Today's topic for Hippie Hotties is not a movie. It's a person. Namely, we are focusing on British actress Vanessa Howard who was a doe-eyed It Girl who had a very hot year in 1970. Let's take a look!
Vanessa started acting in the 1960s when the blonde babe was a singer and actress. She made her debut in the 1963 film I Could Go On Singing and went on to star in films like Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush with Judy Geeson before finding her spot in horror and comedy.
She starred in the 1970 horror-comedy Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly which might be the most British comedy name that I have ever heard. This film by director Freddie Francis has me wanting a cuppa! Vanessa Howard plays Girly and sometimes this film's long title is simply shortened to "girly". The quartet in the title is a deranged, fatherless family who takes out their frustrations by kidnapping hippies and vagrants.
Once again, this movie takes on the 70s approach to hippies: either they are evil or they become victims to someone else's crimes because of how naive they appear to be. Spooky in a way that only the swingin' sixties could be!
They make the hippies play house with them and do a series of role-playing games before eventually murdering them. It's bloody - but Van's cans are bloody brilliant. Vanessa plays Girly and she is the ultimate girly girl as the big-eyed blonde who is much more vicious than she appears.
That is part of what makes Vanessa the perfect part of this film: she looks innocent and gorgeous. She looks like she could be a hippie chick, too. But she is part of the bloody evil! That's why she was used in all of the American posters that promoted the film. She was a femme fatale for a new age.
Her other 1970 film had A LOT more nudity from Vanessa Howard. She played Patricia Cartwright in the comedy The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer. The plot follows an ambitious poll company worker who uses the data that he has collected at his job to become a politician. This comedy follows a data-obsessed man all the way to the top, including the beautiful babe he bags for himself.
Vanessa is the babe, obviously. In one scene, she asks her husband for a divorce while she takes a nude bath, but he just spits statistics back at her. It's actually really funny and you can watch this long nude scene here. The scene even ends with her pressing her totally nude body against a glass door, so we can see some blurry bush in the background:
Two films that Vanessa made Girly and What Became of Jack and Jill? are both exceptionally hard to find copies of. The latter was a grindhouse film that was a bloody Romeo and Juliet, but it was shelved for two years and only found success on the American grindhouse circuit. For a long time, it was rumored that both of those films had allegedly vanished.
Either way, the fact that both films were difficult to find at the time dismayed Vanessa who became disillusioned with the way films are distributed. She felt like she was running into bad luck, so she decided to do something about it.
In the early 70s, following these very British movies, she moved to Hollywood where she hoped things might be different, and married a movie producer by the name of Robert Chartoff who gave the world movies like Up the Sandbox and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? - big name! She no longer felt the itch to act, so she happily became a wealthy Hollywood wife.
The couple divorced in the 90s and Vanessa suddenly found herself a single woman who hadn't worked in two decades. She started working with programs to help recently divorced housewives reiterate into the California workforce. Sadly, Vanessa passed away at the age of 62 in 2010.
She leaves behind a short, but groovy legacy that shows the kind of daring and darling actress she could have been.
