Pamela Green obituary
Although best-known for her cameo appearance in Peeping Tom, Michael Powell's classic 1959 film, Pamela Green, who has died aged 81, was the leading British pin-up of that period. For a generation of young men, her lithe figure, long blonde hair and photogenic features represented an unattainable ideal of feminine allure. Her role in Peeping Tom was the first appearance of a naked woman in a British feature film.
The only child of an English architect and his Dutch wife, Green spent her first decade in the Netherlands. On the eve of the second world war, she and her parents decamped to England. Always keen on painting and drawing, in 1947 she was accepted on to the fine art course at St Martin's, one of London's leading art schools. Between sessions in the painting studio and the life room, where the self-proclaimed "naked civil servant", Quentin Crisp, posed regularly – his scrawny form presenting a test of her draughtsmanship – Green haunted the cafes of neighbouring Soho.
As a means of funding her studies, she worked as a life model at other art colleges. She soon discovered that she could earn much better fees by posing for photographers who produced the decorous and unrevealing nude studies, often lit to resemble classical statuary, that punctuated magazines such as Lilliput and Men Only. Among those photographers were Bill Brandt and Angus McBean.
While still a student, Green endured a violent, short-lived marriage that ended before she had completed her course. On leaving college, she found work as a nude in West End stage shows that incorporated static tableaux of the type made famous by the Windmill theatre, typically mimicking famous works of art. This way of working had evolved as a way of dodging the rules imposed by the lord chamberlain, who acted as official censor. At his insistence, female nudity was permissible on stage only provided the models were motionless and discreetly lit.
Through her role in the lavish 1953 production Folies Bergère, she met the photographer George Harrison Marks. Having established himself as her boyfriend, he persuaded her to model for the nude postcards that he was employed to produce, postcards that enjoyed a furtive trade via backstreet newsagents and smutty bookshops. Eventually, Green and Marks began to produce their own picture sets. With the profits from these, they decided to create a monthly nude photo magazine.
From the Gerrard Street building where they lived and worked, they launched Kamera in 1957. Besides designing the costumes and backdrops, Green posed in a variety of convincing disguises, her alternative personae including Rita Landré, the flame-haired French sexpot. Thanks to the kitsch eroticism and dramatic staging of its heavily retouched colour photos, Green and Marks sold 150,000 copies in five weeks. Before long, assisted by a team of 15 people, they were also producing regular calendars and 8mm striptease films, the latter earning them a court appearance and a surprise commendation from the magistrate who requested a copy for his son.
Impressed by her pictures in Kamera, Powell recruited Green for a small speaking part in Peeping Tom. He cast her as the victim of the film's sinister, duffel-coated protagonist, a serial-killing photographer played by Carl Boehm. For the scene in which she is murdered, Powell chose to reproduce one of her set designs for Kamera. On its release, the film's portrayal of warped sexuality provoked critical outrage which has since metamorphosed into doting reverence.
Green consolidated her growing notoriety by starring in Marks's directorial debut, the hit nudist film Naked As Nature Intended (1961). Their relationship having ended in acrimony, Green left Marks for Douglas Webb, a former RAF airman and veteran of the Dambusters raid, employed as a stills photographer on feature films. Green then took on the role of Webb's assistant on productions such as The Go-Between (1970). She combined this work with fleeting appearances in movies, her credits including the Peter Cushing vehicle Legend of the Werewolf (1974).
As the British film industry collapsed, Webb diversified into television assignments, notably the title sequence for The Sweeney, which featured Green's fingerprints in the montage. After she and Webb had gone into semi-retirement on the Isle of Wight, where she became an improbable stalwart of the Women's Institute, she was invited to write the preface to Doing Rude Things (1992), David McGillivray's groundbreaking account of the British softcore porn industry. The book led to her being interviewed regularly, and the consequent media coverage earned her cult status, sustained by a popular website, redolent of the 1950s world within which her brand of comparatively innocent erotica had flourished.
Pamela Green, actor and model, born 28 March 1929; died 7 May 2010