Susan Elliott; actress and widow of Denholm Elliott
Hyfler/Rosner
Susan Elliott
21/04/2007 Telegraph
Susan Elliott, who has died aged 65, had an open
marriage for 30 years with Denholm Elliott, the actor, who
lived a secret double life as a promiscuous bisexual until
his death from Aids in 1992.
She was a 19-year-old actress in 1961 when Elliott
proposed. He was 20 years older, and his first brief
marriage to Virginia McKenna had ended in divorce. They had
met in New York, at the Strollers' Club on 53rd Street in
midtown Manhattan, where Susan Robinson, as she then was,
was working as a singing waitress.
It was an unlikely pairing. Susan was an American
convent girl, while Elliott, a louche and very English
thespian, admitted at the outset to having had male lovers.
While she came from a patrician family of writers, he was a
chronically insecure actor, a star of The Cruel Sea (1953),
whose career, he thought, was on the slide.
A year later they married in London and enjoyed an
extended European honeymooon driving through France in
Elliott's Mercedes SL 190 convertible, via Barcelona, to
Ibiza, then something of a celebrity playground.
The couple found a plot of land on a hillside outside
Santa Eulalia, built their own idyllic villa there and
stayed for 30 years.
Nearly 10 years into her marriage Susan knew Denholm
was bisexual, when he returned from shooting Too Late The
Hero (1970) and confessed to having participated in various
orgies on location with men as well as women, and suggesting
she attend a clap clinic for a protective shot "just to be
on the safe side".
On visits to London, the couple were regular fixtures
at bohemian drinking clubs. On one outing to the Colony Room
with the artist Francis Bacon and his boyfriend John
Edwards, Susan Elliott was handcuffed to a barstool by
Edwards, who went off home without unlocking her. She made
her way back to north London and managed to get into bed
beside her husband without disturbing him, concealing the
stool by her side of the bed.
Denholm Elliott set off for filming the next morning
none the wiser, and she then hailed another cab to take her
to Bacon's studio in Reece Mews, where she was released, and
then taken for lunch to Wheeler's, by her captors.
Susan Robinson was born on March 7 1942 in Cleveland,
where her grandfather had edited the Plain Dealer newspaper,
and was raised in Washington DC. Her manic depressive father
was a journalist on Time and later Newsweek magazines, her
mother the daughter of a well-off Southern Catholic family.
She attended the Sacred Heart Academy in Washington where
the nuns, ignoring her wish to learn languages, noted her
skill at basketball and made her captain of the school team.
Susan's appetite for show business had been whetted by
attendance at recordings of such television shows as
Saturday Night Jamboree and Record Hoppers. After modest
success as an actress in Riders to the Sea (for which she
won an award as Best Supporting Newcomer), her father
enrolled her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New
York.
The city held no fear for Susan, who had been beaten
up in Washington by a gang of eight girls and a boy, leaving
her with scars on her face and crowns on her teeth.Her
engagement to Denholm Elliott made the New York gossip
columns, Elliott himself scrambling to place a call to her
father at daybreak in the hope that he not yet opened his
morning paper.
When the play he was in finally closed, the couple
married in London, where the diary pages had already trailed
the actor's nuptials to a "devastating 20 year old, slender
Susan Robinson".
She recalled the first few years of her marriage
during the 1960s as "a whirlwind of parties, films, touring
and babies"; with children and later a nanny in tow, Susan
shuttled between Ibiza, London and America in order to be
with her husband.
There were sadnesses, too: her father committed
suicide by jumping off the 28th floor of the Manhattan
Towers, and she lost twin children at birth. Two more
children were born prematurely, a son, Mark, who as a child
suffered serious illness and growth problems, and a
daughter, Jennifer, who later hanged herself having become
hooked on drugs.
When Denholm Elliott first confessed to attending
orgies, Susan instinctively declared the marriage over and
the couple agreed to a trial separation. But on the flight
home, she decided to try again, and within a week they had
patched their relationship up.
Back in Ibiza, his affairs continued, his taste
running to the exotic, including Chinese waiters, Moroccan
gigolos, Spanish garage attendants, Barbadian shop
assistants, even a hunchbacked Haitian dwarf.
Susan had long since become reconciled to her
husband's boyfriends, and seldom felt jealous, except on one
occasion where he followed one of them, a young Moroccan, to
London; as a gesture of defiance she enjoyed a fleeting
affair with a French actor holidaying on the island, and was
reassured to find herself still attractive and desirable,
and with no feeling of guilt. Her own sex life with her
husband remained active. "Between us," she remembered, "he
was always 100 percent masculine, both in bed and in taking
decisions in our home life."
For his part, Denholm Elliott never inhibited Susan's
own affairs ("as long as you don't fall in love and as long
as you don't have anyone else's baby"), mainly because, as
he himself explained, it made him feel less guilty about his
own indiscretions.
These increased in number and frequency as the years
passed until, as Susan noted in her revealing biography
Denholm Elliott, Quest For Love (1994), her husband's
promiscuity became "almost a psychological disorder".
In 1987 Elliott told her he had tested HIV positive.
Having just bought Sandy's Bar on Ibiza, they hurriedly sold
the business on, but in London five years later Susan
decided that she wanted him to die on the island and she
emptied her bank account to hire a private jet for him. He
died at his villa on Ibiza in October 1992 aged 70.
In his memory, Susan Elliott established a hotel
complex on Ibiza called Can Bufi, where people who are HIV
positive could enjoy a free holiday, subsidised by 16 paying
guests.
Susan Elliott died in a fire at her home in London on
April 12. She is survived by her son, her twin brother and a
sister.
RocketScience
> Although not much about her actress life.
>
> Susan Elliott
>
> 21/04/2007 Telegraph
>
> Susan Elliott, who has died aged 65, had an open
> marriage for 30 years with Denholm Elliott, the actor, who
> lived a secret double life as a promiscuous bisexual until
Important video relating to HIV and AIDS. http://www.aidsfraudvideo.com
We are a global-reach voluntary group. Our goal is ensuring the
interests of AIDS-diagnosed people are no longer secondary to the
interests of drug suppliers, service providers and the AIDS research
industry.
http://aidsmyth.addr.com/enteraidsmyth.htm
Did You Know that many experts now contend AIDS is not a fatal,
incurable condition caused by HIV?
We bring you the voices of alternative scientists and reforming
campaigners worldwide. We are independent of vested pharmaceutical
and medical interests -offering readers and forum members, global news
and leading edge views on diagnosis and treatment.
Most of the information you receive is commercially driven and based
on misleading assumptions or unfounded estimates and predictions. The
symptoms associated with AIDS are treatable using non-toxic, immune
enhancing therapies that have restored health and have enabled those
truly at risk to remain well.
rocketscience
PirateJohn
>
> Important video relating to HIV and AIDS. http://www.aidsfraudvideo.com
>
> We are a global-reach voluntary group. Our goal is ensuring the
> interests of AIDS-diagnosed people are no longer secondary to the
> interests of drug suppliers, service providers and the AIDS research
> industry.
>
> http://aidsmyth.addr.com/enteraidsmyth.htm
>
> Did You Know that many experts now contend AIDS is not a fatal,
> incurable condition caused by HIV?
>
> We bring you the voices of alternative scientists and reforming
> campaigners worldwide. We are independent of vested pharmaceutical
> and medical interests -offering readers and forum members, global news
> and leading edge views on diagnosis and treatment.
>
> Most of the information you receive is commercially driven and based
> on misleading assumptions or unfounded estimates and predictions. The
> symptoms associated with AIDS are treatable using non-toxic, immune
> enhancing therapies that have restored health and have enabled those
> truly at risk to remain well.
>
> rocketscience- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Sounds like an excellent charity and an excellent cause. Keep up the
good works.