Article: ‘I was told not to make eye contact with Tom Cruise’: meet the world’s most prolific film extra

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“I was [a dancer] at Murray’s with Mandy Rice-Davies when the Profumo affair was going on.” This was the glamorous, star-studded nightspot where a society osteopath met a showgirl, setting in motion events that would eventually help spell the end for Harold Macmillan’s government.

Sixty-year-old scandals aside, these formative experiences taught Goldston two invaluable lessons for a background artist: first, how to keep one’s cool in the presence of movie stars; and second, that it is much more pleasant to spend time in the refracted glow of the limelight than to be directly in its glare.

While filming the 1969 war comedy The Virgin Soldiers she struck up such a good rapport with a fellow extra that he remembered her when they met again, over a decade later, on the set of 1982 TV movie Baal.

This is the list she refers to now to jog her memory on specifics, such as how many Carry On films she worked on (“Oh, about 80%”), the on-set mood during the very first episode of EastEnders (“It was a party scene in the Old Vic and the producer wanted her dog Roly to be in it”).

While researching archive footage on another job, Ing found himself idly wondering about the people who appear in the background, at train stations and political rallies, often out of focus, or in a few fleeting frames.

And then you would see patterns, and be drawn in by those patterns.” It’s this wistful feeling of searching for the narrative of a life in a series of fragmented images – like flicking through photographs of a long-dead grandparent – that Jill, Uncredited captures so well.

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