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), Benny, der Pechvogel (1978),and Die Stute (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.
Fröhliche Weihnacht (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.
