LA Confidential

‘AMONG her many achievements is that in 1970 Lesley-Anne Down was voted ‘Most Beautiful Teenager’ in Britain.

‘The worry, the worry’

The constraints of those pre-Internet times fail to tell us what organ bestowed that title on the woman Hello! calls ‘an English rose’, but we imagine it was some very great periodical indeed, like Blue Jeans or Eagle.

Nowadays Lesley-Anne is 49 years old and, although no longer a teenager, she is still an ‘English rose’ in Hollywood’s eyes.

By now a few of you will be scratching your heads. You’ve heard the name but can’t place the face.

So here’s a pointer: Lesley-Anne is better known as Jacqueline Payne in The Bold And The Beautiful, the TV soap that is so soft focus it’s recommended viewing for cataract patients.

She did play Stephanie Rogers in Dallas all those moons ago, and then only for a few moons. But if that doesn’t place her, conjure up a picture of Liz Hurley meeting Jackie Collins. And, as with those two, Lesley-Anne’s perfected that cross-Atlantic way of speaking.

The trick here is to pepper the language with words you think Americans think English people say.

As a rough guide to any aspiring English roses out there, the words should of three syllables or more and last used in a spelling test in 1929. It also helps if you load your speech with colloquialisms.

Cue Leslie talking about her son. ‘He’s exhausted me!’ she says. ‘Of all the children he is the most rambunctious.’ Top marks to Leslie there.

And duly softened up by her English charm, Leslie tells us that little George is just as ‘mad as a March hare’ and ‘as tough as old nails’.

Well, smoke me a kipper at ten o’clock old bean! That’s just marvellous. Super-duper, spiffy and fandabidoze on top. Splendiferous!

But to prove that Lesley is no fuddy-duddy old stick in the mud she subscribes to that Californian embalming fluid known as Botox. She has an injection of it between her eyebrows every now and then.

‘I don’t mind happy lines, but I do care about the worry line,’ says she, with an emphasis on the singular.

‘I was worried my whole life about something. Well, not any more.’

Although the worry of worry is something of a worry, as they say in the shires…’

Posted: 24th, September 2003 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink