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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2023
Diana Dors’ film career wasn't just disappointing. It was spectacularly unsuccessful.
For all her fame, talent and ambition, she only secured a small number of starring roles, just 8 out of a total of 67 movies between 1946 and 1984. To be specific, Dors received top billing for Miss Tulip Stays the Night (1955), Yield to the Night (1956), The Unholy Wife (1957), La Ragazza del Palio (1958) Tread Softly Stranger (1958), Passport to Shame (1959), Swedish Wildcats (1972) and Keep It Up Downstairs (1976). None of these won her awards or nominations and most failed miserably at the box-office. Several of them failed on a grand scale in spite of the skilled and celebrated contributors involved in their production, notably The Unholy Wife and La Ragazza del Palio.
Dors’ propensity to fail spectacularly added significantly to the mountain of negative criticism, condemnation and derision already generated by her outspokenness, glitzy image and scandalous behaviour. What she said, how she looked and the things she did generated a stream of sensational tabloid headlines and racy stories in gossip columns. Producers quickly became wary of working with her, while many critics and audiences simply couldn't take her seriously. Yet Dors not only took her work as a film actor very seriously but also consistently created intelligent, nuanced and captivating screen performances for thirty-nine years. From the age of fifteen until her death at fifty-two, she made a significant contribution to all kinds of movies in parts great and small. Her distinctive combination of glamour and intelligence, naturalism and poise, acting skill and self-mockery, provided many films with a memorable moment or two even if the vast majority of them were eminently forgettable and easily dismissed as negligible.
It seems appropriate to reflect on Dors’ questionable cinematic achievements and also the possible lasting value of her cinematic work as the end of my study approaches. Even at this late stage, I’m tempted to ask a number of questions. For instance, was the effort Dors put into film acting really worth it given that she attained so little commercial and critical success during her lifetime? Since her major films largely failed to impress critics and attract mass audiences, can there really be any validity in the claim that her big screen performances reward the attention now being given to them by audiences, scholars and both her long-standing and more recently acquired fans?
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