[citation needed] Norden gained experience singing and dancing while performing in wartime ENSA concerts and variety shows as a teenager.

In an interview with the Sunderland Echo on 3 June 1952, she said: "Please don't refer to me as the girl who was discovered in a cinema queue.

[3] After appearing in ten films within five years, Norden left Britain for America in 1952, where she settled in New York and married her third husband, US Air Force sergeant Mitchell Dodge.

Norden returned to London in the 1970s to work on stage, screen, and television, but retained an apartment in New York and held several exhibitions of her paintings in Manhattan.

[Note 1] She was survived by her son, Michael Cole, and her widower, George Heselden, a retired mathematician who used to work for the Ministry of Defence.