Treat yourself to a Clytie Jessop film festival this Halloween. It won’t take long; in fact, you could wrap up the whole affair, with opening and concluding remarks, in just 280 minutes. Who was Clytie Jessop you ask?

Here she is. With those high, imperious cheekbones, that unblinking stare and skin a whiter shade of pale, Clytie Jessop had a face that lent itself very nicely to the purposes of horror… and yet there is beauty there, too, behind that mask of inscrutability. Jessop will be instantly recognizable to a generation of movie fans raised on British horror and yet she made only three films – apparently being an actress wasn’t her main occupation.

By the evidence on hand, she seems to have had something going on with the cinematographer and later director Freddie Francis (who passed away this year.) Francis first photographed Jessop for THE INNOCENTS (1961), Jack Clayton’s acclaimed adaptation of the Henry James 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw. Seen only fleetingly and only in long shot, Jessop plays the former (and formerly living) governess of an English country estate in whose sensible shoes new governess Deborah Kerr has the misfortune to fill. As was true for all her film appearances, Clytie said not a word but just stood there being haunting… a job she did very, very well.

 She next turned up in NIGHTMARE (1964), which Francis directed for Hammer Studios. It’s a bog standard Young Girl Goes Mad scenario written by Jimmy Sangster and patterned after Henri-Georges Clouzot’s DIABOLIQUE (1955), with no apologies to Wilkie Collins. As was her custom, Clytie is mute throughout, turning up in the visions of leading lady Jennie Linden as the scar-faced Woman in White. Francis and director of photography John Wilcox get good mileage out of our Clytie, keeping her confined for the most part to bottomless shadows but employing her for an amusing (if not entirely believable) twist in the tail.

 Clytie Jessop’s only color film was her last. In TORTURE GARDEN (1967), again directed by Freddie Francis but this time for Hammer rival Amicus Films, she is Atropos (from whom the poison atropine takes its name), the Goddess of Destiny. (“In the left hand, the skein of life. In the right, the shears of fate. Each colored thread represents a human life and the shears have the power to cut it short.”) Again, she keeps mum throughout the film but her rock-like countenance is the perfect match for this formidable Greek seeress and helpmeet of Burgess Meredith’s devil-in-disguise. When TORTURE GARDEN was released recently on DVD, Clytie’s face was all over the design.

And then she quit, just like that.  Well, as I’ve said, acting wasn’t her real interest but rather the fine arts.  She had been born Clytie Lloyd-Jones in Sydney, Australia, in 1929. (The name Clytie is itself taken from Greek mythology. It was Clytie who lost Apollo’s love for another and suffered famously by staring at the sun until she turned golden brown and was transformed into a sunflower.) Her parents, Jonah Lloyd-Jones and Erica Lloyd-Jones, were both artists, as was Clytie’s younger sister Hermia-Lloyd Jones. Named for her father (whose real first name was Herman), Hermia was fated to fall famously in love with Australian sculptor, ceramicist and figurative painter David Jones. When Clytie won £5,000 in the New South Wales lottery, she gave a third of her winnings to David and Hermia, which they used to settle in London… obviously, Clytie followed.

At some point in the late 60s, Clytie founded the Clytie Jessop Gallery at 271 King’s Road in the Chelsea section of London. There she exhibited the works of a wide ranger of artisans, including Paul Roberts, Colin Kirby-Green, Jamie Boyd, Ben Cabrera and an Australia-born Frenchman named Philippe Mora, who would later direct such guilty pleasure B-films as THE BEAST WITHIN (1982) and HOWLING II: YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF (1984). Clytie seems to have been an artist herself and perhaps it was her appreciation for painting and for the stillness required of living models that made her such a good enigma. She returned to film in the mid-80s but kept behind the camera as the producer, co-writer and director of the Australia-set WWII drama EMMA’S WAR (1986) with Lee Remick and a young Miranda Otto.

 And there the trail ends – not a peep out of her in over 20 years.  Of course, she is no doubt not such an enigma to her family, friends and associates, but for those of us who grew up being beguiled and scared by her on the big screen she remains the perfect, elusive woman of mystery.