Scotsman Obituaries: Shirley Anne Field, actress who became an iconic face of Sixties cinema

With her finely chiselled features, she possessed an almost aristocratic beauty and came to films via glamour modelling. But her father was a lorry driver and occasional petty thief, absent for most of her life.

Her mother felt unable to deal with four children on her own and Field was put into care with her brother Guy.

Field left school at 15, trained as a typist and worked for the Gas Board while also doing pin-up photos for magazines like Reveille and Titbits.

She landed a series of small film roles based on her looks before her breakthrough opposite Olivier in Tony Richardson’s 1960 film adaptation of John Osborne’s play The Entertainer.

She recalled auditioning with about 500 other actresses.

“I’d been told by every agency that you had to talk in the correct way, which is what I did. As I was leaving, Tony shouted over ‘Can you do those lines in a Northern accent?’

“I turned around immediately and said (adopting the accent), ‘Bloody hell, I’ve spent four years learning to talk properly and now you’re asking me to do this. Well, if you want me to, but I'm not keen on it, I'll have you know.’ It worked.”

Further success in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning took her to Hollywood and the sprawling historical epic Kings of the Sun, with Yul Brynner, though her Hollywood career proved short-lived when the movie failed to recoup its budget at the box office.

Back in England she was one of Michael Caine’s conquests in the classic Alfie, but she disappeared from view in the 1970s before re-emerging in character roles in films and television in the 1980s.

She was born above a chemist’s shop in Forest Gate in London in 1941 and named Shirley Broomfield, after Shirley Temple, by her film fan mother.

Her father, however, was unimpressed, declaring he did not want “any bleedin’ film stars” in his family. He insisted on calling her Anne or Annie. His comment was to prove somewhat ironic.

Her father did go to the local Odeon, but it was to pose as a cleaner and make off with one of their carpets.

At five, Field was sent to a children’s home in the South of England. Subsequently she lived in a couple of homes in Lancashire.

She waited and waited for her mother to come and get her, but her mother visited only once. She saw her father again when she was 13, but they did not keep in contact. She said later she felt “invisible” until she was 15.

She had small roles in about 20 films before The Entertainer, but was not happy with the way her career was going.

“I felt exploited,” she said. “I felt like a piece of meat just being picked for the way you looked.”

Her career shifted up a gear or two when she impressed Tony Richardson, director of The Entertainer, with her working-class Northern accent, though her relationship with Olivier, who plays an aging seaside showman, got off to an awkward start.

“I’m in bed with him, filming in a caravan,” she said in an interview with the Yorkshire Post in 2012. “And he starts talking. ‘Now who’s your favourite actor or actress, dear? I said ‘Marilyn Monroe’ and he went off into a fit. ‘Dreadful girl! Never shows up on time!’

“Two days later he again tries, very patronising. ‘Who else do you admire?’ So I said ‘I love Vivien Leigh’.” Olivier and Leigh were nearing the end of a stormy marriage.

“He went into a fury. He was horrible. I got out of his bed and said ‘I’m not staying here with you. Every time you ask me something and I answer, you’re always rude’ and I went and sulked.”

Olivier changed his tune when he saw the rushes of their first scene together and wanted her to join his Old Vic theatre company, but she lacked the confidence to do so.

In quick succession she appeared in The Entertainer, Michael Powell’s offbeat thriller Peeping Tom, Beat Girl and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Man in the Moon.

Field starred opposite Steve McQueen in The War Lover. Second World War films were in fashion, but the film proved disappointing. She made more of a lasting impact in The Damned, a chilling drama from the Hammer horror stable about secret government experiments on a group of children.

Even after she got her break in movies, Field went on hoping that her mother would track her down.

“There I was all over the place and she didn’t see it,” she said. “I discovered later she’d heard I was in films.”

Her mother had married an American soldier, moved to the United States and started a second family. She and her daughter were eventually reunited in 1978.

Field made very few films in the 1970s and early 1980s. “I just never seemed to be offered any parts,” she said. She did, however, turn up in game shows including Blankety Blank and Celebrity Squares.

She played Saeed Jaffrey’s girlfriend in the hit drama My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985 and had a recurring role in the American soap opera Santa Barbara.

Later film credits include The Rachel Papers, Hear My Song and UFO, a vehicle for the off-colour comic Roy Chubby Brown, with Field as a feminist alien.

Tragedy struck in 1999 when her brother Guy was shot dead by his lover’s son in San Francisco.

In 1967 she had married Charles Crichton-Stuart, an aristocratic racing driver. They divorced in 1975. Shirley Anne Field is survived by their daughter Nicola.

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