Their parents were alcoholics, as her brother related in his maiden speech in the House of Lords in 2014, saying the two children "experienced the poverty, neglect and shame that are such potent drivers of social exclusion".

[4] Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966) were made back-to back using the same sets and an overlapping cast.

In the Dracula film, she was targeted by Lee's vampire, but fought him off sending him to a cold, watery end assisted by Francis Matthews, who played her husband, and also her brother in Rasputin.

She appeared in a BBC television adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (1966)[7] and played Sally Carstairs in their version of Edmund Crispin's detective novel The Moving Toyshop (1964).

[9] For a month in 1978, Farmer was a cast member of Coronation Street playing a divorced chiropodist who treated Albert Tatlock, and briefly went out with Ken Barlow..[2][3] On stage, she was a founding member of John Fraser's London Shakespeare Group, playing Olivia in a production of Twelfth Night which opened in Beijing, China and had a residency at the Donmar Warehouse in 1982.