Olive Sloane

Details of Sloane's activities in the intervening years are sparse, but information retrieved places her working with a touring stage company in New Zealand in 1927.

The majority of these were cheaply made quota quickies which immediately vanished into oblivion, but occasionally there was a higher-profile and more prestigious production such as the Gracie Fields star vehicle Sing As We Go (1934), in which she was credited as "Violet, the Song-Plugger's Girlfriend".

A minor role in Alfred Hitchcock's 1949 British production Under Capricorn was followed the next year by her most widely admired and best-known screen performance in the critically acclaimed Boulting Brothers-directed Seven Days to Noon, as Goldie Phillips, the woman who helps the desperate Professor Willingdon (Barry Jones).

The character of Goldie was written as an ageing ex-chorus girl – brassy, excessively made-up and cheaply and gaudily dressed, whiling away her days gossiping and tippling in local public houses.

She appeared in the 1953 Ealing Studios satire Meet Mr. Lucifer with Stanley Holloway and the 1954 prison drama The Weak and the Wicked, in which she played Nellie Baden, an elderly compulsive shoplifter sharing the cells with, amongst others, Glynis Johns and Diana Dors.