June Thorburn was born in Karachi in Pakistan in 1931. She was an exceptionally pretty actress and a popular cinema star in the 1950’s. She came to London at the age of twenty. She made her first film “The Pickwick Papers” in 1952. Among her other major films ” The Cruel Sea”, “Touch and Go”, “Rooney” and “tom thumb”. Sadly she was killed in an airlane crash in 1967. She was expecting her third child at the time of her death.
Wikipedia entry:
June Thorburn was born in Karachi, British India. She was the eldest of three children, including her sister Diana and her brother Keith. Her full name was Patricia June Thubron Smith. She spent most of her schooldays in boarding schools in India, since her father was a colonel in the Indian Army and therefore her parents travelled a lot. When he retired from the military, they moved back to Britain.
June began writing plays from about the age of seven. Her grandfather (Sydney Thubron) who had also spent many years in India as a design engineer, building many important bridges, made early ‘movies’ and she was the star in several, the first being “Her Second Birthday”, when she was only two years old.
When she was 20 she left home and moved to London to pursue her career, where she met and married her first husband, Aldon Richard Bryse-Harvey. During their short and stressful marriage she bore one daughter in 1953, named Heather-Louise June. The marriage ended in divorce and June moved back to Hampshire, close to her family, for a couple of years until her career started to take off.
In 1957 she moved back to London, where shortly thereafter she met Morten Smith-Petersen, who subsequently became her second husband. She was married to him until her death in 1967. Together with Morten, she had a second daughter named Inger-Sheleen Christabel.
She appeared in her first commercial film in 1952, and began to win leading roles, in British costume dramas such as Fury at Smugglers’ Bay (1961) and The Scarlet Blade (1963). Her most notable film appearance was as the Forest Queen in Tom Thumb (1958). During the early 1960s, she also appeared regularly on British television.
She was pregnant with her third child when returning to London from Spain on Iberia Airlines Flight 062 when it crashed at Blackdown Hill, Sussex, killing all 37 people on board.
