She caused outrage as a wide-eyed teen in her very first film. As the actor returns in a spooky Agatha Christie, she relives life as a 60s icon – and the taunts she endured in the street
![Rita Tushingham on life after A Taste of Honey: It was a shock when the 60s ended](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/54b49a0e9335fa12faac0fff2fa5926538c7f39d/0_30_5976_3586/master/5976.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=812497ca7cba6102c4623d4c12ebe2ed)
One day nearly 60 years ago, Rita Tushingham was walking through Soho with her friend, the late
British actor Paul Danquah, when a passerby yelled: “Blacks and whites don’t mix!” Tushingham looks troubled by the memory. “It happened to Paul a lot,” she says. “I remember he shouted back, ‘Don’t worry! She’s only been on holiday and got a tan.’”
That was
Britain in 1961, before
London swung, before sex between men was decriminalised, before a black man and a white woman walking in Soho might pass unremarked. There’s a photo in the National Portrait Gallery of the pair that very year, her leaning in care-free, him eyeing the street as if on alert for the next racist.