Whatever happened to Diana Dors, Swindon’s Marilyn Monroe?

My favourite show business anecdote concerns Diana Dors, the sleazy and vivacious actress, born Mary Diana Fluck in 1931, whose ambition was to have “a big house, a swimming pool and a cream telephone”. She was invited back to Swindon, her home town, to open a fête. The vicar, terrified he’d mispronounce her name, mispronounced her name. “We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris Klunt.”

Her father Bert Fluck worked in the Great Western Railway’s accounts department. Mary, Diana’s mother, encouraged her to dress up as Shirley Temple and simper to attract boys. One of her swains was Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape. “I hope he did not base his scientific findings on me,” Dors later joked.

By the age of 15, Dors was earning a guinea an hour as a model. She lolled on a couch wearing a sequinned top and tiny shorts. She won a medal for elocution at drama school and became a starlet for J Arthur Rank. What a biographer called her “brassy, forthright character” won her dozens of cameos and walk-on roles as dance hall hostesses and brazen barmaids. She is in David Lean’s Oliver Twist as the undertaker’s maid. She found a niche playing condemned prisoners – women done wrong by errant husbands. In Yield to the Night, Dors played a version of Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be hanged. “No lights on the Christmas tree, mother. They’re using the electric chair tonight!” was the proposed tag-line for her American debut.

It is not for her acting, however, that we remember Dors today, but her rackety private life, which opens the eyes very wide. Though, as a teenager, she’d believed “a girl could become pregnant by sitting on a lavatory seat vacated by a man,” she was soon having casual affairs with the film crew, leading to numerous backstreet abortions. The press was always told she was “suffering from appendicitis”. Her first husband, Dennis Hamilton, was physically abusive. When he died in 1959 it was revealed he’d been suffering from tertiary syphilis, which accounted for his demented behaviour – such as accusing Dors of having a liaison with Wee Georgie Wood, an elderly midget.

Hamilton stole Dors’s money, went into business with Peter Rachman, the slum landlord, and invested in a duff Singapore-style restaurant in Windsor, called El Dors. He upset producers, turned down parts Dors was offered without consulting her, and faked robberies to defraud insurance companies. On the night they arrived in Los Angeles, he ruined Dors’s chances of a Hollywood career by punching press photographers. Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and Robert Mitchum stopped returning calls. Dors did, however, fit in a clinch with Rod Steiger. Hamilton stormed into Steiger’s dressing-room waving a knife, but fortunately he was out.

Make-up departments were always having to disguise Dors’s bruised and swollen eyes, as Hamilton smacked her around, calling her a “faithless whore”. Even on their good days, the couple were not a model of domestic tranquillity. Neighbours complained about the noise of their lovemaking. There were also sex parties, where spectators gathered behind two-way mirrors to enjoy the action. Max Clifford and Bob Monkhouse were guests.

Dors’s subsequent partners were scarcely an improvement. Tommy Yeardye, a stuntman, went off with Rock Hudson. Kim Waterfield was discovered “up to his neck in a perfume-selling scam”, according to her biographer, and then there was Dickie Dawson, a stand-up comedian who organised Dors’s cabaret appearances in Las Vegas. She was soon relegated to gay clubs and working men’s clubs, where her spot was often secondary to the bingo. Audiences in Glasgow at least knew what they wanted. “Git yer tits oot, lassie!” they’d cry, while gazing at her fishtail frock.

Made bankrupt by the taxman, Dors was not perturbed. On the day she was interviewed by the Official Receiver, she bought a two-inch thick cream carpet, a heart-shaped bathtub and a stained-glass window. She organised a firework party at her new home in Sunningdale, and the rockets burned the house down.

Dors’s final serious relationship was with Alan Lake, with whom she’d appeared in Dixon of Dock Green. They were married in 1968. Lake was an alcoholic who slept off his benders in ditches and other people’s front gardens. Though he was knocked from his horse, breaking his back and being given hours to live by the doctors, he made a full recovery within weeks. He and Dors went to Venice to celebrate, where he fell in a canal, losing a £2,000 watch he’d been given that morning. Back in England, he was sent to prison for “malicious wounding” outside a pub.

As in her earlier marriage to Hamilton, Dors organised raunchy entertainments. “Off came the sweaters, bras and pants. In fact, it was a case of off with everything, except the lights,” she announced. Her son Jason, born in 1969, was less joyous. “I don’t think I should have been exposed to the things I saw,” he said, before his death last year. Jason never located Dors’s alleged “missing millions” – the fortune she was meant to have hidden behind secret codes in foreign bank accounts. But surely such a fortune is apocryphal, especially as the Inland Revenue was monitoring Dors’s income stream for decades.

If her career never soared, in Elizabeth Taylor fashion – and her only point of comparison with Marilyn Monroe was that they each added peroxide to their shampoo – Dors was nevertheless a light entertainment trouper, never turning work down, parodying her blonde bombshell image in rubbish horror pics and non-arousing soft-core vehicles, with titles like What the Swedish Butler Saw, Keep It Up Downstairs and The Amorous Milkman (“He Gave ’Em Much More Than a Pinta!”). She wore a Nazi uniform in The Two Ronnies serial, “The Worm That Turned”. On breakfast television she had a regular slot about losing weight, “Diet With Diana,” for which she received £600, paid in an envelope of ready cash. Unfortunately a stage version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? where Dors would have played the Bette Davis role alongside Noele Gordon of Crossroads fame as Joan Crawford was cancelled. What a classic of high camp that would surely have been.

Dors was blowsy, but small-scale – a very British combination. Her friends included the public hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, assorted gangsters and Stanley Spencer, the artist. “Her pouting lips are particularly pretty,” he said.

Though Dors knew she’d have to leave Swindon to make her dreams of powder-blue Cadillac convertibles and so forth come true (“because nothing magical could ever happen in Swindon”), she nevertheless remained provincial. She attended the funeral of Mary Millington, the porn star, looking like, says one of her biographers, “the guest of honour at some glitzy premiere”. At a Hatchards book event, “Diana Dors was holding court at a large round table,” Barbara Pym told Philip Larkin.

Those flashy cars and Surrey mansions, the fake leopard-skin personality: she’s like a pub landlady or Betjeman’s nightclub manageress, “But I’m dying now and done for/ What on earth was all the fun for?/ For I’m old and ill and ­terrified and tight.” She died of ovarian cancer in 1984. Alan Lake, stricken by grief, blew his head off with a shotgun five months later. Ronnie and Reggie Kray sent wreaths.