Lovely Rita. A Spread for Vanity Fair

Discovered at the age of eighteen, Rita Tushingham was all eyes. She was not tall, nor shapely, nor particularly pretty. Yet her look, both fresh and nostalgic, would make her the poster pin-up of 60s British New Wave cinema. Director Tony Richardson, who would give Rita her film debut in A Taste of Honey (1961), observed Rita had “a face saved from the commonplace by a pair of enormous eyes.”

Rita grew up in Liverpool during the late 1940s. The war was over but to these victors went few spoils. London was a black and white world of rations and rationalizations. Not the sharp edged, glossy Hollywood image, but the black and white of a faded snapshot. And then, an explosion. Four young men from a sleepy seaport town take not only their country but the world by storm. The swinging 60s had begun, and before they would devolve into the violence of assassinations and Altamont, there was a brief and shining moment not to be forgot - even better than Camelot.

Mod London energized youth culture and revived working-class leisure and social optimism. Micro mini skirts roared with the pop art prints of Carnaby Street, and the driving pulse of the Kinks, The Who and The Beatles poured over the radios and exploded onto the big screen. In 1965, Rita starred in Richard Lester’s celebrated romp The Knack and How to Get It, a picture with, “the anarchic quality modish today and at all times appealing to a new generation understandably bent on overturning the ideas which have hardened in the minds of their elders,” wrote critic Dilys Powell. The film won Lester the Palm D’or at the Cannes Film Festival and signaled to the world that the Mod movement had arrived, crowning Rita its cinema sweetheart.

Rita’s iconic status grew with her film credits including The Leather Boys (1962), Girl With Green Eyes (1963), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Smashing Time (1967). She perfected a new kind of girl-next-door; vunerable, direct, and saucy. In a 2003 interview for the BBC, Rita remarked, “I love film. I absolutely love every single thing about it. Not just the acting part, but everything that goes on the floor. It’s fascinating, and was from the day I started. Tony Richardson, the most wonderful director in the world to work with, made me interested in how everything worked.” Perhaps in her most nuanced performance, Rita was cast as a mute woman in Sidney Hayer’s The Trap (1966). Without a word of dialogue, she lit up the screen with her soulful eyes.

Throughout the 1970's and early 1980's, her film career slowed, as did the British filmmaking industry. Rita continued to perform in films throughout Europe and Canada, and appeared at International Film Festivals to promote her own work and that of fledging independent filmmakers. When the National Film Theatre launched its revival season of Mod Sixties cinema in 2003, Rita Tushingham became an immediate marquee attraction. “How do you feel to be the face of the Swinging 60s?” she was asked in an interview. Rita laughed, “I guess it means we made our mark. When you look at the roles women had in the 50s, and then suddenly, in the 60s, there were these tough roles that young women were playing…that’s what made the mark. It wasn’t just us, or our faces, it was the roles we were playing and the stories we told.”