Gloria Brittain

A perennially cheerful, child-like woman with a lisp and hair that often looks three times bigger than her actual head, Gloria Brittain was never likely to be sent to trial accused of being a great actress. Essentially she was a nude model who like many around in the 1970s and 1980s wound up playing bit parts in soft-core sex films. In her uncredited debut in The Playbirds (1978), she was cast as an ill-fated model who is burnt at the stake. Her dubbed in screams and confused expressions are comically at odds with this quite dangerous looking scene. Gloria also worked under the name Busty Bibi Forbes, an alias that made one of its earliest appearances in The Playbirds tie-in novelisation. According to the book's photo section `Busty Bibi' is an American model who is being hailed by one magazine as `America's new Linda Lovelace' for her performance in The Playbirds. Gloria, who in fact hailed from Middlesex, would regularly re-use the name and false identity Bibi Forbes in her modelling work. In 1981 she was thrown in the acting deep end for the short film, 'The Perils of Mandy', her only lead role. Lisping and smiling her way through the 40-minute running time, she just seems bewildered by it all. Telling the story of a young girl who makes it big in London by working in nude modelling and sex films, more often than not The Perils of Mandy plays like a cartoonish version of her real-life aspirations. In the film at least Gloria got to play at being a big sex star, photographers swarm around her, characters remark on how lucky she is getting the lead in a film and she gets to be the focus of attention at a glitzy film premiere. In reality she was destined to never escape the low end of the sexploitation actress pecking order. Her career was more accurately represented by the previous year's filmed striptease contest, The Great British Striptease (1980), which sees her taking part in an embarrassing group striptease, suffering the advances of lewd host Bernard Manning and failing to win the measly £500 cash prize, so we shouldn't really begrudge a clearly nice girl her one and only headlining moment.