June Thorburn

June Thorburn
Born 8 June 1931(1931-06-08)
Karachi, Pakistan
Died 4 November 1967(1967-11-04) (aged 36)
Blackdown Hill, near Haslemere, England, UK
Occupation Actress

June Thorburn (8 June 1931 – 4 November 1967) was a popular English actress whose career was cut short by her death in an air crash.

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Early life

Thorburn was born in Karachi when the city was still in a non-independent India. She was the eldest of three children, including her sister Diana and her brother Keith. She spent most of her schooldays in boarding schools in India, since her father was a colonel in the Indian Army and therefore her parents traveled a lot. When he retired from the military, they moved back to England.

June began writing plays from about the age of seven. Her grandfather who had also spent many years in India as a design engineer, building many important bridges, made early 'movies' and she was the star in several, the first being "Her Fourth Birthday", when she was only four years old.

Family

When she was 20 she left home and moved to London to pursue her career, where she met and married her first husband, Aldon Richard Bryse-Harvey. During their short and stressful marriage she bore one daughter in 1953, named Heather-Louise June . The marriage ended in divorce and June moved back to Hampshire , close to her family, for a couple of years until her career started to take off.

In 1957 she moved back to London, where shortly thereafter she met Morten Smith-Petersen, who subsequently became her second husband. She was married to him until her death in 1967. Together with Morten, she had a second daughter named Inger-Sheleen Christabel.

Career

She appeared in her first commercial film in 1952, and began to win leading roles, in British costume dramas such as Fury at Smugglers' Bay (1961) and The Scarlet Blade (1963). Her most notable film appearance was as the Forest Queen in Tom Thumb (1958). During the early 1960s, she also appeared regularly on British television.

Death

She was pregnant with her third child when returning to London from Spain on Iberia Airlines Flight 062 when it crashed into Blackdown Hill, Sussex, killing all 37 people aboard.

Filmography

External links