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
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.