This week we look back at a lovely actress I had the pleasure to know and who was the only film star I can recall who actually grew up in Borehamwood.

Dana Wynter was one of the screen beauties of the 1950s and 1960s and played the female lead in a number of major films and later enjoyed a successful television career in Hollywood.

Dana told me: “I was born in Germany in 1930 but we moved to Borehamwood when I was a child and my father became the local doctor.

“We then moved to South Africa in 1948 and I went to medical school. Afterwards, returned to England to pursue an acting career.”

Dana retained strong memories of her childhood in Borehamwood and told me: “I recall the scrumptious doughnuts made at a super local bakery and a dairy which I think was on the opposite side of Clarendon Road.

“I remember the pavements with grassy strips on either side and a playground with swings and roundabouts behind Shenley Road.

“There was a lovely gym set up in the hall next to All Saints Church and the rectory had a
pretty garden.”

Dana also remembered the war years in the town: “A public siren was set up outside the dairy and it nearly blasted us out of our beds until we got used to it.

“I remember sleeping through a V1 rocket destroying a house almost opposite us and counting the seconds once a doodlebug was heard and relief when it passed by without landing on our heads.

“We would pick up shrapnel as trophies on the way to school and strips of black paper over silver dropped by the German planes to deflect our radar.

“Once, I arrived at my school — Rosary Priory, near Bushey — to find a bomb had hit the school. We were relocated to a convent in Stanmore and then to the North London Collegiate School nearby.

“I recall the bus ride from Borehamwood through Elstree and getting off for a lonely one-and-a-quarter-mile walk to the back entrance of the school, setting off in the dark in winter time which was an adventure.”

Dana also recalled: “I had a mile-and-a-half walk down Theobald Street for my music
lessons. past a prisoner of war camp and a convent full of very old nuns. who my father treated free of charge in return for them teaching me French.

“Even nearly 60 years later, these memories remain fresh in my mind and Borehamwood was such a lovely rural area in those days. You could walk through fields full of buttercups and
mushrooms just off the main road.”

I also asked Dana about her film career and memories of some of the stars she worked with.

She said: “I remember Boris Karloff was an extremely modest, quiet person and a gentle man in every way. I was playing a Eurasian, so to give me the ‘look’ the make-up man inserted a marble up each of my nostrils!”

In the 1950s, Dana was signed to a Hollywood contract by 20th Century Fox and left for tinsel town, where her most famous film was the science-fiction classic Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

She said: “I still get film fans and even university students studying the film writing to me, but it was just a few weeks’ work half a century ago.”

Dana made other films including Sink The Bismarck, with Kenneth More, and the all-star blockbuster Airport in 1970.

She retired from the screen in the 1990s after a guest role in the successful television series Ironside with Raymond Burr and set up home in a remote part of California, 6,000 miles away from Borehamwood.

Sadly, she died aged 79 in 2011, never having returned to our town. But I suspect she would have hardly recognised it from the days when they drove cattle along Shenley Road and the studios stood surrounded by farm fields.

It has always been my great pleasure to talk to stars of cinema’s golden era, but especially to Dana, who had such fresh memories of our town.