Adrienne Corri

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Adrienne Corri bigraphy, stories - Film

Adrienne Corri : biography

13 November 1931 <!– reference Scottish birth record reference GROS data 644/090851 –> –

Adrienne Corri (born 13 November 1931 Glasgow, Scotland) is a British actress born Adrienne Riccoboni, the daughter of Olive Smethurst and an Italian father Luigi Riccoboni (sometimes spelt Reccobini). Her distinctive auburn hair came from her mother’s Lancastrian Mancunian Smethurst family. In the 1930s her father Luigi (known as Louis) ran the Crown Hotel, Callandar, Perthshire. She had one brother.

Despite having significant roles in many films, Adrienne Corri is likely to be remembered for one of her smaller parts, that of Mrs. Alexander, the wife of the writer Frank Alexander, in the 1971 Stanley Kubrick dystopian film A Clockwork Orange. Though not the originally cast for this role, she was brought in after the first actress left. Clad in an eye-catching bright red pyjama suit, she answers the door to the main character of the film, Alex de Large, and in a scene redolent with black humour and violence is forcibly stripped and gang raped, Corri being thrust centre stage in an exuberant quasi-theatrical spectacle, as Alex accompanies the stripping with a joyful rendition of "Singing in the Rain". Though the scene lasts barely three minutes and Corri’s dialogue is confined to some initial preliminaries, the nature of the scene and the manner of its presentation make it perhaps the most memorable scene in the entire film. Corri was offered the role after two actresses had already withdrawn from the film, one of them, according to Malcolm McDowell (Alex in the film), because she found it "too humiliating – because it involved having to be perched, naked, on Warren Clarke’s (playing Dim the Droog) shoulders for weeks on end while Stanley decided which shot he liked the best." Adrienne Corri had no such qualms about appearing naked, telling McDowell, “Well Malcolm, you’re about to find out that I’m a real redhead.” Corri appeared in many excellent films, notably as Valerie in Jean Renoir’s The River (1951), as Lara’s mother in David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago (1965) and in the Otto Preminger thriller Bunny Lake is Missing. She also appeared in a number of horror and suspense films from the 1950s until the 1970s including Devil Girl from Mars, The Tell-Tale Heart, A Study in Terror and Vampire Circus. She also appeared as Therese Duval in Revenge of the Pink Panther. The range and versatility of her acting is shown by appearances in such diverse productions as the 1969 science fiction movie Moon Zero Two where she played opposite the ever dependable character actor Sam Kyd (Len the barman), and again in 1969, in Twelfth Night, directed by John Sichel, as the Countess Olivia, where she played opposite Alec Guinness (Malvolio).

Her numerous television credits include Angelica in Sword of Freedom (1958), Yolanda in The Invisible Man episode "Crisis in the Desert", a regular role in A Family at War and You’re Only Young Twice, a 1971 television play by Jack Trevor Story, as Mena in the Doctor Who story "The Leisure Hive" and guest starred as the mariticidal Liz Newton in the UFO episode "The Square Triangle". She also was in two episodes of "Danger Man," the first being the well-known surreal "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove," (1965) as assistant to Mr. Alexander, Elaine, as well as "Whatever Happened To George Foster," (1965) in which she played Pauline, a journalist acquaintance of "John Drake." In 1979 she returned to Shakespeare when she appeared in the BBC Shakespeare production of Measure for Measure, as the earthy, cheroot-smoking keeper of a bawdy house, Mistress Overdone.

She had a major stage career, appearing regularly both in London and in the provincial theaters. There is a story that, when the audience booed on the first night of John Osborne’s The World of Paul Slickey, Corri responded with her own abuse: she raised two fingers to the audience and shouted "Go fuck yourselves". Note that Billington only repeats the story, without confirming or providing any evidence of its truth. During the making of Moon Zero Two, she poured a glass of iced water inside James Olson’s rubber space suit, in which uncomfortable state he was obliged to wear it for the remained of the day’s shooting.