Their accord anon developed. “I can’t accept I’m accustomed to f--- Claire Gordon,” Donaldson told addition casting member, according to his biographer Terence Blacker. Blacker, who met her in afterwards life, begin her “funny and sharp, an odd admixture of the alive and the unworldly, with the air of addition who is in on the antic of her own attractiveness and is blessed to ball forth with it”. In an account with him she accepted that she had been “a handful, a absolute case” in the 1960s.
Claire Gordon and Willie Donaldson in 1970 (Solo)
Donaldson alleged her “Mrs Mouse” and in 1966, afterwards actualization in The Memoirs of Fanny Hill at the Lyric, Hammersmith, she confused into his London flat, renting chastening to Scott Walker of the Walker Brothers. In her afterwards account with News of the World she declared how, back she went annular to aggregate the rent, she and Walker would lie on the bed and “kiss and fondle – with me consistently cutting a clingy, cottony dress with no bra”. Their liaisons are said to accept aggressive Walker’s 1966 song, Archangel.
She and Donaldson affiliated in 1967 and were anon hosting “musical evenings” which, according to one Donaldson obituarist, “became acclaimed for their absurdity and balance and were busy by the aberrant and uninhibited”. Donaldson himself declared orgies involving alarm girls, naked DJs and two-way mirrors, admitting Claire Gordon claimed that their soirées were adequately innocent, their capital allure actuality bad cabaret acts such as Zelda Plum, “a rather ample adult who acclimated to do a striptease with a chinchilla on her head. She abashed the cats”. What is accepted is that associates of the drugs band assuming as guests begin assortment cakes actuality served, arch to a drugs apprehension and the brace argumentation accusable in cloister to possession.
Claire Gordon, photographed during the filming of Beat Girl (Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy)
By 1970 Donaldson was skint and their alliance was in trouble. In 1971 Claire followed him to Ibiza area Donaldson blew his aftermost £2,000 on a glass-bottomed boat, acquisitive to accomplish money out of tourists. By the end of the season, he had no money larboard and Claire had befuddled him out.
“Neither of us got what we wanted,” she reflected. “I anticipation I was marrying an bookish and alliance would accomplish me respectable. But the accuracy was all Willie capital was to be a swinger.” Donaldson complained: “It angry out that Mrs Mouse was a noncombatant at heart, absent a bathrobe table and to accord banquet parties for nice people… she bootless as the absolute added woman.”
Claire Gordon was built-in in Cambridge on January 16 1941. Her ancestor was a doctor and her mother a composition artist.
Spotted by a columnist at the age of 16 she was bound alive to a five-year arrangement with the London abettor Bill Watts. She fabricated her date admission in a 1954 awakening of Colley Cibber’s The Refusal and her awning admission as a affiliate of a harem in the Bernard Bresslaw ball I Only Arsked! (1958). The afterward year she fabricated her West End admission in The Darling Buds of May (Saville Theatre) and in 1962 played a impaired albino blur starlet with Bob Monkhouse and Michael Crawford in Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn (Prince of Wales).
Michael Gough gets to grips with Claire Gordon in Konga (1961) (Rex)
Her added blur appearances included sex comedies such as The Dirtiest Girl I Ever Met (1970), Suburban Wives (1971, subtitled “Nine-to-five widows in a animal desert”); Commuter Husbands (1972) and Sex Farm (1973, aka “Frustrated Wives”). During the 1960s she additionally acquired a afterward in Italy afterwards actualization as a ballerina in the 1964 ball I due evasi di Sing Sing, acceptable accepted as “La BB [Bella Bella] Inglese”.
After her alliance to Donaldson bankrupt down, she connected with her acting career, mostly in repertory and binding theatre, authoritative her aftermost date actualization as the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella at the Princess Theatre, Hunstanton, in 2005.
Claire Gordon remained alive able-bodied into her sixties and connected to allure admirers, actuality declared at assorted times as the “former accompaniment of acrid old actor Cardew Robinson”, and as an “ex-wifelet” of the Marquess of Bath. She fabricated casual appearances in the civic press, giving interviews about her 20-year addiction to diet pills and a liposuction operation which she had undergone in afterwards life.
In 1994 her affirmation that she was actuality advised by the actor-producer Steven Berkoff for the allotment of Blanche Dubois to his Stanley Kowalski brought an boorish admonishment from Berkoff, who wrote that the anticipation of casting “an alien extra alleged Claire Gordon” could not be added from his mind.
In afterwards activity Claire Gordon went to alive in the Red Sea resort of El Gouna, Egypt, but she alternate to London afterwards actuality diagnosed with a academician tumour aftermost December.
Claire Gordon, built-in January 16 1941, died April 13 2015
