Stella Bradshaw (Georgina Cates) never knew her father and was abandoned by her mother at an early age. An aspiring actress who has worked mostly as a telephone operator, she lives with her Uncle Vernon (Alun Armstrong) and Auntie Lil (Rita Tushingham). She is a headstrong girl with a mercurial teenage personality filled with contradictions — hardened by the suffering she has seen yet still vulnerable, alternately warm and prickly, perceptive and naive at the same time.