Dame Sheila Hancock told to get nose job as a young actress

Dame Sheila Hancock was told to get a nose job as a young actress starting out in the 1950s.

The Olivier award-winning actress, 90, is best known for her TV and film roles including The Wildcats Of St Trinian’s, The Rag Trade and Edie, along with her West End theatre performances.

She revealed that she had been told to change her looks in her twenties, telling BBC’s Amol Rajan Interviews: “Somebody saw me in Bromley Rep doing a performance as a model and they asked me to go and see them in the office.

“He sat me under a lamp and said, ‘Well, you’ll have to have plastic surgery because my nose is so odd, you know?’

“So I didn’t fit the pattern of what is best to look like as a woman, really, in those days.”

She added that she had acne at the time and was performing in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables.

Dame Sheila previously told The Telegraph that when she was summoned to his office she thought she had “cracked it” in the industry.

“Then he said, ‘Well, the first thing you have to do is have some plastic surgery.’ And I never heard from him again,” the actress said, saying her first big break was from a friend who had good contacts in the industry.

Her first roles were in the theatre, where actors had “very low salaries”, and she told Rajan that people “used to come round with hotpots for me because I was incredibly skinny”.

She added: “Eventually I passed out and they discovered I (had) malnutrition.”

The actress, who won a Laurence Olivier Award for her performance as Fräulein Schneider in Cabaret, also said she had been “one of the very few working class people” at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, known as Rada.

Her fellow classmates at the time would tease her on her pronunciation, as she recalled them “all shrieking with laughter” at the way she said ‘door’.

Dame Sheila added that they were all “frightfully posh” and would comment on the fact that she was on a scholarship to the prestigious acting institute, whose famous alumni include Anthony Hopkins and Imelda Staunton.

Born in the 1930s on the Isle of Wight to a publican father and a mother who worked in a department store, Dame Sheila grew up in King’s Cross, London, after her parents relocated.

She went to Dartford Grammar School before getting into Rada with a grant.

Dame Sheila had small roles in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and comedy Carry On Cleo, and took centre stage in the 1970s series But Seriously, It’s Sheila Hancock.