Filmmaker Frances Calvert always refused handouts. “It ruins friendships,” she'd say. Never knowing if she’d have freelance teaching work from one semester to the next, like many artists in Berlin she developed a repertoire of techniques to manage earnings that could bounce up and down like a yo-yo.
She rented her flat out; she bought her clothes at charity shops; and she was always in the red, with an overdraft charging 18% interest that friends told her to pay off, but she never did. “The bank lived off her for years,” film producer Lindsey Merrison tells me over tea in a West Berlin cafe, a year from the final time she saw her best friend Frances and almost a year from Calvert’s untimely death at 68.
She put a brave face on her troubles too, her sister Judy tells me. “I knew life was tough for her, but she always had this underlying Aussie humour that said I’m a survivor. And that led me to believe that things weren’t too bad,” she says, talking to me over Skype from Melbourne, Australia. “But clearly that was wrong, when you put all the pieces together.”
