Shirley Anne Field, who has died aged 87, was once called Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe; She was a well-known beauty and appeared in some of the most popular films of the 1960s, including The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Alfie.
At the height of her success she enjoyed romances with the Labor politician Anthony Crosland, Dudley Moore and the photographer Terry O’Neill. She was vigorously (though unsuccessfully) pursued by Dennis Hamilton, Diana Dors’s husband, and by Hollywood director Otto Preminger.
Frank Sinatra took her out to dinner in Mayfair (he saw her photo and thought “you look like a nice girl”). During a publicity tour of the United States, she met President Kennedy, who offered her a rocking chair to ease her back pain. It was sketched by Stephen Ward, the osteopath and artist of the association that would later be destroyed by the Profumo scandal.
By the time she was thirty, however, Shirley Anne Field’s comet was virtually extinct. After her brief marriage to a racing driver with aristocratic connections, she was unable to consolidate her career, although she continued to take roles on both stage and screen well into old age.
Throughout her life, she seemed to be haunted by the hardships of her childhood, which left her with feelings of deep insecurity.
She was born Shirley Anne Broomfield on June 27, 1938, the daughter of a down-and-out Cockney lorry driver, and her early years in London’s East End were marked by the Blitz, with the family home damaged several times by bombs.
At the age of five, she was separated from her parents, two sisters and a brother and sent to a national children’s home and orphanage in Edgworth, near Bolton in Lancashire.
It was a year before her mother visited her for the first time, who then sent her a package containing 27 hand-stitched dresses, all in different sizes. Shirley later learned that her mother was planning to leave England with an American soldier, and wanted to make sure her daughter had clothes that would fit her when she grew up (in which case the house divided the dresses among the other girls, leaving Shirley to to keep only one).
At the age of 10 she was transferred to another institution, in Blackburn, where she attended the local Blakey Moor School for Girls for two years before being returned to Edgworth.
It was a welcome relief when Shirley was allowed to live in a hostel in North London at the age of 15.
She trained as a shorthand typist and was hired by Victor, a retired US Marine general who made a habit of mentoring pretty teenage girls. “You were under no obligation to share his bed,” Shirley Anne Field later said, “although he would make it easy for you to do so.” Victor would later live in Shirley’s flat for the last four years of his life, where she devotedly cared for him.
As a teenager, Shirley dreamed of success as a model and actress. In the evening she went dancing at the Lyceum, and one of the American servicemen she met there entered her in their beauty pageant for the coronation of Queen of Great Britain; she won and collected £250 and free trips to every US air base in Britain so she could appear at dances and other special occasions.
After working briefly as a magician’s assistant at Battersea fair, she got a job as a typist with the Gas Council, who asked her to pose for an advertisement while sitting on a gas stove.
This assignment brought her to the attention of photographers and she enrolled at the Lucie Clayton School and Model Agency, where she learned “social skills, makeup, keeping fit, how to throw a dinner party and how to properly attract a girl.” way you can get. getting in and out of a car without showing her panties.” She was soon offered a job modeling for English Rose bras.
She also did pin-up shots for magazines like Reveille, and was hired by the Bill Watts Agency for Special Young Ladies – these were girls in films who “wore almost nothing and got one or two lines of dialogue.” In her first such role, for a comedy called All For Mary, she sat on a plane behind a copy of Vogue, which she lowered to wink at David Tomlinson (who would later play George Banks in Mary Poppins).
Shirley Anne Field’s career began to blossom in 1960, with the release of Beat Girl, in which she appeared opposite Adam Faith, and Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer (based on the John Osborne play), in which she played the beauty queen Tina opposite Laurence Olivier. .
When Shirley Anne auditioned for the role of Tina, she was asked if she could speak with a northern accent. She replied, “I just spent two years learning not to do that.”
In the same year she appeared (alongside Karlheinz Böhm, Moira Shearer and Anna Massey) in Michael Powell’s creepy Peeping Tom, and in the highly successful “kitchen-sink” production Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in which she played Doreen, one of the the lovers of factory worker Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney). Also in 1960, she played a stripper and co-starred with Kenneth More in Basil Dearden’s comedy Man in the Moon.
John Mortimer’s Lunch Hour (1961) starred Shirley Anne Field alongside Robert Stephens in an hour-long film about an office romance that became something of a minor classic.
More films followed: The War Lover (1962), in which she shared top billing with Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner; The Damned (also 1962), with Oliver Reed; Kings of the Sun (1963), a Mesoamerican epic with Yul Brynner; Doctor in Klaver (1966); and Alfie (1966), starring Michael Caine and nominated for five Oscars.
In 1967, Shirley Anne Field married Charlie Crichton-Stuart, a racing driver and flying instructor who was also a cousin of the Marquess of Bute. Within months of the wedding, bailiffs were removing furniture from their London flat, and within four years it was clear to her that the marriage was over.
Shirley Anne Field continued her acting career, but without quite recapturing the success of her early years. She was Saeed Jaffrey’s mistress in Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985); Cathleen Doyle in Peter Chelsom’s Hear My Song (1991); and the housekeeper Mrs. Bolton in the 1993 BBC miniseries Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Her many television credits include Santa Barbara; Monarch of the Glen; The bill; Dalziel and Pascoe; Murder she wrote; Never the Twain; Upstairs Downstairs; Last of the summer wine; and shoelace.
In 1978, Shirley Anne Field was finally reunited with her mother, who was then living in the US, where she had three more daughters. But there was even more sadness for the family in 1999, when Guy Broomfield, Shirley Anne’s younger brother, was murdered in San Francisco by his girlfriend’s son, the heir to the DHL courier fortune.
Shirley Anne Field was a regular guest speaker on cruise ships. In 1991 she published a memoir, A Time for Love.
She had a daughter, Nicola, with Charlie Crichton-Stuart. When Shirley Anne Field was asked in 1993 why she had never remarried, she replied, “I’ve been in love too many times, and always with unsuitable people.”
Shirley Anne Field, born June 27, 1936, died December 10, 2023