Boty’s appearance in the film marked the beginning of her brief acting career. She landed roles in a tv play, as a radio presenter, a bit part in the film Alfie and on stage. She was also a regular on the London club scene and a dancer on Ready Steady Go! the celebrated pop music tv programme that often featured The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Her acting career paid the bills and funded her painting which continued to be her main priority.

The media picked up on her glamorous actress persona instead of her skills as a serious artist. Scene magazine featured her in 1962: “Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have large beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blonde, and you have Pauline Boty.” 

Boty described her work as “nostalgia for now”. She engaged enthusiastically with news and pop culture, titling her works after popular songs and using images from Hollywood: “Film stars are the 20th-century gods and goddesses . . . People need them, and the myths that surround them, because their own lives are enriched by them. Pop art colours those myths.” 

Two years after she got married, Boty became pregnant but during a prenatal exam a tumour was discovered and she was diagnosed with cancer. She did not want to harm her unborn baby daughter and refused to have an abortion or receive chemotherapy. Katy Goodwin (Boty Goodwin) was born in February 1966 and Boty died at the Royal Marsden Hospital just over four months later. She was 28 years old. 

After her death, her paintings were stored in a barn and she was largely forgotten until her work was rediscovered in the 1990s. The location of some of her most celebrated paintings remain unknown.

Buy her artwork from main stream galleries here and visit this great website dedicated to her work here.