Missing million of film beauty Diana (From Borehamwood Times)

Missing million of film beauty Diana

5:14pm Thursday 14th December 2006

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Blonde bombshell Diana Dors still intrigues the public years after her death PAUL WELSH looks at the highs and lows of her life

Do you know a blonde bombshell? And no I don't mean that lady your wife can never meet. I refer instead to that pin-up doll of the 1950s Diana Dors. She started life as Diana Fluck but was worried if she became a star and one of the letters dropped off a cinema marquee so Diana took her grandmother's surname.

Diana got her break into films in the mid 1940s and after a short while was put under contract to the Rank Organisation for the grand sum of £10 a week. Her first role in a Borehamwood studio was at the Gate in It's Not Cricket in the late 1940s.

In 1953 she returned to star at Elstree Studios in The Weak And The Wicked which gained excellent reviews and was a box office hit.

Meanwhile Diana found it lucrative to appear in cabaret and was able to purchase a home in Bray complete with a two-and-a-half acres of garden and an American Cadillac car.

Her next visit to Elstree was for a serious role in Yield To The Night as a killer awaiting execution which had overtones of the real life tragic Ruth Ellis crime of passion.

That same year of 1955 saw Diana voted Britain's top female star. The following year the film was chosen for the prestigious Royal Film Performance and as the British entry at the Cannes Film Festival where Diana created quite a stir.

In that era it was inevitable that Hollywood would take notice and Diana was given a contract for £30,000 a movie.

It proved to be a rough ride, with her husband getting into trouble with the press and Diana embarking on an affair with the married actor Rod Steiger.

This did not endear her to the tinseltown media and when her first film flopped the blonde bombshell was heading home.

Diana's looks were fine in the 1950s era of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield but by the swinging Sixties her career was on the wane. By the 1970s she was married to an alcoholic actor named Alan Lake and had two sons.

Then Diana developed cancer and after a two year fight succumbed to the disease in 1984. By that time she had become something of a national institution and had written a couple of autobiographies.

A few weeks after her funeral, Alan, still overcome with grief, took a shotgun and ended his own life and they are now buried side by side with Diana's gravestone reading: "just a whisper away."

In recent years her sons have been involved in a bit of a mystery.

During her last decade Diana had made many cabaret and personal appearances but always asked to be paid in cash.

In earlier years she had been hit by large bills from the Inland Revenue and was obviously avoiding having a traceable income, which was quite considerable.

She kept a personal account record which the sons later found but coded references to bank accounts opened in other names meant nothing to them. When dying, Diana had told them they would be nicely off but she obviously had no idea Alan would kill himself and thus take the secret of where the money was to the grave.

Twenty-two years later it presumably sits gaining interest in one or more accounts and may never be discovered.

One of Diana's contemporaries in the 1950s was Audrey Hepburn and I hear that a dress she wore in Breakfast At Tiffany's has just sold at Christies for £467,200 which included the buyers premium.

What an amazing sum and it makes me wonder what my Foster Bros closing down sale suit I wear at the Elstree Film Evenings must be worth.

In the past two years a lightsabre used by Luke Skywalker fetched £113,000 and one of Indiana Jones' leather jackets £53,000.

Even old Hollywood items like a blue and white gingham dress worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard Of Oz made £140,000.

If I had kept things I have seen thrown away at MGM and Elstree over the past 40 years I could be sipping a whisky and threat' on some tropical beach serenaded by hoola, hoola girls.

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