Bond Girl mum who gave me my love of the limelight
. . . not to mention my disastrous taste in men and struggles with despair. As the much-loved Dale Winton dies at 62, we celebrate his life by reprinting his typically effervescent – and honest – memoirs
THE FIRST day of filming on my breakthrough TV show, Supermarket Sweep, saw me shaking with fright, a bag of nerves.
Everything I did seemed to be wrong. Each time I moved a muscle or my lips, a producer would bark: ‘Don’t walk like that! Don’t wave your arms about! Don’t be so camp, act butch!’
I don’t believe I could have got through that day without a word of advice from a friend in my dressing room: ‘Think of your Mum, Dale . . . do it for her.’
My mother wasn’t there to see me. I had never stopped missing her since the day she took her own life, almost 20 years earlier. But one thing was certain: I wouldn’t have this big chance, about to step in front of the cameras, without her. I thought of Mum — and pulled myself together.
Sheree Winton was a woman who could stop traffic when she crossed the road. Beautiful, curvaceous, voluptuous, she was a natural blonde bombshell with green-blue eyes, and I loved it when she used to put on her make-up and get dressed to go out.
I adored all the wolf- whistles and attention she attracted.
One day, when I was about eight, a van driver pulled up alongside Mum’s Mini and called out to me: ‘You’ve got a lovely mum, son! Just look at her. Isn’t she gorgeous?’
But there was another side to her, I realised as I grew up.
Despite her elegant clothes and stunning beauty, she suffered from dangerous bouts of low self-esteem and despair. She would plunge into relationships with men who didn’t deserve her, searching for stability and discovering too late that she had made another terrible choice.
I take after my mother in so many ways. Thanks to her, I grew up knowing how to make an entrance and take centre stage. I’ve inherited her eagerness to be noticed and to please.
That’s why I’m in the business I’m in. MY
FATHER, a furniture salesman with a flashy car and a glib line in romantic promises, was her first serious boyfriend . . . though he was nearly 30 years her senior.
They met when she was sweet 17 and he was in his 40s, probably at some nightclub in London, while she was working as the receptionist to a private detective — I told you she was glamorous.
Despite the phenomenal age difference, they were married within a year, and had me before Mum was 20.
Her own parents’ marriage had broken up after her dad returned from World War II, and I often wonder if her choice of partners was affected by the fact she grew up without a father figure.
Their two families, Mum’s and Dad’s, never got on.
I suspect age was only one of the problems — the main issue was that my father was Jewish, and my mother had been brought up Church of England.
She converted to please him, but feeling between the families got so bad that she persuaded him to change his name, from Winner to Winton.
I was named Dale because, when I was born in 1955, my mother had taken a shine to Dale Robertson, the star of a popular TV cowboy serial called Tales Of Wells Fargo.
She couldn’t possibly have known what a great gift she was giving me for my later professional career. ‘Dale’ has served me so well, because it is different and stands out.
Their first TV set — as well as providing the inspiration for my name — was soon to change my mother’s life. Once they bought it, just before I was born, my father lost all interest in going out. He just wanted to watch television. Mum was very young and vivacious, and soon got bored. A row brewed up, and she shouted at him: ‘You’re obsessed with that gogglebox. However dreary the programme, I can’t drag you away from it. Why are the people on TV so much more interesting to you than I am?’
My father bristled. ‘If you’re so clever,’ he retorted, ‘ why don’t you go and get a job on television yourself?’
And she did. The next day, she went out and got herself a theatrical agent. Two weeks later, she was on Michael Miles’s Take Your Pick, dressed in a mink bikini! That was the beginning of a successful career as a Fifties and Sixties pin-up girl and actress who had the world at her feet and the Press on her doorstep.
My father was stunned, but also very proud and he was soon enjoying the kudos of having a famous wife.
Mum knew she was an exceptionally attractive woman — her publicist dubbed her ‘the English Jayne Mansfield’, a reference to Hollywood’s most busty star. Mum never used her beauty to manipulate men, though. She wasn’t a feminist either. She believed women had their role, men had theirs and a lady should always demand to be treated with respect.
Her favourite saying was: ‘ You can buy so much more with a smile than you can with a rolling pin — and it’s so easy to smile.’
Mum’s showbiz career took off quickly.
She worked a lot with Roy Hudd and Bruce Forsyth, and appeared in a film called Dentist In The Chair with Bob Monkhouse. She also had a small part in Road To Hong Kong with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope — she liked Bob, but she wasn’t so sure about Bing.
The comic actor Terry-Thomas became very smitten with her when they worked together on a TV special, and he wooed her diligently.
Mum thought Terry-Thomas was terribly dashing, and allowed him to take her to dinner, where
he announced he was ‘a big star in America’.
She was put off by how heavily he drank. On set, he was disciplined, but when shooting was over he liked to play hard. She told him that she couldn’t handle someone with two such different sides to his personality.
Where sexual chemistry was concerned, Mum’s values were always very firmly rooted. She would make it quite clear from the outset that there would be no monkey business.
Some men found this doubly alluring. Just as my parents’ marriage was breaking up, one suitor’s advances became quite frightening. He ripped open the convertible roof of her Sunbeam Alpine, and stole her photo portfolio.
Then he came back and wrecked the engine by pouring a fistful of coins into the petrol tank. Mum knew who was stalking her, but she was reluctant to file a complaint with police because he had a wife and children, and people would leap to the false conclusion that she had been having an affair with a married man.
At last, his campaign of intimidation became so bad that she had to press charges.
I later learned the man, who must have had serious mental problems, killed himself rather than face court. His death was a great shock to my mother.
Amid all this, my father filled much less space in my life. He was a bullish man with a fiery temper, and I feared him in many ways.
He never harmed me physically, and I never saw him being violent towards my mother — but I also realise that, if he had abused her, she would never have let me know. As a small child, aged four or five, I used to have nightmares in which my father was chasing me, on foot or in a car, and though I was running away as fast as I could, I was unable to escape. I always woke up before he caught me.
ANOTHER abiding memory is of playing with my beloved toy cars in the kitchen, when my father swept them aside and started bellowing at me to recite my times tables.
My mind went blank, and he became even more incensed, shouting: ‘You must learn!’
I didn’t hate my father, but it’s very hard to love someone when your chief aim is to avoid doing or saying anything that might upset them. My grandmother on my mum’s side thought he was great fun, though, and he could always make her laugh. Perhaps he should have married her instead — they were much closer in age.
We were well- off, at first. As a baby, I would be wheeled around regent’s Park by nanny Burke, in her starched uniform. After that we had Scandinavian au pairs, erica and Bodil.
When I was eight, I was packed off to be a boarder at Orley Farm school, Harrow-on-the-Hill. It had a smell of sandalwood and decay, and to me as a small boy, it seemed as vast and forbidding as a Gothic mansion.
I hated it, and was always getting the cane for chattering after lights out. I remember showing Mum the weals on my backside and thighs. I was eight, remember.
After that I went to Aldenham public school in Hertfordshire, where I impressed my new schoolmates when Mum landed a cameo role in the new James Bond movie, Thunderball, in 1965.
She admitted to me that she liked Sean Connery enormously.
After a day of shooting on the 007 set at Pinewood film studios, she visited me in school, still wearing her movie clothes and make-up. That caused quite a stir among the boys.
I was used to it. A couple of years earlier, she had a role in the first Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s night, and invited me along to meet the Fab Four.
I could see she got on especially well with John Lennon, who was cheeky and made her laugh, but she liked Paul McCartney as well.
Paul must have liked her, too, because years later one of my uncles met him and introduced himself. ‘ Sheree Winton! I remember her!’ Paul said.
But Mum was very fearful of losing her looks and seeing her career fade. rather than wait for the work to dry up, she decided to quit. It is only now that I realise how very young she was, just 31 or 32, and that other things must have been weighing her down.
Divorced from my father, she took up with one man, who soon disappeared, and then another — really shocking me when she rang me at school to announce she was marrying him, and that a car was coming to take me to Harrow register Office, where I was to be a witness.
He was a restaurateur called norman, and what I chiefly remember is the terrible smell of his tobacco pipe. I never believed the marriage was a love match.
With hindsight, I understand that Mum was depressed, and she was making a bad choice in haste because she was desperate for some emotional and financial support.
The relationship was volatile, and more than once the police had to be called to break up a fight on the lawn outside the house. She kicked norman out at least ten times — finally he got the message, and left for good.
not long after, aged 16, I finished school. Mum helped me get a job on the very bottom-most rung of the showbiz ladder . . . in the stockroom of HMV records in Oxford Street.
I’d only been there a few weeks when the manager rushed up to me in a panic and said: ‘Dale, I’ve just had a phone call. You have to