Susan George first appeared on stage aged 12 in The Sound of Music, in TV's Swallows and Amazons in 1963, and on screen in Cup Fever (d. David Bracknell) in 1965. Film producers quickly exploited her jail-bait sexiness in such films as The Strange Affair (d. David Greene, 1968 - very strange it was, too) and, most famously, in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), as the victim of yokel lust.

Her pouting sensuality shone through even such anodyne enterprises as Spring and Port Wine (d. Peter Hammond, 1969), as James Mason's recalcitrant daughter, and as the baby-sitter in Fright (d. Peter Collinson, 1971 - what were the parents thinking of?). What were British films to do with this commodity?

Send it to America of course, where George slunk unforgettably through Mandingo (US, d. Richard Fleischer, 1975) and others. She kept working on either side of the Atlantic, often in TV, and in 1988 co-produced Stealing Heaven (UK/Yugoslavia, d. Clive Donner) with husband Simon MacCorkindale, whom she married in 1984.

credit: screenonline.org.uk