It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been scared on screen, nor the final. But there’s a certain level, a certain type of fear that comes from one situation. The way an actress acts, and the way that we in the audience perceive her feelings, has a different effect in one situation than another.

Three years before, she and Christopher Lee had been next to Boris Karloff in one of his last scaring jobs in Curse of the Crimson Altar. She’d put a new spin on a legendary story with Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Later on, she would be the bride of the king of the fanged ones in 1974’s Dracula, and battle Satan’s agents in Disciple of Death.

Point here is, supernatural scarers would be commonplace for Virginia Wetherell. But up against more realistic fear… that’s a different task. Facing a different type of villain and another type of crime, the sorts of preparation undertaken, the thoughts going through the minds of both the performers and the audience, things change. There’s a separate effect. And in an age where most people past a certain age have either had something like this (sexual assault) happen to them or at least know someone who has, it’s a tough world to step into, even for performance purpose.

Like anything Stanley Kubrick ever engineered, A Clockwork Orange was layers deep in controversy, decades after about 98 percent of the films released in 1971 have been carefully tucked away into forgetfulness (although Patton, the year’s Best Picture, will likewise never be forgotten).  No one could have known how prophetic Clockwork would turn out on the world America would become nearly a half century later. Like Network would tell a satiric tale of U.S. culture that ended up the sad truth just a few years later, Clockwork took what once seemed ludicrous and waited for time to make it real.

But just as he always did, Kubrick simply tossed the meaty steak of his project to the pit bulls that are film critics and let us tear it apart while he stepped away and laughed at our war to interpret his work.

That’s not what this is about. Let’s learn about someone who lived in the dark world that Kubrick created for the time being.

Using woman as punching bags and sex objects, jumping old men, killing, robbery, whatever… it was all in a night’s enjoyment for Malcolm McDowell’s Alex, as long as the notes of “Fur Elise” didn’t happen to be belting out of a nearby piano. But the sonofawhore has finally gotten his legal just desserts, although he won’t be doing it alone. This is not going to be a time for him to sit around a solitary cell and consider the error of his ways. This kind of correctional act is coming from the inside out.

But he’s not who this is about.

Auditioning is about the very definition of an inexact science, and, like all aspects of his filmmaking, Kubrick turned it straight into another mystery. Hearing Wetherell tell the story, it’s tough to imagine how Kubrick decided which actresses made one cut after another all the way down to the character.

At the tryout, she recalls, “they told me to look ‘summery,’ so I wore a white blouse with big sleeves and a sort of roundish neck and a long-floaty skirt.” Stepping in to perform, she and the rest of the potentials marveled over this shockingly innovation invention, soon to be known commonplace as… a video camera.

A casting agent strolled up to Wetherell and asked her to read from a short script.

It was Marilyn Monroe’s lines from Seven-Year Itch, the tale of a bumbling sexpot who unintentionally seduces her downstairs neighbor (fortunately, the legendary skirt-blasting scene wasn’t in this part). It was light years away from the character Clockwork would call for.

Still, a few days later, Wetherell’s agent called her back for a second round. Within the same outfit, still before that mysterious bucket of bolts and lenses, Wetherell was told to put together her own routine.

“The casting lady said, ‘Mr. Kubrick liked your reading,’” she says. “’He’d like you, this time, to improvise. He wants you to imagine that you’re walking through a forest, and there are two soldiers on either side of you. Suddenly, they turn on you and rape you. Could you do that, please?’”

Please?! Who in hell could automatically whip out that kind of routine? But it’s part of the ludicrously unpredictable world of auditioning, so Wetherell tried things out.

“It’s a sitting room with an armchair,” she recalls, “there’s no way you can walk, so you have to mind walking while you’re doing all these things.” Once again, she passed whatever test was being given, and was set back for round three.

This time, all she had to do was strip.

“Well, there were some very well-known people waiting outside,” Wetherell says. “So you think, ‘If they can do it, I can do it.’ So I took my skirt off and I’m standing there in my knickers. The camera went up and down, and she said, ‘Can you show us a profile as well… and say your name?’ And that was it.” Not quite – a few days later, she went back to read a bit from the psychiatrist scene in the film.

Then she had the part – without even seeing the script or director. She and McDowell hung out, establishing an important sense of familiarity before a tough scene.

After two years into a prison punishment that may well have been capitalized under different circumstances, Alex can’t wait to be a penance guinea pig, eager to let them try out some new discipline on him if it gets him home faster. But no one could be ready for this.

We see Alex as more of a prisoner than anyone behind bars. Drugged near to catatonia, the only thing at full strength is his mind, while he can’t express anything out into the open. His eyes are pried open, mercifully moistened with occasional drops from a nearby attendant. All the while, violent films are blasted through his unwillingly opened eyes and straight through to his psyche. The scene, one of the last done in the flick, became a landmark of the film, of Kubrick’s career, of filmmaking envelope pushing in totality.

Perhaps that’s what helps him convince us of the effectiveness of the treatment. It’s now working on Alex’s mind. He becomes queasy at the sound of Beethoven’s tunes, painful for the lover of Ludwig. Violence, sex, anything that he found pleasurable will now take over his mind and body and beat both into oblivion.

Basically, it’s the fucking rabid example of Pavlov’s canine experiment.

Many might protest and say that it robs a person of free will, and it does, but the film, in the form of a prison official, says, “Yeah, tough shit.” The entire purpose of imprisonment is to deny human rights, physical, mental, and therein, and this is just an example with the pedal pressed down just a little harder. People like Alex don’t give a flying shit about ethics and civil rights, so why should anyone put forth the same good goddamn about them? It’s unknown whether Kubrick meant Alex’s treatment as a legitimate futuristic punishment, but it’s easy to think that he’s still on to something here. If we can’t rehab criminals on our own, turning their own minds and bodies against them might be the way to go.

It’s time to test the results of this technique. With Alex as the subject before the gleefully curious eyes of scientists and other visitors, his body stops him from fighting back as a fellow beats him down.

Meanwhile, Wetherell had finally run into Kubrick, and showed him her “costume” for the scene; all of a pair of underwear.

Didn’t work for him. Yeah, this guy carried perfectionism to levels unexplored in the space continuum.

Back from a quick shopping trip with a crew member, Wetherell did one last tryout.

“I had to stand and model all these different pairs of knickers until Kubrick got the pair that he fancied,” she recalls, “and that was my costume, and two pages of dialogue that I never got to see. It was bizarre.”

Speaking would be the epitome of unnecessary for her to carry off this appearance.

As Alex recovers from his whomping, a new tune bursts through the auditorium, sounding almost royal. It is, although it might not automatically be recognizable and appreciated by the group – the music is actually from Queen Mary’s funeral, majestic and morbid at the same time.

The new human exam emerges. Men’s eyes and mouths open wide. They may or may not have expected something like this, but it’s welcome either way. Alex’s dreams are running wild; his mind and facial expressions saying so at high volume.

Obviously fake purple hair, probably to hide her identity from Alex should the treatment ever “revert,” streaming down her cranium, she slowly strolls toward him, straddling the line between relaxed and nervous.

She has reason. For a few moments, she’s going to be within nanoinches of a guy who’s done the worst crimes ever. This is worse than vampires, devils, demons, or any other horror villain that only exists in the supernatural.

The wig. Kubrick’s preferred undergarments. They’re all she has on. Nudity, even not in totality, makes almost anyone feel awkward; in front of a group of unsuspecting strangers, it goes to a new level.

But few could resist this displayed masterpiece. As awkward as Wetherall’s preparation had been, and as strange as she might have felt in character, those on and off the screen are glad of it all.

She’s not here as a test of Alex’s resolve; those who chose her (referring to his doctors, not the Clockwork crew) knew all along that he, as anyone, would never even make an attempt at resistance in that regard in this situation. It’s to see if the tool instilled in him will truly work.

She stands perfectly still. Perhaps she’s acting submissive, inviting him to realize the fantasies of every man in the room. Maybe daring him to try and take what she secretly knows he’ll never have.

Maybe anything else. And as he reaches up to claim the best of prizes, that sickness reaches up through him and drags him down, collapsing him at her feet, teaming with her aura to dominate him.

Then there’s a call from offstage, and the character aspect is removed. Suddenly smiling broadly, the actress hiding inside the woman is back on the surface, triumphantly bowing to the applauding audience like a Broadway curtain call. Perhaps realizing, or accentuating, the seductive power she was intended to exude, she even makes a few extra flirtatious farewells, as though she was… in on it all along.

In hindsight, both Wetherell and her character would end up with much in common with women who’ve had not entirely different roles for Kubrick. Much like the gorgeous woman with a dark secret in the bathtub in The Shining and all the scantily or non-clad women in Eyes Wide Shut, getting the chance to so, so briefly shine the light of seduction was worth getting the chance to work with the legendary director.

“There’s nobody else in the world I would have done that for,” she says. “I would have told them to stuff themselves and walked off. But (Kubrick), he was wonderful.”