Pamela Cundell, born in 1920, is a British actor known for her comic character roles that often brought a lighthearted touch to darker narratives. She appears in The Wicked Lady (1983), where her performance adds a layer of complexity to the film's exploration of desire and betrayal. Cundell also features in Emily (1976), a haunting tale that showcases her ability to navigate the eerie and the absurd. With a career that began in 1948, her work spans decades, making her a distinctive presence in the realm of cult and exploitation cinema.
Emily
Emily Foster (Koo Stark) is an American-born seventeen-year-old brought up in London. Her father died when she was a small child, while her mother, Margaret Foster (Sarah Brackett), is supported by a lover. The film, set in 1928, follows Emily as she returns home from a finishing school in Switzerland to her mother's country house in the English countryside, where she meets several characters who would like to seduce her, and follows her induction into sensual pleasures. The film follows her interactions with these adult pursuers. Richard Walker (Victor Spinetti), her mother's lover, is a middle-aged man-about-town who quietly sets his sights on Emily, while a young American writer and schoolteacher named James Wise (Richard Oldfield) tries to impress her by sensual acrobatics in his flying machine. However, her first sexual experience is an encounter with a woman — Augustine Wain (Ina Skriver), a Swedish painter who lives nearby. Emily then later "loses her virginity" in the heterocentric sense to Wain's husband, Rupert Wain (Constantin de Goguel) in a scene indicating penetrative sex. Meanwhile, perhaps intended to mark the contrast in the sexual mores of the different British classes at the time, housemaid Rachel (Jane Hayden) and her soldier boyfriend Billy (David Auker) are engaged to be married, but Rachel tries to insist on waiting until after their wedding before they have sexual intercourse.
