Shirley Anne Field, Sixties beauty who starred in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – obituary
Shirley Anne Field, who has died aged 87, was once talked of as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe; a noted beauty, she appeared in some of the most popular films of the 1960s, among them The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Alfie.
At the height of her success she enjoyed romances with the Labour politician Anthony Crosland, Dudley Moore and the photographer Terry O’Neill. She was pursued vigorously (if unsuccessfully) by Dennis Hamilton, the husband of Diana Dors, and by the Hollywood director Otto Preminger.
Frank Sinatra took her out for dinner in Mayfair (he had seen her photograph, and thought “you look like a fun girl”). While on a publicity tour in the United States she met President Kennedy, who presented her with a rocking chair to ease her backache. She was sketched by Stephen Ward, the society osteopath and artist who would later be destroyed by the Profumo scandal.
By the time she was 30, however, Shirley Anne Field’s comet had all but fizzled out. Following her brief marriage to a motor racing driver with aristocratic connections, she was unable to consolidate her career, although she continued to take roles on both stage and screen until well into old age.
Throughout her life she seemed haunted by the deprivations of her childhood, which left her with feelings of profound insecurity.
The daughter of a feckless Cockney lorry driver, she was born Shirley Anne Broomfield on June 27 1936, and her early years in the East End of London were scarred by the Blitz, during which the family home was damaged by bombs on several occasions.
Aged five she was separated from her parents, two sisters and one brother and sent to live in a National Children’s Home and Orphanage at Edgworth, near Bolton in Lancashire.
It was a year before she was first visited by her mother, who then posted her a parcel containing 27 hand-stitched dresses, all different sizes. Shirley learnt later that her mother was planning to leave England with an American serviceman, and wanted to ensure that her daughter had clothes that would fit her as she grew up (in the event, the home distributed the dresses among the other girls, allowing Shirley to keep only one).
Aged 10 she was moved 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 release when, at 15, Shirley was allowed to go to live at a hostel in north London.
She trained as a shorthand-typist, and was taken up by a retired US Marines general called Victor who made a habit of mentoring pretty teenage girls. “You were not obliged to share his bed,” Shirley Anne Field later said, “though he would make it easy for you to do so.” Later, Victor would live the last four years of his life at Shirley’s flat, where she cared for him devotedly.
As a teenager, Shirley was dreaming of success as a model and actress. In the evenings she would go dancing at the Lyceum, and one of the American servicemen she met there entered her for the Coronation Queen of Great Britain beauty contest; she won, collecting ￡250 and free travel to any US Air Force base in Britain so that she could appear at dances and other special occasions.
After working briefly as a magician’s assistant at Battersea funfair, she got a job as a typist with the Gas Council, which asked her to pose for an advertisement sitting on top of a gas cooker.
This assignment brought her to the attention of photographers, and she enrolled at the Lucie Clayton School and Model Agency, learning “social skills, make-up, keep-fit, how to give a dinner party and the proper way for a girl to get in and out of a car without showing her knickers”. She was soon offered a job modelling English Rose bras.
She was also doing pin-up shots for magazines like Reveille, and was taken on by the Bill Watts Agency for Special Young Ladies – these being girls in films who “wore next to nothing and were given one or two lines of dialogue”. In her first such role, for a comedy called All For Mary, she sat on an aircraft behind a copy of Vogue, which she lowered to wink at David Tomlinson (later to play George Banks in Mary Poppins).
Shirley Anne Field’s career began to flourish in 1960, with the release of Beat Girl, in which she appeared alongside Adam Faith, and of Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer (based on John Osborne’s play), in which she played the beauty queen Tina opposite Laurence Olivier.
When Shirley Anne auditioned for the part of Tina, she was asked if she could speak in a northern accent. She replied: “I’ve just spent two years learning not to.”
In the same year she was seen (alongside Karlheinz B?hm, 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 lovers of factory worker Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney). Also in 1960, playing a stripper, she co-starred with Kenneth More in Basil Dearden’s comedy Man in the Moon.
In John Mortimer’s Lunch Hour (1961) Shirley Anne Field played alongside Robert Stephens in an hour-long film, about an office romance, that became something of a small classic.
Further movies 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 Clover (1966); and Alfie (1966), which starred Michael Caine and was 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 marriage 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 with her acting career, though without quite recapturing the success of her early years. She was Saeed Jaffrey’s mistress in Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985); Cathleen Doyle in Peter Chelsom’s Hear My Song (1991); and the housekeeper Mrs Bolton in the BBC’s 1993 miniseries Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Her many television credits included 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 Shoestring.
In 1978 Shirley Anne Field was finally reunited with her mother, by then living in the US, where she had three more daughters. But there was further heartache for the family in 1999, when Shirley Anne’s younger brother, Guy Broomfield, 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.
With Charlie Crichton-Stuart she had a daughter, Nicola. When asked in 1993 why she had never remarried, Shirley Anne Field 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
