Baby, this doll's still going strong

It is something of a surprise to find that Carroll Baker is 69 years old, not only because she does not look it, but also because she has been etched for ever as Baby Doll.

As the supernubile heroine of Elia Kazan's film, Baker was iconised by one of the most disturbing images in cinema history - that of a blonde child-woman lying in a crib with her thumb in her mouth.

Released in America in 1956 (six years before Kubrick's Lolita) Baby Doll unleashed a storm of protest from the Catholic Church and its Legion of Decency. It also earned Ms Baker an Oscar nomination.

This picture still resonates 40 years later, illuminating, as it does, the dark shadows that flicker around prepubescence and the Electra complex.

Baby Doll Meighan was a child bride of 19 given to an older man by her father on the condition that he waits to consummate the marriage until she is 20. Tennessee Williams created this deviant Southern scenario, but Carroll Baker has had to live with it. When she dropped out of sight people assumed that there must have been a tragic finale - that Baby Doll must have turned into Baby Jane because that's what happens in Hollywood.

An image of a mad old actress rises easily into the mind's eye because there are so many of them. This premonition is further encouraged by Ms Baker herself whose instructions dictate that she must only be photographed 1) Inside. 2) With a flash. 3) From above. Perhaps the Standard photographer will have to swing from a chandelier as Ms Baker had once done in The Carpetbaggers.

"Look," she says, kneeling on the floor in front of me, "if I take a picture from here I get your nostrils, your chin and the wrinkles on your neck. It's a dreadful angle. If I take it from here ..." (she stands up, making her fingers into a camera) "I get the eyes."

It makes sense. She has flown to London from Los Angeles to attend the opening of Baby Doll at the Albery Theatre. A round figure, she has a spray of blonde hair and a down-to-earth quality. No, she says, she does not like getting old. Things begin to creak, the eyes are going and names slip her mind. She wishes she had lied about her age from the start. "Now I find that all the women who are my age are five years younger."

She was born in Pennsylvania. Her father was a travelling salesman and her first marriage, at 21, was to a middle-aged millionaire who raped her and then controlled her with his money. This short interlude precipitated some of the emotions that she later used for Baby Doll. Carroll Baker did not love Louie Witter, he was a sadist and a brute, but she had allowed herself to be trapped by a dangerous sugar daddy. Over the years she has struggled to achieve independence, both financially and emotionally. It has not always been easy. Warner Brothers, keen to cash in on the Baby Doll phenomenon, attempted to force her to fulfil her contractual obligations by playing trashy clones. Ms Baker refused, which meant that she was not paid. Finally she ended up playing a nun in The Miracle. After that there was debt, a painful and expensive divorce from her second husband, a nervous breakdown, and, finally a move to Italy where she raised her two young children and made a dozen films.

Having resented Baby Doll for years, she has learned to accept her. One of her suitcases contains black-and-white Baby Doll stills and a special felt-pen for autographs and everything.