs, to teach me some Hungarian swear-words. The next time they rowed I appeared at the top of the stairs. In colloquial Hungarian I shouted: ‘Do be quiet, you carry on like shitty little gnomes. We’re losing time here . . .’ They were shocked. They thought I had understood what they had been saying all the time.

Apart from Sasdy’s and Paal’s arguments, filming went quite smoothly, although there were some mishaps. In one scene I had to have a tumble in a haystack with Sandor Eles. His character had a moustache but, rather than grow one, Sandor let the make-up man do his magic. Sandor looked up at me from the hay to murmur his hot and sexy lines when I suddenly noticed that half his moustache was missing. I called out ‘Cut!’ Sasdy was immediately on the case, telling me that if anyone called ‘cut’ it would be him. I pointed to Sandor’s pruned moustache and explained I didn’t want to waste my emotions on half a man. Make-up man Tom Smith hastily looked through his box of tricks and found that he was out of moustaches.

Everyone started shouting, running around, searching the haystack, but the missing item refused to show itself. I got bored and went into my winnie-bago. I shed my voluminous frock and tried to stretch out on the divan but my corset was killing me so I whipped that off as well. As I walked past a mirror I saw something black and ugly trying to claw its way out of my belly-button. Before I could faint or scream, I recognised the ugly beastie. It was Sandor’s lost face fungus. Everybody was delighted with my find and we were able to get on with the shoot. How the nasty little thing managed to get through my outer clothes and my corset I’d prefer not to think about.

The film was finally wrapped and we all went home happy. At least, I thought we had all gone home happy. Evidently not Peter Sasdy. Throughout the film he had said I was wonderful and my old Countess the best thing he’d seen since Hydra. Then, as soon as I was off the set, he took my voice away. I found out by accident, when an actress, who’d previously only done commercials, sent me flowers and thanked me for the opportunity of getting such a grand job. Her voice was prissy and very ‘English rose’, and didn’t fit a serial killer. Livid, I phoned Sasdy but he wouldn’t speak to me. I got in touch with Jimmy and he seemed furious too. He said that one of the reasons he wanted me for the role was my accent. I suggested he got on to Sasdy and ordered him to restore my voice, but the next day he rang to say that Sasdy had already thrown away the voice tracks.

I was post-apocalyptic but could do nothing. Later he rang to ask me to talk to Jimmy Carreras about changing the title of the film. He thought Countess Dracula was too vulgar. Suddenly he seemed to see himself as Eisenstein and to be embarrassed to be a director of something he perceived as beneath him. I told Jimmy about Sasdy wanting to change the title and, as I’d guessed, he was enraged – a small but sweet victory.

I was beginning to like my work. It seemed that everything I sucked was sugar free and did me good. Work was being offered on a fairly constant basis so I was playing the star to the hilt and turning down anything I didn’t fancy. I was starting to feel slightly secure about my future.

Domestically, however, there were a few problems. George was still around and getting heavy if he heard I had tea with anyone who wasn’t female or under ninety-five, and was putting on the pressure about us living together. I spoke to Matka on a more or less daily basis and she always assured me that she was fine, but one day I received a call from a neighbour. She told me that my mother was far from well. She was finding it very hard to get around and had, on more than one occasion, fallen over and been unable to get up. I was shocked. Somehow, while I was feeling hard done by because I’d lost a couple of movies, my mama was doing what she always did: soldiering on without complaint. I rang the travel agent and booked a flight immediately. As I was packing I suddenly remembered I had promised George I would join him at a première in Leicester Square.

I rang him to tell him that I couldn’t go. He was not happy; moreover, he had a producer coming with us who was interested in casting me in his film. I tried to hang on to my principles but he said that an extra day wouldn’t make any difference, one way or the other.

I was glad I took time out to go to the première. It was another case of sitting in front of the right plate at the right table at the right time. The man beside me turned out to be Ronnie Lee from United Artists. He said they were about to start pre-production on a film of The Merry Widow and asked if I could sing.

Matka was worse than I expected. She’d always been thin but now she was skeletal. She had also developed a horrendous bronchial condition. It was so debilitating that she seemed to have been robbed of her spirit. She sat in the big old armchair that had been my father’s favourite and appeared to fade into the upholstery. I sat and held her hand, and fought back the tears. Until then I’d taken it as my right that my mother should look after me. Sitting there in that gloomy room I prayed that she wouldn’t die so I could prove to her and to myself that there was more to me than a fixation that I could entertain people. I told Mascha that I would tidy up the house, sell it and that she was coming with me to live in England. She started arguing that she was too old, that she couldn’t leave the place she was used to, that old and young don’t mix – all kinds of silly arguments which I didn’t bother to answer. I just told her she was coming and that was final. I rang a number of estate agents and put the house on the market at once, then set about sorting which things we would ship to England and what we would leave behind. In a few days Matka was smiling once more, helping me decide and talking about how much my father had loved England.

We had goodbye dinners with Haneli and some of her friends, and in little over a week we were on our way. Steffka was happy as a sandboy to have her grandmother living with us. They played chess, went to the pictures and had a whale of a time together. Slowly Mother lost her cough and walked with a spring in her step once more. Only Maria seemed to feel that her domain had been infringed. I thought that eventually they would work it out.

I rang Ronnie Lee and reminded him that he was about to launch the next diva in his Merry Widow film. He set up a meeting with the ranking members of his company and a singing coach, Gustl Sacher. Now we had got down to the hooks and eyes I wasn’t sure I could do it, but Ronnie didn’t want to hear my doubts. Before I knew what I was up to, Gustl was banging away on the piano and I was tralalaing fit to bust.

There was also the dancing lesson. As a dancer I was definitely designed to twist, maybe jive a little and probably do the locomotion, which was awkward because The Merry Widow is all about the waltz. I tried my best and, unbelievably, it seemed to be good enough to get me a screen test. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in the film business. I was so worried that instead of not sleeping the night before the test, my usual lunacy, I didn’t sleep for a week. Feeling like a gutted rabbit in a butcher’s shop I turned up, and to the sound of my recorded trilling my partner, a well-known choreographer whose name I forget, strutted up decked out in full costume and looking like a seventeenth-century fag on New Orleans’ Main Street. The next few minutes were a high-speed blur. Suffice it to say that my partner hardly limped at all as he led me off the floor.

Ronnie Lee was generous with his applause. I went to change and when I got back he told me that I had the job. I was astonished. The actual shoot was ages away but in the meantime I was to have singing and dancing lessons. I was delighted to be working – and earning – and to be able to say when asked that I was making The Merry Widow.

I found a house in Richmond, one of those three-bedroomed, bow-windowed jobs that uninspired architects scattered across the country in the Thirties. Steffka and Mascha liked it and we rented it. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted but it had a pretty garden with a view over a mausoleum at the back and millions of trees. Just as we moved in I was invited to Romania for a horror documentary so Maria and my mother had to cope with the move as I toured the land of vampires surrounded by a vast media crowd. On returning to our hotel in Bucharest I was confronted by the man who owned the house we’d just rented in Richmond. Having discovered through the newspapers that I was in Bucharest, he’d tracked down my hotel and now begged me to buy his house. Apparently, he had fallen in love with a Romanian girl and wanted to stay. I wasn’t terribly keen on the place but he was persistent and invited the entire crew to dinner for the duration of our stay, so I told him about the poor paintwork and leaking roof. In the end he lowered the price considerably and I negotiated some repair work. I did a ‘subject to survey’ deal with him and flew back to England feeling rather smug.

With the house organised, I could get back to my singing. Steffka was on holiday and I thought it would be nice for her to come along to the studio and see her old mother exercise the epiglottis. Gustl Sacher pounded away at the ancient upright piano, I cleared my throat and prepared to impress. I was well into my coloratura before going into one of the arias from Puccini’s La Bohème when I noticed Steffka, her back to me, staring out of the window. I was a mite hurt. To appreciate my versatility properly she should have been facing me. Then I realised that her shoulders and pony-tail were shaking. I stopped in mid-flight and went across and turned her round to face me. Her face was scarlet with the effort she was making not to laugh. I knew then that Maria Callas had nothing to fear. Kids are the most honest critics and I think Steffanie got it about right. In the end it mattered not at all. The production was put on hold when the original investors withdrew their finance. I was told to hang loose and the producer would be in touch when the new financiers were lined up. I’m still waiting . . .