Chase shyness erased

Press, 7 January 1987, Page 22

Chase shyness erased

By

IAN WOODWARD

Relaxing in her manager’s South Kensington office, and adorned in an all-white suit and Royalblue trilby, Lorraine Chase looks a vision; a classy girl. Yet one is still thrown off balance by the voice like sandpaper rubbed over nerve-ends coming from the cool, beautiful exterior of a Sloane Ranger. “Do you know who she reminds me of as I’m listening to her?” asks her manager, Peter Charlesworth. “Shirley Bassey in her younger days. “She’s Bassey without the temperament. The same trusting naivete, the same intuitive cleverness.” The shrewd star-maker should know. His past clients have ranged from Bassey herself to people like George Raft and Barbara Windsor. Now he has Chase’s long-term future planned right down to the finest detail, including what sort of car she should be associated with. “She’s a Mercedes girl, that’s her image,” he asserts, puffing on a large cigar. "Until recently,” says the 35-year-old star of TV’s “The Other ‘Arf,” “I still drove a Ford Escort.” It was Charlesworth who first spotted Chase in Campari television commercials: “Were you truly wafted here from Para-

dise?” asks the smoothie in the white suit. To which the Cockney girl squawks back: “Nah, Luton Airport - .” “I could make that girl go places,” he thought to himself, and put her under exclusive contract. He secured her a huge fee when she took over from Su Pollard in the West End hit musical, “Me and My Girl.” In the new Campari campaign — which shows Chase lounging in a Venice Opera bar in an exquisite Bruce Oldfield-de-signed cocktail dress — Charlesworth negotiated a cool six-figure contract for his beanpole client. It amounts, he insists, to the most lucrative deal ever done in the history

of British television commercials. A substantial part of her wealth also comes from modelling “The Lorraine Chase Collection” for Grattan. “Peter’s done me proud,” chirps the former street urchin from Peckham who, with her delightful’ mixture of ambition, shrewdness, genuine naivete, natural warmth and classy looks, somehow manages to transcend the class-barrier more disarmingly than was ever the case with her Cockney soul-mate, Twiggy. “Even so, I don’t ever see my money. It would be lovely if Peter came along with cases full of the stuff.

“Instead, it’s all hived Off to pay V.A.T. and tax

and insurance and pension funds and stocks and shares. What have I actually got?” “What you’ve got, love,” volunteers Charlesworth, “is a future. You’ve got a big house... you’re a very wealthy lady.” Lorraine Chase, the daughter of an East End painter and decorator, spent 10 years as a model before finding fame at Luton Airport. The big chiefs of America’s N.B.C. TV recently flew to London to see her with a view to casting her in one of their big TV comedy shows. But she will have to wait until April 1987 when her contract in “Me and My Girl” ends, before she can be wafted to Hollywood. Now that she is successful, Chase says her biggest handicap was her shyness. “You know how people say ‘lnside every big

woman is a skinny woman trying to get out?’ Well, that’s how I used to feel about ,my crippling shyness. “I always thought, ‘Why wasn’t you better at that?’ and ‘Why wasn’t you more outgoing?’ Inside me, desperately trying to get out, was this really confident extrovert woman. “It’s funny, because when my career really took off with the Campari commercials, I suddenly felt a kind of release. It was as if the door was opened and I could suddenly breathe. “The person inside who always wanted to be bright and perky in company, but who wouldn’t come out, was suddenly flying like a bird. I can now talk to anyone for ever now, and I couldn’t before.” DUO copyright