Hylton’s first screen appearance came in a 1946 programmer A Girl in a Million. She quickly moved on to minor roles in films produced by Gainsborough Studios (Jassy, When the Bough Breaks) and Ealing Studios (Holiday Camp, It Always Rains on Sunday), then in 1948 landed her largest role to date, as an escaped convict’s mistress in Gainsborough’s My Brother’s Keeper. She was cast as one of the daughters in the successful comedy Here Come the Huggetts, then in 1949 as Molly Reed in the Ealing Comedy Passport to Pimlico.

Hylton’s first television appearance was in the starring role of Queen Guinevere in the 1956 series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and from the early 1960s she spent her career entirely in television, where she featured in a number of one-off productions for BBC and ITV drama strands as well as appearing in series such as Dixon of Dock Green, Journey to the Unknown, The Troubleshooters and Take Three Girls. Her most identifiable TV role was Beryl Fisher, the mother of the hapless Betty Spencer (Michele Dotrice) in the BBC comedy series Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em.

Hylton’s second marriage to actor Peter Dyneley, whom she met on the set of Ett kunglit aventyr (Laughing in the Sunshine), made in 1956, lasted until Dyneley’s death from cancer in 1977.

In the early 1950s Hylton was cast in major roles in several films with a predominantly female cast and targeted at female audiences; Dance Hall (1950), It Started in Paradise (1952 – set in the world of haute couture) and 1954 women’s prison drama The Weak and the Wicked. The quality of film roles offered to her then began to fall and she found herself for the rest of the decade toiling mainly in quickly-shot B-films, an exception being a prominent role in the 1960 horror film Circus of Horrors.

Hylton, who had been diagnosed with a congenital heart defect in her late 30s, died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 28 February 1979, aged 52.