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Tomkinson, Constance

Les Girls, [88] 15

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‘Do chorus girls think?’ asked the headline of a newspaper article that appeared around the time that Constance Tomkinson won a spot in her first chorus line. As one soon discovers from her gloriously comical Les Girls (1956), they not only thought but were experts in navigating the rackety worlds of show business, finance and sex while defending their virtue as energetically as a Samuel Richardson heroine. Not that a spot in a chorus line was Constance’s goal when she started out in show business. Born the daughter of a Canadian Nonconformist minister, she headed to New York in 1933 at the age of 18, hoping to become ‘the Toast of Broadway’. Instead, she joined the mass of unemployed actors turned away from countless casting calls. She and a friend toured churches around the East Coast per forming Biblical dramas for a few months, but then the friend quit, declaring: ‘I’ve had enough of pulling curtains with one hand and playing God with the other.’

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