English actress and singer Denise Black’s diverse career has spanned several critically acclaimed television and stage performances. Best known for her role as Denise Osbourne on Coronation Street, Black has also appeared as Hazel Tyler in Queer as Folk and its follow-up series, Cucumber, and as Joanie Wright in Emmerdale. Her other TV appearances include Bad Girls, A Touch of Frost, The Bill, and Doc Martin. Black has also taken to the stage at The Threepenny Opera, Stop Children’s Laughter, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and King Lear. Not only a theatrical talent, Black is also a member of the jazz group Denise Black & the Kray Sisters and the band The Loose Screw.

This Hampshire-born actress found her first role in the Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre production of Miniatures, before joining the Actor’s Touring Company to travel and perform in Europe, Asia, and South America. Upon her return, she formed Denise Black & the Kray Sisters with actresses Josie Lawrence and Kate McKenzie. Appearances on Channel 4 soon followed, as did her TV debut in an episode of BBC’s Casualty. She has since received a 2004 MEN Award for her portrayal of Mari Hoff in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, and the UK Theatres 2018 Award for Best Performance for her role in The Cherry Orchard.

Black can recently be seen performing in Machinal at the Almeida, singing at the Brighton Pride, and making her silver-screen debut in the feature film The Last Tree. Fans can also catch her portraying Lady Cooper in NST City’s The Shadow Factory.

Sean Barrett. Wikipedia

He began acting as a child appearing on BBC children’s television and in films such as Bang! You’re Dead, A Cry from the Streets, War and Peace, The Genie and Four Sided Triangle.

Years later he made many appearances in television and films including ITV Television Playhouse, Z-Cars, The Wednesday Play, Cast a Giant Shadow, Emergency-Ward 10, Chronicle, Armchair Theatre, Hell Boats, Moonstrike, Attack on the Iron Coast, Softly, Softly, The Terrorists, Robin Hood Junior, BBC Play of the Month, The Zoo Robbery, Paul of Tarsus, Tales of the Unexpected, Father Ted, Holby City, Brush Strokes, Minder, Poldark, Noah’s Ark and Theatre 625.

In the mid-1970s Barrett was cast in the BBC Radio series of George Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels as Maigret’s subordinate, Inspector Janvier. He has performed the voices of Asterix and Caius Tiddlius in the English version of The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, Tik-Tok in Return to Oz, a Goblin in Labyrinth, Big Mac and other characters in TUGS, Thadius Vent’s soothsayer Goodtooth in Oscar’s Orchestra, Melchoir in the English dubbed version of the Lapitch the Little Shoemaker TV series, Roly the Pineapple in the English version of The Fruities and UrSu the Dying Master and UrZah the Ritual-Guardian in The Dark Crystal as well as additional characters in two video games The Feeble Files and Viking: Battle for Asgard. He also provided the voice for Captain Orion in Star Fleet, the English version of the 1980s Japanese puppet series X-Bomber.

He also narrated Fair Ground!, Timewatch, People’s Century and Dark Towers for BBC, dubbed voices in many anime films such as Roujin Z, Cyber City Oedo 808 and Dominion: Tank Police and has done voices for several audiobooks and radio stations.

In 1996, he was the narrator for the Channel 4 documentary series, Black Box. The series primarily concentrated on commercial aviation accidents, and the investigations related to them.

Barrett also worked as part of an ADR Loop Group on Aardman‘s first computer-animated film Flushed Away, a voice director on Lapitch the Little Shoemaker and a dialogue director on The Fruities. He has also narrated episodes of the BBC TV series People’s Century and Dancing in the Street, as well as a number of BBC nature documentaries in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In 2011, he voiced Andre of Astora, Petrus of Thorolund and Ingward in Dark Souls. He returned to voice Darkdiver Grandahl in Dark Souls II, and later reprised his role as Andre of Astora in Dark Souls III, as well as voicing Holy Knight Hodrick.

In 2017, he voiced the titan Azurda in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and in 2018, reprised the role for Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna – The Golden Country.

Hagan Beggs (March 19, 1937 – September 16, 2016) was a Northern Irish-born Canadian actor. He was best known for starring as Dr. George Dunbar on the Canadian television series, Danger Bay, which aired on CBC Television and The Disney Channel from 1985 to 1990.  Beggs also co-starred as Liam Gleeson on the Canadian series, Bordertown, from 1989 to 1991. His other television roles included a recurring role as Lt. Hansen during season one of Star Trek: The Original Series from 1966 to 1967.

Beggs was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on March 19, 1937. He immigrated to Canada as a young adult, where he worked as a film, radio, theater, and television actor, as well as a set decorator and props coordinator early in his career.

Beggs died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on September 16, 2016, at the age of 79.

Beswick was born on 26 September 1941 in Port Antonio, Jamaica to Ronald Stuart Davis Beswick, a British father and Myrtle May (néePenso, 1912-2017) a Portuguese-Jamaican mother.

Beswick, her sister Laurellie (1943-2002) and her mother moved to London in 1954 following the separation of her parents. In 1955, she left high school to work to help support her family.

Beswick is best known for her two appearances in the James Bond film series. Although she auditioned for the first Bond film Dr. No, she was cast in the second film From Russia with Love as the fiery gypsy girl, Zora. She engaged in a “catfight” scene with her rival Vida (played by former Miss Israel Aliza Gur). She was incorrectly billed as “Martin Beswick” in the title sequence.  Beswick then appeared as the ill-fated Paula Caplan in Thunderball. She had been away from the Caribbean so long that she was required to sunbathe constantly for two weeks before filming, to look like a local.

Beswick went on to appear in One Million Years B.C. opposite Raquel Welch, with whom she also engaged in a catfight. She then appeared in various Hammer Studio low-budget films, most notably Prehistoric Women and the gender-bending Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, in which she played the titular villainess. She played Adelita in the well-regarded Spaghetti Western, A Bullet for the General (1966) opposite Klaus Kinskiand Gian Maria Volonté. She starred as the Queen of Evil in Oliver Stone‘s 1974 directorial debut Seizure, or Queen of Evil. In the 1970s, Beswick moved to Hollywood and regularly appeared on both the big and small screens. She made numerous guest appearances on television series, including Sledge Hammer!, Fantasy Island, The Fall Guy, Mannix, The Six Million Dollar Man and Falcon Crest. In 1980, she played the lead role in the comedy film The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.

Beswick’s career was active well into the 1990s. Since then, she has mainly participated in film documentaries, providing commentary and relating her experiences on the many films in which she has appeared. She owned a removals business in London, but is now semiretired except for her guest appearances at international Bond conventions.

In April 2013, she was one of 12 Bond Girl celebrity guests in an episode of the BBC‘s Masterchef.

Beginning with Melvin and Howard (1980), she changed the spelling of her last name to “Beswicke”, but reverted to her original name in the mid-1990s; her last credit with the longer spelling is Wide Sargasso Sea (1993).

After a 24 year absence from the screen, Beswick came out of retirement in 2018 to star in House of the Gorgon opposite fellow Hammer film stars Caroline Munro, Veronica Carlson, and Christopher Neame.

Goldie Hawn. Wikipedia.

Goldie Jeanne Hawn (born November 21, 1945) is an American actress, producer, dancer and singer.^[1] She rose to fame on the NBCsketch comedy program Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968–70), before going on to receive the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Cactus Flower (1969).

Hawn maintained bankable star status for more than three decades, while appearing in such films as There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970), Butterflies Are Free (1972), The Sugarland Express (1974), Shampoo (1975), Foul Play (1978), Seems Like Old Times (1980), and Private Benjamin (1980), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing the title role.

Hawn’s later work includes starring roles in the films Overboard (1987), Bird on a Wire (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992), Housesitter(1992), The First Wives Club (1996), The Out-of-Towners (1999) and The Banger Sisters (2002). After a fifteen-year hiatus from film acting, Hawn made a brief comeback in Snatched (2017). She is the mother of actors Oliver Hudson, Kate Hudson, and Wyatt Russell, and has been in a relationship with actor Kurt Russell since 1983. In 2003, she founded The Hawn Foundation, which helps underprivileged children.

Corey Allen obituary in “The Guardian” in 2010.

Corey Allen, who has died aged 75, belonged to that category of film actors who became famous by association. Allen played Buzz Gunderson, the motorcycle gang leader in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), opposite James Dean as Jim Stark. Since the recent death of his one-time room-mate Dennis Hopper, Allen was the last survivor among the leading performers in the film. Dean died in a car crash shortly before its release, and Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo also died prematurely.

Buzz was a relatively small role, but an extremely significant and memorable one. Wearing a leather jacket and white T-shirt, which clashes with Jim’s bright red jacket, Buzz challenges him to a “chicken run” – driving two stolen cars towards the edge of a seaside bluff at high speed, with the first one to jump out of his car before it sails over the edge a chicken. It ends with the death of Buzz and with Jim suffering guilt.

A subtle intimacy is created between the two outsiders. As the boys prepare for the perilous test of nerves, Buzz remarks, while sharing a cigarette: “You know something? I like you.” “Why do we do this?” Jim asks. “You’ve gotta do something. Don’t you?” Buzz replies.

The role, when he was 21, set the pattern for most of Allen’s acting career, which consisted mainly of variations of Buzz – cool thugs or hot juvenile delinquents – during the period when teenagers were seen in terms of social problems. In The Shadow On the Window (1957) and Juvenile Jungle (1958), he kidnaps a woman; in The Big Caper (1957), he is part of a gang waiting to rob a bank; in Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl (1958), he is a petty Chicago gangster; and he helps disfigure Paul Newman at the end of Sweet Bird of Youth (1962).

At the same time, he was appearing in a dozen or so television shows, often in westerns as a trigger-happy cowboy. No wonder Allen decided to retire from acting in 1970 and become a director, principally of television series.

Allen, who was born Alan Cohen in Cleveland, Ohio, continued the Hollywood tradition of Jewish actors taking new names, such as Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall. His father was Carl Cohen, a casino manager in Las Vegas, and part-owner of the Sands hotel, who was notorious for having punched an obstreperous Frank Sinatra in the mouth in 1967, causing the singer to lose two teeth. Allen studied for a BA in fine arts in theatre at UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles), where he co-starred with Barry Atwater in a short film set during the American civil war, A Time Out of War, which won the Oscar for best short film in 1955. On graduating, he began performing in a variety of plays in the Los Angeles area, in one of which he was spotted by the director Nicholas Ray, who cast him in Rebel Without a Cause.

Television kept Allen busy as a director for around 25 years, during which time he made three best-forgotten low-budget feature films: The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio (1971), Thunder and Lightning (1977, about moonshiners) and Avalanche (1978, a disaster movie starring Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow). Allen was more comfortable directing episodes of TV series such as The Rockford Files, Hill Street Blues, for which he won an Emmy, The Paper Chase, Dallas and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Allen, who had Parkinson’s disease for the last two decades, remained active as a director of plays until a few years ago. He is survived by a daughter, Robin.

• Corey Allen (Alan Cohen), actor and director, born 29 June 1934; died 27 June 2010

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Angular in features, reserved in demeanor and more-or-less plaintive in appearance, actress Jane Alexander’s has played down the glamor card for the most part. Her true brilliance has come from the remarkable range and depth of her talent. Heralded as one of the finest 70s actresses to arrive in films following a towering Broadway success, Jane went on to earn an Oscar nomination for her film debut, an acknowledgment given to very few of her acting peers.

She was born Jane Quigley in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 28, 1939, the daughter of Thomas, an orthopedic surgeon, and Ruth Elizabeth (née Pearson) Quigley, a nurse. Jane attended Beaver Country Day School, an all-girls facility, just outside of Boston. Here is where she first aspired to acting and made her stage debut as an adolescent in a production of “Treasure Island”. Urged on by her father to find stability in her life, she first attended college before embarking on an acting career. She studied math as well as theater at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she thought computer programming might be a convenient alternative in case her acting dreams fell through. However, a chance to study at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wherein she became a member of the Edinburgh University Dramatic Society, dissolved any other career interests but acting.

Following theater roles in “The Inspector General” and “Look Back in Anger”, Jane found critical success in 1967 when chosen to play the mistress of black boxer Jack Jefferson in the landmark production of “The Great White Hope” at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC. opposite James Earl Jones. She and Jones both won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for their performances when the play went to Broadway the following year. Both also earned Academy Award nominations after making the transition to film. The Great White Hope(1970) would mark the first of four nominations for Jane. Although singled out for her supporting roles in All the President’s Men (1976), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and her heartfelt leading role in Testament (1983) as a small town wife whose family is threatened by radioactive fallout, the Oscar trophy has remained elusive. On stage, she received a plethora of Tony nominations over the years for such sterling work in “6 Rms Riv Vu” (1972), “Find Your Way Home” (1974), “First Monday in October” (1978), “The Visit” (1991), “The Sisters Rosenzweig” (1993), and “Honour” (1998). Other telling parts came as Gertrude in “Hamlet”, Hedda in “Hedda Gabler”, Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra”, Annie Sullivan in “Monday After the Miracle” and Maxine in “The Night of the Iguana”.

Jane has triumphed just as notably on TV. She perfectly embodied the unglamorous role of Eleanor Roosevelt opposite Edward Herrmann‘s FDR in the TV movies Eleanor and Franklin (1976) and Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977) and was Emmy-nominated both times for her efforts. Decades later she would portray FDR’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, in HBO’s Warm Springs (2005) starring Kenneth Branagh and Cynthia Nixon and won the coveted award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’. Throughout the years she would play a myriad of quality leads in such TV-movies as A Circle of Children (1977);Arthur Miller‘s Playing for Time (1980); which earned her a second Emmy, the title role inCalamity Jane (1984); Malice in Wonderland (1985), in which she portrayed notorious gossip maven Hedda Hopper; Blood & Orchids (1986), and; In Love and War (1987).

Alexander met and married her first husband, Robert Alexander, in the early 1960s in New York City, when both were attempting to jumpstart their acting careers. They had one son, Jace Alexander in 1964, an actor/director in his own right who co-founded the avant garde NYC theater company Naked Angels. Her marriage to Alexander, who was also a director, ended in divorce. She later met producer/director Edwin Sherin in Washington, DC, while he was serving as artistic director at the Arena Stage. He has three sons from his previous marriage. They married in 1975 and reside in New York City.

In 1993, Jane took a sabbatical from acting when President Clinton appointed her as the first chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Relocating to Washington, DC, she showed strong leadership and served for four years. Her 2000 book, “Command Performance: an Actress in the Theater of Politics” chronicles the challenges she faced heading up the organization when the Republican Congress unsuccessfully tried to shut it down. The agency survived but with a 45% cut in funding.

In 2004, Alexander, together with her second husband, joined the theater faculty at Florida State University (FSU). She holds honorary doctorates from 11 colleges and universities in the U.S. In addition, Jane has been active on many boards, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, Project Greenhope, the National Stroke Association, and Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament. She has also received the Israel Cultural Award and the Helen Caldicott Leadership Award.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net