Am I the only person in the world who’s ever said that?

Recently, while having a look at the Australian vampire movie THIRST (1979) in preparation for an upcoming review in Video Watchdog of the new DVD from Synapse Films, I noted an unnamed bit player in a goofy but disquieting scene in which “blood cow” Jacqui Gordon is milked of her essence for the film’s villainous cult of corporate bloodsuckers.  What made the scene memorable to me had less to do with the conceit (which is like something out of an old Monogram serial) than the expression on the face of that bit player doing the milking.

I thought, “Egad, she enjoys her work.”  I mean look at that woman!  She’s not even in flipping focus but she’s the only thing you can look at through the whole of the scene.

She’s like the scariest dental hygienist ever.  Look at those mad eyes!  Look at those teeth!  This being an Australian production (despite the marquee value of name actors imported from the United States and Great Britain), I naturally assumed the bit player to be local talent.  She even has that dried-in-the-sun look of a native Aussie and I put her casting down to that particular Antipodean inclination towards broadness and the grotesque.  It was only later, while scanning the cast list on the IMDb, that I saw the name “Yvette Rees” and put two and two together.

I know next to nothing about Yvette Rees, other than that she’s an English actress whose career began in British television in the early 1960s.  Sharp-faced and somewhat formidable-looking, Rees had a bit of a patrician air when dressed to the nines but could also convey, if the need arose, coarse commonality or a sense of foreign menace.  She had featured roles on episodes of the long-running BBC police series DIXON OF DOCK GREEN (which ran from 1955 to 1976 and provided early paycheques to rising stars Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Malcolm McDowell and Rees’ THIRST castmate David Hemmings) and Z CARS (1962-1978), as well as on the ITV anthology series OUT OF THIS WORLD hosted by Boris Karloff (all episodes tragically “wiped” by ITV and presumed lost) and CATCH HAND, a British spin on ROUTE 66, in which handsome leads Mark Eden and Anthony Booth played intinerant construction workers who find drama and adventure as they job from village to village.

In Ken Russell’s THE DEBUSSY FILM (1965), Rees had a small but interesting role as an actress playing Emma Bardac, real life lover and later the last wife of French composer Claude Debussy.  What makes the scene interesting is that it begins as a moment seemingly torn from Debussy’s actual life… but it is then revealed via a cutaway to be a stage play, presented in the style of a melodrama (in counterpoint to the real life Debussy’s hatred of all things emotional and melodramatic) and  watched by actors cast in a film about the composer’s turbulent life.

Vigorously and playfully “meta,” this ambitious TV project (for which Russell had intended a theatrical run but which he was forced to give over to the BBC series MONITOR) cuts in and out of the story within the story to both attend the calamitous consequences of Debussy’s many love affairs and to deconstruct the very nature of creativity via a running tutorial by the film’s director (Vladek Sheybal, who was himself a journeyman BBC director before becoming a reliable movie villain) for the edification of his leading man Oliver Reed, later the star of Russell’s THE DEVILS (1970) and here making the transition from the chorus of the Hammer Horrors to leading man status.

I confess I hadn’t seen THE DEBUSSY FILM prior to developing a fascination with this oddly attractive actress.  I knew her exclusively from her participation in two films that got a lot of word of mouth when I was a kid.  In Don Sharp’s WITCHCRAFT (1964), Rees had not a single line of dialogue but was positively immortal as a 17th century witch revived by a warlock (Lon Chaney, Jr.) and his coven in modern times.  The script by Harry Spalding feels and looks to be overreliant on the example of Mario Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY (1960), with Rees an undead ringer for Bava’s leading lady Barbara Steele, but it has its moments and most of them belong to Yvette Rees.

By turns as ethereal as a will o’the wisp and as hair-raisingly creepy as, well, as a 17th century witch resurrected in modern times, Rees’ pantomime performance as Vanessa Whitlock is a definite career high.  She has such a handle on unearthliness that even repeat viewings of WITCHCRAFT do not dilute her ability to spook.  The following year, Rees was called to duty again by Don Sharp, in the service of Lippert Films.

In THE CURSE OF THE FLY (1965), Rees donned Asiatic eye lifts and an overall aspect of inscrutibility to play Wan, faithful (and not infrequently sneaky) family retainer to the beleaguered Delambre family, whose misadventures were chronicled previously in THE FLY (1958) and THE RETURN OF THE FLY (1959).  Splitting its narrative (again the work of Harry Spalding) between Canada and England, this second sequel eschewed the buggy preoccupations of the earlier films to focus on the proto-Cronenbergian mutations wrought by Trans-Atlantic teleportation.  It’s a flawed film, certainly, but an interesting one for the way it examines the fine line between genius and madness.  Looking back at CURSE OF THE FLY at the distance of over forty years, it’s hard to defend the use of an Occidental actress as a Chinese national and Rees’ performance seems informed more by accepted stereotype (especially when she is paired onscreen with Chinese actor Burt Kwouk, who isn’t nearly as starchy).  Nonetheless, Rees imbues Wan with some interesting nuances, not the least of which is an almost Sapphic devotion to her former mistress, Judith Delambre (Mary Manson), whom teleportation has maimed and reduced to homicidal lunacy.

Yvette Rees has no known film or television credits between 1965 and 1970, at which time she appeared as a German doctor in a two-part episode of the PAUL TEMPLE adventure series (clearly inspired by the “Thin Man” novels of Dashiell Hammett and a precursor to MCMILLAN & WIFE and HART TO HART) and popped up bits as a party guest in Dick Clement’s A SEVERED HEAD and as one of the ensemble of Stuart Burge’s all-star film adaptation of Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR.  Rees can be seen periodically throughout the latter film; she is present early on for Marullus’ Caesar-bashing “Oh you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” speech and enjoys prominent placing, after the murder of Caesar (John Gielgud) at the hands of Brutus (Jason Robards) and Cassius (Richard Johnson) et al, for the big “Friends, Romans, Countrymen…” public address by Marc Antony (Charlton Heston).  Heston, one of the biggest film stars of the day, even plays to Rees a bit…

… which boosts her visibility – a perk for Rees Watchers like myself.  Rees was nearly lost in the crowd again in Michael Cacoyannis’ THE TROJAN WOMEN (1971) but at least she got a free trip to Spain out of it.  In this cinematic adaptation of the classic Euripides tragedy, Rees is once again swathed in head-to-toe sackcloth as one of Katherine Hepburn’s fellow war widows.  Early on, Rees gets a fragment of a line or two (“We heard… and through our hearts flashed fear”) in keeping with the Greek chorus style of the piece and can be seen over Hepburn’s shoulder in this tense moment between KH and British actor Brian Blessed as a point man for the invading Greeks.

Rees’ ubiquity early in the film is a bit of a bait-and-switch, however, as she all but disappears from the frame for the film’s midsection and is not used at all in an evocative montage of close-ups.  Rees is not billed as one of the core Trojan Women but is instead listed far down in the credits along with a score of Spanish/Latin actresses (among them Argentine beauty Mirta Miller, later a memorable “Euro-babe” in several Iberian horror movies starring Paul Naschy).  Rees’ known credits thin to a trickle after this.  Who knows how she wound up Downunder but in 1979, around the same time that she appeared in THIRST, she turned up in an early episode of the long-running Australian soap opera PRISONER, which aired from 1979 to 1986 (692 episodes!) and was known in some markets as PRISONER: CELL BLOCK H to avoid confusion with the similarly-titled Patrick McGoohan series.  Set in and around the fictional Melbourne women’s detention center, the drama afforded Rees the role of an obsessively neat Welsh landlady whose merciless ministrations to series regular Peta Toppano drove the paroled murderess back out onto the streets.

I don’t know what else to tell you, other than that I’m always on the lookout for Yvette Rees.  Movie fans can get like this – they spot somebody somewhat obscure (you may remember my article on Clytie Jessop) and start to obsess over finding out things about them, over seeing all their work and being among the first to champion them.  If anybody out there knows anything more about this bewitching but underused actress, please let me know!