We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,590,239.34 | Books Available: 791,653 | Members Online: 231

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - No Bells on Sunday: The Rachel Roberts Journals

No Bells on Sunday The Rachel Roberts Journals
Author: Rachel Roberts, Alexander Walker

Jacket Flaps-- Rachel Roberts was a woman who wanted it all: a happy marriage, children, and a successful career. Although her two marriages were childless and ended in divorce, her career as a stage and screen actress was very successful, earning her critical acclaim and awards in both England and America, until she cut it short by... more » drinking too much for too long and finally by swallowing poison in her Los Angeles home.

During the last eighteen months of her life she kept a journal, in which she reviewed her life from her childhood in Wales right up to the last tortured days preceding her death. The journals, discovered after her death by her lover, provide a painfully moving account of the ever-descending spiral of suicidal depression, of the daily, losing battle of living life on the knife edge of despair.

Two themes dominate her life and her writings: her addiction to alcohol, and her "hunger for love in all its miraculous and unrealistic aspects"-- a hunger that took the form of an incurable obsession with the man she married and divorced, Rex Harrison. Rachel Roberts was a brilliant actress noted for her portrayals of emotional pain and sexual ferocity in such films as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, Alpha Beta, Yanks, and Murder on the Orient Express, and in such plays as The Visit, Platonov, Chemin de Fer and Habeas Corpus. But, as her journals reveal, she was also a woman riddled with insecurity, prone to unrealistic wants, self-delusion, and an insatiable need for attention, particularly from men.

She was a passionate, vibrant person whose hunger for heightened experience led her to dangerous excesses. Always the disciplined professional in her work, offstage she was given to flamboyant, often promiscuous, outrageous behavior. The early, halcyon days of her marriage to Rex, who represented all the sleek sophistication and dazzle of success, became in ;her mind the pure image of the happiness that eluded her her "I wanted life to be like an idyll," she wrote. "And it's not." And so she drank, losing more and more control over her life,becoming torn with fear and anxiety, feeling apart from the human race, envious of the people around her who could perform the tasks of daily living. She became indifferent to everything--even acting had ceased to offer any refuge from "the void and ashy chaos" Only her writing seemed capable of saving her, and the journals show not only her talent but a remarkable lucidity and insight into her own character and feelings. But increasingly those feelings are of utter desolation, and the movement of the journals becomes a downward pull toward what seems inescapable doom, while still she clings to her fierce conviction that her one and only hope for survival is Rex. "If there is no hope with him," she wrote, "then my number is really up." Eventually she must have realized that hope was rooted in fantasy, and on November 25, 1980, she took her life.

Interwoven with the journals and Alexander Walker's commentary are the words of Rachel's colleagues, doctors, and close friends, Sybil Christopher, Lindsay Anderson, Pamela Mason, her lover Darren Ramirez, Sidney Lumet, John Schlesinger, Jill Benett, Albert Finney, Richard Gere, Athol Fugard, Karel Reisz, Hal Prince, and many others, together creating a poignant and unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary woman and her tragic destruction.

Alexander Walker is film critic of the London New Standard and a regular columnist for British Vogue. He has written more than ten previous books on Anglo-American cinema, including biographies of Greta Garbo, Peter Sellers, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Rudolph Valentino and Stanley Kubrick.

ISBN-13: 9780060152352
ISBN-10: 0060152354
Publication Date: 9/1984
Pages: 246
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Harpercollins
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Read All 1 Book Reviews of "No Bells on Sunday The Rachel Roberts Journals"

Please Log in to Rate these Book Reviews

Sandy B. (blue-eyes) reviewed No Bells on Sunday: The Rachel Roberts Journals on 5/14/2006 + 33 more book reviews

Rachel Roberts summed up her deeply troubled life. Haunted by fears of aging,chronic alcholism,and her failed marriage to Rex Harrison.

Share/Like this Review?

Read All Book Reviews of "No Bells on Sunday The Rachel Roberts Journals"

Genres:

Biographies & Memoirs >> People, A-Z >> ( R )

Back to the Top ↑

Search - No Bells on Sunday: The Rachel Roberts Journals

Please Log in to Rate these Book Reviews

Loading...