about me
Anyone who knows me is aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been building an autograph collection of my favourite actors’ signed photographs. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I enjoy. I have collected the photographs from the actors themselves, through contacts in the studios and through auctions. I now have over 2,000 photographs in the collection.
My Autograph Collection
I have separated my autograph collection into different categories, which you can see below. Feel free to browse whichever section interests you. Inside, I share not only the autographed photo in my possession, but also information about the actor, including their biography, photos and posters of their movies, and sometimes videos dedicated to them.
Whether you’re drawn to classic Hollywood icons, contemporary superstars, or character actors with a cult following, there’s something in my autograph collection for every movie enthusiast. If you enjoy my blog, don’t hesitate to leave a comment on one of my entries.
Actors Autograph Collections
Blog Categories
BRITISH ACTORS
Collection of Classic Brittish Actors
IRISH ACTORS
Collection of Classic Irish Actors
HOLLYWOOD ACTORS
Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors
EUROPEAN ACTORS
Collection of Classic European Actors
CONTEMPORARY ACTORS
Collection of Classic Contemporary Actors
RECENT POSTS
SUZY PARKER OBITUARY IN “THE DAILY TELEGRAPH” IN 2003.
Suzy Parker who died on Saturday aged 69, was once said to be the highest-paid model in the world, earning more than £30,000 a year in the 1950s; she later embarked on a brief career as an actress in Hollywood.
Blessed with excellent bone structure, copper-coloured hair and seaweed-green eyes, Suzy Parker enchanted the great names of fashion in the 1950s. Christian Dior called her the most beautiful model in the world; she became the “signature” face for Coco Chanel and was photographed by Richard Avedon and Milton H Greene.
She was born Cecilia Anne Renee Parker on October 28 1933. Her elder sister was the model Dorian Leigh, who had been a magazine “cover girl” since the 1940s; and it was she who introduced the future Suzy Parker to modelling when she was a girl of only 14, taking her to see the modelling agent Eileen Ford. The agent’s initial impression was not favourable: she insisted that the teenager was, at 5 ft 9 ins, too tall to be a successful model
But Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor at Harpers Bazaar for 25 years and editor-in-chief of Vogue, disagreed; the influential arbiter of style and elegance immediately offered to use the 14 year old in fashion shoots. Suzy Parker soon became one of the most recognisable faces of the 1950s, and a forerunner of today’s “supermodels”.
It was perhaps inevitable that she should turn to Hollywood, and in 1957 Suzy Parker made her film debut in the musical Funny Face, which starred Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn – Hepburn was to become a good friend. Suzy Parker danced in a number called Think Pink, a send-up of editors such as Diana Vreeland
Further films followed. Also in 1957, Suzy Parker appeared opposite Cary Grant in Kiss Them for Me; the next year she was seen in Ten North Frederick, starring Gary Cooper. She appeared in The Best of Everything (1959); Circle of Deception (1961); The Interns (1962); andChamber of Horrors (1966).
There were also roles on the television screen, including parts in Tarzanand The Twilight Zone – in one episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963, entitled “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You”, she played six different characters.
In the film Circle of Deception, a spy thriller, she found herself playing opposite Bradford Dillman. They fell in love, and in 1963 they were married on board an ocean liner by the ship’s master. Five years later, she and Dillman abandoned the glamour of Hollywood for a more down-to-earth existence at Montecito, California. For the remainder of her life, the woman who had been one of the world’s most famous models shunned the limelight, preferring to be known as Suzy Parker Dillman.
Suzy Parker’s marital status, before her union with Dillman, had been somewhat mysterious. In 1958 she had broken both her arms, and her father had been killed, when the car in which they were travelling collided with a goods train at Saint Augustine, Florida
then emerged that Suzy Parker had been secretly married, since 1955, to a French journalist and novelist called Pierre La Salle. It did not last, however, Suzy Parker telling one interviewer: “Being married to a Frenchman is interesting – you hardly ever see your husband.” They divorced in 1961.
It also emerged that, at 17, Suzy Parker had eloped from high school to marry a childhood sweetheart, Charles Staton, apparently to escape going to college.
She is survived by Bradford Dillman, four children and two stepchildren
Tribute to Suzy Parker by Mike McCrann in “LA Frontiers”:
The days of the “supermodel” have pretty much disappeared. Today we have celebrities hawking everything from watches to perfumes. The models used in today’s high-fashion ads are mostly anonymous girls with little or no personality.
In the old days, there were legendary models like Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, Cheryl Tiegs, etc. But there was one beauty who transcended all the rest. Her name was Suzy Parker, and she ruled the ’50s as the most gorgeous icon of them all. Suzy Parker also became a movie star—very briefly—before retiring to Santa Barbara with her last husband, actor Bradford Dillman.
Suzy Parker’s older sister was another famous model, Dorian Leigh. Leigh was pretty famous too, but I must say I can’t figure out why, looking at her photos. But kid sister Suzy (born Cecilia Ann Parker in 1932) came to New York to visit Dorian, and this led to the Ford Modeling Agency signing the young beauty to a contract.
Suddenly the 5’10” carrot red head was as famous as any beauty of her day. She was The Revlon Girl. Her face was on every magazine in the world. Suzy became legendary photographer Richard Avedon’s muse. (Years later, Parker said “The only joy I ever got out of modeling was working with Dick Avedon.”) Suzy Parker became the highest paid model in the world, earning over $100,000 a year—a fortune in those days.
Suzy Parker went to Hollywood hoping to become a movie star. Her first film was Kiss Them For Me with Cary Grant and the buxom Jayne Manfield. The movie was pretty bad, and Suzy was upstaged by Jayne’s two assets. A good supporting role followed in Ten North Frederick, where she played the young girl who falls in love with married man Gary Cooper. Parker was lovely in this part, and the last scene in the movie is a great wedding scene when Cooper’s daughter happily realizes that Suzy is the girl that had brought her father the only happiness at the end of his life.
Finally, in 1959, Suzy Parker got the one great role of her career in the fabulous melodrama The Best of Everything. This study of career girls in New York (from the novel by Rona Jaffee) is a cult classic. With Hope Lange, Diane Baker and Joan Crawford, The Best of Everything gives the most glamourous role to Parker. She plays gorgeous Gregg Adams, an aspiring actress who runs around New York in sexy gowns and dark glasses. Greg is wildly in love with Louis Jordan, and most of her scenes are with him and Joan Crawford. When Jordan dumps Greg, she goes off the deep end, spying on him, going through his trash and finally tumbling from his fire escape. Suzy Parker was so gorgeous that she stole the film from her more experienced co-stars.
Superstardom was predicted for Suzy Parker, but life has a funny way of not following the script. After two divorces, plus the death of her father in a car accident (with Suzy also injured), Suzy Parker had enough of fame and empty adulation. She had met actor Bradford Dillman (Compulsion, The Way We Were) while co-starring in 1960’s Circle of Deception. Parker married Dillman and retired. She had four children (three with Dillman) and apparently was quite happy just being a mother. Bad health plagued the former super model, and she died in 2003 at age 70.
Most of the supermodels of the ’50s and ’60s are names attached to bygone eras—faded magazine covers and advertisements. But Suzy Parker’s glorious beauty and talent are permanently on display in the few films she made. If you want to see gorgeous Suzy at the peak of her radiance, rent or buy The Best of Everything. The film is a campy time capsule of its era, but Suzy Parker is the real deal. You cannot take your eyes off her when she is on screen. Model or actress, Suzy Parker was a goddess
NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY IN 2003.
Suzy Parker, the willowy, red-headed beauty whose elegant poses on scores of magazine covers defined glamour in the 1950’s and paved the way for the supermodels to follow, died on Saturday at her home in Montecito, Calif. She was 69.
Her husband, the actor Bradford Dillman, said she had suffered from a number of serious ailments over the last six years.
In the period just after World War II, models were becoming celebrities. Fashion’s influence was inexorably expanding from high society to society at large, and Suzy Parker, along with other models like Dovima and Lisa Fonssagrives, signified a postwar world of stylish promise for all. When Miss Parker posed in one of fashion’s first bikini shots, America noticed.
Miss Parker was the first model to make more than $100 an hour and $100,000 a year, said Eileen Ford, the doyenne of modeling agents. She also worked as a professional photographer and editor, and she appeared in lead roles in movies with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper.
Ms. Ford said she was simply staggered when the famed model Dorian Leigh, Miss Parker’s oldest sister, introduced her to Suzy, then 15.
”She was the most beautiful creature you can imagine,” Ms. Ford said. ”She was everybody’s everything.”
Miss Parker’s trademark in photographs and later on the movie screen was icy sophistication, often likened to that of Grace Kelly, but in person she exuded a girl-next-door prettiness and a sort of wacky loquaciousness. Audrey Hepburn’s role in ”Funny Face,” as a fast-talking beatnik who somewhat unwillingly becomes a world-famous model, was inspired by her, and she made a cameo appearance in the film, her first movie role.
Miss Parker adored slouch hats of the sort favored by Garbo and collected Coco Chanel’s classic designs for herself. Richard Avedon, the photographer, called her ”my most challenging and complicated of muses.”
Cecilia Ann Renee Parker was born in San Antonio on Oct. 28, 1933. While still in high school in Jacksonville, Fla., she modeled in the summers for Ford Models, and after graduation went to work full time for the agency. In a silent profession Miss Parker was outspoken.
”Suzy Parker didn’t stop talking when I first tried to take her picture,” Horst, the photographer, said. ”I said, ‘You keep talking,’ and I left. When she got into the movies, I joked that maybe she would do for the movies what she would never do for me — hold still.”
She publicly condemned drinking and smoking and said marriage killed romance. The New York Daily News reported her lecturing a French economist about the French economy. She said she talked too much for most men.
Her often-quoted remark that she could love a man more when she was not married to him exploded in headlines when it turned out she was secretly married.
That marriage, to Pierre de la Salle in 1958, was actually her second; she had been briefly married to a high school sweetheart. She and Mr. de la Salle, from whom she was later divorced, had a daughter, Georgia, of Paris, who survives her.
In 1963 she married Mr. Dillman, who survives her, along with their daughter, Dinah Kaufman of Irvine, Calif.; their sons Charles, of Los Angeles, and Christopher, of Encinitas, Calif.; and four grandchildren.
Her sisters Dorian Leigh of Paris and Florian Boice of Annapolis, Md., also survive her.
Miss Parker said she looked in the mirror each day and thanked God for her cheekbones. But she insisted that she modeled only for money and had other professional ambitions. In the mid-1950’s she temporarily abandoned being a cover girl for several years to be a photographer herself, apprenticing with Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and working for the French edition of Vogue.
It was through Mr. Avedon that Miss Parker parlayed her modeling fame into a movie career. As visual consultant in the movie ”Funny Face,” Mr. Avedon selected her for a brief but conspicuous appearance. Written by Leonard Gershe and directed by Stanley Donen, the 1957 film depicted a high-fashion photographer not unlike Mr. Avedon, played by Fred Astaire. Miss Parker was the inspiration for Audrey Hepburn’s character in the film, a somewhat kooky intellectual and free spirit.
Hepburn, in turn, became such a cheerleader that Miss Parker called the actress her ”Hollywood press agent.”
Miss Parker was cast opposite Cary Grant in ”Kiss Them for Me” in 1957, getting bad reviews. She appeared with Gary Cooper the next year in ”Ten North Frederick.” This time, Bosley Crowther in The New York Times said she underplayed her part ”neatly.”
She appeared in 1959 in ”The Best of Everything,” based on Rona Jaffe’s novel. In 1961 she played opposite Mr. Dillman in ”A Circle of Deception.” They wed in 1963.
Miss Parker was in several more movies and became a sought-after television guest in the 1960’s. Her most famous television appearance was in a 1963 episode of ”Twilight Zone” in which she played six different parts.
She retired from acting in the mid-1960’s and moved with Mr. Dillman to the Santa Barbara area.
In his book ”Cover Girls and Supermodels, 1945-1965” (Marion Boyars, 1996), the French journalist Jean-Noël Liaut said Miss Parker had escaped the unhappy outcomes of other stellar models.
He wrote, ”She became a perfect housewife, even to the extent of baking her own bread
- Liam
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Gary Raymond was born in 1935 in London. His first film was the swashbuckler “The Moonraker” with George Baker and Sylvia Syms in 1958. He went on to star with Richard Burton in “Look Back in AAnger” and with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in “Suddenly Last Summer”. He played the title role in “The Playboy of the Western World” in 1962 with Siobhan McKenna as Pegeen Mike. In 1965 he went to Hollywood to play St. Peter in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and stayed to make the cult television series “The Rat Patrol”. By the late 1960’s he was back in England again where he has had a long career on the stage and in movies and television.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Born in Brixton, England in 1935, robust and good-looking Gary Raymond came from an acting family. Born Gary Barrymore Raymond, the youngest of three sons (one brother is a twin), his parents were music hall entertainers. Gary won a scholarship at the age of 11 to Gateway School in Leicaster, then graduated five years later and took on assorted odd jobs as a furrier and clerk while studying drama through the auspices of the London County Council.
He was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and trained there until he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-50s. Amid the wealth of his Shakespearean repertoire include the roles of “Horatio”, “Claudius”, “Macbeth”, “Oberon”, “Benedick”, “Orlando” and “Antonio
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THE TIMES OBITUARY IN 2023:
BETTA ST JOHN OBITUARY
Actress of stage and screen who starred alongside Cary Grant in the MGM romcom Dream Wife
Saturday July 15 2023, 12.01am BST, The Times
A Hollywood debut at ten years old alongside Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart in the classic 1939 western Destry Rides Again was undoubtedly a fine start for Betta St John’s film career.
Yet had it not been for a family holiday, her introduction to filmgoers could have been even more memorable. Shortly before she was cast in Destry Rides Again to sing the cowboy song Little Joe The Wrangler, she was offered a part as one of the Munchkins in The Wizard Of Oz.
However, her parents owned a cabin in the picturesque Morongo Valley on the edge of California’s Mojave desert and had arranged a trip there. The dates of the holiday clashed with filming and so St John was unable to join Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion on the set of a film that in 2022 was ranked second by Variety magazine in its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.
Like her contemporaries Judy Garland and Shirley Temple, St John was a member of the Meglin Kiddies, the troupe of child actors and dancers established by the former Ziegfeld girl Ethel Meglin. The school became the first call for Hollywood studios looking for youthful talent and, by the time she was eight years old, St John had already been issued with a social security number.
Her first film and in particular her encounter with Dietrich left a lasting impression that reinforced her determination to be an actress.
“I was taken to meet her for her approval and was extremely nervous,” St John remembered more than half a century later. “She was wearing her dance hall outfit and had gold glitter in her hair. My eyes nearly popped out. I’d never seen anyone dressed like that and as a ten-year-old I thought she was simply marvellous.”
There were further films as a Meglin Kiddie, including playing an orphan in the 1943 adaptation of Jane Eyre starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine and another orphan in Lydia (1941), starring Merle Oberon. Yet after her screen debut she had to wait another 14 years for what she called her “first grown-up movie part”, when she played a sultry Middle Eastern princess in 1953’s Dream Wife in a ménage à trois with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr
By then she had made her name on the stage playing the innocent island girl Liat in the original Broadway cast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. She reprised the role when the musical transferred in 1951 to London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where King George VI and the future Queen Elizabeth II saw the production.
When she was cast in Dream Wife, the film’s trailer billed her as “the screen’s new dream girl . . . the ‘Happy Talk’ girl of the stage hit South Pacific”. In both roles the make-up department gave her eyes an Oriental look. “Showbusiness won’t let me open my eyes,” she joked in the language of the time
When she was cast in Dream Wife, the film’s trailer billed her as “the screen’s new dream girl . . . the ‘Happy Talk’ girl of the stage hit South Pacific”. In both roles the make-up department gave her eyes an Oriental look. “Showbusiness won’t let me open my eyes,” she joked in the language of the time.
Over the next 18 months she made six more films, including All the Brothers Were Valiant, filmed in Jamaica opposite Stewart Granger, and in the biblical epic The Robe, in which she played Miriam opposite Richard Burton as the Roman tribune in charge of the Crucifixion. Burton left as big an impression on her as Dietrich had done. She described him admiringly as “a legit actor” and felt he was “only in Hollywood for the money
She also played Princess Johanna in the 1954 screen adaptation of The Student Prince, singing opposite Mario Lanza, although his voice was overdubbed and he did not appear in the film. She cited it as her favourite among the films she made in adulthood, which also included two Tarzan films in which she played Jane-type roles opposite Gordon Scott as the king of the jungle.
Yet like Shirley Temple, who retired from making movies at the age of 22, St John decided that her career as an adult actor would be brief. Her final screen role came alongside Christopher Lee in the 1960 supernatural horror film The City Of The Dead.
She was only 30 years old and acknowledged it was not the most distinguished way to end her career. “That was sort of an embarrassment because I didn’t like horror movies,” she admitted. “But I’m glad I did it because apparently it has become a cult film.”
There were no regrets about her early retirement. “I thought my career was long enough and I didn’t feel I was giving up very much,” she said. “I wanted to stay home and raise the children and my family was much more important to me. Very few actors can keep a family and marriage together, with a good career going too.”
She enjoyed a 40-year-marriage to the English actor and singer Peter Grant. They met when he was cast as the young Marine officer Lieutenant Cable in the London production of South Pacific and she called him her “leading man” until his death in 1992. She is survived by their three children, Roger Grant, a London-based television producer, and daughters Deanna and Karen
She was born Betty Jean Striegler in 1929 in Hawthorne, California, the daughter of May and George Striegler, an electrician. Her mother put her in theatrical school at the age of seven, where she learnt “dancing, singing and all the bits you do at an early age”.
In her childhood films she appeared as Betty Striegler, the change of name coming after the New York Theater Guild was scouting in Los Angeles for the Broadway openings of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals Oklahoma! and Carousel.
“Whatever I did obviously impressed them because they asked if I would go to New York, where they would put me into whichever one opened first,” she remembered. “There I was, with the choice of ‘Do you want to go back to school, or do you want to go to New York?’ ”
She made her Broadway debut in the chorus line of Carousel on her 16th birthday. “No critic will bother to spell Striegler,” Richard Rodgers told her. “So let’s call you St John.”
Although she lived most of her life in America and kept her main home in Banning, near the Morongo Valley, where her family’s holiday had prevented her appearing in The Wizard Of Oz, she was also a great Anglophile, with a second home in London
For many years she spent summers in Britain, where she loved to hike the coastal paths, and she moved across the Atlantic permanently in 2018, spending her final days in Brighton.
Betta St John, actress, was born on November 26, 1929. She died on June 23, 2023, aged 93
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Quad city times article by laura wagner in nov 2023
Audrey Dalton was born in Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland, on January 21, 1934, the third of five children of Emmet Dalton and Alice Shannon; she was preceded by Emmet Michael and Sybil, and followed by Richard and Nuala. Emmet Dalton (1898-1978) led an eventful life: During the First World War, he fought in the British Army with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, rising from a commissioned second lieutenant when he joined up, to captain. Awarded the Military Cross, he was often referred to as “The Boy Hero of Ginchy.” He was a major general in the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army in the Irish Civil War. Dalton was also a good friend of Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, and was with him in 1922 when Collins was ambushed and killed in Cork. (Read more about him in the 2016 book Emmet Dalton: Somme Soldier, Irish General, Film Pioneer by Sean Boyne.)
Audrey’s interest in acting started early: “I was probably five years old [laughs]—I just allllways wanted to be an actress, as long as I can remember. Probably from just being in theaters. Irish people generally are more theater-going than in a lot of places. I wanted it right from the beginning. I did the usual, school plays. I attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart School and while there played Antigone in one of the school plays when I was 13!”
Emmet Dalton moved to London in 1941 and became a sales agent for Paramount Pictures. In 1947, he became Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn’s personal representative in Britain. In December 1949, the rest of his family joined him in London, and Audrey finished high school there.
At 17, Audrey auditioned at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). “They didn’t accept anyone ’til 18, so I had a few months in a preparatory academy that they ran. I was at the Royal Academy until I came to the U.S., which was a little under two years later.”
In 1952, Dalton was appearing in a RADA play when a Paramount executive in London saw her and asked her to screen-test for an upcoming Hollywood movie, The Girls of Pleasure Island. Dalton and two other aspiring British actresses, Joan Elan and Dorothy Bromiley, landed Pleasure Island’s three ingénue leads. (“The Irish papers kicked up quite a fuss over my selection as a typical English girl,” Audrey told columnist Florabel Muir.) In March ’52, the ladies left London and, after a few days’ stopover in New York City, continued on to California, where Girls of Pleasure Islandfilming began in late May. The movie was based on William Maier’s 1949 novel Pleasure Island (a fictional South Pacific island), adapted and directed by F. Hugh Herbert. After 20 days of shooting, Herbert fell ill and was hospitalized. First assistant director Alvin Ganzer finished the film and received a co-director credit
Dalton, Elan and Bromiley play the naïve, sheltered teenage daughters of the island’s British administrator Leo Genn. They get their first glimpse of young men when 1500 Marines arrive to build an airstrip. These men haven’t seen a woman in 18 months, and hilarity ensues. Dalton, who “bestows her gentleness” (East Kent Gazette) on lieutenant Don Taylor, comes across well, especially in a quiet, sweet scene with Genn, talking about how much they both love the island. Jimmie Fidler predicted in his column that Dalton was “headed for the top rung in movie fame. She has beauty, and what’s equally as important, acting ability.”
Paramount went all-out publicizing the trio (called “New Paramount Personalities” during the end credits), and they became a Life magazine cover story (July 28, 1952): Inside, was a photographic essay by John Engstead, with the gals demonstrating “first an English conception of what American girls are like—sultry, giggling, fervidly leave-taking, jitterbugging; then America’s conception of English girls—demure, tea-drinking, shuddering at the idea of a goodnight kiss, dancing with straight backs at a good yard’s distance from their escorts.” Life quoted an unnamed Paramount editor who remarked, “The Bromiley dame is a pixie, Dalton is ladylike, but the third one is hard to dig.” The three girls and a pair of Pleasure Island actors, Don Taylor and Richard Shannon, were scheduled to go to Korea to entertain U.S. troops in battle zones and hospitals, but at the last minute Bromiley got appendicitis and couldn’t travel. Paramount substituted one of their “Golden Circle” contract players, Kathryn Grant, to take her place
Dalton told Tom Weaver, “Kathryn Grant was fine, and fit in well. That Korea trip was an incredible experience. Flights were long in those days before jets: We flew from Burbank to Travis Air Force Base [in Solano County, California] at night and the next morning we flew to Wake Island or Guam, I can’t remember which, for refueling. The next day we took off for Tokyo, where we stayed at the famous Imperial Hotel, Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘earthquake-proof’ hotel. A couple of days there and then on to Seoul. All our travel was on MATS [Military Air Transport Service] planes—backs against the sides of the plane and small, upright seats.
“In South Korea, we traveled from one base to another every day in an Army truck—always in a convoy of other trucks. The Army treated us so well, serving us their best food. Each night, The Girls of Pleasure Island was shown to a huge audience. After the film, we three girls put on a short skit wearing our beautiful Edith Head ballgowns. The rain was pretty much constant, so as we walked from the truck to the room where the film had been shown, we thought it was funny as we slipped around holding those tulle creations out of the mud and puddles. Inside, we’d sit on the edge of the stage and chat with the guys. Paramount had arranged for us to take a note from anyone who wanted us to send a message home for them. The studio collected the names and addresses and mailed the messages home.
When we were close to the border, Don Taylor and I were flown in the general’s bubble helicopter up to the front where the fighting was actually going on. The two of us were greeted like you can’t imagine and just talked and posed for pictures with the guys. This whole experience is something I will never forget.”
Dalton was the only one of the three girls to continue with a long-term Paramount contract. “Serenely beautiful, dark-haired, with gray-green eyes, she is 18, intelligent and Irish. Looks like a winner,” wrote Photoplay. Her first assignment was a loan-out to 20th Century-Fox for My Cousin Rachel (1952), an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s then-new Gothic novel, with Olivia de Havilland in the title role and Richard Burton making his American film bow. Director Henry Koster told Louella Parsons that he requested Dalton because “I saw her on the screen and I think she has great possibilities as a coming actress.” The young master of a mansion on England’s Cornish coast, Philip Ashley (Burton) tortures himself over his enigmatic cousin Rachel (he can’t decide whether she murdered his beloved guardian or not). The Boston Globe wrote that Dalton gave a “sweet and warm characterization as the girl who wishes Philip would love her instead of Rachel….” In one scene with Burton, Audrey displays gutsy resolve, as she confronts him about his hopeless fixation on de Havilland
Dalton said of her second movie job, “I was working at a different studio and with a director, Henry Koster, I didn’t know—I don’t recall if I’d ever even met him. To my astonishment, he greeted me as a professional, something I wasn’t sure of myself, and we dove right into the scene being shot, effortlessly. He spoke quietly to me about that first scene, and others that followed during the filming, with a rehearsal run-through and off we went. He accepted my interpretation and our work together on the film went smoothly from there on. He came across to me as being confident, deeply involved and knowledgeable about his work. Henry Koster was probably the quietest and most low-key director I ever worked with.
“Burton and de Havilland appeared to get along well when they were working, but off-camera on the set she retired to her dressing room and he stayed on the set, yakking away to the crew and with [English actor] Ronald Squire, who had become a great friend. The two of them spent their time reminiscing about work and other actors in London, laughing uproariously and shooing me away when they felt the story they were telling was too risqué for my young ears (I was 18). My scenes with Burton were magic for me, he was never condescending and I always felt at ease. The scenes practically played themselves. I knew of his reputation as a serious and dedicated actor and couldn’t believe my good fortune to be working with him.
Working with Burton and de Havilland in our scenes together was different. The atmosphere was a little uptight as the quiet de Havilland made clear the scene was hers, as she measured up to Burton. They were so different from each other. He was all noise and banter, fun and bluster, and oh, that voice! I was so impressed to be working with him on his first Hollywood film and he seemed to know how shy and overwhelmed I was. He went out of his way to try to draw me out and talk to me when we weren’t shooting.
“De Havilland was always courteous to me and professional and I continued to be in awe of her. She had such control of her work and never displayed any nervousness. The crew’s respect for her apparent.
“My Cousin Rachel was also the first of many times in my career where I had to ride a horse, and sidesaddle at that. I don’t think my fear showed! In spite of all the Westerns I did later, I continued to be very wary and scared around horses.”
Reporters were struck by Audrey’s resemblance to Joan Bennett, and some readers wrote to movie magazines asking if she was Bennett’s daughter. This caused further confusion when Bennett’s real-life daughter, Melinda Markey, had a small part in Dalton’s next.
Later in 1952, Dalton was loaned out again to Fox to play Annette, daughter of Richard and Julia Sturges (Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck), in Titanic (she beat out Terry Moore and Margaret O’Brien for the role). Based on one of the major news events of the 20th century, the sinking of the British luxury liner, director Jean Negulesco’s film bases a lot of its Oscar-winning story (pre-iceberg) on the wealthy Sturges family: Richard and Julia’s marriage is in trouble, and Annette falls for another passenger, handsome young college student Gifford Rogers (Robert Wagner). But the latter couple’s romance is “suddenly split asunder” (Spokane Chronicle) when the “unsinkable” Titanic fails to live up to its hype and, as the closing narrator puts it, “passes from the British Registry.” Regarding her on-screen parents, Dalton told journalist Nick Thomas in a 2016 interview that Webb “was very funny with a sharp wit,” and Stanwyck “a dream—the ultimate pro, always prepared and ready to help.”
There is a certain similarity, Dalton noted, between the fictional characters in her Titanic and the 1997 megahit directed by James Cameron: “The family that was ‘dysfunctional,’ so to speak, the love affair with the young man and so on. Even the opening sequence of the family arriving at the boat, the flurry of the passengers and everything, was just so similar to the beginning of [the 1953] Titanic. …I thought the dialogue in the new one was just inane. But it’s a fascinating picture, no question. And what a success! Of course, now people say about me, ‘She was in the original Titanic,’ and I have to stress the in, not the on!” she laughs.
On January 1, 1953, teenage Audrey and UCLA student James Brown, 22, wed in Los Altos, California. They kept the marriage a secret until that May. Brown later became an assistant director.
Finally making a second movie for her home studio Paramount, Dalton joined the cast of the Bob Hope comedy Casanova’s Big Night (1954). “Joan [Fontaine] was very effervescent and a great match for Bob Hope. They just traded barbs all the time and laughed and joked,” Audrey told interviewer Rick Armstrong in 2016. “It was fun. On the set, he always had the same group of small-part players with him. He knew all these people and would make sure that they were included somewhere in his movie so they always had a job. He took care of people. He was very, very sweet. In fact, when I first came [to Hollywood], I was 18 and on my own. He had a son and a daughter, who were a little younger than me by a couple of years. On Sunday evenings, he would sometimes take me to dinner with his wife. They would come pick me up and take me to dinner because they figured I needed a little looking after. He and Dolores were kindness itself.”
Casanova’s Big Night is one of Hope’s funniest films. Dalton has little to do except look gorgeous playing the lady that Hope, masquerading as the great lover Casanova, has been paid to romance, to test her virtue as her marriage to Robert Hutton looms. She wore a dress made of genuine Honiton lace that belonged to one of the last czarinas, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. “The dress cost over $1000 and weighed 56 pounds! And I’m presuming the $1000 was what Paramount paid when they purchased it for their wardrobe department,” Dalton said. “Studios had huge wardrobe collections in those days.”
In October 1953, Dalton and Richard Allan (from 1953’s Niagara) won first place for Best Newcomers in Photoplay’s “Choose Your Stars” awards. The ceremony took place at the Rodeo Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Barbara Stanwyck acting as emcee. According to Dalton, she was “very pregnant” at the event; and that same month, she gave birth to her first child, daughter Tara—just weeks after the filming of Casanova’s Big Night! Apparently, most people involved with the production had no idea of her condition. (Dalton points out: “The costumes helped.”)
“Why should people know?” she remarked at the time. “The wardrobe people knew, but nobody else did until I told them.” A few months later, she reflected on her career for interviewer Philip K. Scheuer: “More has happened to me in the past two years than I’d ever dreamed possible. …I have made four pictures, toured Korea and the United States, married and had a baby.
“I had wanted to act on the stage and was very determined never to do films. It’s amazing what happens when you’re offered a film contract!” Dalton today says that at that time, she liked the fact that she could work for perhaps a week on a TV episode, perhaps four weeks on a film, “and then be off for a while to take care of and have time with my family. This is why I never did a TV series and why after I had children I did not go away on location—except maybe to London or Dublin, where I had family.”
After leaving Paramount, Dalton’s first film as a freelancer began shooting in early June ’54: She was leading lady to Alan Ladd in the Western Drum Beat (1954), made by Warner Bros. and Ladd’s company Jaguar Productions. Delmer Daves wrote and directed the story of renegade Modocs threatening to break a peace treaty in the Oregon-California territory. Location shooting took place in Sedona, Arizona, where the cast “sweat[ed] it out in the 115-degree heat” (Star Press). Miami Daily News reviewer Herb Kelly ribbed Ladd, claiming he “shows some real tenderness in his love scenes with Audrey Dalton. Instead of the robot-like smooching he usually does, he’s more hep … especially in a night scene in the woods with Miss Dalton.” As an Eastern girl smitten with Ladd, Dalton gave her customary lady-like portrayal; Marisa Pavan, as an Indian girl also in love with Ladd, has a more colorful and active role in the proceedings.
In 2016, Dalton remembered Ladd as “wonderful to work with—very professional. He was very quiet off the set, very much a gentleman. I knew his family in Los Angeles. My father had known Alan because they were both into racehorses. When I came here [to California], Alan was asked to keep an eye on me. He took me into his family. He had a daughter who was a student at UCLA and she and I became good friends. We’re still friends.”
She was signed by MGM for The Prodigal, a $5,000,000 “wannabe epic” based on the Bible story of the Prodigal Son; it was adapted by Samuel James Larsen, a cerebral palsy sufferer who lived in a hospital and typed with a pencil in his mouth. Lana Turner starred as the temptress Samarra and Edmund Purdom played the title role, with Dalton as Purdom’s shy betrothed. Modern Screen summed this one up pretty well: “Wait till you dig Lana in those bugle beads! She is a real-life goddess for whom young men willingly dive into a pit of fire. And when Edmund Purdom spots her, he says goodbye Poppa (Walter Hampden) farewell Ruth (Audrey Dalton) hail Samarra (that’s Lana) I’m your slave.” Unfortunately, the movie gave Audrey very little to do.
Right after The Prodigal wrapped, Dalton went to England for writer-director Ken Hughes’ Confession (1955), a “punchy” (Banbury Guardian) crime thriller involving a bank heist, murder in a confessional, and a family torn apart by a more modern Prodigal Son (Sydney Chaplin). Dalton makes a good showing as Chaplin’s “charming and ingratiating sister” (Kinematograph Weekly) whose slow realization that he’s a crook and murderer causes her much anguish (or, as the Birmingham Daily Gazette says, she “goes all broody”). Confession, called The Deadliest Sin in the U.S., was a “money-spinner overseas” (Kinematograph Weekly), doing smash box office. Dalton followed this with the John Payne Korean War movie Hold Back the Night (1956): In flashbacks, she’s seen as Kitty, a Melbourne girl to whom Payne is attracted out of loneliness (and vice versa). She only had a couple of scenes, but even in her limited screen time, she gives a moving performance as she tells Payne about her husband (she’s unsure whether he is dead or a prisoner of war). “Because John Payne wanted me to play Kitty, I was paid very well indeed for a small part,” Audrey recalled. “Never knew why. Never met him before or since!”
In May 1956, Dalton appeared in her first TV drama, The 20th Century-Fox Hour’s “The Empty Room,” as Carey, a girl determined to prevent the reunion of her father (Patric Knowles) and mother (Virginia Field), who ran out on him many years before. An unimpressed Variety reviewer re-dubbed it “Stella-Dallas-on-the-Thames” and had no use for any of the characters, including Dalton’s “babbling, idiotic” Carey.
With science fiction and horror pictures all the rage, Dalton signed on to make The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) with Tim Holt. “It was presented to me at a time when I wasn’t working. And I always like to work! I was never discriminating with a capital D. I just wanted to work, I enjoyed working. I’ve always felt with those science fiction things that just that one little nugget of ‘well, it could be true’ kind of gets you [laughs]! So, it was fun.” Monster was based on just that kind of true-life “nugget”: A Mojave Desert lake bed, dry for decades, had recently flooded, hatching as many as 4,000,000 long-buried eggs, and soon the newly formed lake was teeming with fresh-water shrimp. Monster’s screenplay made the eggs prehistoric, and the late-blooming mollusks inside grow to the size of small trucks and terrorize California’s Salton Sea area. Dalton, playing a scientist’s secretary at a Navy base, has a dramatic scene in which she emotionally unloads on hero Holt about the recent death of her pilot husband.
Dalton had started at the top, acting with such stars as Olivia de Havilland, Richard Burton, Barbara Stanwyck and Alan Ladd. Asked by Tom Weaver if she felt Monsterwas a step down, she replied, “Of course it was. But I was also just pregnant, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to work much longer—in those days, once you were pregnant, you couldn’t work. So I thought, ‘Well, let me get another one under my belt while I can!’”
At the end of ’56, she appeared in an episode of Lux Video Theatre, “Michael and Mary,” with Patric Knowles (this time as her husband). Audrey did not return to acting until the following summer and fall, when she did two more Lux Video Theatres (“Barren Harvest” and “Judge Not”), two Bob Cummings Shows (“Bob Hires a Maid” and “Bob the Gunslinger”) and a Men of Annapolis (“Look Alike”).
In between, she filmed two 1958 movies, Thundering Jets and Separate Tables. The former, shot on location at Edwards Air Force Base, had her as secretary Susan, girlfriend of USAF Flight Test School captain Rex Reason. Resentful and “broody” over being assigned as an instructor for novice test pilots, Reason makes everyone’s life miserable, Dalton included. Dalton was ostensibly Reason’s leading lady, but it’s her scenes with the charming Buck Class (as Major Mike Geron) that sparkle. She had a smaller part in director Delbert Mann’s dramatic Separate Tables, based on two Terence Rattigan one-act plays and set in an English hotel. But what a movie and cast to be a part of! The stars were Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster and Gladys Cooper, plus David Niven and Wendy Hiller, both of whom won Oscars for their performances in this Best Picture nominee. Dalton, portraying Rod Taylor’s love interest, is not really involved in the main storyline of Niven’s revelation that he has exaggerated his military career, and does shameful things in the darkness of theaters.
In 1958, Dalton’s small-screen credits included two Wagon Trains (“The John Wilbot Story” and “The Liam Fitzmorgan Story”), The Millionaire (“Millionaire Ellen Curry”), Bat Masterson (“The Treasure of Worry Hill”) and Man with a Camera (“Two Strings of Pearls”). Her next film, the post–Civil War Western Lone Texan (1959), starred Willard Parker as Clint Banister, who returns to his Texas hometown and is considered a turncoat because he served in the Union Army. He finds the town overrun by lawlessness—overseen by his own brother, Greg (Grant Williams). Dalton has one of her best roles as a feisty gal who doesn’t know how she feels about Clint’s return. Her part is more energetic than usual as she stands up to the bad guys, slaps them and fights one of them off when he attempts to rape her. When her father is gunned down, Dalton takes matters (and a pistol) into her own hands and confronts his killer.
Back in the old sod, Ardmore Studios in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland, opened in April 1958, founded by Audrey’s father Emmet Dalton; Emmet and Louis Elliman then became its managing directors. Among the movies shot or partially shot at Ardmore: Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), Dementia 13 (1963), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Lion in Winter (1968)—and the Audrey Dalton–starring This Other Eden (1959). Produced by Emmet, the movie tells of a statue of a local IRA hero, Jack Carberry, being erected in the Irish village of Ballymorgan. The residents pretend Carberry was a saint, but know differently. Conor Heaphy (Norman Rodway), who wants to become a priest, learns that he is Carberry’s illegitimate son and, angered by the hypocritical lies told about Carberry, blows up the statue. Audrey plays his friend Maire McRoarty, who is the object of Crispin Brown’s (Leslie Phillips) affection. Nine days of location shooting took place in the County Wicklow and Dublin areas.
“The idea behind it was to showcase the Abbey Players,” Audrey told interviewer Jim Rosin. “[My father] wanted to make a film of the play This Other Eden and he asked if I would star in it. So I went back and co-starred with Leslie Phillips, Milo O’Shea and members of the Abbey Players. Much of the crew that worked on the film were Irish who had been doing films in England. They were delighted to return home. So was I. It was a wonderful experience. I brought my three children and was able to visit with family and friends.”
As for Ardmore Studios, Audrey told Tom Weaver, “I know it went through hard times a couple of times. In Britain, J. Arthur Rank had a monopoly on distribution, Rank owned all the British theaters and would only release his own productions. Other producers could make films but then have no theaters to release them to. The fight went on for years. Rank eventually lost the fight, but too late for my dad.”
Dalton finished off 1959 with guest shots on Disneyland (“The Griswold Murder”), Wagon Train (“The Jose Maria Moran Story”) and Bat Masterson (“To the Manner Born”). Her TV activity picked up in the early 1960s as she guested on King of Diamonds (an episode partially shot in Paris and London), Dante, The Aquanauts, The Tab Hunter Show, Acapulco, National Velvet, Lock Up, Michael Shayne, Bringing Up Buddy, Whispering Smith, The Investigators, Perry Mason, Checkmate, Bonanza (one of her favorites, as she played a bad girl), Kraft Mystery Theater (as a secretary who schemes with her boss Louis Hayward to kill his wife, Signe Hasso—who is plotting to kill him!), Ripcord, Gunsmoke, Death Valley Days, Wide Country, The Dakotas, Temple Houston, Dr. Kildare and I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster. During this TV whirlwind, Dalton was seen frequently on Wagon Train—six episodes between 1958 and 1964.
“I used to do one every season, and one season they even squeezed me into two. There was that [rule] that you couldn’t do two in the same season, because people were going to confuse you with your other role. Ward Bond liked me—I mean, in the nicest way. It was because I was Irish. He had this thing about Ireland.
“Thriller was the same thing as Wagon Train, I kept getting invited back. When they liked you on a series, you’d get invited back. It was like a stock company, and every year you’d come back. Alan Caillou, Abraham Sofaer, a whole bunch of people would keep showing up on Thriller, and you’d renew acquaintance and get to work together again.”
Dalton recalled the Boris Karloff-hosted horror anthology series Thriller as “a great show” that provided her with some of her best parts. Her first, Season 1’s “The Prediction,” was also Karloff’s first as a cast member in the story itself; he was a stage mentalist who suddenly does have second sight, she was his daughter. Just ten episodes later, in “Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook,” she was the one with second sight: Playing the wife of a Scotland Yard detective, she has inexplicable “visions” in a Welsh village steeped in witchcraft. In Season 2, Dalton excelled at cold-bloodedness in “The Hollow Watcher,” a one-of-a-kind mix of murder drama, sexual tension and backwoods horror, set in a North Carolina hamlet whose folklore includes an avenging, demon-possessed scarecrow. Dalton, the Irish mail order bride of a local yokel (Warren Oates), is actually a money-mad colleen partnered with her real husband (Sean McClory) on a globe-trotting murder tour. Dalton recalled, “Oooh, that was grand! That was a little ‘different’ part for me, too, which was nice. Now and then I played [meanies] … but they were the exception. I was always the nice girl, the ingénue—which was fine, which was…the way I was [laughs]! So it was fun to have something with a little more meat to it, and to be given free rein. [Director William Claxton] let me run with it, which was fun. That hadn’t happened before.”
As if three Thrillers in 15 months wasn’t enough to please the Monster Kids in her fanbase, Dalton also joined the cast of the fright flick Mr. Sardonicus (1961). Nineteenth-century Europe was the backdrop for this bleak horror tale, with Guy Rolfe as a farmer without a farthing, reduced to digging up his father’s coffin to retrieve a winning lottery ticket accidentally buried within. The sight of Dad’s skeletal face is so shocking that the farmer’s own face takes on the same lip-less, toothy grin. Now wealthy enough to re-dub himself “Baron Sardonicus,” he forces Dalton to marry him in order to compel her former beau, London physician Ronald Lewis, to find a medical means of restoring his good looks. Horror producer-showman-huckster William Castle’s gimmick for this production: Just minutes from the end, Castle (playing himself) asks audience members if Sardonicus should receive mercy or no mercy. This of course gave viewers the idea that the theater projectionist had two different finales and would then project the chosen one; but Castle knew that every audience would vote to give Sardonicus the works, and therefore a “mercy” ending was never filmed!
“Every time my acting career seems to be on the way up, I have another baby,” Dalton remarked in 1962. By this time, she had four, Tara (born 1953), Victoria (1955), James (1957) and Richard (1959). In her 2016 interview with Nick Thomas, she said with a chuckle, “What’s interesting is that many websites today have given me a fifth child! He even has a birth date and a name—Adrian. Needless to say, my children have made great fun of it and ask why I never told them about their lost brother!”
Dalton made her last two films in the mid–1960s. For Kitten with a Whip (1964), she phoned in her performance—literally! In her one scene, she phones her husband (John Forsythe) at their home and tells him she will return the next day, unaware that he has entangled himself with bad girl Ann-Margret.
Much better was the Western The Bounty Killer (1965). Filmed in only ten days on a low budget, it featured a wonderfully warm-hearted Dalton as saloon girl Carole Ridgeway—who sings “Go Away Old Man and Leave Me Alone,” dubbed by Harlene Stein. (Dalton wants Bounty Killer fans to know that she was directed to pretend-sing it at an “agonizingly slow pace”!) She falls for the naïve Willie Duggan (Dan Duryea) and they plan a future together. But, when Willie’s friend (Fuzzy Knight) is slain, the lust for vengeance makes Willie a killer. The Bounty Killer received notice for the small role played by Western pioneer G.M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson (his last film), but for Dalton fans it contains one of her most heartfelt performances. Audrey recalled with a laugh that producer Alex Gordon “made me feel like a star—even though I was over the hill by the time I did that.”
Then, it was back to TV in episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Laredo, The Big Valley, Insight, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Dragnet 1967 and Family Affair plus the telefilm Me and Benjy (1967). She remembered her Wild Wild West (“The Night of the Golden Cobra,” in which she plays maharajah Boris Karloff’s daughter) as “great because I got to walk two cheetahs on a leash! That was fun, and so were the exotic costumes.” She ended her acting career with a trio of Police Woman episodes in 1974, 1975 and ’78.
After 24 years together, Audrey and James Brown divorced in July 1977. On July 20, 1979, she wed an aerospace engineer, and that union continues to this day. She is popular as a guest at nostalgia conventions and autograph shows. Asked why she drifted away from acting, Dalton replied, “It sort of drifted away from me. It happens. You have to really have staying power, and I didn’t, I guess. I was involved with family, and I just let it drift. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t. But I did. One goes on.”
As for life today (2021), she enthuses, “I love being on the ocean and have sailed for over 50 years. Racing boats with my husband is one of my great pleasures. I have been so fortunate, all my life, to be able to continue on. Wherever ‘on’ takes me
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Virginia Mayo obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.
Virginia Mayo who has died aged 84, was the picture of All-American blonde prettiness, despite a slight squint. She was Danny Kaye’s dream girl in four Samuel Goldwyn Technicolored musicals in the 1940s, and, at Warners in the 1950s, she starred in tepid but tuneful trivia, in which she entertained in a limited but decorative way. Her dancing was unmemorable and her singing always dubbed.
However, there was more to Mayo than met the eye. When given the chance to act, she was superb, as in two of Raoul Walsh’s best films, the gangster drama White Heat, and the western Colorado Territory (both 1949). In that year, six of her films were released, and she continued to be a popular star for a further 10 years in a variety of genres. Perhaps She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952), in which Mayo plays Hot Garters Gertie, a burlesque star with ambitions to be a serious actress, who enrols in a drama course, was somewhat autobiographical.
She was born Virginia Clara Jones in St Louis, Missouri. One of her ancestors fought in the American Revolution and later founded the city of East St Louis, Illinois. Her aunt, sister to Virginia’s journalist father, ran a dance studio, where Virginia took lessons from the age of six.
· Virginia Mayo (Virginia Clara Jones), actor, born November 30 1920; died January 17 2005
After graduating from high school in 1937, she became a member of the corps-de-ballet of the St Louis Municipal Opera. She then became a show girl in a Broadway revue, where she was spotted by an MGM talent scout.
David O Selznick gave her a screen test, but decided not to sign her up. Goldwyn saw her potential, making her one of his Goldwyn Girls, as well as immediately giving her a small speaking part in Jack London (1943), which starred the uncharismatic Michael O’Shea in the title role. O’Shea and Mayo were married four years later, the marriage lasting until his death in 1973. (Their daughter, Mary, survives her.)
Mayo soon graduated from the ranks of the Goldwyn Girls to be Bob Hope’s co-star in The Princess And The Pirate (1944), in which she looked ravishing in colour and had good comic timing. At the end, Hope loses Mayo to Crosby, who appears in a cameo for a few seconds. “How do you like that!” responded Hope, “I knock myself out for nine reels and some bit player from Paramount comes over and gets the girl. That’s the last film I do for Goldwyn.” So it was
Goldwyn then cast his two favourites, Mayo and Danny Kaye, in Wonder Man (1944), in which she was a sweet librarian to his bookworm with a gangster twin brother. In The Kid From Brooklyn (1946), cream puff milkman Kaye wins Mayo and the middleweight boxing championship of the world. She appears in Kaye’s daydreams in The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947), and, later in Mitty’s life, in need of rescuing from evil Boris Karloff. By that time, “leggy Mayo with her voluptuous body and creamy skin” was part of many male filmgoers’ fantasies. According to the Sultan of Morocco, Mayo was “tangible proof for the existence of God”.
So it was brilliant casting against type when she took the role of Dana Andrews’s unsympathetic, sluttish wife in William Wyler’s multiple Oscar-winner, The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), about returning war veterans.
Mayo then brought her new veritas to the role of the sensuous saloon singer on the run with escaped convict Joel McCrea in Raoul Walsh’s Colorado Territory, an intense tale of doomed love. The ending, as the lovers choose to die together in the barren rockscape, is one of the great western climaxes.
Walsh again got the best out of her in White Heat, a classic gangster movie, in which she was the flighty wife of psychopath James Cagney, competing with his mother for his affection. In 1950 she danced gleefully with Cagney in The West Point Story. She was also a spirited heroine in period pieces, opposite Burt Lancaster in The Flame And The Arrow (1950), Gregory Peck in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951), and Alan Ladd in The Iron Mistress (1952).
She could do little to enliven King Richard And The Crusades (1954), in which, as Lady Edith, she has the line: “Fight, fight, fight! That’s all you think of, Dick Plantagenet!”; nor The Silver Chalice (1955), where she dallies with Paul Newman in his film debut; nor as Cleopatra in The Story Of Mankind (1957), possibly the most foolish film of the decade.
From the mid-1950s, Mayo was at her best in westerns, often assertive until she changed her tight-fitting riding breeches for something more feminine. Walsh allowed her, as a rustler’s daughter, to be more than a match for Kirk Douglas in Along The Great Divide (1951). In Devil’s Canyon (1953), she was a provocatively dressed woman among 500 men in a prison compound. Mayo’s last good horse opera was Westbound (1959), starring Randolph Scott, tightly directed by Budd Boetticher
Walsh again got the best out of her in White Heat, a classic gangster movie, in which she was the flighty wife of psychopath James Cagney, competing with his mother for his affection. In 1950 she danced gleefully with Cagney in The West Point Story. She was also a spirited heroine in period pieces, opposite Burt Lancaster in The Flame And The Arrow (1950), Gregory Peck in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951), and Alan Ladd in The Iron Mistress (1952).
She could do little to enliven King Richard And The Crusades (1954), in which, as Lady Edith, she has the line: “Fight, fight, fight! That’s all you think of, Dick Plantagenet!”; nor The Silver Chalice (1955), where she dallies with Paul Newman in his film debut; nor as Cleopatra in The Story Of Mankind (1957), possibly the most foolish film of the decade.
From the mid-1950s, Mayo was at her best in westerns, often assertive until she changed her tight-fitting riding breeches for something more feminine. Walsh allowed her, as a rustler’s daughter, to be more than a match for Kirk Douglas in Along The Great Divide (1951). In Devil’s Canyon (1953), she was a provocatively dressed woman among 500 men in a prison compound. Mayo’s last good horse opera was Westbound (1959), starring Randolph Scott, tightly directed by Budd Boetticher
Mayo had been retired for over a decade when she was tempted to return to the screen in a horror picture, French Quarter (1978). She made another, Evil Spirits (1991). The glamour girl, who had not aged much, thanks to plastic surgery, substantiated the idea that blondes have more fun. – Guardian newspaper
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Spencer Tracy was one of the most beloved of American actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
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Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American actor. He was known for his natural performing style and versatility. One of the major stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Tracy was the first actor to win two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor from nine nominations. During his career, he appeared in 75 films and developed a reputation among his peers as one of the screen’s greatest actors. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Tracy as the 9th greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema. |
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Hartley began her career as a 13-year-old in the White Barn Theatre in Norwalk, Connecticut. In her teens as a stage actress, she was coached and mentored by Eva Le Gallienne. She graduated from Westport’s Staples High School in 1957, where she was an active member of the school’s theater group, Staples Players. Hartley also worked at the American Shakespeare Festival.
Her film career began with an uncredited cameo appearance in From Hell to Texas (1958), a western with Dennis Hopper. In the early 1960s, she moved to Los Angeles and joined the UCLA Theater Group.
Hartley’s first credited film appearance was alongside Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea in the 1962 Sam Peckinpah western Ride the High Country; the role earned her a BAFTAnomination. She continued to appear in film during the 1960s, including the lead role in the adventure Drums of Africa (1963), and prominent supporting roles in Alfred Hitchcock‘s psychological thriller Marnie (1964) — alongside Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery — and the John Sturges drama Marooned (1969).
Hartley also guest starred in numerous TV series during the decade, with appearances in Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone (the episode “The Long Morrow“), The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (starring a young Kurt Russell), the syndicated Death Valley Days (then hosted by Ronald Reagan),Judd, for the Defense, Bonanza and Star Trek among others. In 1965, she had a significant role as Dr. Claire Morton in 32 episodes of Peyton Place.With Dennis Weaver in Gunsmoke(1962)
Hartley continued to feature in numerous film and TV roles during the 1970s, including appearances in two Westerns alongside Lee Van Cleef, Barquero (1970) and The Magnificent Seven Ride (1972), as well as landing guest roles in episodes of series including Emergency, McCloud, Little House on the Prairie, Police Woman and Columbo — starring in two editions of the latter alongside Peter Falk; Publish or Perish co-starring Jack Cassidy (1974) and Try and Catch Me with Ruth Gordon (1977). Hartley portrays similar characters as a publisher’s assistant in both episodes.
In 1977, Hartley appeared in the TV movie The Last Hurrah, a political drama film based on the Edwin O’Connor novel of the same name; the role earned Hartley her first Emmy Award nomination.
Her role as psychologist Dr. Carolyn Fields in “Married”, a 1978 episode of the TV series The Incredible Hulk — in which she marries Bill Bixby‘s character, the alter ego of the Hulk — won Hartley the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. She would be nominated for the same award for her performance in an episode of The Rockford Files the following year.
In 1983, Hartley reunited with Bixby in the sitcom Goodnight, Beantown, which ran for two seasons; the role earned her yet another Emmy Award nomination. (She would later work alongside Bixby again in the 1992 TV movie A Diagnosis of Murder, the first of three TV movies that would launch the series Diagnosis: Murder).
In the 1990s, Hartley toured with Elliott Gould and Doug Wert in the revival of the mystery play Deathtrap. Numerous roles in TV movies and guest appearances in TV series during the 1990s and 2000s would follow, including Murder, She Wrote (1992), Courthouse (1995), Nash Bridges (2000) and NCIS (2005). She had recurring roles as Sister Mary Daniel in the soap opera One Life to Live (1999–2001; 10 episodes), and as Lorna Scarry in 6 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2003–2011).
From 1995 to 2015, she hosted the long-running television documentary series Wild About Animals, an educational program.
In 2006, Hartley starred in her own one-woman show, If You Get to Bethlehem, You’ve Gone Too Far, which ran in Los Angeles. She returned to the stage in 2014 as Eleanor of Aquitaine with Ian Buchanan‘s Henry in the Colony Theater Company production of James Goldman‘s The Lion in Winter.
From Wikipedia.
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Risteard Cooper (Wikipedia)
Risteard Cooper is an Irish actor, comedian, singer and writer and is one third of comedy trio Après Match.
Cooper graduated from the acting program at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College. He lived in New York for several years where he worked at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Irish Rep and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company (founded by, amongst others, John Malkovich) playing Mickey in the American premiere of Jez Butterworth’s Olivier award-winning play, Mojo directed by Ian Rickson.
He has played lead roles in the major theatres in Ireland including Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme at the Abbey Theatre, Auntie and Me at the Gaiety Theatre, I Keano at the Olympia Theatre, and in numerous productions at the Gate Theatre such as Arcadia, An Ideal Husband, See You Next Tuesday, Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Betrayal (Pinter Festival) and The Deep Blue Sea.
In 2009, he played the role of Dmitri in Brian Friel‘s play The Yalta Game, directed by Patrick Mason for the Gate Theatre at the 2009 Sydney and Edinburgh International Festivals.
He played the leading role of Michael in the RTÉ/Element Pictures film Bitter Sweet for which he received a Best Actor nomination at the 2009 Monte Carlo Television and Film Awards.
He starred as Setanta de Paor in An Crisis, an Irish language satirical comedy series for TG4 for which he was also nominated at the 2010 Monte Carlo Awards, this time in the Best Comedy Actor category.
In 2011, he wrote and starred in a series of parodies on YouTube sponsored by sports betting agency Betdaq.
Later that year he played Henry Higgins in the Abbey Theatre’s first ever production of Shaw’s Pygmalion going on in 2012 to star as Joxer Daly with Ciarán Hinds (Boyle) and Sinéad Cusack (Juno) in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock at the Abbey Theatre, before transferring to the National Theatre of Great Britain.
In 2013 he played Finbar in a production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir at The Donmar Warehouse, which transferred to the West End in 2014. It also starred Brian Cox, Dervla Kirwin, Ardal O’Hanlon and Peter McDonald and was directed by Josie Rourke.
In September 2014 he appeared as Sir Henry Coverly in the ITV drama The Suspicions of Mr Whicher “The Ties That Bind”, while in 2015 he portrayed Dermot Nally in RTÉ’s “Charlie” and most recently, the serial-killer Laurie Gaskell in the critically acclaimed eight-part comedy-drama “No Offence” for Channel 4.
Cooper also writes for the newspaper, The Irish Times.
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Pauline Flanagan (Wikipedia)
Pauline Flanagan was a County Sligo-born Irish actress who had a long career on stage. American television audiences best knew her as Maeve Ryan’s sister, Annie Colleary, on the soap opera Ryan’s Hope in 1979 and again in 1981. She later returned to the show as Sister Mary Joel.
She appeared in many Broadway plays, starting in 1957 with Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. he starred in the 1976 Broadway revival of The Innocents. She appeared on Broadway in Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1994.
She appeared Off-Broadway, several times with the Irish Repertory Theatre, including Juno and the Paycock (1995). She appeared in the Harold Prince play Grandchild of Kings at the Irish Repertory Theatre in February 1992, receiving the 1992 Outer Critics Circle Awardnomination for Best Actress. Other Off-Broadway work included Yeats: A Celebration.
She appeared in the play Summer, by Hugh Leonard at the Hudson Guild Theater, directed by Brian Murray. (Summer premiered at the Olney Theatre, Maryland, in August 1974.)
A resident of Glen Rock, New Jersey, she died at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey one day before her 78th birthday of heart failure following a battle with lung cancer. She was survived by her husband, George Vogel (whom she married in 1958), a sister, Maura McNally, and her daughters Melissa Brown and Jane Holtzen.
In 1997 she won the Barclays Theatre Awards for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her role in Jennifer Johnston‘s Desert Lullaby, at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. (The Barclays Theatre Awards are for outstanding regional theatre (including opera and dance) in the UK.)
She was nominated for the 1982 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play for Medea in which she performed on Broadway in 1982. In 2001 she won an Olivier Award, Best Supporting Actress, for her performance in Frank McGuinness‘ Dolly West’s Kitchen at the Old Vic.
Dictionary of Irish biography:
Flanagan, Pauline (1925–2003), actress, was born 29 June 1925 in Sligo town, youngest child of Patrick J. Flanagan and his wife Elizabeth (née McLynn). Her paternal family, originally from Co. Fermanagh, were driven out by anti‐catholic pogroms and resettled in Sligo, where her parents managed a retail business. The family’s politics were strongly nationalist and republican; her father fought in the war of independence, spending much time on the run or in jail. Both her parents served as mayors of Sligo, her father as an independent republican in 1939, her mother (the first woman to hold the office) in 1945; Pauline’s uncle Thomas Flanagan served two consecutive terms as mayor (1904–5).
Educated in Sligo at the Ursuline convent school, Flanagan was drawn to acting while a schoolgirl, but faced some family objection to pursuing the interest as a career. After performing in amateur dramatics, she landed her first professional roles with the Garryowen Players during the 1949 summer season in Bundoran, Co. Donegal. In the early 1950s she spent three years in the renowned fit-up company of Anew McMaster (qv), in later life recalling fondly the constant travelling, cheap digs, hard work, invaluable experience, and wonderful fun. She played a great range of roles – support and lead, comic and tragic – in Shakespeare, ancient Greek drama, contemporary potboilers, and melodrama. Colleagues in the company included T. P. McKenna (qv), Patrick Magee (qv), Milo O’Shea (qv), and Harold Pinter.
While visiting a sister in New York in the mid 1950s, Flanagan took a job as understudy in a production of ‘The living room’ by Graham Greene. Thus began her long and distinguished career on the New York stage and elsewhere in America, including numerous appearances on and off Broadway. Her Broadway debut came in the first Main Stem production of Dylan Thomas’s play for voices ‘Under Milk Wood’ (1957); the cast included Tom Clancy (qv). Other early New York credits included ‘Ulysses in Nighttown’ (1958), an adaptation from the text of James Joyce (qv), directed by Burgess Meredith; Flanagan played both Molly Bloom and Mrs Dedalus among other characters, opposite Zero Mostel as Leopold Bloom. She appeared in two other stage adaptations with Irish settings: ‘God and Kate Murphy’ (1959), directed by Meredith and starring Larry Hagman; and ‘Drums under the window’ (1960), from the autobiographical work by Sean O’Casey(qv).
In the early 1970s Flanagan performed several major Broadway roles with the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center: the Female Chorus Leader in ‘Antigone’ (1971); Ann Putnam in a revival of Arthur Miller’s ‘The crucible’ (1972); and Bessie Burgess in O’Casey’s ‘The plough and the stars’ (1973), in a cast that included Jack MacGowran (qv) as Fluther Good, and Christopher Walken as Jack Clitheroe. She played Myra White in ‘Summer’ (1974) by Hugh Leonard (1926–2009), both in the original production at the Olney Theater in Maryland, and at the Olympia in the Dublin theatre festival. Pinter directed her on Broadway as Mrs Grose in ‘The innocents’ (1976), an adaptation of Henry James’s ‘The turn of the screw’, starring Claire Bloom and a young Sarah Jessica Parker.
Flanagan received a Drama Desk nomination for outstanding featured actress in a play for her Broadway performance as the First Woman of Corinth in an acclaimed production of ‘Medea’ (1982), supporting the Tony‐winning Zoe Caldwell in the title role. She appeared in the original Broadway production of ‘Steaming’ (1983), and with Keith Baxter and Milo O’Shea in the long‐running ‘Corpse!’ (1986). In her last Broadway role, she played Madge in a revival of ‘Philadelphia, here I come!’ (1994) by Brian Friel. Her many roles with the off‐Broadway Irish Repertory Theatre included Sean O’Casey’s mother in ‘Grandchild of kings’ (1992), adapted and directed by the noted impresario Hal Prince from O’Casey’s early autobiographies, for which she was nominated for best actress by the Outer Critics Circle. Other credits with the troupe included O’Casey’s ‘Juno and the paycock’ (1995) (as Mrs Boyle), and Leonard’s ‘A life’ (2001).
From the early 1990s Flanagan returned to the Irish stage with outstanding performances in some of the most important Irish plays and productions of the period. She was Mrs Grigson in Shivaun O’Casey’s production of her father Sean’s ‘The shadow of a gunman’, in both Dublin and off‐Broadway in New York (1991). In ‘The desert lullaby’ by Jennifer Johnston at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre (1996), Flanagan played Nellie, the housekeeper, friend, and confidante of the mistress of an old Wicklow country house (played by Stella McCusker); the performance, ‘all mothering minder and loving tender, yet never without due reserve’ (David Nowlan, Ir. Times, 1 Nov. 1996), won her the TMA Barclays Award for best supporting actress in UK regional theatre. She appeared as Mother in ‘Tarry Flynn’, adapted and directed by Conall Morrison from the novel by Patrick Kavanagh (qv), both in the Abbey Theatre premiere (1997), and in the warmly received London run at the Royal National Theatre (1998).
Flanagan appeared in two first productions by the Abbey company of plays by Marina Carr. In ‘Portia Coughlan’ (1996) she played Blaize Scully, the vicious‐tongued paraplegic grandmother of the eponymous character (played by Derbhle Crotty), directed by Garry Hynes. In another pungent work of earthy midlands gothic, she was (in Nowlan’s words (Ir. Times, 8 Oct. 1998)) ‘strikingly and effectively unpleasant’ as the ‘venomously selfish’ Mrs Kilbride in Carr’s ‘By the Bog of Cats’ (1998), opposite Olwen Fouéré; directed by Patrick Mason, she was nominated for best supporting actress in the Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards. She appeared as Nell in ‘Endgame’ (1999) by Samuel Beckett (qv), with Alan Stanford, Barry McGovern, and Bill Golding, which played Dublin’s Gate Theatre, the Melbourne Festival, and the Barbican Centre in London. Directed by Mason at the Abbey, Flanagan was superb as Rima West, the hard drinking, raunchy mouthed, but compassionate widowed matriarch in ‘Dolly West’s kitchen’ (1999) by Frank McGuinness, set along the Donegal–Derry border during the second world war. Receiving a Beckett Award as best actress in the 1999 Dublin theatre festival, she remarked: ‘At my age I should be saying my prayers and getting ready for the grave, but here I am winning awards’ (Ir. Times, 20 Oct. 1999). For the production’s run at the Old Vic (2000), she won an Olivier Award as best supporting actress on the London stage, which she described as the pinnacle of her acting career.
Primarily a stage actress, Flanagan did relatively little work in television or film. Early in her American career she performed in two worthy productions of television theatre: in ‘Juno and the paycock’ (1960) in a cast that included Walter Matthau and Liam Clancy; and in ‘Little moon of Alban’ (1964) by James Costigan, supporting Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer. She made several appearances on US television in the 1980s, and impressively supported John Hurt and Brenda Blethyn in the feature film Night train (1998), set in contemporary suburban Dublin, directed by John Lynch.
Flanagan’s last performances were among the greatest of her career. In a revival of Tom Murphy’s ‘Bailegangaire’ she played the physically and mentally demanding role of Mommo, a confused, bedridden old woman (on stage throughout the entire play), who night after night tells the same disjointed story without ever arriving at the conclusion: how a laughing competition resulted in the renaming of the eponymous ‘town without laughter’. Flanagan compared the role to a nightly ascent of Everest, the script being so tight that the performance must not only be word‐perfect and letter‐perfect, but every punctuation point must be perfectly placed. Directed by the playwright as part of the Abbey’s five‐play Murphy retrospective in the 2001 Dublin theatre festival, supported by Jane Brennan and Derbhle Crotty as Mommo’s two granddaughters, Flanagan was hailed for liberating the play from the legend of Siobhán McKenna (qv), who had originated the role in the Druid production of 1986. Fintan O’Toole praised Flanagan’s ‘exquisitely detailed’ performance, ‘not the baroque opera of McKenna, but a haunting chamber piece’ (Ir. Times, 5 Oct. 2001). As the role had been the swansong of McKenna’s career, so it was of Flanagan’s; the production’s reprisal at the Peacock in 2002 was her last appearance on an Irish stage. Though ill with lung cancer, she repeated the role with the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, where Bruce Weber described her ‘captivating performance’ as ‘by turns comic, pathetic, and chilling in depicting the madness of old age’ (NY Times, 15 Oct. 2002).
Among the best Irish actors of her generation, Flanagan was strikingly featured rather than beautiful; Leonard remembered her ‘Nefertiti profile’ (Sunday Independent, 6 July 2003). Some thirty years old when she first hit the New York stage, she never played ingénue roles, and few leading ones, but excelled as strong supporting characters, with distinctive, often difficult or disturbed personalities, going from strength to strength in such parts as she aged. Michael Colgan of the Gate Theatre compared her legacy to the Irish theatre to that of Donal McCann (qv) and Ray McAnally (qv), remarking: ‘It takes such a long time in theatre to nurture that level of timing and talent’ (Ir. Times, 1 July 2003). Lauded by Murphy as ‘a superb woman, a lion-hearted woman’ (ibid.), she was eulogised for her kindness, generosity, and tolerance. She married (1958) George Vogel, an actor whom she met when he was writing a thesis on O’Casey; they had two daughters, and resided in New Jersey. She died of heart failure 29 June 2003 in New York
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John Shrapnel. Obituary in “The Guardian” in 2020
Richly variegated and utterly plausible, with a distinctively weak “r”, the voice of the actor John Shrapnel, who has died aged 77 after suffering from cancer, was instantly recognisable on stage or screen over the past 50 years. He was therefore much in demand for voiceover work on documentaries or television adverts. He always sounded warm and urgent.
But his glory was on the stage, often with the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre, for whom he played leading and prominent supporting roles from 1968 onwards, including a clutch with Laurence Olivier’s NT company at the Old Vic – Banquo in Macbeth, Pentheus in the Bacchae and Orsino in Twelfth Night – between 1972 and 1975.
His NT debut came as Charles Surface in Jonathan Miller’s remarkable, grimily realistic 1972 production of The School for Scandal. He worked well and often with Miller: as a notable, sweating Andrey in Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Cambridge theatre in 1976; and in Miller’s BBC television Shakespeare series of the 1980s, when he played Alcibiades opposite Jonathan Pryce’s Timon of Athens, Hector in Troilus and Cressida and Kent to Sir Michael Hordern’s gloriously distracted King Lear, saddled with the equally senescent Fool of Frank Middlemass.
Shrapnel was always interesting in these “solid” roles because he played them with such force and intelligence. He oozed gravitas and could make dullness seem virtuous, as he did with Tesman in a 1977 Hedda Gabler with Janet Suzman at the Duke of York’s theatre in 1977, or, late on, as a tremendous Duncan in the Kenneth Branagh Macbeth for the 2013 Manchester international festival.
Unusually, he was marvellous as both Brutus (Riverside Studios, 1980) and Julius Caesar (for Deborah Warner, at the Barbican, 2005) in the same play. And he made a final indelible impression as an archbishop in the 2017 televised version of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, starring his friend Tim Pigott-Smith in his last TV appearance, too.
Shrapnel was born in Birmingham, the elder son of the Guardian’s parliamentary correspondent Norman Shrapnel and his wife Myfanwy (nee Edwards). One of his ancestors, Lt Gen Henry Shrapnel, invented the exploding cannonball and gave his name to the
Manchester, and, when the family moved south, the City of London school, where he played Hamlet.
He took a degree at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and made a professional debut as Claudio in Much Ado Nothing at the new Nottingham Playhouse in 1965.
His major film debut was in Franklin J Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) starring Suzman and Michael Jayston, and he scored a string of big successes on television as the Earl of Sussex in Elizabeth R (1971) with Glenda Jackson – he would be Lord Howard to Cate Blanchett’s Gloriana in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007 – as Sir Percival Glyde in The Woman in White (1982) with Diana Quick and Ian Richardson, and as Semper in Tony Palmer’s Wagner (1983) alongside Richard Burton in the title role and the great German actor Ekkehard Schall as Franz Liszt.
An intensity of presence on the stage, as well as a forbidding authority, made him a natural Claudius in Hamlet, but he added something else in Miller’s production of that play (with Anton Lesser) at the Donmar in 1982: a moving and almost sympathetic study of a man seriously under-endowed with imagination.
This ability to convey psychological layers in powerful figures served Shrapnel well both in John Barton’s 10-play epic, The Greeks, at the Aldwych in 1980, when he doubled a laconically wry Agamemnon with an imperious Apollo; and, especially, as the monstrously unflinching King Creon in Sophocles’ Oedipal Theban trilogy, a role he played twice – first, in Don Taylor’s BBC television adaptation in 1986 (Juliet Stevenson as Antigone, John Gielgud as Tiresias), and then for the RSC in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s version directed by Adrian Noble in 1992.
In the second of these his purple-suited tyrant, with a face of granite and a voice of liquid gravel, became strangely battered and susceptible to emotional pleading. Creon does not cave in, and nor did Shrapnel, but he always found colour and humanity in his inhumanity.
He played a jovial Samuel Pepys in Palmer’s television film England, My England (1995), written by Charles Wood and John Osborne, and starring an unlikely duo of Michael Ball as Henry Purcell and Simon Callow as King Charles II; a non-speaking, dog-hunting taxidermist in the 101 Dalmatians film (1996) starring Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil; Julia Roberts’s British press agent in Roger Michell’s Notting Hill (1999); and another Greek worthy, old Nestor, in Wolfgang Petersen’s all-action, highly enjoyable Troy (2004) starring Brad Pitt as Achilles.
He was a Russian admiral in K-19: The Widowmaker (2001), Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping movie, with Harrison Ford, about the Russian nuclear submarine malfunction.
One of Shrapnel’s sons, Lex, also appeared in that film, but their blood relationship was more fruitfully and indeed movingly mined in a 2015 Young Vic revival of Caryl Churchill’s A Number, a poignant, poetic piece about cloning and parenting in which John played Salter, the crazy scientist meddling with genetic material, and Lex his son Bernard.
Later in the same year Shrapnel rejoined Branagh in his season at the Garrick, playing a powerful Camillo in The Winter’s Tale and a mutinous old actor laddie in Terence Rattigan’s Harlequinade. He was the sort of actor any manager or producer wanted in his company; first name on the team sheet.
Outside his work, Shrapnel loved mountaineering, skiing and music.
He is survived by his wife, Francesca Bartley, a landscape designer (and a daughter of Deborah Kerr), whom he married in 1975, by their three sons, Joe, Lex and Thomas – and by his younger brother, Hugh.
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Sites of Interest
These are some of my favourite film websites. They are a fantastic resource for any film buff.