Rita Tushingham

Rita Tushingham (born 14 March 1942) is a British actress. She is known for her starring roles in films including A Taste of Honey (1961), The Leather Boys (1964), The Knack ...and How to Get It (1965), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Smashing Time (1967). For A Taste of Honey, she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, and Most Promising Newcomer at both the BAFTA Awards and Golden Globe Awards. Her other film appearances include An Awfully Big Adventure (1995), Under the Skin (1997), Being Julia (2004), and Last Night in Soho (2021). Tushingham was born on 14 March 1942 in the Garston area of Liverpool, where her father was a grocer who ran three shops. She grew up in the Hunt's Cross district of the city. She attended the Heatherlea School in Allerton, the La Sagesse School in Grassendale (which later became part of St Julie's Catholic High School), and studied shorthand and typing at a secretarial school. She wanted to be an actress from an early age and trained at the Shelagh Elliott-Clarke School, before working as an assistant stage manager at the Liverpool Playhouse. Tushingham's screen debut was in A Taste of Honey (1961). In 2020, Tushingham said of the film, "We shocked audiences without intending to. I only learned later that Paul and I did the first interracial kiss on screen. ... A lot of the reaction was, 'People like that don’t exist' – by which they meant homosexuals, single mothers and people in mixed-race relationships. But they did." A Taste of Honey was banned in several countries.