SUSANNAH YORK

Susannah York was born Susannah Yolande Fletcher in London England in 1939, but grew up in a remote village in Scotland. She went to acting school, and had her first major role in a TV production of The Crucible, starring opposite a then-unknown Sean Connery.

Strikingly beautiful and clearly quite intelligent, she quickly appeared in several movies (mostly English), but she was drawn to quirky, off-beat roles, including as Joss, the English girl who comes of age in The Greengage Summer (released in the U.S. as Loss of Innocence), as one of Freud's dysfunctional patients in the movie of the same name, as Thomas More's daughter Margaret in A Man For All Seasons, and many more.

One of her few commercial roles at this time was in Tom Jones. She created quite a stir in The Killing of Sister George, where she played the lesbian partner of much older Coral Browne (including what were then shocking love scenes), and she also played romantic scenes with both Michael Caine AND Elizabeth Taylor in Zee and Co. (released in the U.S. and X, Y, and Zee).

One of her best roles came in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film), where she played one of the marathon dance contestants who has a psychotic breakdown. York continued to play strange and unconventional roles throughout the 1970s.

In 1978 she finally took a role solely for the money, ironically opposite Marlon Brando, who had also spent much of his career playing unconventional quirky roles, as Superman's mother Lara, and she repeated the role in the sequel (and since she did virtually nothing in either movie, one hopes she was very well paid!).

Since the 1980s, she has been very busy, appearing on stage (in one woman shows), TV, and film, also writing and directing (she had written two children's books in the early 1970s, when her own children were toddlers). She passed away in 2011 from bone cancer at the age of 72.