Shirley Anne Field, who has died aged 87, was likened to Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Deneuve and even “a sort of red-haired Brigitte Bardot”. There was no question she could stop traffic. “Lorries used to thunder to a halt, and I would wonder what they were looking at,” she said.
Her presence was sharply distinctive. In Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a defining work of kitchen-sink drama, she was a vision of self-possession as Doreen (“Rotten name, ain’t it?”), who works in a Nottingham hairnet factory, lives with her mother and catches the eye of the discontented lathe operator Arthur Seaton, played by Albert Finney.
