Is That All There Is? Lindsay Anderson’s envoi to Jill Bennett + Rachel Roberts
//”I know that up there they’ll be having a good laugh.” Lindsay Anderson//
//Rachel Roberts + Jill Bennett//
This is from Lindsay Anderson’s final film Is That All There Is?, the 1995 autobiographical documentary which included a celebration of the lives of his friends, the formidable actresses Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts.
Both were forces of nature; both were mortally wounded by their corrosive relationships with ex-husbands – Bennett was John Osborne’s fourth wife, Roberts Rex Harrison’s fifth.
Both took their own lives (Bennett in 1990, Roberts in 1980).
Both were portrayed unsparingly in literature – Bennett is crisply dispatched by Osborne in his breathtaking memoir Almost A Gentleman (she denounced him as “a Welsh-Fulham upstart”, he called her “Adolf” and expressed the regret that, at her funeral, he was unable to look down upon her open coffin and “like that bird in the Book of Tobit, drop a good, large mess in her eye”).
Roberts’ depiction of herself in her journals – published in the towering biography No Bells On Sunday – is unflinching. The combination of the journals with Alexander Walker’s biography makes for an offering both sad and tender, as is Anderson’s film.
Lindsay Anderson died (in August 1994) before Is That All there Is? was broadcast.