by Stephen Vagg
The life and films of an iconic actress from the 1950s and 1960s.
We were originally planning to do a piece on Janet Munro as part of the movie star cold streaks series, but after investigating her career in a little more depth, this didn’t seem appropriate, as Munro wasn’t a ‘proper’ film star. She only ever played the one leading role in a feature film, being more typically found in girlfriend/love interest parts (though it was different in television). But we felt that she was still worth a piece as Janet Munro had one of the most haunting, magical cinematic presences in the late 1950s and early 1960s… and one of the saddest personal stories.
Munro was born (in 1934) in a trunk, as they say – her father, Scotsman Alex Munro, was a music hall comic who spent most of his life on the road and usually brought little Janet along with him. Like other vaudeville babies such as Buster Keaton and Judy Garland, Janet found herself appearing on stage as a child, singing and performing. Her mum died when she was seven; when Janet turned eleven, dad sent her to various aunts and uncles for a more stable upbringing, but it was no use fighting the family DNA – Janet was determined to be an actress. She entered the “straight” acting industry via the tried and true British method of a provincial rep company. Munro was pretty and talented, and soon started getting television and stage work.
Her notable early roles included a stage play, Daughter of Desire, where Munro starred as a girl-gone-bad: a young woman who becomes a prostitute; it was financed by film producer Raymond Stross who filmed the story in 1957 – without Munro – as The Flesh is Weak. She also got decent parts in television plays, alternating between playing good-girls and girls-gone-bad.
In One of Us, she romanced an Italian mill worker; she turned prostitute again in Pickup Girl (later filmed without Munro as Too Young to Love), then portrayed a 12-year-old who befriends a girl of a different social class in Lace on Her Petticoat; she committed suicide after living too “fast” in Trial by Candlelight and lost her hearing in The Deaf Heart.
Munro did a screen test for the Rank Film Organisation who turned her down, she claimed, for being “too individual” without “the proper Kensington accent which everyone prefers in English films”. This is believable – Rank’s record at developing stars was terrible (whenever they made one, it was usually by accident). However, she did get some good-girl parts in B pictures typical of the British industry at the time: a slight comedy based on a stage success (Small Hotel), a horror movie written by Jimmy Sangster (The Trollenberg Terror) and an adaptation of a TV play by Ted Willis (The Young and the Guilty). Munro is very sweet in Small Hotel, as a maid being taught how to chisel by Gordon Harker; and most winning in Trollenberg as a psychic.
Munro inadvertently increased her public profile by marrying, in early 1957, a blonde actor called Tony Wright. No one really remembers him now, but for a red-hot minute the Rank Film Organisation thought Wright – nicknamed “Mr Beefcake” – was going to be a movie star. His ability to speak French saw him cast as private eye Slim Callaghan in some French films, and Wright had lead roles in a series of Rank dramas like Jacqueline (1956), Tiger in the Smoke (1956) and Seven Thunders (1957). (In November 1956 John Davis, managing director of Rank confidently announced the following Rank actors would be big stars: Peter Finch, Kay Kendall, Jeannie Carson, Virginia McKenna, Belinda Lee, Michael Craig, Maureen Swanson, Kenneth More and… Tony Wright.)
The couple met cute when Munro was making spare cash as a hat check girl at a club, having her backside constantly pinched. They started casually dating when she went on tour with a play (presumably Daughter of Desire), Wright love bombed her and proposed, and Munro gave in, in part because she wanted some stability in her life. At Wright’s request, Munro was given away at the wedding by Rank’s head of production Earl St John, rather than her actual father, and they went on honeymoon in France where Wright was making Seven Thunders.
The marriage wobbled fairly early and by 1958 they were separated (though it took three years to get a formal divorce); Wright was then dumped by Rank and took an overdose of sleeping tablets but recovered and continued to act with decreasing impact.
Anyway, back to Janet Munro. Her big break came when Walt Disney was looking for actors for his Irish fantasy Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959). A casting agent saw her in Pickup Girl and arranged for a screen test; she got the role and a contract with Disney to make one film a year for five years. She says this is what finally killed her marriage to Wright, although in the formal divorce proceedings in 1960 he claimed that she’d committed adultery with Gerald O’Hara, an assistant director who later became a director.
Darby O’Gill and the Little People – set in Ireland, shot in Los Angeles – is one of Disney’s most enchanting live action films of the 1950s, if not the most, and a great deal of that is due to the bewitching Munro, who plays Darby’s daughter, flirting with a young Sean Connery, staring off into the distance, all wistful and joyous. She’s everything you want in a fair Irish miss (apart from being, well, Irish in real life) and the film has never stopped playing on TV somewhere.
Disney then cast Munro as the love interest in Third Man on the Mountain (1959), a boy’s own mountain climbing film with James MacArthur and Michael Rennie. Munro is wonderful once again, even getting to do a little mountaineering.
For American television, she appeared in a version of Berkeley Square opposite John Kerr, a 1950s actor who had his moment in the sun (Tea and Sympathy), but who had no more business being a film star than Tony Wright, really; Munro’s personal reviews were good. Another good-girl part came in a British musical shot in Spain: Tommy the Toreador (1959), with Tommy Steele as a merchantman confused for a matador. It’s a sweet film and Munro is delightful.
She had a little more meat in her third film for Disney, Swiss Family Robinson (1960), being fought over by brothers James MacArthur and Tommy Kirk. Yes, she was another good-girl but she had something different to play this time, masquerading as a boy for a slab of the movie – according to director Ken Annakin, this idea was sparked by Munro’s own stories of dressing as a boy during her strolling player days, and then incorporated into the script. The movie was one of the biggest hits of the year, a deserved classic.
Disney then reunited Munro and Kirk (and threw in Annette Funicello) for The Horsemasters (1961), shot in England, made for TV in America and theatres elsewhere. This was the story of students at a riding school; Munro essentially plays the lead role, a rather grumpier character than usual, who teaches the other students and romances an Australian (John Fraser). Funicello later wrote in her memoirs that several married members of the crew were having affairs with the cast. Cinematographer Freddie Francis later called this, unfairly, the worst film he ever made, but said they had a lot of fun making it. The Horsemasters isn’t bad, just feels patchy.
The contract between Munro and Disney then wound up prematurely. Munro claimed it was her decision, saying “I got fed up playing little girlie parts”. We have also read that it was Disney’s call – after all, the studio had great success with another young British female actor, Hayley Mills, in Pollyanna (1960), and might have figured Munro was now surplus to requirements. It may simply have been mutual.
In 1961, Munro did an adaption of Time Remembered for American TV, with Christopher Plummer; by this time, in real life, she was engaged to an assistant director, Rene Dupont, but the relationship did not last. In England, she did two high-profile juicy television plays: Girl in a Bird Cage, playing a girl-gone-wrong, a woman sent to prison; and Afternoon of a Nymph, as a struggling actress trying to deal with groping men (both featured lesbian characters panting after Munro, incidentally – the sixties were starting to swing). Afternoon of a Nymph co-starred Ian Hendry, then a rising star of British theatre and television; he started dating Munro despite still being married to someone else. After his divorce came through, he and Munro married in February 1963; the two of them moved to a house on Pharaoh’s Island in London and became quite a glamorous couple.
Post-Disney, Munro made her made her best ever British film, Val Guest’s excellent The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962), about the world hurtling towards the sun. She was, once more, a love interest, but this time she got to play a girl who (a) had a job (b) was smart (c) liked sex and isn’t punished for it and (d) can match Edward Judd for wisecracks and helps him figure out what’s going on. To be frank, at times it seems that Munro’s other role in the film seems to be to demonstrate how hot it’s getting by having her constantly sun baking, hopping out of the shower and/or lying around in just a sheet – this did earn her a whole new legion of fans. But she has a real part to play, with great dialogue and dramatic scenes, and it’s a shame that she never worked with Val Guest again. The film is a terrific combination of newspaper film and apocalypse drama which has aged (depressingly) well due to its environmental message.
Changing pace, Munro did Life for Ruth (1962), from the team of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph, who liked a bit of hot-social-topicality in their movies (Sapphire, Victim). Life for Ruth was about a religious man (Michael Craig) who refuses his daughter a blood transaction leading to her death; that’s the first 30 minutes and then the film becomes about a doctor (Patrick McGoohan) trying to punish Craig. The leads are all excellent, even though Munro – who plays Craig’s wife – doesn’t have that much to act other than “sad” and “overruled by her husband”. The film would’ve been better had she been given something more to do, such as McGoohan being in love with her or something. (All those progressive lefty British filmmakers of the post war period like Ted Willis and Basil Dearden generally wrote terrible female parts – Munro did far better under less righteous scribes like Val Guest and Jimmy Sangster.) Life for Ruth is actually very well made, but a kid dies in the first half hour – it’s hard to get a film’s momentum back after that. The movie was a financial flop, helping kill off the idealistic co-op that was Allied Filmmakers (they also made classics like The League of Gentlemen, Victim, Whistle on the Wind, and Seance on a Wet Afternoon).
Munro went straight into another film, this one completely different: Hide and Seek, a Hitchcockian thriller that Cy Endfield directed before Zulu (though it was released afterwards, in 1964). Munro played “the girl” – but it was a decent part as she was a “mysterious girl”, who meets Ian Carmichael’s scientist, who is caught up with spies. Carmichael always wanted to play a Cary Grant type role and thought Hide and Seek would be it; he later whined in his memoirs that the film flopped because the script was changed. Well, yeah, maybe, and Cy Enfield wasn’t a natural director of this material, but also, sorry to be rude to any Ian Carmichael fans, he’s not charismatic enough for this role, and Janet Munro is definitely too hot for him in this movie. That’s mean, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Munro then played the one leading role in her feature film career – Bitter Harvest (1963). This was based on the novel 20,000 Streets Under the Sky by Patrick (Gaslight) Hamilton, and like Afternoon of a Nymph told the story of a young woman struggling to be famous in a sea of sleazy men. The script was by Ted Willis and the director was originally Peter Cotes, the team that had made The Young and The Guilty with Munro – but two weeks into filming, Cotes was sacked and replaced by Peter Graham Scott.
Bitter Harvest is a melodrama where Munro plays a woman from an economically depressed Welsh mining town who dreams of a better life, then spends 90 minutes being punished for it. She is raped while drunk, falls pregnant, meets the Perfect Man (John Stride), a barman who worships her but who also discourages her ambition or social life beyond going bowling in the evening or getting married to him and who literally throttles her when she laughs at him, who goes to a party and is sleazed on by various men and dances “fast”, who (it’s implied) becomes a high class prostitute working for Alan Badel and who dies of an accidental drug overdose after a bad night out. The ambulance carrying her corpse goes past John Stride and his new wife, a dull girl who’s pined after him the whole film and they are shown to be very happy while Munro is dead.
Bitter Harvest is such an odd movie. The filmmakers seem to have such empathy for Munro’s character to start off with – the town she comes from is so boring, her family are so horrible, she is clearly sexually assaulted… but then halfway through they appear to turn on her for the crime of not wanting to be married to the dull, controlling bartender. If you want to tell a cautionary tale movie, it needs to be about someone who deserves punishment – that’s not the case for Janet Munro’s character in Bitter Harvest, she’s clearly a victim. The whole film feels like it was made by old men going “tsk tsk”, which tracks with other scripts written by Ted Willis. Munro does what she can. The film flopped, killing any chance that this film could do what, say, Darling did for Julie Christie or Georgy Girl did for Lyn Redgrave.
(Sidebar: years later, Peter Cotes sued the producers of Bitter Harvest, saying that being fired off the movie wrecked his chance of a feature film career. He was unsuccessful but Cotes claimed, Christian Porter style, that he had won a moral victory. Justice McKenna in the High Court, who obviously fancied himself a bit of a film critic, had to review all the film’s rushes and script. He declared, “I cannot imagine a good film being made of this script by Mr Cotes or anybody else. I think Mr Cotes’ film would have been more pleasing to the public than the finished film.” Cotes’ film career never recovered. Another sidebar: Cotes had come out to Australia in 1961 to help develop Australian television drama, promptly made four television plays, all starring his British wife and based on British plays, then returned home – and later took credit for the successes of the Australian industry in the late ‘60s and 1970s, which he had played no part in.)
Munro changed pace yet again, with a black comedy called A Jolly Bad Fellow (1964). This is a movie that no one remembers, an attempt by Michael Balcon to recapture the magic of Ealing, in particular Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) – it’s about an academic who kills off any people who annoy him. The lead role was played by Leo McKern, in a rare starring part (we think that Balcon was hoping to turn him into the next Alec Guinness). Balcon even enlisted the help of key contributors to Kind Hearts – Robert Hamer, the brilliant, tormented alcoholic, worked on the script, while actor Dennis Price took a support role. Munro plays McKern’s assistant who, not very realistically, wants to schtup him – she is funny, and once more writhes naked under a sheet. It’s not her fault the film isn’t very good.
Munro took some time off to focus on her family – and, from various accounts, her drinking. Hendry was an alcoholic and Munro joined in and apparently, it all got a bit Days of Wine and Roses on Pharoah’s Island. She returned to films as Dirk Bogarde’s ex in Sebastian (1968), a swinging London film which no one seems to remember despite Michael Powell’s association.
Her television credits were stronger, including adaptations of The Admirable Crichton (she played the Tweeney) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. With her training, ability and beauty, plus the variety of work in Britain, there’s no reason to expect Munro couldn’t have kept acting for the rest of her life. This turned out to be the case – it’s just that her life wasn’t very long.
Munro’s last years were rough. She and Hendry lost two children (two survived); both continued to drink, and had health issues. They were meant to co-star in the TV series The Lotus Eaters, but Munro pulled out. In December 1971, she and Hendry divorced; the following month she was involved in a car crash, nearly losing the sight of one eye. On 6 December 1972, Janet Munro collapsed in her London flat, with her two children in the next room. Their nanny tried to revive her, and an ambulance was called but Janet was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, aged just 38.
Hendry remarried and had another child; he had a decent career (The Hill, Get Carter, Theatre of Blood) but there was always a sense of unfulfilled potential about it due to his alcoholism. He died in 1984, aged 53. Here’s a 1978 episode of This is Your Life, where he looks notably uncomfortable, and Munro is briefly mentioned:
Janet Munro is definitely not forgotten, especially by those who were the right age when they saw The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Darby O’Gill and Swiss Family Robinson. If you’re a Munro fan, it’s definitely worth seeing Bitter Harvest, flaws and all. She was a magnetic performer, who still had so much to give, but at least those who never knew her, have something to remember her by.
