SHIRLEY ANNE FIELD
(27 June 1936 - 10 December 2023)
The English actress Shirley Anne Field, who has died aged 87, made her name as a woman of great beauty, being compared to, among others, Marilyn Monroe, whom she once portrayed on stage. She resented the fact that casting directors only looked at surface attraction. In her early films she played ‘types’ such as pretty girl, waitress, redhead or prostitute, but she did progress to better roles and worked for some very prominent directors. Shirley Anne Field was born Shirley Broomfield in Forest Gate, east London, to her lorry driver and petty thief father and his wife who had three other children. During World War II, Shirley was too young to be evacuated, so was sent to a children’s home in Woking, Surrey. After that she stayed in other homes in Lancashire but did not see her mother again until the 1970s.
She became a typist, worked with a magician and entered beauty contests. Attending the Lucie Clayton Model School led to her posing for pin-up magazines and work as a film extra. Her first film was the 1955 comedy Simon and Laura, with Peter Finch and Kay Kendall. After a run of small parts, in 1960 Michael Powell cast her in Peeping Tom as a film actress who discovers a body and has to be consoled by a psychiatrist. In Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer (1960), from the play by John Osborne, she was in a beauty contest and was seduced by the fading music hall star Archie Rice, played by Laurence Olivier. It was Albert Finney’s first film and they both worked on Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, having met at the Royal Court, which fielded Richardson and Reisz. She said she owed her career to Tony Richardson rather than Laurence Olivier.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) was a breath of fresh air for British films and Shirley Anne too. Adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his novel, it portrayed the lives of factory workers and their off-duty passions. Finney was a lathe operator who has an affair with a colleague’s wife, but also meets Doreen (Field) who wants to get married. The same year Field had also been in Beat Girl, Edmond T. Greville’s teen drama with Adam Faith, which was fairly controversial and included some nudity, so that the original title of Striptease Girl had to be changed.
Next came the Basil Dearden comedy Man in the Moon with Kenneth More, but it did not appeal to audiences. Philip Leacock directed Field in The War Lover with Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner – she had to choose between the two. Again, the film was only a moderate success. Joseph Losey’s The Damned (renamed These Are The Damned for the US, as Luchino Visconti had used the same title) was an interesting sci-fi drama with Oliver Reed but it was released two years late and buried as part of a double-bill. Even with Yul Brynner, George Chakiris and Richard Basehart, Kings of the Sun, J. Lee Thompson’s Mayan history lesson, did not click at the box office or with critics either.
She played a nurse opposite Leslie Phillips in Doctor in Clover and another nurse who is seduced by Michael Caine in Alfie. The rest was history but for My Beautiful Laundrette, Stephen Frears’ gay comedy-drama written by Hanif Kureishi. Field was Rachel, mistress of Saeed Jaffrey, the laundrette owner. It broke ground with its casual acceptance of gay characters played by Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke. Apart from a film of Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers, the US TV series Santa Barbara and the odd stage work, Shirley Anne Field retired in 2011. She was married to the pilot and racing driver Charles Crichton-Stuart from 1967 until their divorce in the late 1970s. Their daughter, Nicola, was born in 1969. Field published her memoirs, A Time for Love, in 1991 and on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs talked about meeting John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra. They were just good friends.
MICHAEL DARVELL