TWISTS AND TURNS WORTHY OF A WHODUNIT

he threw me into the nder a boiling hot screaming in pain. er came in and stopped n a towel and sat me on eeks later, the bad ” e institution at the age e her way back to o a Gas Board typing illy,” she recalls. After ted by a photographer, elling and her photos ikes of Reveille and . part in local beauty ecame Miss London). wasn’t chasing fame. mother would see the d she’d find me and ys softly. ken on by an agency movie parts for young ured five years of o take advantage, pressuring her to have sex, offering glamorous holidays.

“I didn’t go on them because I didn’t want to be tested. I was afraid I might enjoy that world,” she says, frankly. “Meantime, I had a steady boyfriend, who was loyal and very nice.”

She appeared in teen rebellion film Beat Girl alongside future pop star Adam Faith.

“At the time I was also being pursued by John Barry [the film’s composer]. Adam was the trainee wolf at the time.” She dated the trainee. “I was never too serious about him.”

Shirley’s working-class accent helped her land a life-changing role alongside Lawrence Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer. She was 19.

“I turned up to casting in a room crowded with young women, all looking the same except I was a bit younger. So I let the pony tail down, took the hoop out of my petticoat and read the lines, as I’d been taught to do.”

She used her Northern accent and landed the role which changed her life.

In 1960 she had three films playing in Leicester Square at one time: Man In The Moon with Kenneth More, The Entertainer and Richardson’s Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.

She was now taking the industry by storm, but her motivation was never about being a film star.

“It was always about hoping my mother would come and get me,” she says gently.

“But there I was, all over the place, and she didn’t see it.”

Shirley finally met her mother, and her extended family, in 1978.

But she didn’t look back in anger at the lost years. “I understood how her head was turned,” she says.

“And I was told she’d later tried to find me, putting ads in the News of the World. She didn’t know I’d become Shirley Anne Field.”