This Sporting Life (1963)

Frank Machin: [to scantily clad nightclub singer] Eh love, show us your personality!

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Frank Machin: We don't have stars in this game, Mrs Weaver, that's soccer.
Mrs. Anne Weaver: What *do* you have?
Frank Machin: People like me.

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Richard Harris was a serious rugby player in real life, but of the union variety. He came from Limerick, sometimes called "the rugby capital of Ireland" and played for Garryowen FC, as well as various junior sides. He remained a fan of the Munster team his entire life, and used to go and watch matches with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. Unlike rugby league, up until the 1990s, the union code was strictly amateur, so Harris would not have been paid as Machin is.
Because the budget would not stretch to the thousands needed for the rugby league match scenes at Belle Vue, director Lindsay Anderson deployed hundreds of wooden dummies to stand amongst the human extras for the crowd scenes.
In a scene in a nightclub, a young woman sings the Helen Shapiro hit "Walking Back to Happiness". She was 21-year-old mill-girl, Kim Leslie, from Pudsey. Producer Karel Reisz needed a Yorkshire woman for a small singing part in the film and advertised in the local papers. Within a few hours of the adverts appearing, 200 women had applied, from which a shortlist of four was selected. When these four women performed at the Wakefield Trinity rugby ground, the loudness of the crowd's applause was measured and Kim Leslie's performance was chosen.
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