Kathleen Byron in Black Narcissus
Credit: Alamy
In a monastery halfway up the Himalayas, in the summer of 1946, a young Englishwoman pulled a gun on her married lover.
“It was a revolver, a big one, US army issue, and it was loaded,” Black Narcissus director Michael Powell would later write of his snow-capped showdown with paramour Kathleen Byron. “A naked woman and a loaded gun are persuasive objects, and I have always thought that I deserved congratulations for talking myself out of that one.”
The story may not be quite as scandalous as it initially sounds. Firstly, while Black Narcissus was set in craggier reaches of British India, it was actually filmed at Pinewood Studios, and at the West Sussex address of an Indian army retiree (whose garden contained geographically appropriate flora). And it is unclear whether the firearm was aimed at Powell during the shoot or afterwards.