Her mother, Mrs Shand, had cancer. Mr Shand had left the two women to their fate years ago by jumping, quite literally, in front of a train. The mother and the daughter lived in extremely genteel poverty in Richmond in a basement flat down an elegant street of Georgian houses. At secondary school, in Saint Joan, a school production that was put on three nights running in the Assembly Hall as it was on the A level syllabus, the same qualities that later mesmerised viewers of the film Heartbreak were already visible in Mary Shand’s performance of the Maid of Orleans: the shining intensity, the unforgettable voice. Her English teacher, Miss Grace, who realised that things were very difficult at home, took a special interest in her talented and very very bright pupil, put the idea of the possibility of drama school into her mind. Mary studied every hour of the night and day as if her life depended on it, as indeed it seemed to do.

Miss Grace lived with her elderly mother who had been a schoolteacher also. Miss Grace spoke to her mother of Mary Shand over their evening sherry; they had both known many, many adolescent girls.

‘She is so talented and so very bright, but I fear for her,’ she said to her mother, ‘there is something so – fragile about her, as if she might break.’

‘Girls survive on the whole,’ said Mrs Grace robustly. ‘Almost all girls survive, they find ways of dealing with the world.’

‘No,’ said Miss Grace slowly, ‘not all. It’s something you can almost – touch. I am not sure I should have suggested drama school. Such a life could be too stressful for her. But what will happen to her when her mother dies? She must have some future to hold on to.’