Pat Astley

A minor, but always fun to watch, sexploitation starlet. Pat Astley grew up in the seaside town of Blackpool, Britain's 'Las Vegas of the North'. By the early 1970s Astley, with a baby daughter in tow, relocated to London in pursuit of fame and fortune. She drifted into 'blue movies' (i.e. hardcore shorts) made by John Lindsay and George Harrison Marks. These were of sort of home projection 8mm porn films that would later be referenced in mainstream movies like Get Carter and O Lucky Man. Promoted as a 'mind-blowing orgy of Lolita lust' End of Term (1971) is in keeping with John Lindsay's taboo theme of dressing 20 something aged actresses as schoolgirls with its story of a 'teenybopper' spending her holiday seducing a chauffeur and a Maid (Astley).

Astley's 'legit' debut came as an extra in 1976's I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight (1976), a silly softcore comedy about a 'sex-ray' machine co-produced by an un-credited John Lindsay. After a few years working as a model for raunchy 'Men's Magazines', Astley bounced back in a surprisingly mainstream role as Young Mr Grace's Nurse in the 1977 run "Are You Being Served?" (1972). However the role was not to last and after 7 or 8 episodes she was replaced by Vivienne Johnson who was allocated dialogue and billing in the 'you have been watching' end credits, two attributes curiously denied to Astley.

For the rest of the seventies Astley was part of an almost repertory company of young actresses who were required to do little but run around naked in background scenes of sex films. She had 'nude walk on' roles in Rosie Dixon - Night Nurse (1978), Adventures of a Plumber's Mate (1978),and The Stud (1978). 'Films and Filming magazine', a scholarly publication at heart who used racy images on their covers to increase sales, gave Astley an amusing career boost by name-checking and using a picture of her from the comedy Let's Get Laid (1978) for the cover of their Feb 1978 issue. The cover would seem to suggest that Astley was the star of the film, whilst in reality she appears in the film for all of eight seconds and isn't even billed in the end credits!

There are a few exceptions to the 'blink and you'll miss her' nature of Astley's film career. Disco/Soap Opera flop The World Is Full of Married Men (1979), is the only film that uses her as an actress rather than a nude, despite her role as one of Anthony Franciosa's disco dollies being dubbed. While in the amateurish Queen of the Blues (1979), Astley played a stripper who gets scared by a skeleton spectre and delivers a fair share of the film's lewd backstage dialogue. Many British Sex films (and horror films for that matter) used pre-release 'publicity shots' to perk the interest of the public with stronger images than appeared in the films themselves. Astley's most memorable appearance in this respect was in promoting 'murder thriller with thrilling bodies' The Playbirds (1978), where she was ghoulishly depicted rubbing stage blood on her breasts.

While many nudie actresses' career ended with the demise of the British Sex Film era, Astley's career stretched to one further movie. Don't Open Till Christmas (1984)was a cheapo horror film partly moneyed by a video distributor who wished to get into film financing after several of his tape releases had been prosecuted as 'Video Nasties'. Astley's Playbirds co-star 'Alan Lake' played a psychopath murdering anyone dressed as Father Christmas. Coincidently Astley's 'Are You Being Served' debut was in an episode entitled 'The Father Christmas Affair' and featured the Grace Brothers staff dressing up as Father Christmases as well. In the film Astley enjoys a semi-autobiographical role of a nude model who encounters the Santa hating psycho down a back alley. Sadly, 'Don't Open 'Til Christmas' did nothing for anyone's career, and Astley never acted again. She was last heard of working part time in a shop in Lancashire, at least avoiding the tragic legacies of several of her contemporaries.