Adrienne Corri A Clockwork Orange, Hammer and Beyond

Adrienne Corri was a Scottish actress with copper hair and a voice that could cut glass, and for most people she is one face in one terrible scene: Mrs Alexander in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). That is too small a frame. She played Shakespeare with Alec Guinness, worked for Renoir, Lean and Preminger, gave Hammer some of its strangest women, and later became a serious Gainsborough researcher.

I want to give her the whole screen back. Her horror films first, the gypsy of Vampire Circus (1972) and the masked actress of Madhouse (1974), because she loved them. Then the hard part. As far as I can find, the Clockwork Orange home invasion is the only time she was filmed fully undressed, and it is a rape scene. I will discuss it only through Kubrick's design, the "Singin' in the Rain" counterpoint that still divides critics, and her own account. No description, no glamour. I also ask a question nobody seems to have put to her: why nothing like it before or after? The one earlier case is the bath in The Hellfire Club (1961), about ten years before, shot in several versions for different markets at a time when British censors allowed very little.

Key takeaways

• Adrienne Corri was born Adrienne Riccoboni on 13 November 1931 in Glasgow, per most sources. The Guardian's obituary says 1930 and Edinburgh.
• Her best-known role is Mrs Alexander in A Clockwork Orange (1971). She took it after two other actresses dropped out.
• For Hammer she made The Viking Queen (1967), Moon Zero Two (1969) and Vampire Circus (1972).
• She wrote The Search for Gainsborough, a hunt for an early Gainsborough portrait of David Garrick.
• She died in London on 13 March 2016, aged 84.

A Redhead from Glasgow, a Renoir River and a Devil Girl

Category: documented biography, with critical opinion

Where was Adrienne Corri born, and how did she start? Adrienne Corri was born Adrienne Riccoboni in Glasgow on 13 November 1931, trained at RADA as a teenager, and made her film debut in The Romantic Age (1949). Renoir's The River (1951) followed, then Devil Girl from Mars (1954).

Glasgow or Edinburgh, 1931 or 1930

The sources disagree, and I would rather show you than pretend. Wikipedia, the New York Times obituary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography give Glasgow, 13 November 1931. So does Corri herself, in an interview with Bruce Hallenbeck around 1990. Ronald Bergan's Guardian obituary says Edinburgh, 1930, and gives her age at death as 85. I follow 1931, which makes her 84 when she died. Her father, Luigi Riccoboni, was Italian and her mother, Olive Smethurst, English. In the 1930s her father ran the Crown Hotel in Callander. To Hallenbeck she called herself "Scots-Italian" and traced the family to Italian strolling players. Another Luigi Riccoboni, an ancestor, wrote a history of the Italian theatre. "I'm a sort of throwback," she said.

RADA and The Romantic Age

She went to RADA in her teens, and the stage stayed her first home for life. Her film debut, The Romantic Age (1949), is a British boarding-school comedy in which she plays Norah, a pupil. She was 17. Bergan, in the Guardian, described the film as "a blend of prurience and prudery," which fits how British comedy of the period treated schoolgirl roles: adult filmmakers selling a teenager's knowingness while keeping a straight face about it. I note it and move on. Her real arrival came two years later.

The River: Renoir's Bengal

After an uncredited walk-on in Quo Vadis (1951), shot in Rome, she went to India for Jean Renoir's The River (1951), his first film in colour. She plays Valerie, the most spoiled of three girls who all fall for a wounded American veteran. Bergan called it her best film, and I agree. Technicolor did the rest: that red hair against Bengal greens is one of the film's warmest notes. She was about 18 during the shoot, and the role is a coming-of-age portrait, so I leave it there. Renoir looks at adolescence with tenderness, not appetite.

Devil Girl from Mars and the Barmaid

By 1953 Picturegoer said she had "no nice-little-girl-next-door nonsense about her." The next year proved it. In Devil Girl from Mars (1954) she is Doris, the barmaid of a remote Scottish inn, fighting to keep her man from a leather-clad Martian who has come to collect men for breeding. Patricia Laffan plays the Martian, and Hazel Court, whom I wrote about in my piece on Hazel Court, the Hammer actress who became Corman's scream queen, shares the inn. Corri, at 22, is all heat in a small space: hair catching the bar lamps, arms crossed like a locked door, a woman who knows what she wants and won't be hurried. She remembered it as "great fun" and thought it one of Britain's first science-fiction films. It still plays like a cosy fireside invasion.

Adrienne Corri in A Clockwork Orange: Kubrick and Mrs Alexander

Category: documented film history, her own account, critical opinion

Who played Mrs Alexander in A Clockwork Orange? Adrienne Corri played Mrs Alexander, wife of the writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee), in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). She was cast late, after two other actresses withdrew, and she was 39. It is a small part, and it is the one she is remembered for.

How She Got the Part

The A Clockwork Orange cast list, one of the most searched in film history, puts her far down, below Malcolm McDowell, Magee, Michael Bates and Warren Clarke. Her own account of how she got there is blunt. Speaking to Bruce Hallenbeck around 1990, she said Kubrick's first idea was to have actresses undress in an empty office and be photographed and taped. She refused, she said, not wanting such tapes circulating around Wardour Street, and went off to do a play at Greenwich. The actress who was cast instead lasted two days, by her account. Kubrick then sent for Corri, and she set her own terms: if he didn't like what he saw, he could pay her and send her home. "One has to be very tough with Stanley," she said. "He appreciated it."

Working with Kubrick

She liked working with him and did not romanticise it. Kubrick, she said, was "especially difficult, I think, for women to work with." He was also generous in ways most directors aren't: he showed actors the rushes and the cut, so they knew what they were building. She said the cast spent about ten days working on the home-invasion sequence before shooting and cut all its dialogue. The Times obituary quotes her on the physical cost. One take, she said, was shot 39 times before McDowell said he couldn't hit her any more. Kubrick's black joke on set, as she told it, was that she was playing "the Debbie Reynolds part."

The Singin' in the Rain Counterpoint

That joke points at the film's most argued-over choice. In Corri's telling, Kubrick asked McDowell whether he knew any songs, and McDowell, who said he knew only one, sang "Singin' in the Rain." McDowell has told the same story in many interviews, and Kubrick then paid for the rights. A song of pure joy laid over cruelty is the design of the whole film: Alex as a performer who enjoys his violence, and an audience made to feel the pull of that rhythm. Defenders call it Kubrick's sharpest effect, since we are implicated by the music. Critics have long objected that the stylisation makes the violence attractive. Corri seemed to see both sides. She called it "really an anti-violence film," then admitted that, like an anti-war film, "it turned out glamorous."

What You Don't See

This is a scene of sexual violence, and I will not describe it. Corri's own view is the useful one. The cast "choreographed it like a dance scene," she said, and "the rape scene is frightening because of what you don't see." She added that Kubrick had told them at the start they did not want "to do a Peckinpah." Whether nudity and stylisation in a rape scene can ever be neutral is a fair question, and I take it up in a later section on exploitation and drama in her films.

X Certificate, Withdrawal and the Red Socks

The British Board of Film Censors passed the film X, uncut, on 15 December 1971. Its secretary, Stephen Murphy, judged that it could not be accused of exploitation. After press stories linking it to copycat crimes, Kubrick himself withdrew it from British distribution in 1973. It returned only after his death, rated 18 uncut in 1999 and back in UK cinemas in March 2000. Corri kept up a friendship with Kubrick for a while. When he complained that he kept losing socks in the wash, she gave him a pair of bright red socks for Christmas, a dry reference to her own costume. John Baxter's 1998 biography tells the story. For more on Kubrick, see my piece on The Shining and "Hotel California". Corri was one of the few actresses who answered him back.

The Allure on Camera: Hammer Glamour from The Hellfire Club to Vampire Circus

Category: documented film history, her own account, critical opinion

What horror films did Adrienne Corri make? Adrienne Corri's horror and fantasy run includes Corridors of Blood (1958), The Tell-Tale Heart (1960), The Hellfire Club (1961) and, for Hammer, The Viking Queen (1967), Moon Zero Two (1969) and Vampire Circus (1972). She loved them. "Horror films are my weakness," she told Bruce Hallenbeck, "I love doing them."

Corridors of Blood: The Irish Madam

She was 26 in Corridors of Blood (1958), and she plays it rough. Rachel is a lowlife who, the Guardian says, gets Boris Karloff's surgeon to sign false death certificates for the people she and her partner have killed. Corri told Hallenbeck she chose an Irish accent because, she had read, the brothel madams of the period were mostly Irish. The director was upset at first, then came round. Christopher Lee lurks in the same shadows. She makes vice look warm and practical, a woman pouring gin with one hand and counting coins with the other, and the red hair does the rest even in black-and-white.

The Tell-Tale Heart (1960): The Window Across the Street

The Tell-Tale Heart (1960), Ernest Morris's Poe adaptation, gives her the role of Betty, the flower seller across the street from a timid librarian, played by Laurence Payne. The Guardian notes that she has the horror heroine's habit of undressing at a window without closing the curtains. That is the whole erotic engine of the film. A lit square of glass in a dark street, a woman unpinning her hair inside it, a man who cannot stop looking. The sexy charge belongs to his obsession, and Corri plays her without a trace of knowing, which is what makes the watching feel like a crime. She was 28. Morris had been a cameraman, she said, and the film shows it. "It's shot very well, I think."

The Hellfire Club: Lady Isobel in Silk

In The Hellfire Club (1961) she is Lady Isobel, haughty and two-faced, "a villainess, but with a soft touch," as she put it. She said her gowns were by Cecil Beaton, taken from his play about the Gainsborough girls. Picture eighteenth-century silk cut low across a collarbone, candlelight sliding off pink satin, a neckline so precious, she joked, that her death scene had to be staged around it to keep the dress unmarked. The film was also made in several versions for different markets, including a bath scene. I return to that in the section on exploitation and drama.

The Viking Queen and Moon Zero Two

Hammer used her as a woman with a temper. In The Viking Queen (1967) she is Beatrice, a pro-druid princess the Guardian describes as snapping and snarling and going to war with relish. In Moon Zero Two (1969), a "lunar western," in the Guardian's phrase, she is Liz, the police chief on the moon, at 37, with holsters, per the Guardian, built into thigh-length plastic boots. White vinyl, long legs, a gun belt riding the hip: it is pure 1969 pop-art glamour, and she wears it like armour. She called it "a very uncomfortable costume drama." Her revenge on the discomfort was to pour a glass of iced water into the leading man James Olson's rubber spacesuit, she said, and he had to work the rest of the day in it.

Vampire Circus: The Gypsy Woman

Vampire Circus (1972), directed by Robert Young, is the film her horror reputation rests on. She plays the Gypsy Woman who runs a travelling circus of vampires through a plague-struck nineteenth-century village. She was about 40, and this is her most magnetic screen presence: dark eyes ringed with kohl, the red hair loose, a body moving through lamp-lit canvas with an animal patience. Lalla Ward, she recalled, played her daughter. Corri said the circus scene had no written dialogue, so she improvised, and on an empty shooting day she suggested what she called "instant lurking": cutaways of her and others appearing behind caravans and bushes, looking significant, then vanishing. Every shot, she said, was used. Horror, to her, was like "telling wicked fairy stories," and here she tells one in a whisper. For two other Hammer women who understood that hush, see my portraits of Veronica Carlson and Ingrid Pitt.

Exploitation or Drama? Nudity, Consent and Context in Adrienne Corri's Films

Category: critical analysis, her own account, editorial opinion

Did Adrienne Corri do nude scenes? As far as the sources go, Adrienne Corri appeared fully undressed on screen only once, in the home-invasion assault in A Clockwork Orange (1971). The one earlier case is a bath scene in The Hellfire Club (1961), made in several versions for different markets. One scene is sexual violence, the other a costume-film tease, and they need different questions.

The Hellfire Club: A Bath in Five Depths

In 1961 a British film could show very little, and The Hellfire Club was cut by the censors for a U certificate in the UK. Producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman worked around that the way many did, with alternative takes for other markets. IMDb says the French version has topless scenes missing from British and American prints. Corri's own memory is wonderfully unglamorous. It was her first bath scene and her first nude scene, she told Bruce Hallenbeck, and she dreaded it, but it turned out "the most prosaic thing in the world." A prop man added or bailed out water according to which country's version was being shot, and she reckoned they did about five depths. What she wore under the water, how she was framed, and whether any continental shot uses her, a double or another actress are questions I have not been able to settle. The film's American publicity, according to the critic Glenn Erickson, promised far more than any US print delivered. That is the oldest exploitation trick there is: sell the poster, not the film.

A Clockwork Orange: Consent Before the Camera

The Clockwork Orange scene is different in kind, and I will not describe it. What can be discussed is how she came to do it. By her account, she refused Kubrick's first casting idea, photographing and taping actresses undressed in an office, and only took the part when he sent for her on her terms. Two actresses had already left the role, one, Malcolm McDowell later said, because she found the shoot humiliating. Corri's consent was real and negotiated, and she was 39, a working actress of twenty years, not an ingénue.

Her defence of the scene was artistic. Kubrick, she said, told the cast they did not want "to do a Peckinpah." They cut the dialogue and "choreographed it like a dance scene," and she argued that it frightens "because of what you don't see." The British Board of Film Censors agreed in its own way. It passed the film X, uncut, in December 1971. By then the minimum age for X films had been raised from 16 to 18, as part of the Board's 1970 changes. Its secretary, Stephen Murphy, judged the film no exploitation.

The Case Against

The case against has never gone away. Pauline Kael, reviewing it in The New Yorker in January 1972, called Kubrick "a clean-minded pornographer" and said the rapes and beatings were "frigidly, pedantically calculated." Her sharpest point is the one that touches Corri: Kubrick, she argued, made the victims more repulsive than the thugs, so the film takes Alex's side. Later feminist critics pressed the same issue. The camera's choreography, however stylised, still turns a woman's assault into the film's opening showpiece, set to a song people hum. Corri herself conceded that the anti-violence film "turned out glamorous." The "Singin' in the Rain" counterpoint is the crux. It indicts the audience, or it seduces them, and fifty years on critics still cannot agree which.

Why Never Again?

What follows is my speculation, not documented fact. She was nearly 40 in 1971, and British film, then sliding into sex comedies, offered women her age few roles worth undressing for, or any roles at all. She was choosy, and loyal to the stage. By the 1980s her energy went into eighteenth-century bank ledgers and Gainsborough. And having done one scene on her own terms for a director she respected, she may simply have had nothing left to prove. I have found no interview in which she was asked.

Film	Year	Her age	What sources say is shown	What she said	Verdict in the literature
The Hellfire Club	1961	28–29	Bath scene in several market versions; topless material in the French print (IMDb), with whose body unresolved	"The most prosaic thing in the world"	Exploitation as marketing; minor in the drama
The Tell-Tale Heart	1960	28	Undressing at a window (Guardian); no nudity documented	Not discussed	Drama: the voyeur's obsession is the plot
A Clockwork Orange	1971	39	Forced stripping and implied rape (BBFC)	"Anti-violence film"; "what you don't see"; "turned out glamorous"	Mixed and still contested: art for the BBFC and defenders, sexualised violence for Kael and others

My own position, as a critic, is that The Hellfire Club bath was a sales device and Corri treated it as a joke, which is the right size for it. A Clockwork Orange is serious art that makes a serious mistake. Kubrick wanted us implicated, and he got that, but he got it by making a woman's suffering the film's most quotable set piece. I admire Corri for the way she owned her part in it: on her terms, with her eyes open, and without pretending afterwards that it was simple. Cinema's arguments over screen violence, which I traced in my piece on the banned video nasties of the 1980s, start with films like this one.

Madhouse, A Study in Terror and the Art of Disguising Beauty

Category: documented film history, her own account, critical opinion

Which Adrienne Corri movies hid her face? In A Study in Terror (1965) and Madhouse (1974), Adrienne Corri played disfigured women, a scarred prostitute and a mutilated former star, and she designed much of each look herself. Around them ran a mainstream career, from Doctor Zhivago to Doctor Who.

A Study in Terror: The Face in the Mirror

James Hill's A Study in Terror (1965) sets Sherlock Holmes, played by John Neville, against Jack the Ripper. Corri is Angela Osbourne, a woman whose face has been scarred with acid. She was 33, and the Guardian praised her for bravely disguising her beauty. She told Bruce Hallenbeck she wanted an eye hanging half out on her cheek and was overruled. In the end she suggested casting the scar from a mould of her face so it could be stuck on "like a pancake." She was asked, she said, to stay out of the studio canteen in make-up. Playing Angela was "like playing scenes in mirrors," keeping the audience guessing whether she is victim or schemer, though she leaned to the sympathetic side. The camera finds the unscarred profile first, then turns, and the shock lands precisely because the beauty was real.

Madhouse (1974): Faye in the Cellar

Madhouse (1974), directed by Jim Clark for Amicus with American International Pictures, not Hammer, puts her opposite Vincent Price and Peter Cushing. Linda Hayden is also in the cast. Corri is Faye Carstairs Flay, a former horror co-star who has gone mad after a car accident left her disfigured and now lives among the spiders in the cellar. The Guardian says she was bald and masked and talked to the spiders like babies. She was 42. Her own additions were the best part. Told minutes before shooting to play it American, she worked out with the sound man a "quivery," Tennessee Williams voice, she said. She gave Faye three white streaks in homage to Elsa Lanchester's Bride of Frankenstein. In one scene she copied Garbo's touching of the furniture in Queen Christina, stroking a dressing gown just before the bodies tumble out of the cupboard. And the film ends, she said, with her humming Mozart. There is something tender in it: a ruined beauty, veiled, still performing for the one man who remembers her face. She was close to Price, whose wife, Coral Browne, was her friend, and she said she got to kill Cushing "as he'd never been killed before." For two more British horror women, see Madeline Smith and Caroline Munro.

Zhivago, Preminger and the Pink Panther

The mainstream used her in smaller frames. In David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965) she is Amelia, mother of Julie Christie's Lara, a dressmaker kept by Rod Steiger's Komarovsky. She gives the role a worn, perfumed vanity, a woman who knows her daughter has replaced her. For her friend Otto Preminger she played Dorothy in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), Lady Carter in Rosebud (1975) and Sylvia in The Human Factor (1979). The Guardian found those roles more prestigious than interesting, and I agree. In Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) she is Therese Douvier, per Wikipedia's cast list.

Doctor Who and UFO

Television gave her stranger women. In the UFO episode "The Square Triangle" (1970) she is Liz Newton, a wife who plots to kill her husband. In Doctor Who she is Mena, the ageing leader of the Argolin in "The Leisure Hive" (1980), opposite Tom Baker. Lalla Ward, her daughter in Vampire Circus, was by then playing Romana. Corri was 48, regal and weary under heavy make-up, and the Adrienne Corri Doctor Who searches still lead there.

After the Camera: the Gainsborough Detective and Her Last Years

Category: documented biography, her own account, critical opinion

What did Adrienne Corri do after acting, and how did she die? In later life Adrienne Corri became an art researcher and wrote The Search for Gainsborough (1984). She acted on stage and on television until Lovejoy in 1992. She died at home in London on 13 March 2016, of coronary artery disease, aged 84.

The Search for Gainsborough

The story begins in a theatre corridor. At the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham, Corri came across a dusty portrait of the actor David Garrick that she became convinced was an early work by the young Thomas Gainsborough. Proving it took years. She published her case in The Burlington Magazine in April 1983, in an article on Gainsborough's early career, and then as a book written like a diary. The Search for Gainsborough came out from Jonathan Cape in London in 1984. Vanguard Press published the first American edition in New York in 1985, with a foreword by her Madhouse co-star Vincent Price. Wikipedia's citation of a 1986 edition seems to be wrong. The Guardian called the book an excellent art "whodunit."

Down in the Bank Vaults

Her method was archival, and gloriously unglamorous. Wikipedia says her attribution rested on Bank of England records suggesting large payments to Gainsborough while he was still a boy. She told Bruce Hallenbeck around 1990 that she was spending her weeks in bank vaults under the City and had learned to read eighteenth-century banking ledgers. "So I'm back to the horror film vaults," she joked. She also said she was working on a full life of Gainsborough, which as far as I can find was never published. The fight ended in May 1990. The Herald reported that the theatre, which disputed both her valuation and the attribution, gave her the painting in an out-of-court settlement over her claim for the costs of restoring and authenticating it. A 2009 Philip Mould exhibition catalogue on the young Gainsborough discussed her research, so the art world did not ignore her.

The Stage, Always

Behind the films ran a stage career she never gave up. On the first night of John Osborne's The World of Paul Slickey (1959), when the audience booed, she answered it with a two-fingered salute. She joined the Old Vic company in 1962–63 and went to Broadway in Anouilh's The Rehearsal in 1963. On television she played Olivia in Twelfth Night opposite Alec Guinness's Malvolio, a production dated 1970 by Wikipedia and 1969 by the Guardian. She was Lady Fidget in The Country Wife (1977) and Mistress Overdone, smoking a cheroot, in the BBC Measure for Measure. Her last screen role was Lady Rebecca in the Lovejoy episode "Highland Fling" (1992), fittingly a series about antiques and attribution. For another British actress who moved between stage, screen and an independent life, see my portrait of Jenny Agutter.

Family and Her Death

She was married to the actor Daniel Massey from 1961 to 1967, by Wikipedia's dates; the Guardian says the marriage ended in 1968. Her son Patrick and daughter Sarah were born from a relationship in the 1950s with the film producer Patrick Filmer-Sankey. Adrienne Corri died at her home in London on 13 March 2016. The New York Times gave the cause as coronary artery disease. She was 84 if born in 1931, as most sources say, or 85 by the Guardian's date of 1930.

The Woman in the Frame

I like ending with her in the vaults. The woman cinema remembers for one brutal scene spent her last working decades restoring someone else's image, peeling back varnish and paperwork to prove who had made a face. There is elegance in that: the red hair now silver, perhaps, a ledger open under a lamp, and the same stubbornness that once told Kubrick to pay her or send her home.

Conclusion: Adrienne Corri, Beyond the Frame

Adrienne Corri spent her life refusing the frame other people chose for her. She told Kubrick to pay her or send her home, rewrote her horror characters from the inside, and later went down into bank vaults to prove who had painted a forgotten face. The Glasgow redhead of Renoir's The River, the gypsy of Vampire Circus and the masked ruin of Madhouse belong in the same portrait as the Mrs Alexander everyone remembers, and the Gainsborough detective belongs there too.

Watch her in lamplight, in silk and in plastic moon boots, and you see an actress who treated horror as "wicked fairy stories" and played every one with relish. One scene made her famous for the wrong reasons. Her own words, and the four decades of work around it, are the better reason to remember her.

She went back to the stage again and again, and never stopped arguing with directors, critics and attributions. That stubbornness is the thread through everything she did. Next on Meeting Venus: another British actress from the Hammer and late-night years, whose own words tell a different story from her posters.

FAQ: Adrienne Corri

What is Adrienne Corri best known for?

Adrienne Corri is best known for playing Mrs Alexander in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), a small but notorious role. Horror fans also know her as the Gypsy Woman in Hammer's Vampire Circus (1972) and as Faye in Madhouse (1974), opposite Vincent Price and Peter Cushing. She also had a long career on stage and on British television.

What was Adrienne Corri's cause of death?

Adrienne Corri died of coronary artery disease at her home in London on 13 March 2016, according to The New York Times. She was 84, based on the birth date of 13 November 1931 given by most sources. The Guardian's obituary gives her birth year as 1930 and her age as 85.

What movies did Adrienne Corri star in?

Adrienne Corri's films include The River (1951), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), Corridors of Blood (1958), The Tell-Tale Heart (1960), The Hellfire Club (1961), Doctor Zhivago, Bunny Lake Is Missing and A Study in Terror (all 1965), Moon Zero Two (1969), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Vampire Circus (1972), Madhouse (1974) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978).

Who played Mrs Alexander in A Clockwork Orange?

Adrienne Corri played Mrs Alexander, the wife of the writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee), in A Clockwork Orange (1971). She was cast after two other actresses withdrew from the role. In a later interview she called it an anti-violence film and said Kubrick was a tough director who respected actors who stood up to him.

How old was Adrienne Corri in A Clockwork Orange?

Adrienne Corri was 38 or 39 while A Clockwork Orange was filmed in 1970 and 1971, and 40 when it reached UK cinemas in January 1972. Those ages assume her birth date of 13 November 1931. If the Guardian's 1930 date is right, she was a year older.

What was Adrienne Corri's role in Doctor Who?

Adrienne Corri played Mena, leader of the Argolin, in the Doctor Who serial "The Leisure Hive" (1980), opposite Tom Baker. Lalla Ward, who had played her daughter in Vampire Circus, was then playing the Doctor's companion Romana. Corri also appeared in UFO, Danger Man, The Champions and Lovejoy.

Was Adrienne Corri married to Daniel Massey?

Yes. Adrienne Corri was married to the actor Daniel Massey from 1961 to 1967, according to Wikipedia; the Guardian says the marriage ended in 1968. Her two children, Patrick and Sarah, came from an earlier relationship with the film producer Patrick Filmer-Sankey in the 1950s.

Which Hammer films did Adrienne Corri make?

Adrienne Corri made three Hammer features: The Viking Queen (1967), Moon Zero Two (1969) and Vampire Circus (1972). She was also in a Hammer TV segment released as part of Journey into Darkness (1968). Madhouse (1974) is often mistaken for Hammer, but it was made by Amicus with American International Pictures.

Did Adrienne Corri write a book about Gainsborough?

Yes. Adrienne Corri wrote The Search for Gainsborough, published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1984 and in the United States in 1985 with a foreword by Vincent Price. It tells, in diary form, her attempt to prove that a portrait of David Garrick was an early work by Thomas Gainsborough.

Is Adrienne Corri the same person as Adrienne Barbeau or Adrienne Shelly?

No. Adrienne Corri was a Scottish actress (1931 to 2016) best known for A Clockwork Orange and Hammer horror. Adrienne Barbeau is an American actress known for The Fog and Escape from New York, and Adrienne Shelly was an American actress and director known for Waitress. They are unrelated.

Was Adrienne Corri's role in A Clockwork Orange exploitation?

Critics still disagree. The BBFC passed the film uncut and said it was not exploitation, while Pauline Kael called Kubrick a clean-minded pornographer. Corri said the scene was choreographed like a dance and frightens through what you don't see. The film is analysed above in that critical context.

Where can I watch Adrienne Corri's films?

A Clockwork Orange, Doctor Zhivago and several of her horror films are available on disc and on digital rental or streaming services in many countries. Catalogues change often and differ by region, so check a current streaming guide or a specialist label's Blu-ray releases for Vampire Circus, Madhouse and Moon Zero Two.