Special Report: Marcus Heslop on Frantastic!

Mike talks with author Marcus Heslop about Frantastic!: The Amazing Story of Fran Fullenwider, the Plus-sized Pioneer, the first biography of the actress whose single wordless scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) made her a cult fixture despite a stranger, richer career about which most fans never knew.

Heslop, a secondary-school drama teacher in northeast England who works on his books during school holidays, built the biography largely from letters, scrapbooks, and photographs a stranger rescued from an abandoned Texas mansion in the 1990s and donated to the Museum of South Texas History — the same archive that lets him trace Fullenwider from a wealthy, closely chronicled Texas childhood through a brief but real Italian film boom, a four-year run with Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror world, and a death scene in House of the Spirits that got cut for time, which Heslop confirmed really existed by tracking down director Bille August himself. The book features new interviews with O’Brien, director Jim Sharman, costume designer Sue Blane, and Jeremy Irons.

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