Celebrity Biographies
Adrienne Corri
Recognizable by her auburn hair, Adrienne Corri went from playing Shakespeare on the stage to horror movies, and though she worked with great filmmakers like Jean Renoir and David Lean, she will be remembered most of all as a rape victim in one of the harshest sequences of “A Clockwork Orange”. The actress herself passed away on March 13, 2016, at her London residence, at the age of 84.
Adrienne Riccoboni (her real name) was born in Glasgow on November 13, 1930, the eldest daughter of Italian Luigi Riccoboni, and Olive Smethrust, an Englishwoman from whom she inherited her characteristic hair. When she was a teenager, she enrolled in the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts, in the British capital, after which she began to become a regular on the city scene.
After debuting with the forgotten The Romantic Age , she was recruited by Jean Renoir for The River , where she played the older sister of the family who picks up a mutilated ex-combatant. She spent the decades of the 50s and 60s alternating between theater, television and cinema, where titles such as The Kidnapping of Bunny Lake and Doctor Zhivago stand out , where she played the mother of Lara, the character of Julie Christie .
She married producer Patrick Filmer-Sankey, with whom she had two children, Patrick and Sarah. She subsequently left her husband for fellow actor Daniel Massey .
It wasn’t easy shooting the violent sequence of A Clockwork Orange in which he was involved. Adrienne Corri joined the project after two other actresses dropped out, due to having to remain nude for several days, while the individual Stanley Kubrick thought through every shot. She had no qualms about going naked, and taking real beatings from Malcolm McDowell . One scene was shot 39 times, until this actor yelled, “I can’t hit her anymore.”
Shortly after, she played a gypsy in the horror film The Vampire Circus . She retired in 1992, after finishing the Lovejoy series .