Devil in a black dress
Iplayed Mrs Danvers in 1979, in a four-part TV adaptation by Hugh Whitemore (which, incidentally, starred Jeremy Brett, my first husband, as Max de Winter). I was too young for the part. Mrs Danvers was meant to be in her late 60s but I was nowhere near. In the book, she is described as having grey hair tied up in a bun, and wearing a Victorian dress with a long train. I saw no reason to play it like that - I didn't see why, age-wise, she couldn't have been a contemporary of Rebecca's.
Rebecca is an extremely romantic and rather sexual novel. I think Mrs Danvers is one of the sexual participants - maybe not consciously, but she's certainly a sexual thread through it. We know that Rebecca didn't love Max, but we don't really know what Max's feelings were for Rebecca - apart from the fact that he was obsessed by her beauty. We do know his feelings were totally tarnished by the end of their marriage. Whether Mrs Danvers was a latent lesbian, I have no idea. But she was certainly in love, totally and utterly obsessed with Rebecca. The book is littered with sexual symbols - the hairbrush and the nightie laid out carefully on the bed. So I played her rather like a lesbian in a French film, in a slinky black silk dress.
Essentially, I played what I imagined Du Maurier had subconsciously written, though it also seemed an interesting new angle on the part. Of course, I would not want to detract from Judith Anderson's startlingly scary and brilliant performance as Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca. I didn't see this version when it came out in 1940, as I was three years old, but I must have seen it when I was 9 or 10 and I remember being very scared by her. Mrs Danvers is a very scary part, whether you play her in a Victorian dress or in a slinky silk dress. What she wears is only an outward carapace: underneath she's one of the really evil female characters in literature. You never forget that malevolent smile.
· Anna Massey was talking to Aida Edemariam