British Actors Archives

Phyllis Calvert

PHYLLIS CALVERT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002

Phyllis Calvert was one of the Gainsborough ladies who were the leading lights of 40’s cinema in Britain. Margaret Lockwood was the leading light followed coosely in popularity bu Phyllis Calvert and then Patricia Roc and Jean Kent. Ms Calvert was born in Chelsea, London in 1915. She made her London stage debut in “A Woman’s Privilege” in 1939. Her breakthrough role on film came with “The Man in Gray” in 1943. Other film highlights include”2,000 Women”, “Fanny by Gaslight”, “Madonna of the Seven Moons” and “The Magic Bow”. She made three films in Hollywood including “Appointment With Danger” in 1951 with Alan Ladd where she played a nun who witnesses a murder. In 1952 she received widespread critical acclaim for “Mandy”. She continued working well into her eighties. Phyllis Calvert died in 2002 at the age of 87

Eric Shotter’s obituary in “The Guardian” :

Phyllis Calvert, who has died aged 87, made her way to the top of British cinema in the 1940s through niceness. As a well-bred, Kensington-accented cornerstone of Gainsborough costume epics, she vied with Margaret Lockwood at the box office.

Regency romps, they were known as. Utter nonsense, with heart-throbs like Stewart Granger and James Mason served up with grace and charm, was quintessential to Calvert’s artistic durability – but to keep it up, without growing dull, required a determined personality and an exceptional talent. It saw her through a long and respectable career in films, plays and television.

The only great dramatic part that ever came Calvert’s way was Madame Ranevskya in The Cherry Orchard, for the Oxford Playhouse on tour in 1971. Yet, within her permitted range, was a talent which served writers from Terence Rattigan (Flare Path, 1942), JM Barrie (Peter Pan, 1947), Roger MacDougall (Escapade, 1953) and Graham Greene (The Complaisant Lover, 1959), to Noel Coward (Present Laughter, 1965, Blithe Spirit, 1971, Hay Fever, 1973), William Douglas Home (The Reluctant Debutante, 1975), Edward Albee (All Over, 1973), Denis Cannan (Dear Daddy, 1976) and Rodney Ackland (Before The Party, 1980).

Whether as bored wives realising how much their boring husbands need them, long-suffering matriarchs tied to bombastic pacifists or in flight from their rowdy families, or just het up because cook had handed in her notice, Calvert’s galère of gracious British womanhood was hard to take your eyes off. Her sense of comedy never failed her in its dry, sarcastic discipline, and there was always that expressive lower lip, with which she stirred our feelings in the feeblest part

child dancer until an injury forced her to switch to acting, she was born Phyllis Bickle in London, and educated at the Margaret Morris school of dancing and the Institut Français. She first appeared on the stage aged 10, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, with Ellen Terry in Walter de la Mare’s Crossings (1925). She got her chance in films at 12 and, during six or seven prewar years in weekly rep, made a few forgotten talkies.

In Max Catto’s Punch Without Judy (1939), she met her future husband, Peter Murray Hill, better known later as a publisher. With him as Hook, she also acted Peter Pan in the annual Scala revival of 1947. The golden wartime days at Gainsborough studios, with James Mason or Stewart Granger dancing attendance in such epics as The Man In Grey (1943), Fanny By Gaslight (1944), Madonna Of The Seven Moons (1944) and They Were Sisters (1945) had long gone; though she regularly went on making films of even more variable quality for another quarter of a century.

One of the best of the bunch was probably Mandy (1952), in which Calvert got all our tear-ducts going as the mother of the deaf-and-dumb heroine.

Her work on stage and television – especially as a woman’s page writer in the series Kate, and plays like Death Of A Heart (1985) and Across The Lake (1988) – stood her in better stead because it had the backing of years in rep. It gave her a technique of little use before the camera, but invaluable on stage.

As a parent-turned-novelist in Felicity Doulkas’s It’s Never Too Late (1954), Calvert took over from Celia Johnson. As the Countess in Anouilh’s The Rehearsal (1961), she superciliously condoned her husband’s affair with Maggie Smith’s young Lucile; and, as Mrs Arbuthnot in Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance (1967), she showed how beans could be spilled with style.

It was, however, as Queen Mary – in succession to Wendy Hiller – that her stage authority rose exquisitely to the social occasion in Royce Ryton’s Crown Matrimonial (1973). Struggling – first, as a mother through the constraints of court behaviour, and, second, as an actor through her natural niceness – to speak to her son, Edward VIII (Peter Barkworth), she brought emotional eloquence to the task of reproaching him for putting personal happiness before the monarchy.

She made her final stage appearance at the Chichester festival in 1989, in Henry James’s The Heiress, when she was 74, and came out of retirement to appear in her last film, Mrs Dalloway, in 1997.

The only other times I recall Calvert risking loss of sympathy for an apparent lapse of taste, grace or charm was at the Lyric in 1963, and at the Duke of York’s in 1964. In the first, as Marius Goring’s wife in Ronald Duncan’s Ménage à Trois, she condoned his misconduct – as long as it took place off the premises, herself departing as a lesbian with his mistress as the curtain fell. Then, as the cold, insensitive stepmother in James Saunders’s A Scent Of Flowers, she left no trace of “the rose that sings”. Was it purely coincidental that neither show ran?

Peter Murray Hill died in 1957. Calvert is survived by her son and a daughter.

· Phyllis Calvert, actor, born February 18 1915; died October 8 2002

Carol White

Carol White was one of the gifted young actors who rose to prominence with the rise of British cinema in the 1960’s. She made a huge impact in the television programme “Cathy Come Home” directed by Ken Loach. She went on to work with Loach again in “Poor Cow” opposite Terence Stamp in 1968. The following year she went to Hollywood and made a tense triller “Dayy’s Gone A Hunting” but sadly her career tapered off significantly thereafter. She died in reduced circumstances in 1991 in Miami at the age of 48.

Her obituary from Bob Meade’s website:

CAROL WHITE, the actress who has died in Florida aged 49, was celebrated for her powerful performance in the title role of Cathy Come Home, Jeremy Sandford’s coruscating account of homelessness on BBC Television, which caused a national sensation in the 1960s. Cathy Come Home was not so much a television play as fierce propaganda. Sandford traced the painful downhill journey of a young couple who began their married life full of hope and gaiety and ended it, separated from their children, as casualties of the Welfare State. After an accident cut the husband’s earnings, the couple lived with unfriendly relations, were evicted from squalid tenements, were driven out of a caravan site and found refuge in a rat-ridden hostel. For all its overemphasis, the production showed with compassion the raw degradation of hostel life. In a tour-de-force of naturalistic acting the highly photogenic Carol White succeeded in making Cathy likeable and eventually extremely moving as the courage and optimism in her wasted away. The diminutive Miss White, a London scrap merchant’s daughter who had already made her mark in the television version of Nell Dunn’s Up the Juction (1965), consequently became something of a Sixties icon. She went on to bring warmth and a plausible innocence to the film Poor Cow, a raw and realistic picture of South London life which opened with a graphic scene of Miss White giving birth while reflecting on the shortcomings of her absent husband (“He’s a right bastard”).

Subsequently Miss White was rather miscast as a jolly virginal girl in Michael Winner’s all too forgettable I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name. However, she made a good impression — when she remembered to substitute a Gloucestershire accent for her native Cockney — as a comely country lass in Dulcima (1971) adapted from a story by H. E. Bates

Miss White showed promise of better things as an actress opposite Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and lan Holm in the film of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer. Her performance as Raisl Bok won her a Hollywood contract in 1968 to make Daddy’s Gone-A-Hunting.

But from then on nothing seemed to go right, and the rest of her career was distinctly chequered. Miss White’s attempts to establish herself in America were dogged by ill fortune. Her name — forever bracketed with her role of Cathy — became more familiar in the press in connection with her amours, divorces, court appearances, drink and drugs than with her acting. “I came to America thinking I was at the very top,” she recalled shortly before her death from liver failure, “and that no one could touch me. But pimps, pushers, liars and ex-husbands brought me crashing down.”-• In 1982 she returned to London to take over the role of Josie from Georgina Hale, in Nell Dunn’s play Steaming, but her comeback ended unhappily when her contract was terminated following several missed performances.

Carol White was born in Hammersmith, London, on April 1 1942. She described her father as “a scrap-metal merchant and a spieler in a fairground and a door-to-door salesman of the elixir of life”. At the age of 11 Carol heard about theatre schools from a hairdresser and thereafter attended the Corona. Miss White made her film debut three years later in Circus Friends and went on to appear in Carry On Teacher, Beat Girl and Never Let Go, in which she played Peter Sellers’s girlfriend. “In those days in British films,” she recalled, “brunettes were ladies and blondes were bits. I wore my hair white and painted my lips red and my eyes dark.” She then married Michael King of the King Brothers singing act and gave up acting for a few years. She returned, this time on the smaller screen in Emergency — Ward 10 and, more notably, as a bright Battersea girl in Nell Dunn’s exhilarating sketch of South London life, Up the Junction. Miss White’s later films for the cinema — not a distinguished collection — included The Man Who Had Power Over Women, Something Big, Made, Some Call It Loving, The Squeeze, The Spaceman and King Arthur and Nutcracker.

She wrote a racy volume of memoirs, Carol Comes Home (1982), in which the Swinging Sixties of purple hearts and Courreges boots gave way to the excesses of Hollywood (“the assault course of a hundred different bedrooms . . . with broken hearts and broken promises left at every corner”), as well as a beauty book, Forever Young. After her divorce from King she married Dr Stuart Lerner, a psychiatrist, and then Michael Arnold, a musician. She had two sons from her first marriage. Jeremy Sandfbrd writes: In her early films Carol captured powerfully the quality of the urban girl-next-door from the less prosperous areas. And in Cathy Come Home she seemed the archetypal young mother, every mother who has ever struggled not to be separated from her children. I last saw her some 10 years ago when she had come over to London and asked me to help her write her autobiography. She had devastating tales to tell about double-dealing Hollywood psychiatrists. Unknown to her, she told me, hers had been paid double her fee by an ex-boyfriend, to “muck her up”. She told me she had come home for good to live the simple life back in Hammersmith, and I never dreamed she would go back to America. She later wrote the book with help from another writer and I have regretted since that it wasn’t me. It seems the classic tale of the pretty but unsophisticated girl who goes to Hollywood. There is no simple moral, though, because Carol, besides being pure and straight, was always reckless, always something of a life gambler.

September 20 1991

The above obituary can also be accessed online here.

Article from Tina Aumont’s Eyes:

Known as the ‘Battersea Bardot’, Carol White used her working class background to enable her to give several natural performances in British dramas, which sometimes mirrored her own turbulent life. Unfortunately, a later problem with alcohol and drug abuse would harm her career, and ultimately end her life.

Born Carole Joan White in Hammersmith, London, on April 1st 1943, Carol studied drama at the Corona Stage Academy. This led to early minor appearances in many of the UK’s best known products at the time. There were ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ parts in ‘Doctor at Sea’(1956), ‘Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s’(1957), ‘Carry on Teacher’, and ‘The 39 Steps’( both 1959). After another dozen or so bits in mainly sexy background roles, Carol’s breakthrough came in Ken Loach’s 1966 social drama ‘Cathy Come Home’, a ground-breaking production, shot as part of ‘The Wednesday Play’ television series. White’s performance was so realistic that for many years afterwards, Carol would quite often be stopped in the streets by people believing her to be Cathy, and offer her money to help her out.

Following ‘Cathy Come Home’, Ken Loach cast Carol as Joy in what would become White’s signature film, the mostly improvised ‘Poor Cow’ (1967). Carol was superb once again as a struggling young mother, married to an abusive criminal (John Bindon). Carol’s final scene where her character gives an interview to camera is astonishingly real and powerful, leaving the viewer with a slight hope of optimism for the much put-upon Joy. The success of ‘Poor Cow’ had everybody knocking on White’s door, with Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty just two of Carol’s famous new fans.

Travelling to America, White’s Hollywood career got off to an interesting start. Taking the lead role in Mark Robson’s stalker flick ‘Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting’ (1969), the film has gained a cult reputation over the years. A pretty good thriller, it tells the exciting story of a woman who is menaced by the man whose baby she once aborted.

Favourite Movie: The Squeeze
Favourite Performance: Poor Cow

Jeremy Spenser

Jeremy Spenser (born Jeremy John Dornhurst de Saram; 16 July 1937) is a British actor who is widely known for his work in film and television from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s. He made his screen debut aged 11 in Anna Karenina (1948).

The following year he played in the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets as the young Louis Mazzini. He played the young King Nicolas in The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe and in Ferry to Hong Kong with Orson Welles.

In the 1960s, the role offers began to slow down. His last film role was in 1966’s Fahrenheit 451 directed by François Truffaut, after which Spenser retired from acting

JOHN FRASER OBITUARY IN ”THE INDEPENDENT” IN 2020.

John Fraser, who has died aged 89, was a British film star who captured the public’s imagination when he appeared in The Dam Busters as Flight Lieutenant JV “Hoppy” Hopgood, taking part in a daring Second World War RAF operation – and offering a pint of beer to the beloved dog of his wing commander

He followed the 1955 box-office hit two years later by taking the role of Inigo Jollifant in The Good Companions, a screen musical version of the JB Priestley play. He and Janette Scott acted the romantic leads, with his schoolteacher-turned-songwriter joining her in a touring variety troupe.

The film, an attempt to compete with American musicals, flopped with cinemagoers but helped to give Fraser heart-throb status and launch a brief singing career. He released “Bye Bye Love” in 1957, but it failed to chart – in a year when several other versions were released, notably the Everly Brothers’ first hit.

Fraser’s star was on the rise again when he appeared in the biopic The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) as Lord Alfred Douglas, known as “Bosie”, poet lover of Peter Finch’s title character. One critic praised his “suitably vain, selfish, vindictive and petulant” portrayal of the Marquis of Queensberry’s son.

Fraser, who acted opposite Hollywood legends such as Sophia Loren over the years, believed his own homosexuality held back his career in an industry where discretion was paramount during the days when it was illegal.

In Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales, his 2004 autobiography, Fraser spilled the beans on his own sexual exploits and those of some of the film world’s most famous names.

He had a six-week fling with Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev that ended only when his agent told him: “If you don’t stop this madness instantly, your career will be over!”

Producer Jimmy Woolf had “taken a serious shine” to Fraser, according to the actor’s memoirs, and showered him with presents while considering who to cast in the title role of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the epic directed by David Lean. He resisted the advances and Woolf gave the part to Peter O’Toole.

Meanwhile, he wrote, Woolf was known to be the lover of Laurence Harvey, who “kept marrying to further his career”.

Living a lie like this made Fraser want to shun Hollywood and, while promoting The Good Companions in Los Angeles, he turned down an offer by an American producer to further his career.

He observed how having different private and public personas affected one major star’s life when, in the late 1950s, he was invited to supper at the mansion of Dirk Bogarde, who kept out of the public eye his long-term relationship with Tony Forwood, whom he simply described as his business manager.

“Do you and Tony still make love?” Fraser asked Bogarde, who replied: “We’ve been together a long time. Now, we’re like brothers.” So Fraser asked what the star did for sex – embark on casual affairs, perhaps? “God, no,” said Bogarde. “How could I possibly in my position? I can’t go anywhere without being recognised.”

Then, Bogarde took Fraser to the loft to reveal his pride and joy, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle standing on a plinth – his substitute for sex.

Fraser confronted his own sexuality by visiting a brothel and consulting a psychiatrist with the idea of changing his sexual orientation but eventually resigned himself to being what was then described euphemistically as a “confirmed bachelor”.

He saw his career out in television and brought his intelligent insights to print as the author of several novels and autobiographical books.

John Alexander Fraser’s life began in poverty on a Glasgow council estate in 1931. At the age of 11, he was sexually abused by a soldier.

Two years later, the death of his father, John, an alcoholic who ran an engineering business until being hospitalised, was followed within six months by that of his mother, Christina (née MacDonald). He and his two sisters were brought up by an aunt.

On leaving Glasgow High School aged 16, he joined the city’s Park Theatre company as an assistant stage manager and was soon landing acting parts.

Following national service as a lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals on the Rhine, he became a member of the new Pitlochry Festival Theatre company, set up by the director of the Park Theatre after its closure.

In 1952, Fraser made his television debut by starring as David Balfour in a BBC serialisation of Kidnapped.

It led to a seven-year contract with the Associated British Picture Corporation, which thrust him into the spotlight in Valley of Song (1953), romancing Maureen Swanson, a fellow Glaswegian who later became a lord’s wife.

Fraser’s other significant film roles included a Scottish piper in Tunes of Glory (1960), alongside Alec Guinness and John Mills; Prince Alfonso in El Cid (1961); and Catherine Deneuve’s ill-fated suitor in the psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), directed by Roman Polanski.

On stage, he gained valuable experience in the classics during two seasons at the Old Vic, London (1955-57), with parts that included Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.

There were also starring roles in the West End, but Shakespeare became his lasting love. In 1976, he was a founder member of the London Shakespeare Group, directing the actors on annual tours abroad, funded by the British Council.

His 1978 book The Bard in the Bush recounted a tour of Africa, when costumes and props for five plays were typically carried in one trunk, which doubled as the set.

Fraser also devised his own one-man stage show, JM Barrie: The Man Who Wrote Peter Pan, performed at the National’s Olivier Theatre in 1998.

His TV roles included Julius von Felden in A Legacy (1975), Lieutenant Commander “Monty” Morgan in Thundercloud (1979) and Dr Lawrence Golding in The Practice (1985-86).

By the middle of the 1990s, he had retired to Tuscany and La Contadina, the 10-room mountain-top house near Cortona that he bought in 1971, having fallen in love with Italy while playing Hedy Lamarr’s young lover in the 1954 film L’Amante di Paride (Loves of Three Queens).

“I loved the paintings, the towns, the soupy music of Puccini and Verdi and, above all, the people,” he said.

Fraser, who returned permanently to the UK in 2010, is survived by Rodney Pienaar, an artist and his partner of 42 years.

John Fraser, actor and author, born 18 March 1931, died 7 November 2020

DAVID MCCALLUM. TCM OVERVIEW.

David McCallum was born in 1933 in Glasgow. He began his career in British films in the 1950’s usually as a skinny sullen juvenile deliquent.In the early 1960’s he went to Hollywood and very soon became enourmously in the television series “The Man from Uncle”. He has since gone on to have a very lenghty career on television in the United States. His films include “A Night to Remember”, “Robbery Under Arms” and “The Great Escape”. Interview with David McCallum here.

TCM Overview:

A thoughtful, intense presence on television in America and his native United Kingdom, David McCallum was a pop culture sensation in the mid-1960s as the suave spy, Illya Kuryakin, on “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” (CBS, 1965-68) and later as the avuncular Donald “Ducky” Mallard on “NCIS: Naval Criminal Service Investigation” (CBS, 2003). The Scottish-born McCallum worked his way up the ranks in British film and television before bursting onto the American scene with “U.N.C.L.E.” His cool charm and blonde good looks made him an immediate TV idol, but failed to translate into stardom after the show left the air. McCallum settled into a steady diet of TV appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, frequently essaying mellowed professorial types or pensive government figures, before scoring his late-inning smash with “NCIS.” The rare performer with two major hits to his credit, McCallum’s image and talent ensured his fame for generations of TV fans.

Born David Keith McCallum, Jr. in Glasgow, Scotland on Sept. 19, 1933, he was the son of David McCallum, Sr., the famed principal violinist for numerous orchestras in the United Kingdom, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and cellist Dorothy Dorman. Both parents encouraged McCallum and his brother Iain, who later became a novelist, to pursue their chosen fields; for McCallum, this was initially the oboe, which he studied at the Royal Academy of Music. But when a performance from Shakespeare’s “King John” at a local theater group yielded a positive response from its audience, he switched his focus to acting while keeping music as a secondary interest. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he made his debut in a 1946 BBC Radio production of “Whom the Gods Love, Die Young.” Bit and supporting roles in British features and on television soon followed, often as troubled youth, as benefiting his brooding intensity. Among his more notable turns during his period was in 1958’s “Violent Playground,” where his psychotic gang member is spurred by poverty and rock and roll to take a classroom of school children hostage

McCallumâ’s American film debut came as the mother-fixated Carl von Schlosser in John Huston’s “Freud” (1962), with Montgomery Clift as the pioneering analyst. The following year, he played Royal Navy Officer Ashley-Pitt, who devised the method of dispersing the dirt from tunnels dug under a POW camp in “The Great Escape” (1963). His co-star in the film, Charles Bronson, later became entangled in a headline-grabbing relationship with McCallum’s wife, actress Jill Ireland. McCallum and Ireland eventually divorced in 1967, which allowed her to marry Bronson. An early American television appearance on “The Outer Limits” (CBS, 1963-65) became one of his most enduring, thanks to the eye-popping makeup applied to McCallum. His character, a bitter Welsh miner, agreed to take part in an evolutionary experiment, which turned him into a hyper-intelligent mutant with a massive domed cranium. The image was memorable enough to make McCallum a go-to for numerous science fiction efforts in the ensuing decades.

In 1964, McCallum was cast as Illya Kuryakin, a minor character on the spy series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Despite having only two lines, the producers saw that McCallum and star Robert Vaughn had considerable chemistry together, and boosted the character to co-star status. The move changed McCallum’s career forever. Kuryakin’s cool demeanor, physical proficiency with any weapon, and passion for art, music and science not to mention his wealth of blonde hair made him an immediate favorite among female viewers, whose fan mail to the actor was the most ever received in the history of MGM, which produced the show. For the series three years on the air, McCallum was at the apex of television stardom, and netted two Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe nod, as well as major roles in several films. He was the tormented Judas in George Stevens’s epic Biblical drama “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), and took the lead in a number of minor features, including 1968’s “Sol Madrid” and “Mosquito Squadron” (1969), many of which traded on McCallum’s popularity in “U.N.C.L.E.” by casting him in action-oriented roles. During this period, McCallum also orchestrated and conducted a trio of lush, sonically adventurous records that put unique spins on some of the period’s more popular songs

In the 1970s, McCallum was a fixture on television in both America and England. In the States, he was a staple of science fiction and supernaturally-themed TV features, including “Hauser’s Memory” (NBC, 1970), as a scientist who injected himself with a dying colleagues brain fluid to preserve defense secrets from foreign agents, while “She Waits” (CBS, 1972) cast him as the husband to a possessed Patty Duke. He also briefly returned to series work with “The Invisible Man” (NBC, 1975-76) as a scientist who used his invisibility formula to aid a government agency against evildoers. His work in England hewed more towards dramatic fare: in “Colditz” (BBC, 1972-74), he was an aggressive RAF officer who put aside his anger towards the Nazis to help organize an escape from a notorious German war prison, while in “Sapphire & Steel” (ITV, 1979-1982), he and Joanna Lumley played extraterrestrial operatives who investigated strange incidents involving the time-space continuum. In 1983, he reunited with Robert Vaughn for “The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (CBS), which saw Illya retired from espionage to design womenâ¿¿s clothing in New York. The escape of a top enemy spy brings both U.N.C.L.E. men back into action, albeit with other, younger agents. The TV-movie was intended as the pilot for a new version of the series, but the show was never greenlit.

After logging time on countless, unmemorable series like “Team Knight Rider” (syndicated, 1997-98) and “The Education of Max Bickford” (CBS, 2001-02), McCallum found his next hit with “NCIS,” a police procedural drama about Navy investigators. McCallum played Chief Medical Examiner Donald “Ducky” Mallard, an eccentric but highly efficient investigator with a knack for psychological profiling. A close confidante to Mark Harmon’s Jethro Gibbs, he served as father confessor and paternal figure for the show’s offbeat cast of characters. The show’s slow-building popularity brought McCallum back to a television audience made up in part of the children of viewers who sent him fan letters back in the “U.N.C.L.E.” days, granting him a rare burst of second stardom

British film institute obituary in 2023

At one point in the 1960s, David McCallum, who has died at the age of 90, was the hottest British actor in Hollywood. Nicknamed ‘The Blond Beatle’, he had become a pop culture phenomenon for playing a Russian spy on an American TV show at the height of the Cold War. According to MGM, McCallum received more mail from female fans than any other actor in the studio’s history, including Clark Gable and Elvis Presley. Not bad for someone who only had two lines in the pilot.

Born in Glasgow on 19 September 1933, McCallum was the son of classical musicians who settled in Hampstead when his father became leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936. He became so proficient on the oboe that he took classes at the Royal Academy of Music. However, the thrill of being applauded as Prince Arthur in an amateur production of King John convinced the eight year-old that his future lay in acting.

In 1946, McCallum secured his Equity card after making his radio debut in Whom the Gods Love, Die Young. Several juvenile roles followed at the BBC before McCallum became an assistant stage manager at Glyndebourne on leaving school. Following National Service with the Royal West African Frontier Force, he trained at RADA from 1949 to 1951, where Joan Collins was a classmate.

Repertory stints in Frinton-on-Sea and Oxford ensued before McCallum made his television bow in The Rose and the Ring (1953). More in hope than expectation, he sent photographs to the Rank Organisation and was cast by debuting director Clive Donner as a leather-jacketed James Dean wannabe in the crime drama The Secret Place (1957). Next, he hobbled on crutches as Stanley Baker’s younger brother in the gritty realist thriller Hell Drivers, and married co-star Jill Ireland shortly after the shoot. They were paired as lovers down under in Robbery Under Arms (both 1957) before headlining the seedy crime saga Jungle Street (1960) as a mugger and a stripper.

The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961)

Reuniting with Baker, McCallum impressed as another delinquent in Basil Dearden’s problem picture Violent Playground (1958). His Scouse accent was patchy, although as a gang leader he oozed surly charisma. But two parts as radio operators, in the Titanic drama A Night to Remember (1958) and war story The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961), signalled a shift towards more mature roles, and McCallum left to try his luck in Hollywood.

Although he had been cast as Judas Iscariot in the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), delays meant that McCallum was already established by the time it was released. Having suffered from an Oedipus complex in John Huston’s Freud and shown sailor Terence Stamp kindness as a gunnery officer in Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (both 1962), McCallum guaranteed his place in cult movie folklore as Eric Ashley-Pitt, the POW who earns the nickname ‘Dispersal’ for devising an ingenious way of shifting tunnel soil in The Great Escape (1963).

Yet it was television that proved McCallum’s métier. He gave notice as a time-tweaking inventor and a mutating Welsh miner in two episodes of the sci-fi series The Outer Limits (1963/64). And it was as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964 to 1968) that he became a superstar. Having only been a minor character in the feature-length 1963 pilot Solo, the Russian with a blonde mop and a penchant for black turtlenecks became equal partners with Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn), as the agents of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement sought to confound the nefarious schemes of the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity, or THRUSH.

Although Kuryakin was intense, introverted and intellectual, McCallum played him with such cool charm and enigmatic wit over 105 episodes that he earned a Golden Globe and two Emmy nominations. He and Vaughn also made eight spin-off features, as well as The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair (1983), a teleplay that started with Kuryakin as a fashion designer.

A comeback series didn’t materialise, but McCallum had exploited his peak fame to record four instrumental albums with producer David Axelrod, one of which contained ‘The Edge’, which was sampled by Dr Dre and resurfaced in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017). His own excursions as an big-screen action man, Sol Madrid (1968) and Mosquito Squadron (1969), underwhelmed, however, and McCallum retreated back into television.

Following the neglected TV horror movies Hauser’s Memory (1970) and She Waits (1972), McCallum returned to Blighty to play a short-fused RAF officer in Colditz (1972 to 74), Jacobite warrior Alan Breck Stewart in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1978), and an impassive extra-dimensional detective alongside Joanna Lumley in Sapphire & Steel (1979 to 1982). He would later team effectively with Diana Rigg in the miniseries Mother Love (1989) and steal scenes as a gambler in Howard’s Way follow-up show Trainer (1991 to 1992), during a period in which he trod the US guest star circuit following the short-lived sci-fi series The Invisible Man (1975 to 1976).

However, a cameo in the legal series JAG (2003) turned into a 20-year gig, as McCallum reached a new audience as medical examiner Dr Donald Mallard in spin-off show NCIS (2003-). Sporting a bow-tie and dispensing offbeat avuncular wisdom over 457 episodes, ‘Ducky’ so caught McCallum’s imagination that he studied pathology and attended so many autopsies in order to appear credible in the role that he became something of a forensics expert.

David McCallum, 19 September 1933 to 25 September 2023

Michel Ray

Michel Ray was born in 1944 in England to an English mother and a Brazilian father. He made his film debut in “The Divided Heart” in 1954. In 1956 he went to America to make “The Brave One” and “The Tin Star” amongst others. In 1962 he was featured in “Lawrence of Arabia”. He ceased acting in 1964 and became a stockbroker.

His IMDB entry:

He was born into a wealthy family having an English mother and a Brazilian father. He was educated in Switzerland where he learnt to ski. His parents were friends of producerMichael Balcon who was looking for a boy who could ski for his 1954 film The Divided Heart (1954). Young Michel fitted the part perfectly and started a film career which culminated in the role of Faraj in Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

This project took eighteen months and caused Michel to look at the affect film work was having on his education. He decided to quit acting. He subsequently attended Harvard where he read business studies. After university he joined White Weld & Co moving on to NM Rothschild and Credit Suisse First Boston. In his London city career in investment banking he made his first millions.

In 1995 he joined Nikko Securities and in 1998 became the first non-Japanese member of the main board. Meantime he had continued his passion for winter sports and was a member of the British Olympic ski team at the 1968 Winter games in Grenoble, France

He was in the team again in ’72 and ’76 competing on these occasions in the luge. He had also married a childhood friend Charlene, daughter of Alfred “Freddie” Heineken. Her mother was Lucille Cummins daughter of a Kentucky Bourbon maker.

Her father Freddie died in January 2002 and left his controlling interest, 50.05%, in the Heineken brewing empire to the couple. It is estimated at three billion pounds sterling or four point two billion dollars. Michel’s life story is more glamorous than many a Hollywood fiction.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Crombie

MailOnline” article on Michel Ray in 2012:

As a teenager, Michel de Carvalho was living every boy’s fantasy. While his friends sat in school, 17-year-old Michel was a movie star, with a coveted role in Sir David Lean’s epic, Lawrence Of Arabia.

Between breaks in filming, he caroused through the fleshpots of Beirut with Hollywood stars Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, pursued by hordes of adoring females. The film won seven Oscars and would go down in cinema history. Michel, using the stage name Michel Ray, seemed destined for fame.

Many child actors would let the experience go to their heads and veer off the rails, eventually disappearing from view. But Buckinghamshire-born Michel has continued to thrive and enjoy life to the full.

Now aged 68, he is still living out a male fantasy – as a financier with a £5.5 billion fortune and limitless supplies of beer. He did it by deciding to abandon acting on the set of the classic film so that he could enrol at Harvard University.

He also went on to compete in two Winter Olympics as a skier and tobogganer. And he married the love of his life, Charlene Heineken, now 58, the daughter of the late brewery magnate Freddie Heineken. In 2002, the couple inherited the £4 billion controlling stake in the Heineken empire.

The shares have surged and with the recent acquisition of the Tiger beer brand the group’s value has increased by more than £1 billion.

Now chairman of Citi Private Bank’s business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Michel commutes between London, Washington and Holland. ‘I’ve always believed work hard, play hard,’ he says. ‘Life has never been boring – luckily.’

Approaching their 30th wedding anniversary, the couple undoubtedly lead an enviable life, but their lifestyle has never been ostentatious.

Their wealth eclipses that of Sir Philip Green and his wife Tina, as well as the Bransons and the Rausings, but the couple have never appeared in glossy photo spreads or hosted lavish public parties.’I partied in Beirut with the greatest actors of the age’

Instead, they concentrated on raising their five children in England, away from the glare of publicity. But later this month they may be tempted out for a rare appearance – to celebrate the re-release of the film that could so easily have launched Michel into a Hollywood career 50 years ago.

In the biopic of T. E. Lawrence, Michel played Farraj, one of the First World War hero’s two teenage followers. ‘They offered me the choice of the two roles – one dies in quicksand, the other is blown up,’ Michel recalls, speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday about his extraordinary life.

‘I said, ‘‘Which one lasts longer?’’ And they said the one that gets blown up by a detonator near the railway line. So I took that one, because it paid more.

‘Now whenever I tell anyone I was in Lawrence Of Arabia they say, “Oh, were you the one who went down in the quicksand?” And no one can ever remember the other one.’

Sands of time: As a child actor, Michel de Carvalho played the role of Arab boy Farraj opposite Peter O’Toole in the classic film Lawrence Of Arabia in 1962

In fact, Michel appears in one of the film’s most iconic scenes – as he and Lawrence stride into the officers’ mess in Cairo to announce the audacious capture of Aqaba. ‘We’re thirsty,’ Lawrence announces, dusty and dishevelled. ‘We want two large glasses of lemonade . . . there’s been a lot of killing, one way or another.’

During the 18-month shoot in 1961 and 1962 Michel became acquainted with some of the most talented actors of his age – as well as the countless women who pursued them. ‘The parties happened on rest and relaxation days in Beirut. Quite often I went with Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif – and that was super fun,’ he says.’At school I got so much fan mail’

Camel-riding proved more of a challenge. ‘In the beginning it wasn’t pleasant,’ Michel says. ‘You are sitting mostly side-saddle, with the hump coming up in the middle and you’re not really supposed to grip it. On one occasion I was on a camel which suddenly saw its stable – and it bolted for home, which was terrifying.

‘Years later, friends of mine had a 50th birthday party in Egypt. We went up and down the Nile. On one day they organised a camel race. Needless to say, I won.’

‘We couldn’t possibly discuss the fun in an elegant Sunday newspaper… they were the superstars and I was the bag carrier. But even superstars can only handle so much. And then the bag carrier…’

Looking back, Michel appears incredulous at his teenage decision to give up acting on the set of one of the greatest movies. ‘I said – using a huge swear word – ‘‘What am I doing here in the Arabian desert with all these funny people, superstars, Anthony Quinn, Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Jack Hawkins and the rest?’’ Where are my friends? This is a weird life. And then, almost simultaneously I became self- conscious about acting. And I just couldn’t get over my self-consciousness. It was the worst decision I ever made.

Multi-talented: Michel de Carvalho was part of the British Olympic luge team. Here he is pictured at Heathrow Airport before a flight to Japan, where he took part in the Winter Olympics at Sapporo

‘I never usually talk about Lawrence Of Arabia, but I was discussing it with someone last night and they said it wasn’t the worst decision because where would I be today? Some ageing B actor, looking for TV adverts.

‘But I should have stretched out the acting career a bit – maybe until 30.’ Born to a Brazilian diplomat father and an English mother in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, in 1944, Michel fell into acting at the age of ten. His father had died when he was very young and his mother married again, to a wealthy leather merchant.

The family entertained many illustrious figures to dinner in their London home – one was the famous producer Sir Michael Balcon, who needed a young boy who could ski, to star in his film, The Divided Heart. Initially Michel’s mother, Annie, was opposed to the idea of her son appearing on screen. He recalls: ‘But Sir Michael said it was only three months and who knows what will happen – this door has opened, why would you close it?’

Michel was a hit and film offers flooded in. Using his two Christian names as a stage name, Michel Ray was the Daniel Radcliffe of his day – going on to great acclaim in films such as The Brave One and The Tin Star.

Between films, Michel attended a boarding school in Switzerland, honing a gift for languages and developing his passion for skiing.

Rich lives: Michel de Carvalho with his wife Charlene, the Heineken heiress

Aged 17, his star reached a peak with Lawrence Of Arabia. ‘I had massive attention at school,’ he says. ‘I got so much fan mail. I never get that any more – as a banker, you get hate mail.’

Five years after he walked away from acting, just as he was about to take up a graduate place at Harvard Business School, his life took another twist when he was offered the chance to become a member of the British ski team at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France.

‘It wasn’t so much for my skill as for my ability to pay the plane fare,’ says Michel modestly.

His mother was not keen on the idea. She had been relieved when he gave up acting and wanted him to get serious about making a living. ‘I wish I had kept the telegram she sent,’ he says. ‘Every second word was “bum”. It said, “From film bum to ski bum – if you make this totally stupid decision, you will be completely cut off.” So I made the completely stupid decision.’

He delayed taking up his place at Harvard to compete. ‘I told a huge porkie pie to Harvard – I can’t tell you what it was in case they take away my diploma.’

His mother need not have worried. He duly graduated from Harvard and embarked on a career in banking. But he had just begun his second job, at NM Rothschild, when he was asked to join the 1972 GB Olympic team once again – this time in the luge, the fastest and most dangerous style of tobogganing. Nervously, he asked his new boss for time off to compete in Japan. ‘I was sitting at my desk and the internal phone rang. A voice said, “Will you pop up?’’ It was Eddie Rothschild, the chairman of the bank.

‘I went upstairs and Eddie rummaged in his pockets, pulled out £200 – which was my weekly salary – and said, “Let me remind you, young man, in this bank, England comes first.” ’

Michel competed in the luge with his best friend Jeremy Palmer-Tomkinson – the uncle of socialite Tara Palmer- Tomkinson. ‘In the first week of training, my entire body was dark blue,’ he said. ‘When you are in the double luge you really are just fodder – I was the little guy and Jeremy was the big heavy guy on top. In the Japan Olympics, we were really just clowns.’

In 1983, when he was in his late 30s, Michel married Charlene Heineken. ‘Our families both had houses in St Moritz,’ he says. ‘I was ten years older than her so it wasn’t what you would call love at first sight – certainly not on her side.’I met the girl of my dreams, complete with free beer’

‘I always drank Heineken. But the problem was Heineken was the most expensive beer. So when I met my wife I thought, “This is fantastic, I’ll have free beer.” I didn’t realise then that marriage is not just about free beer.’

The couple honeymooned in the Caribbean but suffered a shock on their return. In November 1983, Charlene’s father was kidnapped in Amsterdam and held for ransom for three weeks.

‘It was a baptism of fire,’ says Michel. ‘I was just not prepared for something like that. My father-in-law had no other family but my mother-in-law, my wife and me. Luckily, it all ended well. The ransom was paid and the kidnappers all went to jail.’

In 2002, Freddie Heineken died and Charlene inherited her father’s stake in the family business – which transformed her and Michel, overnight, into one of Britain’s wealthiest couples. Today, Charlene and Michel still play a key role in the business.

Sitting in the desert with Peter O’Toole, Michel could little have dreamt how his life would turn out. ‘I never planned my life,’ he says. ‘The good lord has been kind. If you have a bit of luck, you can do quite a lot. But looking back, it was probably a mistake quitting acting.

‘ Looking back, someone should have said to me, “No, stay with that.” ’

The 50th Anniversary 4K Restoration of Lawrence Of Arabia is in cinemas across the UK from November 23. The Empire Leicester Square will have special preview screenings from next Saturday

Gary Raymond

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

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.

Phoebe Nichols (Wikipedia)

Phoebe Nichols was born in 1957) & is an English film, television, and stage actress. She is known for her roles as Cordelia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited and as the mother of John Merrick in The Elephant Man.

Nicholls is the daughter of actors Anthony Nicholls and Faith Kent. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Nicholls married director Charles Sturridge on 6 July 1985; they have two sons, including actor Tom Sturridge, and a daughter. Her grandfather is photojournalist Horace Nicholls.

As a child actress in several films she was billed as Sarah Nicholls. In her early 20s, she appeared in David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man, Michael Palin‘s The Missionary and as Cordelia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Since then, she has worked almost exclusively in television and theatre. Debuting in Michael Lindsay-Hogg‘s original staging of Whose Life Is It Anyway? in 1978, she went on to perform in Robert Strura’s revival of Three Sisters with Vanessa Redgrave, Stephen Daldry‘s acclaimed National Theatre version of J.B. Priestley‘s An Inspector Calls and in the Olivier Award-winning productions of Pravda, with The Elephant Man co-star Sir Anthony Hopkins and Terry Johnson‘s Hysteria. Her supporting performances in the 2008 West End revivals of Noël Coward‘s The Vortex and Harley Granville Barker‘s Waste earned her the 2009 Clarence Derwent Award from Equity. She also played the conniving art critic Rivera in the Royal National Theatre production of the Howard Barker drama, Scenes from an Execution.

She appeared in the 1995 BBC film Persuasion, an adaptation of Jane Austen‘s novel. She has made guest appearances on several television mystery series, including Kavanagh QC, Prime Suspect, Midsomer Murders, Lewis, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (“May and June”, 1997), Foyle’s War, Second Sight starring Clive Owen, and the 2012 Christmas episode of Downton Abbey, a role she reprised for the 2014 season. She has also appeared in several works directed by her husband, Charles Sturridge, including his 1995 television adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, where she portrayed the Liliputian Empress, the 1997 film Fairy Tale: A True Story and Shackleton in 2002.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Phyllis Calvert

PHYLLIS CALVERT OBITUARY IN “THE GUARDIAN” IN 2002

Carol White

Jeremy Spenser

John Fraser

JOHN FRASER OBITUARY IN ”THE INDEPENDENT” IN 2020.

David McCallum

DAVID MCCALLUM. TCM OVERVIEW.

British film institute obituary in 2023

Michel Ray

Gary Raymond

John Shrapnel

John Shrapnel. Obituary in “The Guardian” in 2020

Phoebe Nichols

Phoebe Nichols (Wikipedia)

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