She played Diana goddess of the moon who inspires Lysistrata with the idea that women must refuse their favours until men agree to

She played Diana, goddess of the moon, who inspires Lysistrata with the idea that women must refuse their favours until men agree to keep the peace. Still recalled affectionately by theatregoers is the show-stopping duet she shared with her uncle Pluto (Cyril Richard), “Vive la Virtue!”, a lilting gavotte in which he points out, “This is man’s ambivalent taste, whatever is chaste has got to be chased.”The New York Herald-Tribune critic Walter Kerr wrote, I suppose Cyril Ritchard and Janice Rule could have danced all night; they link arms, lift their ears for a beat, and take off – to the lightest of Offenbach – as though they’d quite forgotten which Palace they’re supposed to have come from. Lovely work.Howard Taubman in The New York Times lauded her “personal magic” and John Chapman in the New York News called her “a beautiful and bewitching dancer and an all-round musical comedy player.”The previous year Rule had starred as a man-hating beatnik in a screen version of Jack Kerouac’s “beat” novel The Subterraneans, a film that caused Joan Crawford graciously to admit her error. In 1962 she wrote, On board a ship last summer I sat watching The Subterraneans, absolutely rapt over the performance of an actress who dances brilliantly, who has a flair for drama, for comedy “Who is this girl? She’s fantastic!” I said Well, the girl was Janice Rule I’ve since seen her on TV and I can only add superlatives. Miss Rule, my apologies, I think you’re going to be with us a long long time.Rule’s film career continued to be sporadic. She co-starred with Yul Brynner in a Freudian western, Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964), and was one of a fine cast (Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Angie Dickinson, Miriam Hopkins, Robert Duvall) in Arthur Penn’s muddled melodrama The Chase (1966), which gave her one of her first neurotic roles as Duvall’s slatternly wife who drunkenly swallows a string of pearls. She was a loose woman dallying with both Richard Widmark and William Holden in the western Alvarez Kelly (1966), was splendid as a rugged frontierswoman in the bleak western Welcome to Hard Times (1967) and had a rare chance to display her sense of humour in the spy spoof The Ambushers (1967).In Frank Perry’s hauntingly enigmatic drama The Swimmer (1968), Rule was powerfully biting as Burt Lancaster’s vitriolic ex-mistress who claims never to have loved him.

Her scene with Lancaster was directed, uncredited, by Sydney Pollack. Rule’s screen work, though impressive, had never made her a box-office name, and much of her later work was on television.In 1972 she appeared in Stephen Frears’s British film Gumshoe, which starred Albert Finney as a bingo-caller with aspirations to be a Bogart-like private detective. Rule was a duplicitous client who is actually a gunrunner and dope smuggler. In 1977 she had one of her most memorable roles as a mute and pregnant artist, painter of weird and vaguely sexual murals which reflect her fear of men, in Robert Altman’s audacious, strange but compelling movie Three Women, co-starring Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek.Among her last film roles was that in John Badham’s American Flyers (1985) as the dysfunctional mother of two brothers, one of whom is dying, who enter a bicycle marathon.

For several years she had been working as a psychoanalyst, having gained a doctorate from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in Los Angeles in 1983.Tom Vallance. Interesting news from Scotland, where Pakistanis feel more Scottish than English people living there. Differing cultural attitudes are cited, but we are confident of the real reasons: have any Pakistanis had to contend with Mel Gibson painted blue?

Interesting news from Scotland, where Pakistanis feel more Scottish than English people living there. Yesterday’s budget announcement for schools contains no new money from the Government to bolster the education budget for 2004/5; not a wise move by a Blair government committed to “education, education and education”

The Government appears to have missed out on a golden opportunity to put things right with yesterday’s announcement of the budget for schools in 2004/5. Granted there will be an average 5.5 per cent increase in funding for schools against an estimated 3.4 per cent increase in costs. Granted, too, every school in the land will receive an increase in its funding of at least 4 per cent per pupil.

However, Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, did not give a cast-iron guarantee that schools would avoid the kind of difficulties that led to so many declaring teacher redundancies earlier this summer.
Indeed, he went so far as to acknowledge that many primary schools – where pupil rolls are expected to fall next year – would have to face up to the prospect of cutting jobs. While no one would argue that these schools should be given carte blanche to avoid teacher job losses whatever the circumstances, a government committed to improving public services should have made more of an effort to seize the opportunity created by falling pupil numbers to reduce class sizes.Mr Clarke is confident that – by setting up an emergency fund of £120m for schools in difficulties – there is now a mechanism to sort out any problems that may occur. He also believes that there is enough money in the kitty to fund the agreement to reduce teachers’ workload – which guarantees a limit on the amount of time they have to cover lessons for absent colleagues from next September.He may be confident and he may believe, but – in the words of Doug McAvoy, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers – it is a “suck it and see” settlement. Yesterday’s announcement contains no new money from the Government to bolster the £20bn education budget for 2004/5, agreed as part of Chancellor Gordon Brown’s comprehensive spending review.