Wearing a vintage-inspired pink and white gingham dress modelling one of the looks from the Barbie movie, June Furlong regularly takes to the stage at The Odyssey cinema in St Albans to introduce the box office hit. She tells the waiting audience she owns about 300 of the dolls. The BBC had to find out more.
Greta Gerwig’s film, which sees the toy, played by Margot Robbie, swap her pink fantasy home for the real world, is this year’s biggest box office hit so far, having made $1.38bn (£1.1bn) globally.
When the St Albans cinema heard that Ms Furlong, who has worked there for four years, had a large collection of the dolls, it jumped at the chance for some of them to take pride of place in the foyer while the film runs there.
The 59-year-old said that as she was unable to display all the dolls in her Hemel Hempstead home, mainly due to the 1,500 pairs of shoes she also owned, the display was a “great excuse to get them all out”.
“There were about 300 at the last count, but there’s more now because I’ve bought a few more from the movie,” she said.