The Killing of Sister George

Actress June Buckridge (Beryl Reid) plays a kindly nun in a popular British soap, a role altogether distinct from her off-screen persona: a fabulously brassy butch with a sadistic streak who hits the bottle hard. Her life begins to unravel when plans are made to kill off her character, and, making matters worse, one of the show’s producers has eyes for her much-younger girlfriend. The writer Terry Castle described The Killing of Sister George as “a lesbian fable at once so jolting and so sophisticated, so true and so false, so intelligent and raffish about what women do together, it seemingly had to be forgotten immediately.” Yet revisiting the film, she concluded that “one may feel one still hasn’t caught up with it. Susannah York in lingerie and bunny skuffs, chomping on a cigar fished from the toilet by her lover, a raddled Beryl Reid: it’s a revolution in awareness still waiting to happen.”