Here She Sat, Pretending to be a Dead Woman
Alison has long since quit wondering whether she’s been typecast. Fatal Bliss is her seventeenth onscreen appearance. In fourteen of these movies, she has played a corpse. There was Last Night in Soho where she’d been strangled with her own tights and Don’t Trust the Vicar where her communion wine had been laced with arsenic and two nice made for TV movies where she’d died of natural causes: diphtheria and leprosy. If forced to choose between a violent and a peaceful end, Alison will always go for violence because there’s a tiny bit of acting involved in playing a murdered body. You can get away with a dreadful grimace or even a kind of frozen scream. Of course, she’d prefer a role where she isn’t dead. But beggars can’t be choosers and Alison usually ends up dead.
Alison’s agent is forever trying to tell her that she makes the most wonderful corpse -just the right mixture of peaceful and pallid- and this is why she’s in such high demand. Alison struggles to see this as an asset. What serious actor wants to look best dead? Plus, the better part of her is not convinced; it is an agent’s job to lie to her clients. Alison’s under no illusions. She has always struggled with speaking parts. The problem isn’t memorising her lines, or even reciting them in the correct order. Alison could reel off half of Hamlet if the role required reeling. The problem begins when she opens her mouth. She’s seen director’s visibly wince. She’s been moved from major to minor part, then relegated to the role of extra with not a single line to say. It’s dispiriting, but Alison understands. She sounds like a donkey when she speaks.
Under the heavy blanket Alison stretches the pins and needles out of her toes. She’s been sat here in this armchair since early morning while the rest of the room buzzes around her. Most of her limbs have gone to sleep. They’re shooting the scene where the niece and her husband arrive to find Aunt Emily dead in the parlour. It’s poison this time, but the kind of poison which could easily be mistaken for a heart attack. The Director has explained this to Alison and warned her to try to look natural, but also shocked, and kind of peaceful though somewhat strained, as if she’s passed away quietly in her sleep but also been murdered in her own home. It isn’t easy to convey this without moving, especially seeing as two thirds of her body is encased in a handknit blanket. But these days, Alison’s a professional corpse. She knows exactly what the Director wants.
Today it’s a little easier to play along because tomorrow she’s beginning a brand new project and her agent has negotiated an exciting role. Of course, there won’t be dialogue; Alison understands this is out of the question. But there will be movement – actual acting- and perhaps a little grunting and gasping, a scream if she’s lucky, or a beleaguered groan. It’s not one of the usual detective movie. It’s a film set in a hospital. Alison will play a young woman rushed in on a stretcher with multiple stab wounds to her torso. She will act her socks off, writhing around on the operating table, heaving up and down when her heart stops and the actor playing the surgeon is forced to shock her back to life. She won’t speak but she’ll do everything else and when the defib fails on the third attempt, wilt gracefully in the nurse’s arms, before slipping into her usual role.
Just thinking about tomorrow morning makes Alison head starts buzzing with possibilities. Surely, this is a step in the right direction. It is one thing to play a dead body, another thing entirely to play a body as it dies.
Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1954 novel, Destination Unknown.