Born on this day 90 years ago in Pennsylvania, USA, Vera Jayne Palmer would go on to find fame and fortune as larger-than-life Hollywood actress Jayne Mansfield.
Working in the same era as fellow sex symbol and archetypal 'dizzy blonde', Marilyn Monroe, Mansfield would forge a moderately successful career with 20th Century Fox in the 1950s and early '60s. Her most notable film was 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It, which showcased the new musical craze of rock’n’roll and featured cameos by Little Richard, Fats Domino and Eddie Cochran. Other movie offerings included Kiss Them For Me (1957), Illegal (1955), and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957).
If her dozen or so films were generally acknowledged to be less-than-memorable, off screen she played the movie star role to the full, becoming one of the most well-known glamour girls of the era. But by 1967, with her film career in terminal decline, Mansfield was working as a nightclub singer and entertainer. Taking up the offer of lucrative work in the UK, in March that year she pulled into Newcastle Central Station with her retinue on the latest stop of a national cub tour.
