Shirley Anne Field had the kind of ingenue English-rose freshness and beauty that the British cinema loved in the 50s and 60s – it had something feline about it, a kind of innocent-fatale. Hers were the kind of looks that always introduced an almost unintentional note of innocence and poignancy into the tough dramas and kitchen-sink pictures in which she was cast; she had something of the model agency and deportment school and yet also the pinup mag.
Field was of the same generation as heartstoppingly beautiful performers such as Janette Scott, Shirley Eaton, Sylvia Sims and Julie Christie. She appeared briefly in Michael Powell’s 1960 chiller Peeping Tom as a temperamental film diva (quite unlike her real self) but had her breakthrough in Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer later that year, based on John Osborne’s acidly satirical play about Britain’s fading imperial dream. Laurence Olivier is seedy music-hall entertainer Archie Rice who seduces Field’s character as the judge of a seaside beauty contest. A shot of Field, in bed with the post-coitally brooding Olivier, was heavily used in the movie’s promotion; she is sexy and calculating, but also shown as a “nice” girl, or at any rate a girl from a wealthy family whose resources Archie may want to exploit. The same year, Field was in Beat Girl, the earnest kind of “youth” movie that seems a bit toe-curling now, containing young people in coffee bars putting pop songs on the jukebox. She also sings the dreadful song It’s Legal to a smouldering lite-tough guy Adam Faith.
