Articles/Interviews

At the age of 25. after 11 films, I had still not studied acting and it showed. Each film was more frightening than the last. I seldom slept and night if I was shooting the next day, and I concealed my anxiety from myself by constant criticism of everything around me - the plastic flowers, shabby script, blatant wigs.

But ultimately I could never hide my terror from others and it hardly made for a body of work I could be proud of.

As a story in Time magazine put it: "Candice has been bedded by Elliot Gould in Getting Straight, deflowered by Bekim Fehmiu in The Adventurers, and raped by Oliver Reed in The Hunting Party.

So went my image. When I wasn't cast as the cool dilettante I so resembled, I was the Snow Queen, a natural for rapes scenes, the woman men love to defile.

For The Hunting Party, Oliver Reed arrived on location in Spain accompanied by his mistress and new-born baby and stayed in character as an outlaw leader even when the cameras weren't turning, brawling drunkenly, flinging plates of food after fleeing waiters and presenting me with an ultimatum he actually delivered straight-faced.

Either we had a sexual relationship during the film or we had no relationship at all. Direct contact would cease abruptly and we would speak no further.

After I declined his courtly offer, he immediately imposed a vow of silence, speaking to me only when necessary and then through intermediaries, referring to me as "The Girl".

"Tell The Girl to get off my mark."

In The Hunting Party, which opened with my being raped by my husband (Gene Hackman), I was kidnapped by a gang of outlaws, raped in the back of a buckboard, then raped again.

In the end I was rescued by my sadistic husband, who then shot me for going off with another man.

Why would I make such films?

I was choosing the best of what was available to me, and any qualms I had about inferior or tasteless scripts were temporarily assuaged by lucrative salaries.