Shirley Anne Field, who has died aged 87, was likened to Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Deneuve and even “a sort of red-haired Brigitte Bardot”. There was no question she could stop traffic. “Lorries used to thunder to a halt, and I would wonder what they were looking at,” she said.
Her presence was sharply distinctive. In Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a defining work of kitchen-sink drama, she was a vision of self-possession as Doreen (“Rotten name, ain’t it?”), who works in a Nottingham hairnet factory, lives with her mother and catches the eye of the discontented lathe operator Arthur Seaton, played by Albert Finney.
After meeting Arthur in the pub, Doreen agrees to go to the pictures with him – “but not on t’back row”. When he protests that the screen will be blurry if they sit any nearer, she gives him short shrift: “You want glasses by the sound of it.” As she turns on her heel, he warns her not to be late. “I won’t be,” she says. “But if I am, you’ll just have to wait, won’t yer?”
She and Finney had already appeared together on stage at the Royal Court theatre in London at the start of that year in The Lily White Boys, directed by Lindsay Anderson, as well as in Tony Richardson’s film of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, which heralded Finney’s screen debut and provided Field with an escape from the “starlet” roles of her recent past, during which she had spent “five years being hassled or groped by this star or that”.
In Richardson’s film, she played Tina Lapford, the beauty queen involved with the down-at-heel vaudevillian Archie Rice (Laurence Olivier), who promises to further her career. It was Olivier who frogmarched Field to the daily screenings of rushes, which she did not want to attend. Afterwards he put his arm through hers and said: “No improvement needed there, is there young lady?”
Also in 1960, she was in Michael Powell’s disturbing thriller Peeping Tom and the racy teen drama Beat Girl opposite Adam Faith. In the latter film, Field gave a sultry rendition of John Barry’s teasingly suggestive song It’s Legal. “Just think of the things that we can do/ Without even breaking the law,” she sings, writhing as she runs her hands through her hair.
Thanks to Beat Girl, The Entertainer and Man in the Moon (also 1960), in which she was a stripper falling for a trainee astronaut (Kenneth More), her name was up in lights on three Leicester Square marquees at once. She also starred with Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner in The War Lover (1962), and was married off to a Mayan ruler played by George Chakiris in Kings of the Sun (1963).
After that first rush of films, Field moved to the US, where she met important people including John F Kennedy, who presented her with a rocking chair after she complained of a bad back. But she felt paralysed by the attention and overtures she received. “There I was sitting in the Beverly Hills hotel, with the phone ringing night and day, all sorts of offers and suggestions and I had no idea what to do. I was an innocent. Maybe victim is too strong a word, but I was certainly taken advantage of.”
Once she had returned home in 1965, the Miami Herald wrote: “The Saturday night girl woke up suddenly to a cold, wintry Sunday morning.” In the UK Field discovered that “there really wasn’t any British film industry left”. A small part in Alfie (1966), as a nurse seduced by the incorrigible charmer played by Michael Caine, became even smaller in the editing.
Her career dwindled during the 1970s, but she later enjoyed a mini-comeback courtesy of two offbeat hits. She brought a dash of old-school glamour to My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, in which she was the doting mistress of a Pakistani businessman (Saeed Jaffrey), and to her role as a former beauty queen in Hear My Song (1991).
She was born Shirley Broomfield in Forest Gate, east London. Her father was a lorry driver given to minor criminal schemes such as pinching the balcony carpet from the local Odeon cinema. Her mother, who once sent her on an errand downstairs at the age of three to steal chilblain ointment when they lived above a chemist, accepted the invitation to send Shirley to a children’s home near Woking in Surrey because she was too young to be evacuated.
From there she was relocated to another institution in Edgworth, near Bolton, Lancashire, where she remained for the rest of her childhood, except for several years at another home nearby in Blackburn while she attended Blakey Moor school for girls. Her mother visited her only once; they were not reunited until 1978.
After working as a magician’s assistant and typist, and winning cash prizes in a series of beauty contests, she enrolled at the Lucie Clayton School and Model Agency in London. Modelling jobs led to films where she was billed as “redhead”, “waitress” or “pretty girl”, much to her chagrin.
“I hated being ‘the special girl’ picked out to look glamorous, going out and saying your lines then going home on the workman’s bus,” she said. She changed her name to Field “because I didn’t want ‘Broomfield’ up in lights—my family had rejected me.”
As she became a fixture in gossip columns, her name linked to Frank Sinatra after a single evening on the town with him, she grew so weary of tittle-tattle detracting from her work that she considered retiring prematurely. Working with Anderson, Reisz and Richardson, and signing a contract with Woodfall Films, stopped her from doing anything so rash.
Even when the films were agreeable, she continued to feel trivialised by her press coverage. In 1963 she dispatched an angry letter to the Daily Mirror complaining that she was only ever asked about the same salacious topics. “There is more to my life than sex, money, fame and a few horrific people I met once or twice,” she said.
Though she acted on stage during the 70s, including in the title role in The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe, she was at a loss to explain why her career had stalled. “I just never seemed to be offered any parts, and I made the mistake of not creating my own,” she said. Appearances on TV panel games such as Blankety Blank and Give Us a Clue did their bit to pay the bills.
Later screen work included recurring roles on the American soap opera Santa Barbara in 1987 and the ITV drama series Where the Heart Is in 2001, as well as a smattering of films, among them an adaptation of Martin Amis’s debut novel The Rachel Papers (1989) and UFO (1993), a vehicle for the unsavoury comic Roy “Chubby” Brown, in which Field played the supreme commander of a race of feminist aliens.
“She is so beautiful still that she stands out on the screen and breaks your heart,” said Frears in 1985. “It is iniquitous; a tragedy that she hasn’t been used more.”
She is survived by Nicola, her daughter from her 1967 marriage to the racing driver Charlie Crichton-Stuart, which ended in divorce in 1975.
• Shirley Anne Field (Shirley Broomfield), actor, born 27 June 1936; died 10 December 2023
