Dru was a respectable girl who is blackmailed into becoming Stark's mistress then abandoned, provoking Stark's assassination by her brother. As a young woman being escorted across country by the military troupe, Dru was courted by two of the officers (John Agar and Harry Carey Jnr). The same year she starred in Robert Rossen's Oscar-winning All the King's Men, based on the life of the former Louisiana governor Huey Long (here called Willie Stark) and an uncompromising portrait of an initially idealistic politician who turns corrupt and fascistic. Dru was the resolute pioneer who refuses to be separated from Clift whatever the hardships. After the climactic fight, Dru delivers an emotional tirade rebuking the two men and provoking a reconciliation, an ending despised by Clift "because Joanne Dru settles the matter and it makes the showdown between me and John Wayne a farce". Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) was another classic in which Wayne poignantly played an ageing cavalry officer unable to come to terms with a changing way of life.

In this sprawling saga which dramatised the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, John Wayne and Montgomery Clift (in his first film) played a ruthless rancher and his rebellious adopted son whose tempestuous relationship climaxes with a violent brawl in which they almost kill one another. Based on a 1922 play which had confounded critics by running for five years, its tale of Jewish and Irish families trading racial insults while feuding over the romance of their son and daughter was hopelessly old-fashioned and tasteless and the film received limited distribution. She made her screen debut inauspiciously as star of Abie's Irish Rose (1946). Her real name was Joanne LaCock and she was born in West Virginia in 1923. She entered show business via a modelling career and was performing in a night-club chorus when she met the crooner Dick Haymes, who took her to Hollywood when he was signed for movies and helped her start an acting career. Though never a major star, her work in these films - Howard Hawks's Red River, John Ford's cavalry western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and his elegiac Wagonmaster, plus Robert Rossen's powerful political drama All the King's Men - has ensured her a permanent place in film history.

A beautiful brunette with high cheekbones and a provocative personality, she provided the sort of feistiness that both Hawks and Ford sought in their leading ladies. But that's often the way with true pioneers.Karl DallasWilliam Smith Monroe, singer, songwriter, mandolin player: born Rosine, Kentucky 13 September 1911; twice married (one son); died Nashville, Tennessee 9 September 1996.. In 1948-50 Joanne Dru starred in three of the finest Hollywood westerns and an Academy Award-winning drama. I met him on one of these occasions, and he was remarkably patient when asked questions he must have answered a thousand times before, though assuming, wrongly, that my tape recorder meant I represented some UK radio station, wishing my listeners good luck in conclusion, professional to the last.With a score of awards as long as your arm - starting with his well-deserved entry to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970 - he had changed the sound, not only of country music, but of popular music throughout the world (he had lots of fans in Japan) He never set out to be a pioneer. The folklorist Ralph Rinzler - no mean mandolin player himself - took the band under his wing, wrote scholarly sleevenotes to their albums, and gave them the sort of respectability the revivalists wouldn't concede to a mere "pop" musician, which of course is what he was.Surprisingly, when so many of the younger, bluegrass-inspired musicians made it their business to be seen around Soho and Cambridge, Monroe didn't come over to Britain for a long time, but then appeared regularly at Wembley country music festivals, amid the spangles and rhinestones that had become as much a part of the trappings of country as long hair and jeans were of folk.

PDFM, the fund management group, is, however, still thirsty for the shares. It picked up a further 500,000, lifting its shareholding to 19.6 per cent. Others include British Biotech and Dana Petroleum.Unilever, responding to its US investment presentation, jumped 30.5p to 1,373p and Zeneca recovered from recent weakness with a 22p gain to 1,546.5p.Imperial Chemical Industries was hit by a profit downgrading, thought to be from Barclays de Zoete Wedd. At one time off 20p, the shares closed 5p lower at 840.5p.Oils were mixed with Tullow Oil clipped 4p at 101p after hitting 94.5p.