Rita Tushingham on life after A Taste of Honey: 'It was a shock when the 60s ended'
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.
At the time,
Tushingham and Danquah were filming the now-celebrated A
Taste of Honey, adapted from the play by Shelagh Delaney. “It had
everything – race, class, gender, sexuality, poverty,” says Tushingham of her
first film role. She played something cinema had never seen before: a bored
teenager from the rough end of Salford. Jo was alienated from school, revolted
by her boozy single mam and eternally suckered by worthless suitors. After
falling in love with a sailor, played by Danquah, Jo gets pregnant. He returns
to sea, so she moves in with Geoffrey, a gay textiles student who becomes her
surrogate co-parent.
“We shocked audiences without intending to,”
says Tushingham. “I only learned later that Paul and I did the first
interracial kiss on screen.”...
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jan/28/rita-tushingham-interview-taste-of-honey-shock-60s