The role was in Vertigo the director was Hitchcock and for the best part of two hours

The role was in Vertigo, the director was Hitchcock; and for the best part of two hours Kim Novak is sublime cinema, being so natural, so shy, so edgy, that acting never came into it. Whereas, for Dors, those precious frilly undies were as vital as a pope’s robes.I mentioned Kim Novak earlier, and just as she never had it in her to be as “sexy” as Dors or Monroe, still Novak had the blind luck to find herself in a great role – the stooge woman (in every way a set-up and a ghost) who moves according to the fantasies of men. It stayed guilty, furtive, a subject more for nudging than caressing. And by the time Dors got to Hollywood, she was puffing up and filling out. It was also by then, the Sixties, an age in which nymphs, sylphs and college girls (looking like Jane Fonda or Mia Farrow) would drop their clothes without a second thought. Monroe operated on a more industrialised plane, and she was lucky enough to bump into the sardonic Billy Wilder who saw just how much fun he could have at her expense.

And very early on, whatever she might protest to Lee Strasberg or Arthur Miller, Monroe learned that her money was in that wide-eyed look that said, “What did you mean by that?”, when the explosion of the eyes also indicated that some beast was screwing her from the inside out.Sex was never that epic in Britain. Had she been 15 years younger, even in giggly British TV, she would have been something else – the Rubens-like earth mother that Joe Losey made of her in Steaming, and the overflowing come-on that she was in Jerzy Skolimowski’s great and almost forgotten picture, Deep End, a title that does not seem to make the NFT season.That corridor of newspaper stories would be more eloquent than the movies, and a time would come when Dors’s real-life involvement with riff-raff was far more interesting than anything she could do on celluloid. Dors went to RADA; she played Charlotte in David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948); and she had the occasional role – like the prison picture, Yield to the Night – where she had a chance to act. When, belatedly, she went to Hollywood, she had an affair with that monster of the Method, Rod Steiger.

How one longs to hear their pillow talk about how they might be Lear and Cordelia – not that lifting Diana would ever have been easy.In truth, and in respect for the weird thing we call movies, the NFT should have a corridor of Diana Dors pin-up pictures from the papers where her mouth sags open, a satin dress is about to slide clear of her great blancmange treats, or she is asked to register the dismay at being caught in her undies.Dors represented that period between the end of the war and the coming of Lady Chatterley in paperback, a time when sexuality was naughty, repressed and fit to burst. Yet “Diana Dors” may have been a mercy – despite the way it allowed for the title, Swinging Dors, for a 3-D booklet that may now be a collectors’ item. Born in that great railway junction, Swindon, in 1931, the daughter of a railway booking clerk, Diana’s real surname was Fluck.
Not even in the 1930s (well before Kenneth Tynan) could that humble, West Country name inspire much innocence. And when nature determined that Diana was pretty, with a wide, sulky mouth, eyes trained by a life of dirty jokes, and breasts that could have served as gentle restraints to entering trains at Paddington Station, there was no denying or altering the path set for Diana Dors.