While the actor Patti Love was best known for her stage work, she will be remembered by cinemagoers for her part in The Long Good Friday (1980), in which she played Carol Benson, the widow of a minicab driver murdered by the IRA.
Her two brief appearances are characterised by a remarkably high emotional intensity: in the first, she stops the funeral car to get out and spit into the face of Bob Hoskins’ right-hand man, Jeff (Derek Thompson); in the second she is seen arranging flowers at the grave of her husband.
Approached by Harold Shand (Hoskins), she flies at him, calls him a “vicious bastard”, and demands money to help with the maintenance of her two children. When asked by Shand if she wants anything else, the aggression and fury dissipate into tears and, her whole body shaking, she sobs: “I just want him back.”
