Hilary Mason and the laugh that made Don’t Look Now impossible to trust

Hilary Mason

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	September 4, 1917 Birmingham, England
Died	September 5, 2006 (89)
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Don't Look Now, Dolls, Haunted

In a restaurant lavatory in a wintry Venice, an elderly blind woman takes the hands of a grieving stranger and tells her that her drowned daughter is sitting at her table, between her and her husband, laughing. “She’s wearing a shiny little mac,” she adds, as if passing on a piece of good news. Hilary Mason delivered that speech in Don’t Look Now with a plain, almost chatty conviction, and audiences have argued ever since about what they were watching: a medium, a fraud, or a lonely woman who believes in her own gift. Nicolas Roeg never settles the question. Mason’s reputation has never quite settled it either. She worked on British screens for close to half a century, and she is still remembered almost entirely for a few scenes as a woman nobody can decide whether to trust.

The doubt is built into the performance. Heather and her sister Wendy, played by Clelia Matania, are two elderly sisters staying in Venice who approach Julie Christie‘s Laura, a mother still raw from the death of her child. Heather holds a séance and warns that Laura’s husband, played by Donald Sutherland, is in danger in Venice. Roeg also lets us watch the sisters laughing together once Laura has gone, a moment that can be read as relief or as a con artist’s private joke. Mason does not play the seer as a crone. Her Heather is warm, slightly fussy and faintly absurd, and that ordinariness is what makes her frightening. When the film’s prophecy comes true, nobody has been able to dismiss her.

The actress behind her had trained the long way. Hilary Lavender Mason came from Birmingham, where she was born in September 1917, and won a scholarship to the London School of Dramatic Art. Repertory followed, with seasons in Preston, Southport, York and Guildford, and during the Second World War she toured with ENSA, the organisation that put on shows for the troops. It was the standard schooling of the British character actor: a different part every week and no time for vanity.

Television came to her late, when she was nearly forty, with the role of Mrs Drummond in Thunder in the West in 1957. Over the next decade she became one of the faces that turned up wherever a drama needed a mother, a landlady or a neighbour with opinions. She was Mrs Yapp in the Midlands council serial Swizzlewick and Mrs Timothy in the football soap United!, a role that ran for more than fifty episodes. She played eight different characters in Z Cars and three in Dixon of Dock Green. In Coronation Street she had two separate parts, the second as the mother of Derek Wilton, who disapproved of his romance with Mavis Riley and failed to end it.

Period drama gave her bigger material. She played Lady Boleyn in The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 1970, opposite Keith Michell’s king. Two years later the BBC gave her the title role in Mistress of Hardwick, a ten-part series about Bess of Hardwick, the Elizabethan noblewoman who married four times and built one of England’s great houses. It was the only time a series was built around her.

Her record turns uncomfortable at this point. Most episodes of Mistress of Hardwick no longer exist, so the one sustained lead of her career can barely be seen, while the supporting turn in Don’t Look Now has been restored, reissued and analysed for decades. The film that made her face known abroad also narrowed what cinema asked of her. After Venice the offers leaned towards horror and the uncanny old woman. She played Mrs Hyde opposite Joan Collins in the possessed-baby shocker I Don’t Want to Be Born, and later took parts in Afraid of the Dark and Haunted. The usual summary of her career as “best known for Don’t Look Now” is accurate, and it reduces nearly fifty years of work to a single restaurant scene.

Some of those genre jobs turned out better than the formula. In Stuart Gordon’s Dolls she played Hilary Hartwicke, wife of the toymaker played by Guy Rolfe, a couple who shelter stranded travellers in their mansion during a storm and let the dolls decide who leaves. The film was shot in Italy for Charles Band’s Empire Pictures before Gordon made From Beyond, but it was held back and only released in 1987. Gordon cast her again as Professor Laplace in Robot Jox, the giant-robot film whose release was delayed until 1990 and which later found a cult following.

On television, meanwhile, she kept working across comedy and literary adaptation. She was Mrs Booth, the exasperated mother of mismatched twins, in My Brother’s Keeper, and Michael Palin‘s mother in the Ripping Yarns episode “The Curse of the Claw”. She played Mrs Nickleby in the BBC’s Nicholas Nickleby and Mrs Mayhew in “Gunfight at the O.K. Laundrette”, the pilot of Minder. In 1985 she was Emily Barton in the BBC’s Miss Marple adaptation of The Moving Finger, followed by Mrs Gummidge in David Copperfield in 1986 and Mrs Fagge in Great Expectations in 1989. A generation of sitcom viewers also caught her in passing, as the old woman next door in The Young Ones and as Elspeth in One Foot in the Grave.

Her last long run was aimed at children. In the early 1990s she played Gladys in Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, Tony Robinson’s comic retelling of the Robin Hood legend. Her husband, the actor Roger Ostime, appeared in one episode as Gladys’s father. One of her final roles was Mrs Murray in the children’s series Aquila in 1997.

Hilary Mason died in Milton Keynes on 5 September 2006, the day after her 89th birthday. The film that defined her has kept growing without her. In 1999 a British Film Institute survey of industry professionals ranked Don’t Look Now eighth among the British films of the twentieth century, and in 2011 a Time Out London poll of 150 film professionals placed it first. A 4K restoration from the original camera negative, supervised by cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond, appeared in 2023. In the week after Sutherland’s death in June 2024 it was among the most-streamed films in the United States. Each new audience reaches the same lavatory scene and faces the choice Mason refused to make for them: to believe the blind woman, or to laugh with her.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Donald Sutherland, Don't Look Now, Nicolas Roeg, Julie Christie, Hilary Mason

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