The case of the actress’s bottom $30,000 in damages

Press, 14 January 1986, Page 21

The case of the actress’s bottom $30,000 in damages

Actors and actresses have been grumbling for years about the malignity of critics. Now one of them, who decided to sue, has collected $30,000 in damages for an abusive review.

The Case of the Actress’s Bottom, which was heard in the High Court in London, is the first within living memory in which the right of a critic to savage an artist or performer in extravagant language has been challenged at law. It left Britain’s journalists feeling decidedly wary.

The plaintiff was the distinguished National Theatre actress, Charlotte Cornwell, who won rave reviews for her performances there last season. The defendant was Nina Myskow, television critic of the tabloid “Sunday People,”

By

LAURENCE MARKS

whose weekly column includes a section entitled “Wally of the Week.”

In contemporary English argot, a Wally is someone of low intelligence and vulgar tastes.

Nominating Miss Cornwell as “Wally of the Week,” Miss Myskow had written of her performance in a TV series “No Excuses”: “She can’t sing, her bum is too big, and she has the sort of stage presence that jams lavatories. Worst, she belongs to that arrogant and selfdeluded school of acting which believes that if you leave off your make-up (how brave, how real) and shout a lot, it’s great acting. It’s Art. For a start, dear, you look just as ugly with make-up, so forget that.”

Although Britain’s libel law is stricter than that of many countries, certainly America’s, artistic criticism has always been allowed a very wide latitude. The critic can plead “fair comment” for almost anything he says about a performance or work of art provided he is not actuated by malice. According to the law books, there is an exception to this: a “personal attack.” In practice, however, the custom of the trade has sanctioned sortie extremely personal brickbats. A long line of

Brunhildes and Sieglindes have had to put up with rude remarks about the size of their bottoms from Wagnerian critics.

The most recent anthology of critical abuse, “No Turn Unstoned,” edited by the actress, Diana Rigg, contains many examples of ferocious personal attacks and allegations of professional incompetence in the great British tradition of

comic exaggeration and surrealist imagery, also seen in newspaper cartoons and caricatures.

A radio commentator, Jack de Manio, once said of the actress Glenda Jackson that she “has a face to launch a thousand dredgers.” The New York critic, John Simon, wrote of Miss Rigg herself that she was “built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses.”

The newspaper columnist, Bernard Levin, wrote of the actor, Denis Quilley, that “he played the role with all the charm and animation of the leg of a billiard table.” And a Catholic newspaper reported of Robert Hardy’s Ariel in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: “Mr Hardy ... postured throughout like a stone batstand in a Second Empire Turkish bath.”

In 1984, one of the “Sunday People’s” readers complained to the Press Council (a non-govern-mental regulatory body) after Miss Myskow had described an actress as having “little piggy eyes.” The council ruled that, although offensive and insulting, it did not exceed the bounds of show business comment in popular journalism.

In court, Miss Cornwell’s lawyer, Andrew Bateson, tried to persuade Miss Myskow to define her critical vocabulary, which reflects a penchant for nursery scatology. Her column, which nowadays qspears in another tabloid, the “News of

the World,” also includes an occasional section entitled “Willy of the Week” whenever she spots a naked or near-naked man on the TV screen.

Miss Myskow once described a performance by another actor, Max Boyce, as “the equivalent of stepping in a woopsie.” Bateson: “You mean a turd, don’t you?”

Miss Myskow (sharply): “Actually, I mean a dog turd.”

Britain’s more rumbustious critics are waiting hopefully to see whether the “Sunday People” will appeal the verdict. For the moment, willies, woopsies, and bums appear to be boomerangs rather than brickbats.

Copyright — London Observer Service.