Linda Hayden was cast after an extensive talent search. She was only fifteen years old and had to do her screen test topless. In a 2011 interview, she talked about auditioning, "...it was very much a sex-type movie, that was the fashion. And my screen test I did topless, because that was the scene with the elderly man who played the part, Keith Barron. When she came into the study. So it was all quite near the knuckle. And there was a big to-do about that and my parents were asked did they mind (that she auditioned naked). When I did the screen test I was there with a girlfriend of mine from school, a very beautiful blonde girl, a mate of mine, a very strong personality. And she was convinced she was going to get it. But before the end of the day I was being pictured and photographed and I think and I think she sussed something was going on. That ruined a good friendship. They made up their minds pretty quickly. But I think they'd done quite a lot of auditioning."
Final film of Sally Stephens.
Feature film debut and first nude scenes for 15-year old Linda Hayden. When Hayden was cast, the press referred to her as the "new Lolita," comparing her with Sue Lyon, who'd been a similar age when she appeared in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation. While this film's notoriety didn't produce the major long term stardom that producer Michael Klinger had been grooming Hayden for, it did lead to an interesting, if characteristically (for British cinema) fractured and halting, career in horror (Taste the Blood of Dracula, Blood on Satan's Claw, Madhouse), sexploitation (Confessions of a Window Cleaner/from a Holiday Camp, Let's Get Laid) and a mixture of the two (Expose). While Hayden's career roles ended up being varied, her early films like this one exploited her youth and sexuality.
As producer Michael Klinger searched for a teenage actress to star, he told the press, "the 15 year old girl must look like an innocent girl who underneath is a woman, as every man who looks at her will realize." She was also supposed to be northern, but he ended up casting Linda Hayden and promoted her as a major discovery. The press was largely more titillated than outraged by someone so young performing nude scenes on screen.
15-year old Linda Hayden's young age figured prominently in the promotion of the film. In the US trailer, she addressed the camera directly and announced,"I'm old enough to make it but not to see it." The press had made much of the fact that she was not legally old enough to see the racy X certificate film she had made. The British premier was scheduled to coincide with her 16th birthday, with the invitations taking the form of copies of her birth certificate. If this ostensibly confirmed that she was now old enough to see it, it also reminded people once more of how she was still underage in the film.