Citas

I said to this priest "Am I expected to believe that if I went out and had an affair that God was really going to be upset? Okay, thou shalt not kill... steal... but thou shalt not commit adultery? If no one is any the wiser, what the hell difference does it make?". He was lovely. He told me the Commandments were laid down for a lot of guys living in the desert.

I was the first home-grown sex symbol, rather like Britain's naughty seaside postcards. When Marilyn Monroe's first film was shown here [Mientras la ciudad duerme (1950)], a columnist actually wrote "How much like our Diana Dors she is.".

The figure was fabulous, but my face was never much, little eyes and lips like rubber tires, I did well because I was the first and only British blonde bombshell.

I've trained as an actress and all that sex glamor publicity stuff had gone long before. It was merely a sort of side step really. So when I went back to being a serious actress, it was very nice for me to take off where I'd left off so many years before.

[comment made in the early 1970s] I'm forty now and I can't go on playing good time glamor girls and tarts forever. I want to play women my own age, now and in the future.

I did a small cameo in Deep End (1970) and that received fantastic critical notices. Really, out of all the films I've done, there are just a handful I can look back on and be proud of.

[on Los fantasmas de la casa encantada (1972)] That was a beautiful film. I played the villainess, a sort of female Sweeney Todd. They tarted me up, padded me out, and had me looking like I was 60. They even blackened out my teeth and gave me a wig that made me look bald when someone snatched it off my head. As the final straw, they put a wart on my chin. I really went over the top with that film but I had a ball. Lionel [Lionel Jeffries] became such a great director.

I've played my share of drunken sluts, good time girls, and whores. Being bumped off is really no novelty for me. I've been shot, hanged, strangled, gassed, burned to death, and even pushed off a cliff. And for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955), I was sawn in half by an electrical buzz saw.

Quite frankly, in America, they've never taken me seriously as an actress. They had not seen any of my work I had done when I went over and signed a contract in Hollywood. They were of the opinion, and quite naturally so, that I had merely aped Marilyn Monroe and that I was some British blonde who had copied her and tried to climb on that bandwagon. That was a perfectly natural thing especially since they had never seen any of the films I've done including Yield to the Night (1956). They had never been released in America so all they'd read was the publicity and so forth.

When I was 15, I was put under contract with the J. Arthur Rank Organization. It was fantastic. Marvelous. We had a film industry during those days and it was very exciting. J. Arthur Rank had saved it all and had poured millions from his flour empire into the film industry. It was a real industry. There was a lot of work for everybody, wonderful pictures were made, and glamorous premieres, which lasted until the early 1950s and then it all came to an end. It was very sad really. But I'd like to see something like that happen again. Perhaps we could find some rich Arab to take Mr. Rank's place.

[on El castillo de los muertos vivos (1973)] I play a triple murderess with a record of assault, larceny, and prostitution. I play a mother who fights to get her daughter back from an orphanage. I was hunted all over like a wild animal in the moors. I wore a red wig, my clothes were dirty and disheveled, a million miles from my old image.

[comment on the decline of the British film industry and acting in sex comedies and horror movies in the early to mid-1970s] The trouble is that there are so many good actors in this country and they are obliged to work in films like that because there is nothing else for them to do. This is why I get so sad. There is no film industry here anymore and the only types of films being made are either horror or sex films. I'm very fortunate because I can do cabaret as well as write books. I've gotten two number one best sellers and have many more strings to my bow. But if I was sitting around, as the majority of actors and actresses are today for an acting role to come along, then I'd never work unless I did horror films and sex films. I think it's very sad because we do have some marvelous actors and actresses in this country.

[1968] It really is terrifying how gullible and naive I was and still am. I fell for hard-luck stories the way boys fall for girls. To make things worse I surrounded myself with gangsters, con men and phonies.