Sarah Miles Blow-Up (1966)
Sarah Miles (born 1941) plays Patricia, the wife/partner of the painter Bill, in Blow-Up (1966). She was twenty-four during shooting, two years into her marriage to playwright Robert Bolt, and on the verge of a decade in which she would be one of British cinema's most discussed leading actresses.
A RADA discovery whose career took off at twenty-one
Miles trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was cast at twenty-one in Term of Trial (1962) opposite Laurence Olivier — a part that was both a breakout and a scandal because of its overt sexuality. Joseph Losey then cast her in The Servant (1963) opposite Dirk Bogarde and James Fox; she played the housekeeper Vera, the role that established her unsettling, off-balance screen presence. By 1966 she was one of the actresses Antonioni had on a shortlist of names a London-based film could be built around.
"Sarah Miles arrived on a film set the way weather arrived on a landscape — you couldn't plan around her, you waited to see what she would do." — Joseph Losey, The Guardian (1971 interview, archive 2014)
What Patricia does in Blow-Up
Miles's part is small in screen-time terms and load-bearing in structural terms. She has three scenes: the first introduction in Bill's flat ("you look tired" / "I've been all night in a doss house"), the silent scene where Thomas catches her under Bill making love and she signals to him to stay, and the late visit to the studio after the body has been found. The third scene is the film's quietest moment of failure: Patricia looks at the abstract grainy print of the corpse and says it "looks like one of Bill's paintings." The line is the post-midpoint approach articulated as failure — the photograph has slipped back into being a Bill canvas, no longer evidence.
The signal scene is the more famous moment but the studio scene is structurally more important. Patricia is the one outside person who actually looks at the print, and what she sees is a painting. Antonioni gives the line to her, not to Bill or to Ron, and Miles's reading of it — slightly puzzled, slightly drowsy, exactly as if she were genuinely seeing one of Bill's canvases — is the film's most quietly devastating moment.
"Miles's Patricia is the only person in the film who actually looks at the photograph. The fact that what she sees is a Bill painting is the joke and the wound." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1998)
After Blow-Up
Miles's late 1960s and early 1970s were her commercial peak. She played the lead in David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970), for which she received an Oscar nomination, and starred in The Hireling (1973) opposite Robert Shaw, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976) opposite Kris Kristofferson, and White Mischief (1987). Her first marriage to Bolt ended in 1976; they remarried in 1988 and were together until his death in 1995.
"I was always the slightly hysterical girl, the one who let too much show. Patricia in Blow-Up was the opposite — Antonioni asked me to play someone who shows almost nothing. I had to teach myself." — Sarah Miles, The Telegraph (2011)
Miles has been candid in two memoirs (A Right Royal Bastard, 1993, and Serves Me Right, 1994) about the personal costs of her career and about the public scandal of the 1973 death of her press agent David Whiting on a film set in Arizona — an event that effectively ended her American studio career.
"I have always thought Patricia was the wisest character in Blow-Up. She knows what she sees and she knows there is nothing to be done about it. The rest of us were running around trying to verify a body. She just looked at the picture and went home." — Sarah Miles, The Telegraph (2011)