Diana Dors was born Diana Mary Fluck on 23 October 1931 in Swindon. At 15 she enrolled at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and was almost immediately spotted and put into films, making her debut in 1946 in the thriller The Shop at Sly Corner. She was offered a 10-year contract with the Rank Organisation and joined the ill-fated Rank Charm School which had been set up to discover and groom British stars to match Hollywood idols like Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. She changed her name to Diana Dors (her grandmother's maiden name) but despite a brief appearance in David Lean's Oliver Twist she was already being typecast as the sleazy blonde good-time girl in third-rate crime films.
Her screen career never really took off and her Rank contract lapsed in 1950. As with her most famous American counterpart, Marilyn Monroe, any possible acting talent was deliberately marginalised by a ruthless publicity machine mainly interested in the promotion of glamour, sex appeal and scandal. Her long platinum-blonde hair, full-lipped pout and pneumatic curves were fully exploited by her first publicist - Dennis Hamilton, the man she married in 1951.
Fabricating a colourful personal life not yet entirely a reality, he ensured that the gossip columns were provided with a steady flow of sensational stories and created the image of the 'blonde bombshell', Britain's first sex symbol in the American mould. The couple moved to Hollywood but a contract with RKO came to nothing when the company went bust.
During the 1950s she appeared in a succession of uninspired luridly titled crime films with the one exception of Yield to the Night when she played the unglamorous character based on the murderess Ruth Ellis. The marriage to Hamilton ended in a blaze of publicity in 1957 and two years later she married a New York comedian, Dickie Dawson with whom she had two sons, Mark and Gary.
When her eight-year marriage to Dawson ended, she lost custody of her two sons. She married her third husband, Alan Lake, an actor, in 1967 and they had one son, Jason. She was declared bankrupt that year despite having been paid £35,000 in 1960 for a 12-week serialisation of her memoirs by the News of the World. They were pretty racy for their time, prompting the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, to denounce her as "a wayward hussy".
During the 70s there were brief revivals in her acting career, notably playing a brassy widow in Three Months Gone at the Royal Court Theatre and a good part in Jerzy Skolomowski's film Deep End, but a television series Queenie's Castle, despite being written for her by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, was unsuccessful and her acting and screen career entered a terminal decline. But she remained a celebrity, publishing further instalments of her sensational memoirs and appearing as a regular and popular guest on television shows like Jokers Wild, Blankety Blank and Celebrity Squares.
In 1983, now weighing over 15 stone, she presented a diet and nutrition slot for TV-AM. She survived a serious attack of meningitis in 1974 but ten years later died of cancer. Her toughness and resilience, courage and cheerfulness in the face of adversity earned her widespread admiration and affection and she was genuinely mourned on her death.
Her connection with the borough
She and her first husband Dennis Hamilton moved to Brook Cottage on Brayfield Road in Bray in 1954, later moving to Woodhurst, an 89-roomed mansion on Ray Mead Road, Maidenhead. She and Dennis converted it into rental flats, building for themselves a luxurious penthouse which they called called Bel-Air, over the marble swimming pool in the grounds. The late-night celebrity parties for guests such as Petula Clark and the Kray twins became the stuff of local legend.
The late 50s saw the rise of coffee bar culture and they turned one of the shops on the Colonnade in Maidenhead High Street into the El Toucan coffee bar. It was managed for a year by a local theatrical costumier called Henry Greene who described it as all done in Hawaiian style, "The walls were covered in half-cut pieces of bamboo and there were little nooks and crannies done in crazy paving where you could sit and drink your coffee. Right at the back, before you went into the kitchen, was the area where the toucans lived. It was very upmarket."
In 1956 Stanley Spencer met Diana Dors at a cocktail party given by Sir Charles and Lady Ellis of Dial Close, Cookham. He wanted to paint her, though it came to nothing, saying "Diana had a simple beauty. Her pouting lips are particularly pretty."
She and her third husband were close friends of Louis Brown, the owner of the Skindles night club where she celebrated her 50th birthday.
She died on 4 May 1984 at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Windsor and over 1,000 friends and admirers attended her funeral. She was buried in Sunningdale, where she had made her home in later life.