Vivian Pickles as Mary of the Scots

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32998, 18 August 1972, Page 4

Vivian Pickles as Mary of the Scots

There are few more tragic figures in European history than Mary, Queen of Scots. She could have been queen of three countries, yet she lived much of her life an unhappy exile or prisoner surrounded by plots and intrigue. She married three times, twice unhappily and ended her life on the block. As Vivian Pickles plays it, in "Elizabeth R,” Mary’s death is the stunning climax to the fourth episode of the series. Her tragic quarrel with Elizabeth ana her involvement with the Babington Plot, form the basis of the episode. Mary, ageing, crippled by arthritis, is finally sent for execution. The cameras follow her down the corridors to the execution platform. Mary kneels and the axe falls. The executioner bends to pick up the head by the hair. Instead he pulls off a wig to reveal the thinning grey hair of a prematurely aged woman. The head used in the episode is, needless to say, not Miss Pickles’, but one fashioned in surgical plastic in a famous London hospital from a cast of Miss Pickles’ own.

Each time it was used, Dawn Alcock, the senior make-up girl for the series had to make it up—a rather grisly business. It gave actor Ronald Hines, who plays Lord Burghley, quite a turn too when he saw it. He was returning from story-telling on a children’s programme when he spotted a head floating in the wash basin of his dressing room. Miss Alcock had put it there to keep it fresh. Isadora Duncan Miss Pickles may make a name for herself dying on television. Her previous great success was as Isadora Duncan in the television biography made by producer Ken Russell in which her

death was by way of strangling when her scarf caught in the wheel of an open car in which she was travelling. It was her role as Isadora in 1966, one which she admits she played with rather more robustness—and with more weight, Isadora weighed nearly 13-stone—than Mary, that brought Miss Pickles’ fame. “A big, bawling, convincing portrayal,” one critic called it.

Previously she had given up a budding stage career for marriage to actor Gordon Gosteiow and a family. She returned to a major role with the television production of Isadora. It in turn led to parts in the television productions of “Pride and Prejudice” and a Charles Dickens* biography. She was also in “Bloody Sunday” a film starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch and Aimed “Nicholas and Alexandra,” in which she played Lenin's wife. Isadora also led to her major American film role in the recently completed Paramount production “Harold and Maud.” Responsibility Miss Pickles feels keenly the responsibilities of historical dramatisation. “I prefer to portray real people,” she says, “although I find it more difficult. There’s a responsibility to the character, a loyalty to the real person. It means you have to read all you can and try to portray the person as truly as possible.

Which means that Miss Pickles suffers with her

characters, especially when they die on stage.

“After I did the death of Mary, I was quite ill,” she recalls.