Celebrity Biographies
Billie Whitelaw
“Damien, I’m doing this for you.” With this phrase, Mrs. Baylock, caretaker and guardian of one of the most terrifying children on the screen, made viewers’ hair stand on end in “The Prophecy.” The actress who played that character, Billie Whitelaw, died in London at the age of 82 on December 21, 2014. Her name was closely linked to playwright Samuel Beckett, with whom she collaborated closely for 25 years, and in film she worked with James Ivory and Alfred Hitchcock.
Born on June 6, 1932 in Coventry, Warwickshire, in central England, Billie Honor Whitelaw came from a humble working-class family. At the age of 11, she made her debut as a child actress in various radio programs. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), she began to frequent the London stage in the 1950s.
Samuel Beckett described her as “a perfect actress”, and wrote for her some of his memorable characters from the theater of the absurd. The most particular joint work of hers was the short film Not I , a monologue by the actress in which only her mouth can be seen.
She made her film debut as a waitress, in the 1953 thriller Criminal Fraud , specializing from then on in small roles as a dazzling blonde or secretary. She switched registers as the cheated wife of Albert Finney , also the film’s director, in Charlie Bubbles , a role for which she won a BAFTA in 1967.
Since then they began to offer her more complex roles, and even the master of suspense called her for Frenesí . Her character gave rise to the most outstanding and chilling sequence of the last stage of Alfred Hitchcock , when Hetty Porter, the ex-wife of a friend of the murderer, accompanied the latter nonchalantly to her home. As the door closed, a masterful backwards tracking takes the viewer – imagining that a murder is about to take place – back to the streets of London, where its inhabitants walk carefree…
Her character most remembered by viewers is Mrs. Baylock, a nurse who jealously guards the Antichrist, in The Prophecy , where she was accompanied by Gregory Peck and Lee Remick . Later she played the witty mother of the young protagonist of Maurice , by James Ivory , another parent, this time dominant and protective, of the twins in The Krays , the nurse in Jane Eyre (1996), and the blind laundress in Quills . Her last work was the Edgar Wright comedy Fatal Weapon , with Simon Pegg ., where she was one of the inhabitants of an apparently idyllic little town.
Divorced in 1966 from fellow actor Peter Vaughan , she later joined writer Robert Muller , with whom she had a son.