Shirley Anne Field

Shirley Anne Field0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

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The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety three and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

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My Castaway this week is an actress. Abandoned by her parents and brought up in children's homes in the north of England, her beauty and determination attracted the attention of photographers and film directors. In the sixties she was said to be Britain's answer to Marilyn Munro, starring in films such as The Entertainer on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

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She always hoped her fame would help her find the mother who had left her behind. Her career has been accompanied by a search for her roots and for security.

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Recent audiences have seen her in the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Hear My Song, and this year on television in the character of Mrs Bolton, the housekeeper in Lady Chatterleigh's Lover. She is Shirley Ann Field.

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Mrs Bolton was a different role, uh, Shirley Ann, from one you'd ever played before, really, in the sense that she was real really quite matronly. Yes, she was. Did you have to think twice before taking it? No. I wanted to work with Ken Russell. I had to think twice about looking at myself in my costume and my make-up because

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It was quite a different look for me, and it took some time to get ready. But it gave me a great insight into how people react to women who

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Don't physically, immediately, excite them. A lot of my girlfriends have told me that when you reach a certain age you become invisible, and I've always said rubbish. But when I played Mrs Bolton,

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People never noticed me unless I spoke.

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People who'd always opened doors for me and taken care of me. Just odd little things. So this was a completely new experience. Very new. And I hadn't realised before that I may have been spoiled and not realised it. So are you saying that it's stopped you worrying now that if your looks fade, or when your looks fade, or one doesn't know if they will or not, that somehow it won't matter to you any more, whereas before you'd worried about it? It'll always matter to me, I'm afraid. I hope that I'm not vain, but I wouldn't like to lose the privilege of people being nice to me. But now I know that sometimes

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It it's a very strange thing. If people like the look of you and your smile.

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They'll do all sorts of things for you, which they won't necessarily do.

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Unless you attract their attention. Now, that's made me much kinder to people who are not.

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Obviously attractive to look at.

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Let's turn to your music now to start with. Tell me what your first record would be on your desert island.

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My first record is going to be Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number Two in C minor. And why do you want that?

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Because I'm going to be on a desert island. I need something with some substance. I need something that.

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I can keep finding new things in and something that will console me when I'm feeling lonely.

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Part of Rachmaninoff's piano concerto number two in C minor, played by Vladimir Ashkenazi with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrei Previn.

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Your first big break in films, of course, was back in nineteen sixty, um, The Entertainer, which of course starred Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice and was directed by Tony Richardson. You played Tina, the beauty queen that he lusted after. What was it like acting with him?

Speaker 44:25

That is true.

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Very strange at first, very, very cool and aloof, Sir Lawrence, in those days. To me, and I was young and sparky and cocky and difficult. You know, when some people are nervous, they're very quiet and shy. I'm afraid I wasn't. I'd talk too much, shout, carry on, you know, and I was excited and excitable. It was your first proper acting girl, really, wasn't it? I'd been what they call a special girl before that, which is the most deadly thing you can be. It's.

Shirley Anne Field4:49

Yeah, really well.

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You know, you get one line, you sit at some great star's feet next to nothing, and I always got the one line wrong. But then suddenly, Olivier and Tony Richardson give you all these lines. Now, how did they choose you? Where did they find you? Why you? Everybody auditioned for it. Everybody.

Shirley Anne Field5:07

Why you

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But I went into this room and we all looked identical. It was sort of nineteen fifty nine. We all had these wide skirts on, ponytails, doe eyes. We were all trying to copy the beauties of the day.

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And I sat down, aged nineteen, and I thought, Oh my goodness, we all look alike So I went to the cloakroom.

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I brushed my hair down, I wiped my make-up off as much as possible, and I took the hoop out of my petticoat because I thought, well.

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I better try and look.

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Stand out a little, as they own-I don't know what instinct made me do it, and I didn't feel very confident, but I felt, well, at least they'll notice me, and they did.

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And then Tony said to me, Can you talk in a northern accent? Now I said, I've just spent four years learning how not to talk like that That was in the children's home. Yes. And that made you perfect for the part. Well, he then we had to go and read it on stage.

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And as soon as I got these three pages of dialogue, I knew it was written for me. And then you came to do it. There was that I think the central scene for you was in the caravan with the entertainer, with Archie Rice, and he was Oh, yes, and at first he was very cool, um Laurence Olivia, and he was this great knight of the theatre.

Shirley Anne Field6:13

Yeah, yeah.

Shirley Anne Field6:15

Without you.

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And I didn't want to go and see my rushes because I was self-conscious. I always couldn't bear the way I looked. It sounds very odd to say this because it sounds affected, but I don't mean it that way.

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So I thought, no, I'm not going to go and see the Rushes. And he said, What do you mean, young lady, you're not going to go and see the Rushes? This is one art form where you can correct yourself as you go along. And Frog marched me off to the Rushes Theatre, and we sat there.

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Roger Liversey, myself, Sir Lawrence and then this marvellous scene came up.

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Everybody, I could tell they liked it. And afterwards, we came out and he linked his arm in mine, and Roger Liversy linked his other arm. We danced off down the street. He said, Well, no improvement needed there, is there, young lady? And after that, he was a great friend to me. Interesting. And so loving. And your name went up in lights. Yes, it did. For that. But there was a point, wasn't there, when in Leicester Square, I mean, around that time, it was up three times. Yes, all around Leicester Square. What were the films? So it was The Entertainer, was it? The Entertainer Beat Girl.

Shirley Anne Field7:18

We entered.

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With Adam Fay.

Shirley Anne Field7:21

Yeah.

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The other one was not Saturday night, Sunday morning, which everybody thinks. It was Man in the Moon, which was a royal premier. With Kenneth Warren. Yes. Yes. You were barely twenty. I was a bit older than twenty by the time the f three films, it takes some time, I was about twenty-three.

Shirley Anne Field7:32

And

Shirley Anne Field7:36

I was

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Nearly twenty four great age, I thought.

Shirley Anne Field7:39

Yeah.

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And I I thought this was wonderful, but I sort of took it for granted a bit. It all happened so fast. I thought it was always going to be the same. I didn't realize it was a unique thing to happen. Let's have your second record.

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My second record, for all sorts of reasons, which perhaps I'll tell you about afterwards, is Elvis Prayer to thee singing Are You Lonesome Tonight?

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Do you get He's at your doorstep

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That picture me there

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Is your home?

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Filled with pain.

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Shall I come back again?

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Tell me, dear.

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Are you lonesome?

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

Speaker 48:25

Uh

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Too much.

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Elvis Presley, and Are You Lonesome Tonight? and memories of your father, I think. Oh, absolutely. My father used to sing it to me in the pub, aged fifteen. I was fifteen, not him. And he'd have this white silk scarf on, and he'd sing this wonderful song to me while he played the piano. But he was a bit of a Jack the Ladd, your husband. Oh, he was more than Jack the Lad, he was Del Boy.

Shirley Anne Field8:44

Oh

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My father and my uncle, my mother's brother, went into an Odeon cinema when they were young men in their twenties, and they went up to the first floor and started to roll up the whole of the carpet. And when people asked them what they were doing, they said, Well, we're taking it to the dry cleaners, aren't we?

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And they commandeered this carpet and they tried to sell it and of course they found when they tried to sell it had a big motif of odeon written over it. So what they did was give it to all their relatives. And I had an Aunt L Isle and they gave her a piece and she put the Odeon under the sofa naturally so it wouldn't show. And my Uncle George, who was my father's older brother, was extremely honest and my father was not quite the same.

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And he came in from work as a coach driver, and he said to my Auntie L Isle,

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Very nice carpet. Who's been here'? She said,'Well, Erne gave it us,' so he said,'Oh, did he?

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And he went searching round the carpet and he found the Odeon. And he made my auntie roll it up. But and he said, I want this out of this house tomorrow. And she supposedly rolled it up and threw it away, but she didn't. She kept it. And when they were evacuated many years later and Uncle George wasn't around, she put it down again. And he came down to visit her and he saw the same carpet.

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And he'd forgotten it by that time and she'd got made very clearly sure that she'd covered up Odeon. So she never threw the carpet away.

Shirley Anne Field10:05

So she never

Presenter10:07

But it was your mother really who who tried to keep the family together, wasn't it? You and I. Yes, absolutely. You live together above a chemist's shop in West Ham.

Shirley Anne Field10:10

Yes, you can.

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Weren't you one night sent down stairs into the shop to steal some chilblain ointment? I was sent down age three and a half to get the chilbane ointment because we couldn't afford it.

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And it was quite scary in the dark, and there was a cat in this store. It was the most frightening thing in the dark, with these cats' eyes gleaming at you. And then I knocked over the whole of the chill brain ointment, and the owner came in, said, Who's there? I'm going to call the police and I had to sit still for half an hour.

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Then I got upstairs, not with one thing of chill brain ointment, but with six. I thought, Well, if I'm, you know, going to be caught, I might as well have six. So I'm not going to be sent down to this chemist shop. And I gave my sister a great big punch and I said, Why didn't you warn me? She said, I was frightened, so I ran away and I thought you'd just sit still, which is exactly what I did do.

Shirley Anne Field10:48

I'm not gonna

Presenter11:00

Amazing presence of mind, age three.

Shirley Anne Field11:01

Yeah.

Speaker 411:01

Hey.

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But but then and as you say you were only three you were put in a children's home because your mother couldn't cope. We were in the baby home. My sisters were old enough to be evacuated, but my baby home

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had been bombed where I used to go during the day while she worked. So they gave my mother an option. They said, Look, we're going to take all the children we can so they're not at risk from the East End bombings and everything else to the country. Will you let your children go? And she said, Yes, if I can be a nurse there.

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She then came along and was a nurse there, but she used to pick my brother up when he cried, so she got sacked for favouring her own children.

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So then we were left, and my mother would come and visit us. I don't know what happened, but age five I was too old for the baby home. So the matron wrote to the NCH, the Methodist Children's Home, and they took me in. The only trouble is it was 300 miles away. It was in the north of England, and I'd been born in the south. So I got on that train and off I went. And you never knew family life again after that? No, never.

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Record number three.

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Record number three is

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The Pathetique by Tchaikovsky. Now it's not meant to be sad in any way, but it is very special.

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I used to dance to this when I was a little girl, and make up stories.

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Part of the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. Six in B minor, the Patitique, played by the New York Philemonic conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos.

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So you were sent to this home in in Lancashire, Shirley Anfield, to Edgeworth. Yes. The atmosphere sounded positively Dickensian from what you said about it. Well, I suppose it was, but it never occurred to me, aged nearly five, or just over five, that it was. I thought

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I thought that's the way it was at school, you know. They chopped off your hair. Oh, yes, that's the bit that I wasn't too keen on. When I arrived, I was.

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Quite the exception because everybody was in these sort of clothes that had been washed so many times they all looked like sort of grey.

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And sandals and plimpsaws, and they all had the same short pudding basin haircut, the fringe and just short cut to just above the ears. I thought it was a ghastly haircut. And they kept brushing my hair, all the older girls. It was like a new little doll had arrived. Well, you had long shiny locks, did you? Yes, and slightly curly at the bottom. And I was thrilled with this, but of course that was immediately construed as vanity.

Shirley Anne Field14:15

Yeah.

Presenter14:23

Um I remember when a sister asked me about my hair, I said, Well, you see, you can't really cut my hair'cause uh my mother says it's my only asset and she said, What do you mean? and I said, Well, I don't quite know, but

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Sunny's very beautiful, and Joy's the eldest, and this is my asset.

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And of course that immediately made them furious, and the pudding basin went on my head and my hair was chopped off, and I was very upset. And what happened when you wet the bed?

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Well, luckily I didn't wet the bed very often.

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Because I don't think I could have stood it if I did, but at birthdays and Christmas, when I thought some day was going to appear from my family and I couldn't contain myself, and I used to dream that I was already at the loo, and of course I wasn't. But if you did wet the bed

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You had to stand the next day with a sheet over your head till it dried to teach you not to wet the bed, and it was called playing ghosts. Also, you were sent to Coventry. Nobody spoke to you. It was a terrible disgrace.

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And then one day a very large parcel arrived for you with twenty-seven dresses inside. Very beautiful dresses.

Shirley Anne Field15:25

DSI.

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I was about seven.

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And I was very

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overcome when I opened it, because I knew they'd belonged to my two older sisters, which I kept banging on about. I kept saying, Look, I've got two older sisters and they'd said, Don't exaggerate, don't fib. We're your family now. And it was living proof to me that they existed.

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But I was also a little bit

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Frightened because they were very big dresses, and I thought, does this mean my mother is not going to see me again?

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It was like one for every year.

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And then sister said to me, Now, look, you know what we do here, don't you? We have to share everything.

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and to my horror

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She

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Gave all my dresses.

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To other girls that they fitted, except one that was almost too tight for me.

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And it was

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Such anguish for me. I used to watch these lovely dresses hand sewn by my mother and my aunt on other girls, and by the time they got handed down to me they were all old and grey and the same as everybody else's, and I've never forgotten that. And your mother never did come to the home again after that, did she?

Shirley Anne Field16:32

Joe

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She didn't.

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With the resentment did you feel resentment, or did you just believe by then that this is how life was? No, I felt resentment. I knew they were my dresses. Also, the last time I'd seen my mother

Shirley Anne Field16:39

No.

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She had come to claim me.

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But what happened in the forties and fifties in England, and there's books about it they believed that children were better off in children's homes than with their parents. But when my mother came to pick me up and they wouldn't let us go, I'll never forget her crying, because

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She was at one end being pulled, and I was at the other end, with my brother standing behind me, and she was crying, and I was crying, and she kept saying to me,

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Don't cry any more, Shirley, don't cry any more, because I can't bear it. So I couldn't even cry, and I had to console my brother, and I never forget her being pulled away.

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and I was being pulled away the other end and

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I always felt very, very sorry for my mother. I don't know why I didn't feel sorry for me, but I felt very sorry for my mother.

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Next piece of music.

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The pics will cheer us all up.

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Karen Carpenter, or the Carpenters, we've only just begun. I love her voice. She had um a strange life. She died of anorexia. She had parents that loved her. But you see, you never know in life, do you?

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I've only just begun to live.

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White lace and promises

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A kiss for luck and we're on our way We've only begun before the rising sun

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If love

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The Carpenters, and we've only just begun.

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How did you make the transition then, Shirley Anfield, from from Northern Children's Home to Showbiz London, from Waife to Starlight, really, wasn't it?

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Yes, well we've only just begun. When I came back to London, sent back to London, and the NCH sent me to further schooling till I was seventeen. I learnt to be a shorthand typist. One minute you seemed to have been typing at the Gas Council. Oh yes. And the next minute you were sort of sitting on gas stoves selling the pictures. That's because I was such a terrible typist. So finally they got.

Shirley Anne Field18:40

Oh yes.

Shirley Anne Field18:44

Well

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They got so bored with me, but they liked me all the same. So they thought, what can we do with this teenager? We can't sack her because, you know, where's the poor thing going to go? I think, this is what they thought. So they sat me on the gas cookers and sold cookers this way. And somebody saw me. Val guessed, actually, and wrote to Bill Watts and said, Look, this girl should be doing pin-up photography and should be in films. And Bill Watts phoned me and he said, Would you like to come and see me?

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And he I said, Yes, I only want to be an actress. And so I went to see him.

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So that's how I began. And you met Richard Burton at Umbrella. Oh, yes, I did. He was doing Sea Wife with Joan Collins on the opposite set. Very glamorous it seemed to me. And I was playing a special girl in something called

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Hell is Fire or Fire is Hell, or something stupid like that. One of many girls. And I was doing Revlon commercials on the side, not really making a living, to be honest.

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And he he'd come bounding over to our set and he'd say to me, Why don't you have lunch with me?

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And he'd take me off to the pub in Sheppardon. And he said, What are you doing, wasting your time in things like this? And I said, Well,

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You know, it's a start. I want to be an actress. So, well, you'd make a very good one with your mobile face, and you're far too short to be a model. I'll pay for your acting classes. I didn't realise this was a great coup because Richard Burton was also very careful with his pennies. He wouldn't waste them on anybody. But there were other people around, weren't there, who were going to become very big. Sean Connery? Yes, Sean was around. He was lovely, Sean. What was he doing? He was older and wiser. He was a chorus boy, I think, in South Pacific.

Shirley Anne Field20:21

What

Presenter20:26

Yes. He was the 25-year-old neighbour who lived down the street. And weren't you part of what became known as the Clivedon set before we had even heard of Christine Keeler? No, not really. I wanted to be Dame Edith Hanfield. I hadn't got time to waste on weekends. I wanted to be a great actress. So you were determined throughout all of this that you were. You were unbelievable. You weren't just in a whirl, you were going somewhere. Oh, absolutely. It kept me completely steady. I managed to avoid drinking. I managed to avoid pills, all sorts of things, only because I had this.

Shirley Anne Field20:43

Throughout all of this that you weren't.

Presenter20:54

Great ambition. You didn't manage to avoid Otto Preminger. No, I didn't. Leaping upon you. No, I didn't. And uh, what about Frank Sinatra? He made a play as well, didn't he? No, I went to dinner with Frank Sinatra, and I'm certain to this day that Frank Sinatra thinks that I alerted the press, which I didn't. I was all over the papers. I was doing all these sort of

Shirley Anne Field20:57

Yeah.

Shirley Anne Field20:58

Yeah.

Shirley Anne Field21:02

Do

Presenter21:12

Pin up photographs. I was, if you like, the dressed Samantha Fox of my day without making the money. And Frank Sinatra asked me out to dinner, and I was thrilled, and off I went, and I behaved myself impeccably. But when we were in a night club these photographers all burst in, and I put my head down in every shop.

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And Frank Sinatra, I'm certain, thinks that I alerted the press, and I mean, he wasn't even gentlemanly enough the next day to sort of

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take my phone calls'cause I they were ringing me off the hook to ask me what had happened. Nothing had happened at all. I just got home very late and went off to rehearsal the next day. And never saw him again?

Speaker 421:45

By ch

Presenter21:50

Well, I I I heard about him for years and heard that he thought that I was a a sort of upstart little starlet who'd alerted the press. I'd never really got to know him before or since, but I like to tell him that I certainly did not.

Shirley Anne Field21:58

Yeah.

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Record number five.

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Record number five is somewhere out there sung by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram. It's optimistic and it's dreamy. I just love it.

Speaker 322:16

Oh I know how very far apart we are.

Speaker 322:21

Help the thing we might be wishing on the same bright star And when the night winds

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To sing a lonesome lullaby

Speaker 322:32

Uh

Speaker 422:33

It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky

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Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram singing Somewhere Out There.

Presenter22:49

Well, as you said, Chirley Ann, your your determination did in the end get you somewhere, as we've said, into The Entertainer with Laurence Olivier, and then you went on to be in a a play called The Lily White Boys at the Royal Court, which had Albert Finney in it. And then you went on with Finney, of course, to make Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was a huge success. Wonderful.

Shirley Anne Field23:06

Yeah.

Shirley Anne Field23:07

Wasn't it?

Presenter23:08

It was it was a marvellous film, it still is. It stands up very well to the test of time. We were the first, really, except for room at the top, and we were different anyway.

Shirley Anne Field23:12

Well to

Shirley Anne Field23:13

We will

Presenter23:17

You were Doreen, weren't you? Yes, Doreen, rotten name, ain't it? Yeah, much put upon, girlfriend. Was he easy to work with, Finney?

Shirley Anne Field23:18

Yes, Dora.

Presenter23:24

Yes, he's very easy to work with. Any English actor is compared to an American actor. Because your fame spread, of course, then you did go and work with American actors after that. Yes. Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner.

Shirley Anne Field23:34

Yeah.

Presenter23:35

Because suddenly you were big in America.

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Let's just say I did one over here.

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Because of Saturday night, Sunday morning, Mike Frankovich put me in and I was sort of under contract to Columbia. Now that wasn't a big stunning success, although lots of people still like Warlover. It was from the John Hersey novel. And then I went to America to sell The War Lover.

Presenter23:56

And the Americans were very nice to me. They liked me enormously. It was a great freedom for me in many ways to have these people who seemed to adore me. I always work well with praise. I think most people do. So you sat in the Beverly Hills Hotel with the phone ringing non-stop, with it seemed the whole of America wanting to meet you. Yes. At first I loved it, and then I realized. Well, I didn't realize I didn't know what was wrong. For the first

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month I was so excited and then I was so frightened because I couldn't sort out who meant well and who didn't.

Presenter24:30

I was twenty-two, nearly twenty-three, and I was frightened. I just didn't know who was genuine and who wasn't.

Presenter24:38

Yes, I knew he was. He'd seen me on the um Johnny Carson Show in New York. Actually, President Kennedy didn't ring me. Peter Lawford rang me. When I met President Kennedy, I knew he was sincere. And and did you meet him often? No.

Presenter24:54

Not as often as I'd have liked.

Shirley Anne Field24:54

Not as a

Presenter24:56

I only met him just before, you know, that awful year when he was assassinated, which everybody remembers.

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But I

Presenter25:03

I did meet him twice and I looked up to him and I I loved the whole Kennedy era. And he gave you a rather special present, and he did. Yes, he did. A rocking chair for my bad back. Have you still got it? Yes, I have.

Shirley Anne Field25:13

Yeah.

Presenter25:15

I didn't ask for diamonds or things like that and never got given them. Isn't that ridiculously sad? I could deal with them now. But in all this time, of course, the one person you really wanted to hear from, your mother, didn't get in touch. Were you persuaded by that stage that she must be dead, as so many people had suggested to you?

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Well

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I thought that as I'd been all over

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The American.

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networks by now and been heard of and people had talked about me. I thought if she's somewhere here she'll fire me.'Cause people had suggested to you, hadn't they, that that she'd g gone abroad with a GI. Yes. Oh yeah, my sister had told me, um

Shirley Anne Field25:55

Yes, oh yeah, my son

Presenter25:57

Very much so. Sunny used to say to me all the time, Oh no, she's married an American. That's why she's not back for us. So you came home from the States, you fell in love with and married uh the racing driver Charlie Crichton-Stewart, and you had a daughter, Nicola, who's now in her twenties, and presumably you must have tried to give her all the love and security that you didn't have. Yes, I did.

Presenter26:19

And she'll tell you that I probably did. She's very, we're very close. It's a good relationship. She's a lovely person. More music.

Presenter26:27

Okay, the next thing I'm going to have is number six. Now I'm going to have the three tenors singing. Not because I'm an opera buff, I'm not. But I if I'm cast away

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I'm gonna have chance to learn about it.

Speaker 426:55

That's the first time.

Speaker 427:01

Yeah.

Presenter27:40

Jose Carreras Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti singing Nesundoma from Puccini's Turundot.

Presenter27:46

So, Shirley Anfield, in nineteen seventy eight, more than thirty years since you'd last seen your mother, the call came. She was alive, she was well, and she wanted to see you. Tell me about the meeting.

Presenter28:00

Well, it was the most extraordinary feeling of my whole life, because I didn't just meet my mother. I met my older sister that I hadn't seen since I was six. I met my brother, who I'd been a little bit estranged from. I met my three half sisters, and it was overwhelming, to say the least. And when I met my mother

Presenter28:20

I had never said the word mummy.

Presenter28:22

Not since the age of four and I

Presenter28:25

when she came towards me and said

Presenter28:27

Shirley, do you remember me? and I said, Yes, I do, mummy, and I

Presenter28:31

burst into tears and stood in the corner, this mature woman,

Presenter28:35

You know?

Presenter28:36

nearer forty than I was thirty, to be honest, and I just stood there and I couldn't stop crying. So how did she explain that she'd never tried to find you? She hadn't um not tried to find me she had. But she lived under a cloud, she was frightened.

Presenter28:51

She'd married my step daddy with without the benefit of divorce. So she lived in fear all her life that she had. She thought she'd be deported and she'd lose her second family. And it'd be s be so painful to her, I don't think she could have survived it. She'd already lost her first family.

Shirley Anne Field28:58

She thought it was a good idea. Yes.

Presenter29:07

Ah, so she lived in fear?

Presenter29:09

So i in the end that was perhaps

Presenter29:12

Reasonably easy to accept intellectually, but to accept it emotionally must have taken a long time.

Presenter29:18

Well, who knows if I've ever accepted it emotionally. I mean, I have

Presenter29:22

I've been angry for many years and been very fiery and lost my temper and not

Presenter29:27

Done the things I should have done often because I've got this buried anger. But has it solved things for you? Do you feel differently about life now than you used to?

Presenter29:36

I'm better a lot better than I was. There's not the anger.

Presenter29:40

My work is a great balance to me.

Presenter29:43

My daughter is a great balance. It'd be nice if I could find a partner that I could love equally and he could love me equally, and that if I didn't have to keep struggling and keep working.

Presenter29:52

And if I could work constantly, yes, I'd like all of that, but who wouldn't?'Cause your marriage failed in the end calls. Yes. It was a fairly short marriage, wasn't it? Yes.

Speaker 429:58

Yeah.

Speaker 430:00

Yeah.

Presenter30:01

You've never been tempted to marry since.

Presenter30:03

Let's say I've been in love too many times, and always with unsuitable people.

Presenter30:10

I would like now to get married if I could find someone that I could respect who would respect me.

Presenter30:17

Who was attractive and intelligent.

Presenter30:22

And quite well heeled. Now where is he?

Presenter30:25

Let's find him.

Presenter30:27

Record number seven.

Presenter30:29

Record number seven is Beethoven's Piano Concerto Number One. It has all sorts of sad moments and all sorts of happy moments.

Presenter30:38

I think it would remind me of all the good things that have happened in my life, and all the good things yet to come.

Presenter31:44

Part of Beethoven's piano concerto number one in C major, played by Vladimir Ashkenazi with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter31:52

It's quite a life to look back across as you sit on your desert island, but uh the jigsaw's more or less in place now. Are are you reasonably happy about it these days, or are there bits of it that you ache to live again, for whatever reason? No, I don't ache to live any of it again.

Shirley Anne Field32:06

No.

Presenter32:09

I think it would have been nice to have met my mother much earlier.

Presenter32:12

Hmm.

Presenter32:13

I would have liked to have met her when I was first a mother.

Presenter32:16

I hadn't missed.

Presenter32:18

So much with my childhood, strange as it may seem, but the m moment I had my daughter.

Presenter32:24

I needed a family badly.

Presenter32:27

Your professional regret, though, must be that you you you never quite managed to consolidate your career, that that somehow it it

Presenter32:34

Really rather like the British film industry. It it it ebbed away. I mean, cat came out.

Shirley Anne Field32:38

Why?

Presenter32:39

Let's say this, that in many ways there's a great deal of hope in my kind of career, because every time people think it's over, it starts again, and I am part of the British film industry. I don't regret, how can I regret the long gaps? Because through those long gaps I found reality, because I had to, because my life wasn't all magic and stardom and in lights.

Presenter33:02

And that's why I can give the kind of

Presenter33:05

reality to performances that I do now, which if I'd become a great big song King star, I couldn't have done Mrs. Bolton the way I did. I couldn't have played that mistress in my beautiful laundrette. I couldn't have played that beautiful vulnerable woman in Hear My Song, because

Presenter33:21

I wouldn't have that reality.

Presenter33:23

Let's have your last record.

Presenter33:25

My last record is Count Your Blessings, and it's particularly apt for me because I count them, and also it's from the film I did, Hear My Song.

Speaker 433:37

Those and toil of day is done And in sweet dreams they'll come again to you

Speaker 433:54

He feel will come your blessings.

Presenter34:01

It's bad for

Presenter34:04

Joseph Locke singing Count Your Blessings. So if you could only take one of those records, Shirley Anne.

Presenter34:10

I think I'll have to settle for.

Presenter34:13

Number seven. Beethoven's Piano Concerto Number One.

Presenter34:17

Because it's got so much depth and so much in it. I think I'll take that. And your book?

Presenter34:23

My book I'm going to take a great jumbo version of the Reader's Digest, all the short stories shoved together, and I'll write in the other bits myself that have been squashed out.

Presenter34:34

I think I'll take a large Chippendale mirror, beautifully gilt-framed.

Presenter34:39

Completely useless, except to me, because I can make a lovely room with it in my little glen and I can look in it when I'm lonely and pretend I'm somebody else. Keep yourself company.

Shirley Anne Field34:48

Time current

Presenter34:50

Yes, and I can see if there's any wild animals coming up behind me.

Presenter34:55

Shirley Anfield, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you. I've enjoyed it.

Shirley Anne Field35:08

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.