In the 1961 spring finals at the Drama Academy, in the performances given to members of the public and interested agents and casting directors keeping an eye out for new talent, Nicola Abbott quite simply shone – even though there were more good actresses than usual in the class of ’59: Emmy Lou Brown, Molly McKenzie, Pauline O’Brien, Juliet Lyall. Eleven big London agents wrote to Nicky, saying how pleased they would be to represent her; Miss Grace excitedly asked the advice of a friend of hers who directed in repertory but Nicky never went into repertory. An established director, recognising a strange and almost alarming talent, decided to take a tremendous risk and cast her as Nora – a part longer than Hamlet which everybody said was the ultimate test of an actor’s stamina – in his new West End production of A Doll’s House. At first he tried to tame the intensity of her performance which seemed un-English and disturbing; finally he decided to cover it with just the thinnest veneer of sophistication and Victorian manners. Nicky worked with him intently, intuitively; he was a homosexual and came as near to falling in love with a woman as he ever did in his life. His gamble paid off: he was called innovative and daring in his new production and Nicola Abbott was hailed as a star. A new, young feminist radical from Australia – the words feminist and radical not yet in vogue – hailed Nicky’s performance: at last the play is about a woman’s right to her own life: this is a performance for the new decade, for the sixties.

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But 1961 was not part of the swinging sixties.

1961 was still part of the fifties; the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was quoted in the newspapers as saying he believed mistress was a French word. Nicky and Miss Grace had pored over John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger which caught at changes in the air, but in 1961 they and Molly and Juliet and Emmy Lou and Frances and Pauline had never heard of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Peace and Love or a contraceptive pill; they were very ignorant about sex, abortion was illegal, and people who wore flowers in their hair came from the South Sea islands.