Topic: Susannah York

Susannah York (9 January 1939 – 15 January 2011) was an English film, stage and television actress. York was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and won best actress for Images at Cannes Film Festival. Her apperances in various hit films of the 1960s formed the basis of her international reputation, and an obituary in The Telegraph characterised her as "the blue-eyed English rose with the china-white skin and cupid lips who epitomised the sensuality of the swinging Sixties".

York was born Susannah Yolande Fletcher in Chelsea, London in 1939, the daughter of merchant banker and businessman Simon William Peel Vickers Fletcher, and his wife, Joan Nita Mary (née Bowring), a diplomat’s daughter. After her parents’ divorce her mother married a Scottish businessman, and at the age of 11 York entered Marr College in Troon, Ayrshire. Later she became a boarder at St. Cuthmans, a school housed in Wispers, a Norman Shaw-designed country house in the Sussex village of Stedham. Still aged 13 she was removed – effectively expelled – from Wispers after owning up to a naked midnight swim in the school pool, and she transferred to East Haddon Hall in Northamptonshire.

Enthused by her experiences of acting at school, she first decided to apply to the Glasgow College of Dramatic Art; but after her mother had separated from her stepfather, and moved to London, she auditioned for, and was accepted by, RADA instead. There she won the Ronson award for most promising student before graduating in 1958.