Black Beauty (1971)

Pamela's Nite
Special guests: Tess and Fiona.

Mark Lester on starring in Black Beauty via Daily Mail:

We had two ponies playing the young Black Beauty, with the famous white blaze on their foreheads, and I loved spending time with them. Patrick Mower [now Rodney Blackstock in Emmerdale] played the cruel squire. He was a nice bloke and a good laugh but I couldn't work out why my mother, who had accompanied me to Ireland, was so excited to meet him. I didn't realise Patrick already had something of a reputation as a heart-throb.

Although in my memory that summer seems to stretch on for ever, as they do when you are a child, I was there for only about three weeks. After that the cast and crew left for Spain to shoot the rest of the film.

I can't recall what I was paid for Black Beauty but I do remember in 1967, when I was making Oliver!, proudly telling the Daily Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter that I was earning £200 a week and banking the lot with a view to buying an E-type Jag! I made my last feature film, The Prince And The Pauper, in 1976 when I was 18. I'd never really seen acting as a long-term career.

I became an osteopath and today I have a successful practice in Cheltenham. I haven't acted in three decades but there is a possibility I may return to the screen. I have been asked to play King Harold in a film called 1066.