Beautiful and talented Shirley Anne Field spent many years in the 1950’s in small parts in British films. Her breakthrough role came in 1960 in “The Entertainer” as the girlfriend of Archie Rice played by Laurence Oliver. She then won a bigger role as Doreen girlfriend of Albert Finney in the classic kitchen-sink drama “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”. She starred in “The War Lover” with Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner and then went to Hollywood to make “Kings of the Sun” with Yul Brynner and George Chakiris. She returned to Britain to make “Alfie” with Michael Caine. By the end of the sixties she was working in the theatre. However she returned to film in two major works “My Beautiful Laudnerette” with Daniel Day-Lewis and the wonderful “Hear My Song”. She went back to Hollywood to star in the soap “Santa Barbara”. She continues to make film, stage and television appearances. Recently she appeared as guest star in an episode of “The Bill”. For interview with Shirley Anne Field, please click here. Barb
Brian McFarlane’s entryin “Encyclopedia of British Film”:
The remarkable thing about Shirley Anne Field is that she has survived and become more interesting with the years.
Shirley Anne Field (Wikipedia)
Shirley Anne Field was born in 1936 a dis an English actress who has performed on stage, film and television since 1955.
Shirley Anne Field was bo in Forest Gate, London. She was the third of four children, with two elder sisters and a younger brother, Earnest “Guy” Broomfield (c. 1938–1999). Guy Broomfield was murdered in 1999 by Harry Dalsey, the son of Adrian Dalsey.
At the age of six, Shirley was placed in the National Children’s Home at Edgworth, near Bolton, and four years later was moved to another children’s home in Blackburn, where she attended Blakey Moor School for Girls. She subsequently returned to Edgworth until she was 15, when she moved to a children’s home hostel in London, training as a typist while still attending school.
After a course at the Lucie Clayton School and Model Agency, she became a photographic model for pin-up magazines like Reveille and Titbits. She was subsequently spotted by Bill Watts, who ran a theatrical agency and obtained for her a number of uncredited roles in various late 1950s British films. Her first appearance in a film was as an extra in Simon and Laura (1955), but her breakthrough came in 1960 when she was chosen by Laurence Olivier to play the role of model Tina Lapford in The Entertainer. That same year, she appeared in probably her best known role as Doreen, the would-be girlfriend of rebellious Arthur Seaton (played by Albert Finney), in the influential New Wave film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Co-star Finney had previously had a small role in The Entertainer. Also in 1960, Field starred alongside Kenneth More in Man in the Moon (1960). With those three big film starring roles in 1960, she became one of the very few actors ever to have their name above the titles in all the major cinemas around Leicester Square simultaneously.
During the 1970s, she spent some time working in stage roles before returning to films and television, in both the US and UK, in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
She married the aristocratic RAF pilot and racing driver Charles Crichton-Stuart (1939–2001) on 7 July 1967 and they had a daughter, Nicola Crichton-Stuart, who was born in 1969. The marriage ended in divorce during the late 1970s. She wrote her autobiography A Time for Love (1991).[6]
On 14 November 1993, Field appeared on BBC Radio 4‘s Desert Island Discs ,talking to Sue Lawley about her upbringing in different children’s homes in Northern England and her success as an actress in the 1960s. She also reminisced about her friendship with John F. Kennedy and an ill-fated date with Frank Sinatra. Her record choices included Beethoven‘s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major and pieces by Rachmaninov, Elvis Presley and the Carpenters. In the September 2009 issue of Cinema Retro, there was a long interview with Field, where she candidly talked about her childhood and the making of Peeping Tom, The Entertainer, Beat Girl and The War Lover.
Shirley Anne Field died in December 2023 at the age of 87.
Tribute by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian in December 2023:
Shirley Anne Field: a smart and seductive key player in the British New Wave
Appearing in many of the landmark gritty dramas of the era, the actor, who has died aged 87, stood out for portraying vulnerability combined with a canny intelligence. 12 Dec 2023.
Shirley Anne Field had the kind of ingenue English-rose freshness and beauty that the British cinema loved in the 50s and 60s – it had something feline about it, a kind of innocent-fatale. Hers were the kind of looks that always introduced an almost unintentional note of innocence and poignancy into the tough dramas and kitchen-sink pictures in which she was cast; she had something of the model agency and deportment school and yet also the pinup mag.
Field was of the same generation as heartstoppingly beautiful performers such as Janette Scott, Shirley Eaton, Sylvia Sims and Julie Christie. She appeared briefly in Michael Powell’s 1960 chiller Peeping Tom as a temperamental film diva (quite unlike her real self) but had her breakthrough in Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer later that year, based on John Osborne’s acidly satirical play about Britain’s fading imperial dream. Laurence Olivier is seedy music-hall entertainer Archie Rice who seduces Field’s character as the judge of a seaside beauty contest. A shot of Field, in bed with the post-coitally brooding Olivier, was heavily used in the movie’s promotion; she is sexy and calculating, but also shown as a “nice” girl, or at any rate a girl from a wealthy family whose resources Archie may want to exploit. The same year, Field was in Beat Girl, the earnest kind of “youth” movie that seems a bit toe-curling now, containing young people in coffee bars putting pop songs on the jukebox. She also sings the dreadful song It’s Legal to a smouldering lite-tough guy Adam Faith.
Field was again cast as a slightly vapid and even oppressive “nice” girl Doreen in Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, someone who (of course) would not sleep with a man before they were married. Doreen is dating the explosively moody and demanding Arthur Seaton, unforgettably played by Albert Finney, who is in turn having an affair with blowsy married woman Brenda, played by Rachel Roberts. Perhaps Roberts and Finney, in their muscular, unfinished realness rather upstaged the more demurely cast Field, but their tortured, sexually contorted existence wouldn’t make the same kind of sense without her.
In Joseph Losey’s sci-fi pulp shocker The Damned from 1963, Field’s slinkier, scarier side came to the fore, playing a young woman who seduces a middle-aged man to an awful fate; Losey saw how to use her conventionally groomed looks and mannerisms for a more menacing purpose. She was cast as the romantic female lead opposite Robert Wagner in the war film The War Lover, about handsome Yanks over in Blighty having romantic escapades with blushing female Brits. Perhaps that was another role in which she was destined to be upstaged. Four years later she appeared in the zeitgeisty swinging-60s movie Alfie as a sexy nurse (the kind of role she also had in Doctor in Clover).
But above all these roles is what had to be her 60s masterpiece: a genuinely challenging extended role in the mini-feature Lunch Hour from 1962, itself lasting about an hour and taken from a one-act play by John Mortimer, in which she is a young woman inveigled into a furtive affair with predatory smoothie Robert Stephens. Field is excellent: smart, seductive, but sweetly vulnerable and yet determined. Lunch Hour has all the New Wave preoccupations with class and pre-Pill sexual morality of the time, but unlike Alfie or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning it gives Field something substantial to do.
Field continued to work as a much admired character actor in later years, including playing Saeed Jaffrey’s mistress Rachel in My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, perhaps ironically inheriting the kind of role that Rachel Roberts had in Saturday Night. But riding the crest of the British New Wave, she was the very epitome of a certain kind of sweet and knowing Englishness
