20th Century Foxes No.6: Anne Heywood

As March in the controversial film of D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox (1967), Anne Heywood expertly conveyed that character’s aching sense of loss, purposelessness and wanting—it’s one of my all-time favorite screen performances, even if it strayed from the author’s intentions. (The lean but effective screenplay was written by Lewis John Carlino of Seconds fame.) She began in beauty contests, which led to a middling career in the movies. But The Fox, released somewhere between the fall of the Production Code and the birth of the MPAA ratings system, allowed her to explore a multifaceted and complicated persona without their rigid guidelines, down to the mainstream cinema’s first (mildly) graphic female masturbation scene.