A spectacularly audacious and voluptuous forty-nine-year-old Diana Dors caught my attention when I was a shy and skinny fifteen-year-old. She first fascinated me in 1980 as the ball-breaking Commander wearing a camp military uniform in the television comedy series The Two Ronnies, simultaneously sexy and scary as the head of a matriarchal state police force, a supreme subjugator of men. The following year, I was mesmerised by her appearance as a glitzy fairy godmother in the pop music video for Adam and the Ants’ hit single Prince Charming. Here, while Adam Ant repeatedly sang ‘ridicule is nothing to be scared of ’, Dors waved her starry wand in the air and transformed his rags into ‘glad-rags’ so that he could attend the queerest of costume balls.

Now I can see why Diana Dors was so perfectly cast as Adam Ant’s fairy godmother. For her role here is not simply to make his dreams come true but to inspire him to love himself and be proud. In so doing, this pop promo capitalised on Dors’ reputation as a survivor despite disaster and derision, as someone who remained unashamed even when acknowledging personal failings and professional failures. Many people craved this kind of chutzpah in the early eighties. Her bravado was truly inspirational in an individualistic and highly competitive world. Yet I didn't know then that she’d been a major international sex symbol in the 1950s. Nor did I appreciate her skills as an actress, until I saw her some years later in Yield to the Night (Lee Thompson 1956). Watching this film, I marvelled at her transformation from a glamorous blonde salesgirl into a plain drab prisoner awaiting execution. Yet what was just as astonishing was the sheer intensity of her performance, notably in scenes with co-star Yvonne Mitchell as the caring guard with whom Dors’ doomed Mary Hilton discovers a close bond of mutual understanding and sympathy, possibly even love.

It took several viewings of Yield for me to realise that this film is not a straightforward story of a young woman who loved a man so much that she committed murder to avenge his death.