When the reigning Miss World appeared on stage in 1969 in war-torn Saigon, alongside comedian Bob Hope, she received a rapturous reception from thousands of salivating US troops recovering from their brutal battles in Vietnam. Just weeks earlier more than 100 million viewers worldwide watched on TV as Eva Rueber-Staier, Miss Austria, was crowned as the world’s most beautiful woman.
Back in London, student Sally Alexander, wearing a tweed coat, sensible specs and a tan suede bucket hat, was trying to grab the attention of just one man, her history tutor, but her ideas were being overlooked in favour of those offered by male undergraduates.
Jennifer Hosten is crowned Miss World by Bob Hope, surrounded by the four runnersup, from left: Jillian Jessup, Irith Lavi, Pearl Jansen and Marjorie Christel Johansson
Keira Knightley as Sally Alexander. Alexander and 50 other members of the nascent Women’s Lib movement went undercover in the Miss World audience with flour, stink and smoke bombs, ink-filled water pistols, football rattles and rotten fruit and vegetables concealed in their handbags. Their aim? To disrupt the beauty pageant and publicise their own cause
It’s a single but potent reminder of the power of beauty.
It is also the arresting opening to Keira Knightley’s new film, Misbehaviour, the true story of what happened when Britain’s first feminists, led by Alexander, took the fight for women’s rights all the way to the final of the Miss World competition in 1970.
Back then, Alexander and 50 other members of the nascent Women’s Lib movement went undercover in the Miss World audience with flour, stink and smoke bombs, ink-filled water pistols, football rattles and rotten fruit and vegetables concealed in their handbags. Their aim? To disrupt the beauty pageant and publicise their own cause. Midway through the event, they launched their attack, causing scenes of such chaos the BBC was forced to pull the plug on a global broadcast being watched by 22 million viewers in the UK alone. The fracas sent the evening’s star entertainment – Bob Hope again – scuttling to a safe room backstage while judges including Dame Joan Collins watched in shock.
‘They are on every front page in the world,’ acknowledged competition boss Julia Morley the next morning. ‘Clever girls.’ Three months later, the first Women’s Lib march filled the streets of London.
What’s bizarre is that such a spirited chapter of social history had almost faded from memory. While the closing seconds of the film remind us that feminism has forgotten its roots, Misbehaviour is being released just a few weeks after the conviction of Harvey Weinstein in a trial that many feel marked the culmination of the #MeToo movement and heralded a new era of female empowerment.
Radio 4’s documentary The Reunion, which brought together the women in 2010 to recall their daring protest, was heard by producer Suzanne Mackie (currently executive producer of The Crown) and award-winning screenwriter and novelist Rebecca Frayn.
The moment feminist activists leapt from their seats and hurled leaflets into the Albert Hall audience to disrupt the contest in 1970
‘It was a thunderbolt moment,’ says Frayn. ‘I was eight in 1970 and had no idea the women’s movement had been formally founded at the beginning of that year, and that they had subsequently got into the Miss World show. One of my professional passions is telling women’s stories – how on earth did I not know this? But when I asked around, no one else seemed to either.
‘Miss World had been considered part of the cultural landscape, innocent family viewing, and suddenly it had a sinister subtext. This was a moment when people asked, “What were we thinking?” I came of age off the wave of energy it unleashed, the mischief and the questioning of the status quo. It formed my feminism.’
Mackie and Frayn recognised the potential for a film and agreed there was just one candidate for director – Philippa Lowthorpe, still the only woman to have won a best director Bafta (twice, for Call The Midwife in 2013 and again in 2018 for Three Girls). Lowthorpe is an advocate for women’s stories and, like Mackie and Frayn, has personal reasons for telling this one. ‘My mum was not allowed to go to university because her dad thought she should marry the farmer on the next farm over. I grew up with this sense of her burning injustice about that. For me it was different, I went to Oxford, which was still very male-dominated, but it made me think, I can do this, I can be like the boys.’
Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Hosten. Hosten was the first woman of colour to win Miss World, an important victory in another social battle
All three women are delighted that the story they are telling is responsible for the fact that a major British film such as Misbehaviour can be written, produced and directed in 2020 by a female power trio. But put them together and you’ll find them talking about clothes, dinner and children. ‘I like how we have embarked on a feminist project and we are all talking about Philippa’s new jacket,’ laughs Mackie. ‘Groups of women are capable of having huge fun, which does not come at the expense of passion and deep thinking. This is what we had to harness for the film.’
It’s what makes Misbehaviour a comedy as much as a drama, even though the social and economic status of women 50 years ago was grim. There was no equal pay or contraception on demand and wives needed their husband’s permission to borrow money. Only two per cent of MPs were female. Women’s Libbers wanted equality and the Miss World competition, in which a woman’s 34-24-36 was far more valuable than her IQ, was the perfect place to start a revolution.
Keira Knightley plays Sally Alexander, a mature student and single mum, recently divorced from the actor John Thaw by whom she had a daughter, now the actor Abigail Thaw. Her equal and opposite is 22-year-old Miss Grenada, Jennifer Hosten, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, all high hair and chandelier earrings. She was the first woman of colour to win Miss World, an important victory in another social battle, as Hosten would then go on to leverage her looks for the career she truly wanted, becoming Grenada’s High Commissioner to Canada.
Yet on November 20, 1970, Hosten was just one of the unsuspecting beauty queens willing to have their bosoms frisked for contraband padding and pirouette so leering cameras got a hot shot of their ‘derrieres’.
Hiding in plain sight in the audience were Alexander and her political partner Jo Robinson, played by Jessie Buckley.
It’s Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) and his Seventies gags who detonates their anger. ‘I don’t want you to think I don’t consider women’s feelings – I consider feeling women all the time,’ he says, provoking the Women’s Libbers to hurl missiles and leaflets at the stage.
Miss World had been thought family viewing. Now it had a sinister subtext
Frayn explains that it was the recent #MeToo movement and the fight to bring Harvey Weinstein to justice that made her feel compelled to tell the story in Misbehaviour. ‘The movement took the world by storm,’ she says. ‘Misbehaviour had been a marginal story, the financiers looking at it were a bit dead behind the eyes, but suddenly it was so of the moment you knew they were going to make it.’
Misbehaviour also flies thanks to the brilliance of its ensemble cast. Eric Morley, head of the Mecca business empire, which ran Miss World, is played by Rhys Ifans in a Seventies camel coat and trilby. Lesley Manville is Bob Hope’s betrayed wife Delores. When Hope had last hosted Miss World in London he returned home with the winner, the UK’s Rosemarie Frankland, and set himself up as her sugar daddy. So the scene in which Hope comes to Dolores for consolation after the professional disaster wreaked upon him by the Women’s Libbers, and she heads out alone for a drink and a dance instead, is a real ‘gotcha’ moment.
Mostly, though, this a story about how a group of women decided they shouldn’t be judged on how they look. In a TV interview at the time with Robin Day, Alexander pointed out that the only place other than a beauty contest where creatures such as Frankland and Hosten were weighed and measured and assigned a value in public was a cattle market. Yet Misbehaviour wears its message as lightly as a Miss World wears her crystal crown. Go and see it. Take your daughter, if you have one. Better still, take your son.
‘Misbehaviour’ is in cinemas nationwide from March 13