Lysette Anthony
The Bryan Adams videos from Reckless are the 1984 image most people carry of her, but Lysette Anthony (born 1963) was already at work in British costume television by then, as Lady Rowena in Ivanhoe (1982) and in Oliver Twist the same year.
The 1980s were her period of genuine range. She was Princess Lyssa in Krull (1983), the fantasy epic that has aged into a cult item, Christa Norris in the first series of the comedy-drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, and Angie Tyler across four years of the BBC sitcom Three Up, Two Down. A fantasy lead, a comedy-drama and a mainstream sitcom inside about two years is not a common spread.
Hollywood took her next and mostly wasted her. Husbands and Wives (1992) is the exception and remains the best thing she has done: cast as Sam in Woody Allen's most abrasive film, she is genuinely unsettling, a young woman whose ease is the most uncomfortable thing in the room. Around it sit broad comedies, Switch (1991), Look Who's Talking Now! (1993), Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995) and Mel Brooks's Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), where she plays Lucy Westenra.
She kept a foot in the gothic throughout, as Angelique in the 1991 Dark Shadows revival, Mary Jane Kelly in the Jack the Ripper serial (1988), and Filette d'Auferre in the medieval mystery The Hour of the Pig (1993). More recently she spent six years in Hollyoaks as Marnie Nightingale.
Movies (15)
- Krull (1983)
- Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)
- Look Who's Talking Now! (1993)
- Ivanhoe (1982)
- Save Me (1994)
- Switch (1991)
- We Still Kill the Old Way (2014)
- Without a Clue (1988)
- Husbands and Wives (1992)
- Strippers vs. Werewolves (2012)
- Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995)
- Russell Mulcahy’s Tale of the Mummy (1998)
- The Hour of the Pig (1993)
- Oliver Twist (1982)
- The Emperor's New Clothes (1987)
TV (9)
Where to start with Lysette Anthony
Husbands and Wives deserves the first slot by a wide margin. The film is shot like a documentary, it is about two marriages coming apart, and Anthony's Sam is the disruptive element the whole thing turns on.
After that, Krull for the opposite reason, a big silly 1983 fantasy with a glaive, a fortress that relocates itself and total commitment from everyone involved. Without a Clue is the underrated comedy, a Sherlock Holmes inversion with Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It is late Mel Brooks, patchy but with a few real jokes and a very game Lucy Westenra. For the gothic television, Dark Shadows is the ambitious revival and Jack the Ripper the handsome period serial. The Hour of the Pig is the true curiosity, a medieval courtroom drama in which an animal stands trial. Her long soap run on Hollyoaks is not among the credits listed here.