Diana Dors at the top for 25 years

Press, 22 February 1978, Page 15

Diana Dors at the top for 25 years

There are only a few great good unabashed sex symbols left. Thank heavens then, some may say, for Diana Dors, who cruises on larger than life and at least twice as natural. There she was in the White Elephant club in London as full-blown as if the skimpy 1960 s had been, a bad dream and Twiggy had never been born. The platinum hair, the eyelashes in drill order and the sumptuous freckled cleavage giving perhaps even more promise of pneumatic bliss than once it did. But, aside from that, the image created for her by her first husband and manager (the late Dennis Hamilton) when she was 19 and he swore to make her into a female Erroll Flynn, is unchanged. “Madam tits and lips,” her present husband, the actor, Alan Lake, called her when they first met, and so she is. Hollywood was not Diana’s favourite place when she went there in the 19505. There was a lot of feeling against British stars then, she says, and her image was almost instantly ruined when she was pushed into her swimming pool in full view of the media. She was accused of being a Commie, carpeted by the moral guardian, Louella Parsons, for telling a lie about her affair with Rod Steiger, and could not come 'to terms with the double standards of living. What saved her then, as now, was probably her incorrigible sense, of humour. She revels in the trappings of stardom but can’t take them too seriously. She doesn’t throw a tantrum but gets out and hitches a lift. So she can laugh about her powder blue Cadillacs, mink bikinis and other trappings of her image. She doesn’t regret any of it, except that perhaps it went on a bit long. “After I did ‘Yield to the Night’ it went a bit sour. It should have been toned down a bit to give me the chance to become a serious actress.”

Stunts haunt her to the extent that when she became a Catholic last year she was afraid people would think that was a stunt too. But she was pretty mad when she agreed to kick off at a church charity football match and an organiser complained about her cleavage: “Aren’t you supposed to have tits if your are a Christian?” snapped the convert. At 46 Diana still has trouble convincing people that she was making movies and headlines before Monroe was heard of. “Marilyn was for years in the stable of girls 20th Century Fox kept for the entertainment of the • bosses. Everyone said I was apeing Monroe. “But I have this cutting . from ‘Picturegoer’ magazine which says of M.M’s performance ta the ‘Asphalt Jungle’: ‘How like Diana Dors this new Marilyn Monroe is.” Diana’s mother weaned her on the movies. “I wanted to be Betty Grable, then Lana Turner; then, most of ail, Bette Davis. I can stili tell you what Veronica Lake had for breakfast.'' Diana (nee Fluck) grew up when the Beauty Queen circuit was a rea-

sonable route to stardom. She became one at 13 and never looked back. She has played the Glasgow Hippodrome cold, and wowed them in Las Vegas hot. She has had rave notices in the London West End and done her own television series. Not to mention 65 movies. She is still paying off tax owing from the days when she was coining it and Dennis Hamilton was mismanaging it. “I signed everything. I was so naive. But no judge is going to be very ■sympathetic to me if I say that. Anyway, Dennis and all his associates are dead. I’m the only one left to shoot at.” When Diana Dors was a Big Star (a label she mow feels is reserved for pop singers and footballers) most of her fan mail came from women. “A lot of them were middle-aged, saying I wish I was like you — if only I could have been like you. I was a fantasy figure. That’s why poufs and drag artists like me too — I am extreme and outrageous. “You see I was iucky because I was the first; until I appeared sex was a dirty word and the most that cinema audiences had ever seen was Margaret Lockwood and some very ample cleavage in ‘The Wicked Lady.’ “After the war there was this great enthusiasm and movement back towards life. “In comes Dors and she’s big and blonde, a symbol of liberation and pleasure and sex. Nothing to do with permissiveness; I believe in going so far but no further. “Today it is different; there are hundreds of sexy girls who have to go the whole way to get work. And I don’t mean just their clothes off, I mean everything, pornography. “I feel sorrv for girls

now. I’d hate to be young starting put, anyway. Think of the cost of everything, the price of furniture.” She says she has settled down. “I used to think it was a lot of hooey that life begins at 40. But I know what I can put up with; I’ve mellowed. I’m a homey person, although I don’t 'expect people to believe it. ‘“Why can’t you play a good girl for a change,’ my mother used to say.

‘Why must they always be bad girls?’ But then I’ve never been the giri next door.”