Patricia Dainton obituary
She was not on the list.
Patricia Dainton may have already performed on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon and been able to count John Gielgud among her admirers, but when as a teenager she was signed by the Rank Organisation and enrolled at its “charm school”, she was not safe from the indignities of the starlet’s lot — most of them cooked up by the publicity department.
On one such occasion she was required to fashion a bikini from two silk scarves, each of which bore pictures of the leading film-star couple Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray. The idea was to photograph Dainton wearing the ensemble as she frolicked beside a swimming pool.
“I came whooshing down a water slide, smiling and waving my arms for the photographer,” she recalled decades later. “Then I hit the water and everything fell off. I was so embarrassed, but he was very kind.”
The Rank charm school, officially named “the Company of Youth”, was based in a church hall next to Rank’s film studios in Highbury, north London. Dainton and her classmates — among them Joan Collins, Petula Clark and Jean Simmons — were trained in everything from deportment to fencing.
Regional accents were transformed into clipped upper-class tones, and attracting publicity for Rank was the order of the day. The young actors were “pushed into a kind of purdah. We were paid a very small wage and we were owned body and soul,” Dainton recalled in 1993. Every aspect of their lives was controlled. “If they didn’t like the man you were going out with, you had to give him up,” she said.
Her film career took off only after she had left Rank, and over a decade she became a popular leading lady on cinema screens and on television in Sixpenny Corner, Britain’s first daily soap opera — a show that put her on the cover of the first edition of TV Times in 1955, alongside the American comedy star Lucille Ball.
Patricia Dainton was born Margaret Bryden Pate in Hamilton,
near Glasgow, in 1930. Her father, George Pate, was a coalmaster’s cashier, and
her mother, Vivienne Black, was involved in the theatre.
The marriage did not last long after the premature births of Margaret and her twin brother George, and they later divorced. Cared for by their maternal grandmother, the twins had a typical tenement upbringing on Glasgow’s southside, while their mother was building her career in London.
At the start of the Second World War, they were evacuated to Southport in the northwest of England. From there, they went to London, where they attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. Their mother, by then a well-known agent, pushed them towards acting careers.
Aged 11, Dainton made her stage debut in The Windmill Man at Stratford-upon-Avon and was a member of Gielgud’s company at the Haymarket Theatre for a year in her early teens, appearing with her brother in the supporting cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Duchess of Malfi in the 1944-45 season.
Despite her acting talent, the elegant Dainton was more interested in dance — she studied for a while at the Cone School of Dancing and longed to be a ballerina. “Ivor Novello and John Gielgud were going to put up enough money for me to go to Russia to be trained . . . and bring me back to this country as an international star, but unfortunately my mother didn’t see it that way. She said: ‘If you go as deep into ballet as that, you’ll have no feet left, you won’t earn any money. You’re going into acting.’ ”
For her stage name, she chose Patricia, as an extension of her surname, and, convinced that casting agents would not stop flicking through lists of names before they arrived at “D”, her mother came up with Dainton. It was through working in rep that she landed her Rank contract.
Not only was she controlled by Rank, but she was also under the thumb of her mother, who kept all her earnings and gave her only enough for her bus fares and her lunch. Dainton and her brother were obliged to do all the cooking and the housework.
At Rank, one of her friends also took advantage of her good nature: “I was great friends with Di [Diana] Dors at one stage, but when I went round to her flat I always ended up cleaning the floors . . . I fell out with her in the end. I didn’t approve of how she was living. She had these extraordinary parties . . . She had this bedroom in a house with a mirror in the ceiling, but if you went upstairs you could see everything that was going on. She used to take people up there to watch.”
After a run of uncredited roles, she made her official screen debut in a made-for-television film called The Boltons Revue (1948), in which she was billed as “Pat Dainton”.
Her breakthrough came when Novello gave her the chance to dance in the leading role in the 1950 Technicolor film version of his musical The Dancing Years, having remembered that she had been the understudy in his touring production. Her mother extricated her from her Rank contract and she signed with Associated British.
“It was wonderful to be a star at last,” she recalled. “When the film came out, I was given a wonderful wardrobe and sent round the country on a publicity tour. I was engaged at the time, but I couldn’t tell anyone.”
In 1952 she married the up-and-coming actor (and future producer) Norman Williams, whom she had met when she was 16. Over the next few years her career took off as they started a family. Acting was not always glamorous, though: for her part in the detective film Hammer the Toff, she was told that she would have to sort out her character’s wardrobe herself.
Sixpenny Corner, which was launched by ITV on its second day of transmission in 1955, was, Dainton later said, “like Crossroads — but without the motel”. Each episode lasted 15 minutes and was broadcast live every weekday morning. “It was all terribly disorganised. The crews were so inexperienced we had to tell them where to stand. After just one rehearsal, we did the show live, and we had to remember three scripts at any one time.”
The series lasted only one year, with the target audience, housewives, failing to be gripped by the trials and tribulations of a newlywed couple, Sally and Bill Norton (played by Dainton and Howard Pays), who owned a run-down garage business. One reviewer noted that the cast never quite mastered the Cockney accent and that “Patricia Dainton could have gone straight into Noël Coward’s Private Lives.”
She appeared in the 1957 crime film No Road Back and shone in the otherwise pedestrian thriller Witness in the Dark (1959), in which she gave an impressive and subtle performance as a blind woman who turns out to be the sole person present when her elderly neighbour is murdered. She prepared for the part by working with blind people and observing how they carried out day-to-day tasks.
By this time, she was mother to two young children. During her third pregnancy, she was prescribed thalidomide because her morning sickness was threatening her ability to work. At eight and a half months, she delivered a baby girl, Linda, who survived only a short period of time. The devastating experience made her re-evaluate her life. She was keen to have more children and to be able to spend more time with them than had been possible with her first two children: she decided to quit acting altogether and was “never tempted” to go back.
Her four children — Petrina Redman, Glyn Williams, Tamara Ann Harrison and Amanda Jane Williams — survive her. Norman Williams predeceased her in 2010.
In the mid-1970s, once her children were more independent, she became a sales assistant in the Walton-on-Thames branch of WH Smith, continuing to work for 25 years and eventually running her own book department.
Her acting career was a phase that she did not dwell on or discuss with her children until they became aware of her early stardom, thanks to the steady trickle of fan mail through the years and the attention she attracted when, well into her eighties, she still exuded film-star charisma at events organised by the BFI or Talking Pictures TV.
If pressed, she enjoyed sharing stories about the publicity stunts and dates with visiting Hollywood stars that she was obliged to undertake as a starlet. One of these was with the Welsh-born Hollywood leading man Ray Milland. They went out for dinner with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who were visiting London at the time.
At the end of the night, Milland “walked me all the way home
and then I left him standing on the doorstep. He was furious. But once you
start anything like that, you have to carry on. Imagine what he’d have said if
he’d come up and found Norman in the bed?”
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