Helen returned to the National Youth Theatre to play one of Shakespare’s great female roles – Ophelia in “Hamlet. She also worked on her first film, although her scenes were cut from the final cut. Her progress towards the big screen was an altogether more halting affair – “a slow burn”, she describes it – beginning as an uncredited extra when barely out of her teens, painting Laurence Harvey’s toenails in the 1966 Cold War comedy, “The Spy With A Cold Nose (the spy in question being a pedigree bulldog with a listening bug grafted inside its stomach). “I didn’t really go to the cinema very much when I was young, and I suppose the only kind of film actress I would have wanted to be then was one of the European greats, like Anna Magnani, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti or, my father’s particular favourite, Simone Signoret.”