She co-wrote the screenplay of A Taste of Honey with Tony Richardson, who also directed. Much of it is shot by the canal in Shelagh's native Salford. The film was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. Rita was a star. She still is. And all that was more than a year before the Beatles, her fellow Liverpudlians, had scored their first hit with Love Me Do and the 60s began to swing. It was a wonderful time of challenge and promise for "Tush" and the films followed with A Place to Go (1963), The Leather Boys (1963),The Girl With Green Eyes (1963), The Knack (1965), Dr Zhivago (1965), The Trap (1966), Smashing Time (1967), Diamonds For Breakfast (1968), The Guru (1969) and The Bed Sitting Room (1969). The 60s ended, but Rita kept working at home and abroad and was in Bread, the TV sit-com of the late 80s and early 90s, written by her friend Carla Lane. The Spaghetti House Siege (1982), An Awfully Big Adventure (1994) and Under the Skin (1997) were among her more recent films. Along the way, Rita married twice, having two daughters, Dodonna and Aisha, with her first husband, Terry Bicknell, a TV cameraman. Her second husband, Ousama Rawi, was a film cameraman. They are divorced. Millions of TV viewers watched Rita earlier this month playing the bespectacled and sinister Miss Elizabeth Percehouse in The Sittaford Mystery, a very loose adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, in which Geraldine McEwan is Miss Marple, although she didn't even feature in the book. But all the usual ingredients were there. Snow sweeps across Exmoor and a ouija board predicts a murder. Everyone is a suspect. "They are such fun to do," says Rita. "The cast (which included Timothy Dalton, Mel Smith, Mathew Kelly and Patricia Hodge) was great and everyone got on so well." Rita began filming it in Shepperton at the end of last year, shortly after the death of her mother, Enid Ellen, aged 96. Now she is filming Puffball in Monaghan, Ireland, which is being directed by Nick Roeg, forever associated with Don't Look Now (1973), which starred Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Sutherland is in the new film along with Miranda Richardson and Kelly Reilly. It is based on a novel by Fay Weldon and all concerned are confident that it will be a success when it is released. | 
