Brian Beacom

THERE’S a scene in 1960 kitchen sink drama The Entertainer in which Sir Laurence Olivier’s fading comedian Archie Rice seduces beauty queen Tina in a tiny, run-down static caravan in Morecambe.

It’s a great metaphor for the decline of variety, a look through the dirty net-curtain into the reality of showbiz.

However, a few hours spent in Southend-On-Sea with the film’s beauty queen, actress Shirley Anne Field, reveals a life that’s been far more of a struggle than anything Archie Rice had to contend with.

Shirley would go on to star alongside Albert Finney in the classic Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, with Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner in The War Lover and in a range of British films and TV series.

Adam Faith was once a boyfriend. She was courted by composer John Barry, Sean Connery adored her and she married a handsome racing driver.

But Shirley, who is appearing as the caustic housekeeper in the touring production of Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement In Stone, has had a heart-wrencher of a life.

Little Shirley Broomfield (named after Shirley Temple by her showbiz-struck mother) was just five when East London was bombed.

Too young to be evacuated, she was sent to live in a Bolton orphanage run by Methodist Sisters. She didn’t see her mother again until she was 38.

“I kept crying and getting into a temper,” she recalls of the early months.

“I kept saying ‘I’ve got a little baby brother, who is two years younger!’ I had two sisters as well, but they were old enough to be evacuated.

“Finally, the nuns brought my brother up to Bolton and he was put into a boys’ building on the other side of a field, which was full of cows, which I was terrified of. I only got to see him at special times.”

The family unit had been blitzed. “My sister, Sonny, was married four times by the age of 34 and had six children. She got cancer and died early. I didn’t meet my other sister Joy until I was in my 30s.

“My mother meantime had disappeared into the American south where she married a Southern American serviceman, but not legally. Joy had been turned back at the ship. My mother’s ‘husband’ promised he’d come back for all her children and she went out there with that promise.”

Shirley only discovered all this much later in life. Her lorry driver father had meantime remarried; he didn’t visit the orphanage until his daughter was 13.

“Your childhood sets you up for life,” she maintains.

“All children want is someone to put their arm round them. And I did miss my mother. I craved her. Even though she left us behind, she had loved us all so much and her leaving us left an indelible mark, so much so that none of the Sisters had a chance with me.

“One or two of them tried to be loving but I shrugged them off because I felt disloyal to my mother.”

Not all of the Sisters were loving. Shirely believes there was abuse. “There was one Sister that I think got sacked because of me,” she recalls grimly.

“There was a system in place at the home if you were very lonely you could take your mattress and sleep in Sister’s bedroom.

“I was sleeping on the floor one night when one Sister did something to me and I didn’t like it, so much that I wet the bed in anger.

“As a result, she threw me into the bathroom and under a boiling hot geyser and I was screaming in pain.

“Another Sister came in and stopped it, wrapped me in a towel and sat me on her knee. Two weeks later, the bad Sister was gone.”

Freed from the institution at the age of 15, Field made her way back to London and into a Gas Board typing pool.

“I was bored silly,” she recalls. After being talent-spotted by a photographer, she took up modelling and her photos appeared in the likes of Reveille and Titbits magazine.

She also took part in local beauty contests. (And became Miss London). But the teenager wasn’t chasing fame.

“I hoped my mother would see the photographs and she’d find me and want me,” she says softly.

Shirley was taken on by an agency that found small movie parts for young women. She endured five years of “wolves” trying to take advantage, pressuring 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 in my best RP, 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 the 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, her motivation was never about being a film star.

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

* A Judgement In Stone is at the Theatre Royal Glasgow, June 19-24.