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No Bells on Sunday: The Journals of Rachel Roberts
Rachel Roberts was a brilliant actress, but also a woman riddled with insecurity. In the eighteen months before she took her own life she kept a journal, in which she reviewed her life from her childhood in Wales right up to the last tortured days preceding her death.The journals provide an account of the ever-descending spiral of suicidal depression. Two themes dominate her life and her her addiction to alcohol, and her "hunger for love in all its miraculous and unrealistic aspects".Interwoven with the journals and Alexander Walker's commentary are the words of Rachel's colleagues, doctors, and close friends, together creating a poignant portrait of an extraordinary woman and her tragic destruction.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Rachel Roberts
3 books3 followersRachel Roberts was a Welsh actress noted for her fervour and passion. Roberts is best remembered for her forthright screen performances as the older mistress of the central male character in two key films of the 1960s, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life. For This Sporting Life, Roberts was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Lead Actress. In Australia, she is remembered for her performance as Mrs Appleyard in Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 20, 2009
Harrowing insight into the mind of brilliant actress Rachel Roberts through the diaries she kept in the last 18 months of her life and the words of her closest friends. Not remembered as she should be today -- and she's as much to blame for this as anything: how much time and talent did she waste in her life and untimely death? -- but she emerged as one of the most promising and respected actresses of her generation on the stage and in landmark British New Wave films Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, playing women of simmering sexual desire and lonely resignation with rare vitality and intensity. During the filming of This Sporting Life, she became Rex Harrison's fourth wife, and too much of her potential and sanity were lost to that relationship and the mark it left on her.
I dispute and rather resent the subtitle "A Fatal Passion of Unrequited Love" (omitted from my own edition, happily), because, aside from sounding quite tawdry, it's fair to neither party to suggest the divorce was the cause of all her problems or the whole reason she ultimately took her own life. The same drives and behaviors and fears existed before Harrison came into her life; she wonders and comes to various conclusions as to whether she would have ended in the same nightmare of alcoholism and incapacitating self-doubt with or without him.
In her writing -- lucid if increasingly desperate right up to the eve of her death -- it is clear she was also a wit and a talented writer: more than once she remarks that only her writing keeps her alive, and with the help she needed perhaps she could have been an accomplished novelist, too. With apparently an intention of having it published in some form, and partly as a therapeutic tool, she uses her journal to examine her life from birth with brutal honesty and almost completely devoid of accusation and defense. She recognizes her yearning for the fame and glamour her particular talents and looks never could have earned her; her need for love and assurance her inveterate promiscuity could not garner her; her wild behavior and desperation to be the life of the party, but more crucially, and harder for her to achieve, to feel "a part of things"; her ongoing hope, even as she acknowledges the impossibility, that life could be the idyll she once had and was later exiled from in Portofino -- all recounted in excruciating detail, exaggerated by an increasingly unstable and masochistic mind, distorted in memory by the filter of pills and alcohol. Well -- it's exhausting to read.
By the end, she gives up the therapeutic and more literary journal format in favor of keeping a contemporaneous diary. At the same time, she begins to speak more seriously and persistently about suicide. What comes before is difficult, but the writer seems essentially in control. The last few months are desperately sad, spiraling through past and present, increasingly certain of what afflicts her but also increasingly hopeless anything could save her from it. She searches for and is increasingly detached from the "little Ray" she was, the "Rachel Roberts, distinguished actress" she was. Even in these final days, her words are so clear one can almost understand how it might feel to, helpless but without self-pity, feel so entirely separate from life and self and others that going on is actually impossible.
Still, it is not easy to reconcile all this with the woman I've loved on the screen: so intense, so vibrant, passionate, powerful; nor to the woman her friends describe as infinitely giving and funny and energetic. Despite her problems, she fooled many -- and what remains, wonderfully and tragically, is the work of an astonishing actress. I wish this world could have given such a woman what she needed -- whatever that may have been -- to live in it, to feel finally a part of things, to thrive. What a sad thing, and what a waste, that there isn't more on the level of This Sporting Life to appreciate her in. She could have had that: but she denied herself that, she lost faith in that, she wasted that -- life, too, took that away from her. But I'm grateful for every moment that did come to life, and does survive, from this hauntingly sad, fascinating woman, from this almost peerlessly brilliant, almost forgotten actress.
I dispute and rather resent the subtitle "A Fatal Passion of Unrequited Love" (omitted from my own edition, happily), because, aside from sounding quite tawdry, it's fair to neither party to suggest the divorce was the cause of all her problems or the whole reason she ultimately took her own life. The same drives and behaviors and fears existed before Harrison came into her life; she wonders and comes to various conclusions as to whether she would have ended in the same nightmare of alcoholism and incapacitating self-doubt with or without him.
In her writing -- lucid if increasingly desperate right up to the eve of her death -- it is clear she was also a wit and a talented writer: more than once she remarks that only her writing keeps her alive, and with the help she needed perhaps she could have been an accomplished novelist, too. With apparently an intention of having it published in some form, and partly as a therapeutic tool, she uses her journal to examine her life from birth with brutal honesty and almost completely devoid of accusation and defense. She recognizes her yearning for the fame and glamour her particular talents and looks never could have earned her; her need for love and assurance her inveterate promiscuity could not garner her; her wild behavior and desperation to be the life of the party, but more crucially, and harder for her to achieve, to feel "a part of things"; her ongoing hope, even as she acknowledges the impossibility, that life could be the idyll she once had and was later exiled from in Portofino -- all recounted in excruciating detail, exaggerated by an increasingly unstable and masochistic mind, distorted in memory by the filter of pills and alcohol. Well -- it's exhausting to read.
By the end, she gives up the therapeutic and more literary journal format in favor of keeping a contemporaneous diary. At the same time, she begins to speak more seriously and persistently about suicide. What comes before is difficult, but the writer seems essentially in control. The last few months are desperately sad, spiraling through past and present, increasingly certain of what afflicts her but also increasingly hopeless anything could save her from it. She searches for and is increasingly detached from the "little Ray" she was, the "Rachel Roberts, distinguished actress" she was. Even in these final days, her words are so clear one can almost understand how it might feel to, helpless but without self-pity, feel so entirely separate from life and self and others that going on is actually impossible.
Still, it is not easy to reconcile all this with the woman I've loved on the screen: so intense, so vibrant, passionate, powerful; nor to the woman her friends describe as infinitely giving and funny and energetic. Despite her problems, she fooled many -- and what remains, wonderfully and tragically, is the work of an astonishing actress. I wish this world could have given such a woman what she needed -- whatever that may have been -- to live in it, to feel finally a part of things, to thrive. What a sad thing, and what a waste, that there isn't more on the level of This Sporting Life to appreciate her in. She could have had that: but she denied herself that, she lost faith in that, she wasted that -- life, too, took that away from her. But I'm grateful for every moment that did come to life, and does survive, from this hauntingly sad, fascinating woman, from this almost peerlessly brilliant, almost forgotten actress.
April 16, 2021
Excruciatingly sad. The bit with the bike is just awful.
March 21, 2011
what a story. It's amazing how well Roberts wrote, how lucid and logical she is, even though her word is crumbling.
I read this book on a flight, I could not put it down.
oh yea, and Rex Harrison seems like a predatory jerk. I'll never be able to watch the original Dr Doolittle ever again.
I read this book on a flight, I could not put it down.
oh yea, and Rex Harrison seems like a predatory jerk. I'll never be able to watch the original Dr Doolittle ever again.
July 19, 2018
I'm ashamed of myself. I've seen "This Sporting Life", "Saturday Night And Sunday Morning", "Picnic At Hanging Rock", and even the Peter Ustinov version of "Murder On The Orient Express". And yet somehow I don't remember Rachel Roberts, the Welsh actress who appeared in all of those films and many more.
"No Bells On Sunday" was assembled from the journal she kept in the last 18 months of her life, as depression and alcoholism and suicidal impulses all laid their stones atop her one by one and finally crushed the life out of her. The first three-fourths or so are her (auto)biography -- her own words interspersed with editorialization by Alexander Walker (some of which is annoyingly twee; hence the docked star) and interviews with acquaintances and colleagues. The last fourth is her journal, day by day, over the last couple of months of her life as she realized first that everything she'd wanted was hopelessly out of reach, and then that the only thing she wanted to do now was die.
What emerges most from her words, and the words of all those around her, is not a diagnosis, but a dilemma. It's clear she was manic-depressive: The way she compulsively became the life of the party, or became the party itself when there wasn't a party to begin with. The way her acting was that of a consummate professional, but how the minute she left the stage or the camera was shut off, she needed drink and camaraderie (and more drink) to stave off the feelings of inadequacy and unease and disappointment.
But worse was how she seemed to know very clearly what was wrong -- that even as an award-winning actress on both sides of the Atlantic, she still remained emotionally starved in a way that simply could not be satisfied through the flashy trappings of her career. She tried to stave off the pain with pills and booze and friends, but it always came back. The strength to be her own person -- to be as coolly resilient as, say, her ex-husband Rex Harrison (whom she became increasingly obsessed with after their divorce) -- seemed unavailable to her.
Stories like this are wretchedly commonplace in Hollywood. I think we have become inured to them because we assume anyone with that much money or opportunity should be able to deal with their boredom and pain. I confess, that's the line of thought I had when I went into this book: Why feel sorry for her, when there are countless other people suffocated by their pain who never have one-one-hundredth of the opportunity she did, let alone access to the resources she had for dealing with it all?
But then I think about it this way. Here is someone who, by the standards of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps crowd, did all the right things. She ascended from unassuming origins, entered a difficult and often chauvinist industry, made a respectable place for herself in it, and earned her success the way we imagine it is best earned, by way of hard work and dedication. And none of it was enough to save her.
"No Bells On Sunday" was assembled from the journal she kept in the last 18 months of her life, as depression and alcoholism and suicidal impulses all laid their stones atop her one by one and finally crushed the life out of her. The first three-fourths or so are her (auto)biography -- her own words interspersed with editorialization by Alexander Walker (some of which is annoyingly twee; hence the docked star) and interviews with acquaintances and colleagues. The last fourth is her journal, day by day, over the last couple of months of her life as she realized first that everything she'd wanted was hopelessly out of reach, and then that the only thing she wanted to do now was die.
What emerges most from her words, and the words of all those around her, is not a diagnosis, but a dilemma. It's clear she was manic-depressive: The way she compulsively became the life of the party, or became the party itself when there wasn't a party to begin with. The way her acting was that of a consummate professional, but how the minute she left the stage or the camera was shut off, she needed drink and camaraderie (and more drink) to stave off the feelings of inadequacy and unease and disappointment.
But worse was how she seemed to know very clearly what was wrong -- that even as an award-winning actress on both sides of the Atlantic, she still remained emotionally starved in a way that simply could not be satisfied through the flashy trappings of her career. She tried to stave off the pain with pills and booze and friends, but it always came back. The strength to be her own person -- to be as coolly resilient as, say, her ex-husband Rex Harrison (whom she became increasingly obsessed with after their divorce) -- seemed unavailable to her.
Stories like this are wretchedly commonplace in Hollywood. I think we have become inured to them because we assume anyone with that much money or opportunity should be able to deal with their boredom and pain. I confess, that's the line of thought I had when I went into this book: Why feel sorry for her, when there are countless other people suffocated by their pain who never have one-one-hundredth of the opportunity she did, let alone access to the resources she had for dealing with it all?
But then I think about it this way. Here is someone who, by the standards of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps crowd, did all the right things. She ascended from unassuming origins, entered a difficult and often chauvinist industry, made a respectable place for herself in it, and earned her success the way we imagine it is best earned, by way of hard work and dedication. And none of it was enough to save her.
July 24, 2014
When I bought this book I did not realise the person I was reading about was someone I had seen on screen. What a tortured and unloving place the spotlight can be. And how sad that what drives actors to be in front of an audience is also sometimes their biggest fear or millstone. She sounded like a strong woman full of self doubt yet still able to attract people to her like a flame.
May 1, 2019
I viewed picnic at hanging rock and was interested in the trivia regarding ms Roberts. As a movie buff I found her book fascinating
August 9, 2019
Makes you wonder how many great actors were as bonkers as she was.
November 28, 2021
Moving story
March 17, 2023
Das Rachel Roberts Probleme hatte, war zumindest in Hollywood ein offenes Geheimnis. Wenn ich an das, was sie über ihre Kindheit und Jugend geschrieben hat, denke, glaube ich aber, dass diese Probleme durch ihre Alkoholsucht kamen, sondern dadurch nur verstärkt wurden.
Die Schauspielerin ist mir in zwei Rollen aufgefallen, aber ich möchte nicht ausschließen, dass ich noch mehr Filme mit ihr gesehen habe. Beides waren kleine Rollen, trotzdem war ihr Charakter sehr präsent. Deshalb kann ich verstehen, warum sie trotz ihrer immer schlimmer werdenden Ausfälle immer noch Rollen bekam: sie war gut.
Über ihre letzten Wochen zu lesen, war bedrückend. Rachel Roberts befand sich in einer Abwärtsspirale, die sie selbst bewusst herbeigeführt hatte. Auch wenn sie anfangs noch versucht hatte, sich selbst zu helfen oder Hilfe zu suchen, ist sie doch ab einem gewissen Punkt mit offenen Augen auf ihr Ende zugegangen.
Schwer zu lesen, aber durchaus lesenswert.
Die Schauspielerin ist mir in zwei Rollen aufgefallen, aber ich möchte nicht ausschließen, dass ich noch mehr Filme mit ihr gesehen habe. Beides waren kleine Rollen, trotzdem war ihr Charakter sehr präsent. Deshalb kann ich verstehen, warum sie trotz ihrer immer schlimmer werdenden Ausfälle immer noch Rollen bekam: sie war gut.
Über ihre letzten Wochen zu lesen, war bedrückend. Rachel Roberts befand sich in einer Abwärtsspirale, die sie selbst bewusst herbeigeführt hatte. Auch wenn sie anfangs noch versucht hatte, sich selbst zu helfen oder Hilfe zu suchen, ist sie doch ab einem gewissen Punkt mit offenen Augen auf ihr Ende zugegangen.
Schwer zu lesen, aber durchaus lesenswert.
July 16, 2010
The pain of loosing paradise
June 13, 2016
Rather a well laid out book but I found out that not having seen any of her work the overall impression I gained of this woman extinguished any curiosity I might have had about tracking down her plays or movies.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews