JENNY HANLEY I had Warren Beatty thrown out of my hotel room
Returning to the stage for the first time in 40 years, the former Bond girl and Magpie star talks about her co-star Christopher Lee and Raquel Welch’s plastic surgery
SHE has appeared in movies alongside Ava Gardner, Peter Sellers and Ingrid Bergman, turned down legendary lothario Warren Beatty and beat Raquel Welch and Brigitte Bardot to the title of the world’s sexiest woman.
But as former Bond girl Jenny Hanley concedes, that’s all a lifetime ago. This week, more than 40 years after she last appeared on stage, the ex-model, actress and TV and radio presenter is making her comeback in the Agatha Christie play The Hollow at the repertory theatre in Stoke-on-Trent.
Given that Hanley is just days away from celebrating her 70th birthday she could be forgiven for thinking it’s time to put her feet up, especially after suffering a spate of mini strokes only four years ago. But she hasn’t lost her zest for life.
“I just wanted to do it,” she says. “At three score years and 10 the Bible has pretty much written you off, let alone the NHS so it’s a challenge, especially after the strokes. I wondered if my memory would work, whether all of me is functioning.”
Home for Hanley these days is an apartment on the south coast, an hour from Hythe, Kent, where her grandparents – photographers of the Royal Family and even the late Roger Moore when he modelled for knitting patterns – used to live.
“Two years ago I found a photo in an old album of a lanky young Roger on the beach in Hythe and sent it to him,” she says. “He wrote back saying it had made his wife fall in love with him again.”
Hanley’s parents were distinguished actors Jimmy Hanley and Dinah Sheridan but she and her brother Jeremy – who went on to become chairman of the Conservative Party and was knighted – had an unsettled childhood.
“Mother was married four times so we moved from pillar to post thanks to the law for a few years, then finally she got custody and control of Jeremy and I,” she says. “When mother married John Davis, head of the Rank Organisation, we went from a teeny house in Hertfordshire to a manor house in Kent with live-in staff and step-siblings. We didn’t meet father until I was 11 as John Davis didn’t want us to have anything to do with him.”
Although a shy youngster Jenny attended a modelling course paid for by her mother and never looked back. She featured on the covers of Vogue, Harpers & Queen and Living magazines and was cast as one of the dozen Angels Of Death in the 1969 movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service starring George Lazenby in his sole outing as 007 and Telly Savalas as Blofeld.
“George was his own worst enemy, bless him,” says Hanley. “You don’t come to a film set up a mountain and say, ‘There are 12 of you, it won’t take me long!’ He tried it on with all of us.”
HANLEY is embarrassed to have been labelled a Bond girl ever since, especially given her role was little more than a cameo. “A hat-stand could have done what I was meant to be doing,” she says with characteristic self deprecation. “I didn’t mind my lines being cut as I had a five-year film contract with film producer Harry Salzman. He had two British actors in his stable and the other one was called Michael Caine but I don’t know what became of him,” she adds with a laugh.
“I then lost my contract when I refused a role in Battle Of Britain because it involved going topless for a bed scene and Billy Wilder wanted me in The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes.”
In America to promote the latter – even though she was edited out of it – Jenny met Steve McQueen and Paul Newman “who sadly were both shorter than me” and Warren Beatty, who naturally tried to seduce her. “I’d met him before in London when he sat in places where auditions were held and asked for girls’ numbers,” she says. “I didn’t like him. He wasn’t pleased when I called the manager to remove him from my New York hotel suite after he’d let himself in and said, ‘Spend one night with me and you’ll never want to go home’.
“But I told him, ‘Just go, sunshine. I’m British. We don’t do that.’ And threw him out. To make matters worse each day I asked the hotel for some carrot batons and a vodka and tonic to be left in my room and not only had he drunk my vodka and tonic, he’d eaten my carrots! I was furious.
“A little bit later I discovered that he had also cancelled my ticket back to England. He seemed to think he owned New York.”
Hanley also had a tricky time working with Christopher Lee on Hammer Studios’ 1970 horror flick Scars Of Dracula. “He was difficult,” she recalls. “You had to be careful because he didn’t like you laughing while making a film, which is tough when you’ve got a rubber bat that hits your frontage and then goes backwards.”
That same year Hanley beat renowned beauties Brigitte Bardot and Raquel Welch in The Daily Sketch’s poll to identify The World’s Most Beautiful Woman.
“I thought that was hilarious, and wonderful,” she says now. “I went out for dinner with Raquel and her husband. She’d already had plastic surgery and he kept telling her things like, ‘Jenny’s had nothing done. You don’t need a big bust to succeed.’ No wonder their marriage didn’t last.”
Hanley had a long relationship with Robin Nedwell, who found fame as a medical student in the hit 1970s sitcom Doctor In The House. Her own TV acting credits included The Persuaders, Man About The House, Emmerdale Farm and Softly Softly. She also spent six years on Magpie, ITV’s rival to BBC’s Blue Peter, from 1974 to 1980.
“I preferred to hide behind characters and initially was scared rigid about presenting but I loved doing Magpie,” she says. “It was the time when women started saying, ‘We can do anything. We don’t all wear petticoats and most of us don’t wear bras so let’s get on with it.’
“We had some great guests. My colleague Mick Robertson fell in love with Kate Bush and Lynsey de Paul and I went soft and gooey when David Soul came in.”
From 1980 until 1997 Jenny was married to Trevor “Herbie” Clark, a publican whose inns at Thames Ditton and Sonning she helped to run as her showbiz career gradually fizzled out.
“I had to give up working when my marriage exploded and I was told that if I didn’t give up my career I’d be declared an unfit mother for deserting my children by going to work and they would be taken away from me,” she says.
Jenny remains close to her sons Daniel, 30, and Tobias, 33, as well as her grandchildren Tabitha, four, and Leo, six.
The witty, talented lady who was so in demand as a glamorous young woman has long been single with only one “not serious” relationship since her acrimonious divorce. Does she feel unlucky in love?
“Yes, I think so,” she admits. “But the past few years were so difficult that I haven’t been looking. Other things have taken precedence. If you can find me a charming man on a big white horse that would be lovely but I’m not waiting. The roses don’t need the manure.”
The Hollow will play at Stoke Repertory Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent until August 12. For tickets call 0333 666 4466.