Shirley Anne Field

About Shirley Anne Field

Shirley Anne Field was one of Britain's most highly respected actresses, who performed on stage, film and television starting in 1955. From childhood she had the ambition to be in films. By age 20 her looks and talent found her appearing in films and she changed her name. She was very prominent during the British New Wave, starring opposite Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney, Oliver Reed, Steve McQueen, Michael Caine, Daniel Day-Lewis and Ned Beatty in such classic films as The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alfie, and My Beautiful Laundrette.

Born in 1936 as Shirley Broomfield, and having been abandoned as a baby, she was partly raised in a children's home. During the war she was evacuated to Bolton, where she was fostered by two families and grew up believing that she was an orphan. (In 1979, she found her real mother, Mrs. Ivy Collins, who would die at 97 in 2004, and discovered that she had three half-sisters living in Georgia in America.

At the age of six, Shirley was placed in the National Children's Home at Edgworth, near Bolton, Lancashire, 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, Field became a photographic model for pin-up magazines like Reveille and Titbits to pay her way through acting school. She was subsequently spotted by Bill Watts, who ran a theatrical agency and obtained for her roles in late 1950s British films, usually uncredited.

Field first appearance in a film was as an extra in Simon and Laura (1955). She had small parts in All for Mary (1955), Lost (1956), Yield to the Night (1956) (directed by J. Lee Thompson), It's Never Too Late (1956), It's a Wonderful World (1956), The Weapon (1956), Loser Takes All (1956), The Silken Affair (1956), Dry Rot (1956), The Good Companions (1957) (again for Thompson), Seven Thunders (1957), and The Flesh Is Weak (1957). She was in episodes of The New Adventures of Martin Kane (1957) and International Detective (1959).

Field's first sizeable film role was in Horrors of the Black Museum (1959). She had minor parts in Once More, with Feeling! (1960), and And the Same to You (1960), and then a larger role in Michael Powell's controversial Peeping Tom (1960).

A friend of Tony Richardson's told Shirley how Tony and he had gone to Leicester Square to see her name in lights. She worked with Albert Finney at the Royal Court in Lindsay Anderson production of The Lily White Boys (1960). They later worked together again, on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, written by Alan Sillitoe.

In 1960, Field's breakthrough came when she was chosen by Tony Richardson to play the role of model Tina Lapford in The Entertainer (1960), starring Laurence Olivier. Half a century later, she clarified that she did not owe her break to Olivier: "It was Tony Richardson I owe it all to."

Field had a supporting role in Beat Girl (1960), then her role as "Doreen" in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) soon followed. Only 22 years old, Shirley Anne was now a major film star. Her next movie, Man in the Moon (1960), was featured in a Royal Command Performance. This resulted in her name being above the title in all the major cinemas around Leicester Square, apparently a record to this day.

Although offered a role in A Kind of Loving (1962), Field turned it down to play the female lead in a Hollywood financed film, The War Lover (1962), with Steve McQueen. Four decades later she admitted that the shoot was not ideal:

"It was the stuff dreams are made of, but I didn't get to enjoy it like I should have. When I arrived I was so panicked and tired and the sun was just too yellow and the orange juice too orange. It was very stressful and I had a headache all the time. I just wasn't used to it. I didn't have anyone to look after me."

In the UK, Field had the lead in Lunch Hour (1962), which was one of her favourite films. For Hammer films, she starred in The Damned (1963), directed by Joseph Losey. She then went to Hollywood to play the female lead in an epic directed by J. Lee Thompson, Kings of the Sun (1963), with Yul Brynner and George Chakiris, filmed in Mexico. Thompson had her under personal contract by now, and she says she turned down roles in a James Bond film and an Elvis Presley movie.

Field then went to Italy to appear in The Wedding March (1966), then back in England made Doctor in Clover (1966) and Alfie (1966). She had a supporting role in Hell Is Empty (1967).

In July 1967 Field married the aristocratic RAF pilot and racing driver Charles Crichton-Stuart (1939–2001), but the marriage collapsed due to them being "too alike", and they divorced in 1975. The marriage produced a daughter, Nicola, born in 1969. There also were romances with Bill Kenwright and actor Kenneth Cranham.

Field then starred in With Love in Mind (1970) and A Touch of the Other (1970), then later made House of the Living Dead (1974).

By the late 1970s Field was more commonly seen on TV, in shows such as Centre Play, Shoestring, Buccaneer, Never the Twain, Anna Lee: Headcase (1993), Murder She Wrote, Lady Chatterly, Rumble, Bramwell, Barbara, Madson, Dalziel and Pascoe, The Bill, Where the Heart Is, Waking the Dead, Monarch of the Glen, Last of the Summer Wine, Doctors, and a long run on Santa Barbara, as well as TV movies like Two by Forsyth (1984).

In the 1980s, she met up again with Stephen Frears, with whom she had worked when they were both beginners at the Royal Court. He cast her in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which was a big success and a breakthrough movie. She also had roles in films like Shag (1989), Getting It Right (1989), The Rachel Papers (1989), Hear My Song (1991), U.F.O. (1993), Taking Liberty (1993), Loving Deadly (1994), and At Risk (1994).

Her autobiography, A Time for Love, was also published in 1991.

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 September 1999, her brother, publisher Guy Broomfield, 60, was shot dead in his San Francisco home in September 1999 by his girlfriend's son, 25-year-old Harry Israel Dalsey, the heir to the DHL courier fortune. Dalsey admitted in court that during an argument he fired a .38-caliber revolver, striking Guy twice in the chest at point-blank range and killing him. However, he got only 36 months in prison after plea-bargaining the charge from second degree murder to involuntary manslaughter. Guy was the boyfriend of Dalsey's widowed mother Annie, and had lived in her California mansion for six years. Field flew to the US to begin a civil action alleging wrongful death.

In recent years, she toured in theatre productions such as The Cemetery Club and Five Blue Hair Ladies Sitting on a Green Park Bench. Late in her career, she appeared alongside Flora Spencer Longhurst in Beautiful Relics (2014), a short film directed by Adrian Hedgecock.

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.

Field died on 10 December 2023, at the age of 87.