When Wendy Was Fab
Back when Wendy Richard (Pauline Fowler) was first launching her acting career, she was beside herself when her agent called to tell her that she was to appear in the Beatles' second film, Help!
But unfortunately her scene, especially one in which she becomes very close with Paul McCartney, ended up on the cutting-room floor because the director Richard Lester felt it didn't work.
However, during the preparation of the recent DVD release of Help! still photographs were discovered by researchers restoring the 1965 movie. They are all that's left of the encounter. The film stock was subsequently destroyed by United Artists.
In the cut scene, Richard plays an acting student, who's learning Lady Macbeth's lines opposite McCartney. Wendy retells the story in a documentary on the second disc of the DVD. It's also in her 2000 autobiography.
Lester told Radio Times that Richard "suited the role as written, being attractive, cute and buxom," but the scene's acting coach, played by veteran British actor Frankie Howerd, who turned out to be miscast. "It didn't move the story along," the director said.
Wendy remembers: "I went along to the audition for Help! at Twickenham Film Studios, aged 18 or 19 — not realising it was the Beatles at first. it was amazing just to see them. By the time I got home, my agent had phoned to say I'd got the part. I was absolutely thrilled to get it; I was just starting out in my career and had only been working three or four years.
"When I turned up to filming there were hundreds of screaming girls outside. [The Beatles] were all extremely nice and John Lennon told me to bring in any Beatles albums I had so he and the boys could sign them. When I got home, I rang all my friends, who came rushing around with their albums. I took them in the next day and they all got signed.
Richard was "absolutely devastated" to learn that she didn't make the film, which she figured out after not being invited to the premiere. "You just have to get over it. I had that experience, and not everyone can say they worked with the Beatles."
"But I've met Paul since. Years later, in the 1980s, when I was standing with the EastEnders cast during the Royal Command Performance, Paul pushed his way through to me and said, 'It's so nice to see you. I've watched your career and I'm pleased you're doing well.' I think I stood there and gaped. It was lovely that he remembered me."
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