IN later years she would be known as Anne Heywood, a respected actress who was nominated for a Golden Globe Best Actress award (alongside Faye Dunaway, Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, and others) in 1968 for her performance in a film, The Fox. Back in 1953, when she appeared at the Glasgow Empire, she was still using her real name - Violet Pretty.
Then 21, the Birmingham-born actress, who had won an All-England beauty contest at 18, was a TV compere of the programme, Television Teenagers, and at the Empire she presented 'TV Teenagers in Glasgow' as part of the long-running Carroll Levis 'Discoveries' show.
Violet, pictured here in a slightly unorthodox manner by photographer Malcolm Dunbar, went on to have a successful career in films. The film website iMDB says that though she was "pretty much relegated to playing 'nice girl' types in the 1950s and 1960s," in her later career "her film appearances courted controversy and she seemed drawn toward highly troubled, flawed characters" and that she was "very popular with Italian audiences." Four years ago there were calls in her native Birmingham for her to be honoured with a place in the Walk of Stars in the city's Broad Street.
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