Tom Wisdom was born in Swindon in 1973. He was part of the “Coronation Street” casr from 1999 to 2000. His films include “Hey, Mr D.J.” in 2003, “300” and “The Boat That Rocked”.
Attended Tauntons College in Southampton, Hampshire.
Educated at Academy Drama School (Stage Scholarship Winner)
Tom’s father, who came from Blackburn, was in the RAF, which meant Tom was born in Swindon and grew up on air bases in Swindon, Doncaster and Devon.
Admires actors Johnny Depp, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Mirren (and has a crush on her), Daniel Craig, and Mickey Rourke.
Would have liked to play sports professionally if he didn’t become an actor.
Plays football (soccer) and follows Liverpool FC devotedly.
Is a huge fan of all sports – loves watching them, playing them, and talking about them.
Personal Quotes
I would love to play a down and dirty rockstar! Along the lines of Midnight Mark but with all the bad stuff thrown in! Something darker than I have done before but still with the leather trousers. I also loved the physical aspect of 300 and would love to do more fighting. I thoroughly enjoyed killing people. (On what role he would like in the future)
The above IMDB enty can also be accessed online here.
Bill Maynard was born in 1928 in Farnham, Surrey. In 1970 he had a part in “Coronation Street”. His first film was “One More Time” the same year. “Carry On Loving” was the first of his appearances in the Carry On series.
Andrew Cruickshank was born in 1907 in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is best known for his role as Dr Cameron in the very popular British television series of the 1960’s, “Dr Finlay’s Casebook”. He had made his film debut in 1937 as Robert Burns in “Auld Lang Syne” Hos other films include “Where No Vultures Fly” in 1951, “John & Julie” and “The Story of Esther Costello”. He died in 1988 at the age of 80.
He appeared in many television plays and series, amongst them A. J. Cronin‘s Dr Finlay’s Casebook, containing his most famous characterisation, Doctor Angus Cameron, a crusty but erudite senior partner in the rural general practice run in Tannochbrae, with the help of the much younger Doctor Alan Finlay (Bill Simpson) and “stiff Presbyterian” housekeeper Janet (Barbara Mullen). The highly popular BBC production ran from 16 August 1962 until 3 January 1971, after which Cruickshank continued with it on BBC Radio 4 for seven years, it having been adapted to that format since 10 March 1970. He finally bade farewell to the character on 18 December 1978, following its parting episode, “Going Home”.In 1963 he played the title role in the BBC sitcom Mr Justice Duncannon, having appeared as that character in the final episode of the 1962 sitcom Brothers in Law.His final performance on the stage was as Justice Treadwell in Beyond Reasonable Doubt at the Queen’s Theatre in 1987. His last appearance of any kind was at the age of 80, in the first episode (“Kicks”) of series two of the ITV television production, King & Castle, which starred Nigel Planer and Derek Martin as partners in a debt collection agency, and in which Cruickshank played “Mr Hodinett”. It was aired on 10 May 1988, just over a week after his death.
He was chair of the board of directors of Edinburgh Festival Fringe between 1970 and 1983.He married Curigwen (née Lewis), and they had one son and two daughters.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
Paul Dupuis was born in 1913 in Montreal. Virtually all his film career was in British movies. His films included “Yellow Canary” with Anna Neagle in 1943, “Johnny Frenchman” with Patricia Roc, “Against the Wind” with Simone Signoret and “Madness of the Heart” with Margaret Lockwood on 1949. Paul Dupuis died in 1976.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Paul Dupuis (August 11, 1913 – January 23, 1976) was a French Canadian film actor who was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and performed in British films during the late 1940s. The roles he played were mainly as the romantic leading man. He died in Saint-Sauveur in Quebec.
Oliver Ford Davies was born in 1939 in Ealing, London. He has featured in “Kavanagh Q.C.” and “Foyle’s War” on television. His films include “Defence of the Realm”, “Scandal”, “Titanic Town” and “The Mother”.
Joan Regan was a very popular singer in Britain in the 1950’s. She was born in Romford, Essex in 1928. Her film appearances include in 1955 “A Prize of Gold” and “A Santa for Christmas”. She died in 2013.
Dennis Barker’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
Though there may have been a rather old-fashioned element in the sort of blonde, blue-eyed wholesomeness projected by the singer Joan Regan, who has died aged 85, it clearly worked to her advantage. Her first release, Till I Waltz With You Again, sold 35,000 copies – highly unusual for an unknown singer in the early 1950s. Soon she was able to sell 250,000 copies of Till They’ve All Gone Home, another number in which sentiment was never allowed to become cloying. Ricochet (1953) sold 8,000 within days of its release and reached No 8 in the charts.
“I don’t profess to be a sexy sort of person,” she said as her career was taking off. “It makes me feel good to draw the whole family, rather than just the teenagers.” Some fans thought she took after Vera Lynn, the famous wartime forces sweetheart, who kept up the morale of the troops by singing about stable relationships back home, while she reminded others of Gracie Fields.
Regan’s smile, revealing flashing white teeth, suggested high spirits rather than roguishness. Of her stage manner, one commentator said that she “sings the abominable lyrics of the modern pop songs with rapt sincerity”. Once she had established herself, albums and television work followed.
Born in Romford, Essex, to parents who had come from Ireland, Regan married an American serviceman, Dick Howell, at the age of 17, and for a time lived with him in Burbank, California. They had three children, but the middle one died and the marriage broke down.
Depressed and wanting the reassurance of being back with her own family, she returned with her two sons to London. She was 22, and dreamed of being what was then called a crooner.
For a time she worked in the office of her fruiterer brother-in-law. By chance she told their bank manager that as a child she had sung publicly and had won two talent contests as a teenager, but that she saw little point in a housewife and mother hoping to become a singing star. The bank manager happened to know Keith Devon, who worked for the then Bernard Delfont agency, and told him that there was a girl driving him mad with her determination to be a singer, and would he please talk her out of it? Devon arranged for a demo disc to be made and was playing it in his office one day when his boss walked in. Delfont was impressed.
The result was that Regan began to record for the Decca label. The disc jockey Jack Jackson’s enthusiasm for her recording of I’ll Always Be Thinking of You was one of the factors that helped make her well known even before becoming a regular stage performer. By 1954, when If I Give My Heart to You reached No 3, she was earning £10,000 a year, a great deal at the time, and had a fan club of 7,000.
Once she had begun to appear in variety, she took the strains with apparent ease – though two days after her debut she bent low when taking her bow at the front of the stage, was knocked unconscious by the descending safety curtain and had to be carried off. She decreed that her sons should be allowed to see her only once during any stage run – she did not want them to grow up thinking she was an “extraordinary” person.
When the television producer Richard Afton staged the first series of his Quite Contrary programmes, she was away on tour. But in 1954, she joined the second series and became a firm favourite. Explaining her unselfconscious attitude to television cameras, she recalled that in the US after the war, she and her husband were home-movie fanatics. When the television cameramen turned their big zoom lenses on her, she was at ease. For Quite Contrary, she regularly worked from her 10am call to the transmission time of 9.15pm.
Her first appearance in cabaret was the result of a good-natured gesture to her friends the Beverley sisters – Joy, Teddie and Babs – who were appearing in cabaret at the Pigalle nightspot when they were also due to start their own television series Three Little Girls in View. She offered to do their first slot at the Pigalle for them, so they could be whizzed back in time for the second.
Regan appeared in a number of shows at the London Palladium in the late 1950s and early 60s, toured internationally and had four series of her own BBC TV show, Be My Guest. In 1957 she married Harry Claff, the Palladium’s joint general manager, but divorce followed his conviction in 1963 for fraud.
She married Martin Cowan, a doctor, in 1968, and they lived in the US and Britain. In 1984, a fall in the shower led to a brain haemorrhage, but she eventually recovered, and three years later her old piano accompanist Russ Conway encouraged her to return to the stage.
Martin predeceased her, and she is survived by the two sons of her first marriage and the daughter of her second.
• Joan Regan, singer, born 19 January 1928; died 12 September 2013
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Jim Dale was born in 1935 in Northamptonshire. He started his career on the stage of the British music halls. His film debut came in 1961 in “Raising the Wind”. His inital (of many appearances)contribution to the Carry On series was in 1963 in “Carry On Cabby”. He made nine further appearances in the series. Other films include “The National Health” and “Pete’s Dragon”. He has been very popular in stage musicals both in the U.S. and Britain.
TCM Overview:
Best known for his stage work in Britain and on Broadway, Jim Dale starred in New York as “Barnum!”, the musical about the circus impresario, for two years (1979-81), winning a Tony Award for his efforts. He also racked up an Academy Award nomination for writing the title song for the 1966 film “Georgy Girl”. Dale trained in acrobatics and ballet as a youth, and made his professional debut while still a teen in Kettering, England, working as a comedian.
When he was 19, Dale performed in a production of “The Wayward Way,” and when he was 22, made his London debut playing the title role in a production of “The Burglar”. In 1974, he traveled to the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the Young Vic Company’s production of “The Taming of the Shrew” and remained in Brooklyn to direct, score and star in “Scapino” (1974), which eventually moved across the East River to Broadway. “Barnum!” (which featured Glenn Close as Barnum’s wife) followed and, in 1984, Dale toured the US as “The Music Man”.
He settled in on Broadway again to star with Stockard Channing and Joanna Gleason in the revival of “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg”. In 1995, he was Off-Broadway in an all-male version of “Travels With My Aunt”. In the latter, Dale was Aunt Augusta, the role Dame Maggie Smith had portrayed in the 1972 film version of the Auntie Mame-ish tale.
Dale first appeared in films with “Raising the Wind” (1961). He was an aptly-named sailor called “Lusty” in the unsuccessful 1969 farce “Lock Up Your Daughters!”, the peddler in “Joseph Andrews” (1977), and the villainous Dr. Terminus that same year in Disney’s unsuccessful “Pete’s Dragon”.
Dale did have the title role in “Carry on Columbus” (1992), a take on the explorer’s history. TV roles have also been sporadic, with Dale frequently appearing on variety programs, such as hosting “Sunday Night at the London Palladium” (1973), and “The 116th Edition of the Ringling Bros. & Barnum & Bailey Circus” (1986). He played The Duke in the “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (PBS, 1985) and also had a supporting role in TNT’s 1993 rendition of “Arthur Miller’s ‘The American Clock'”.
The above TCM overview can be accessed also online here.
Elizabeth Bradley was born in 1922 in London. She is best known for her part as Maud Grimes in “Coronation Street”. Her films include “Davy Jone’s Locker” in 1966 , “In This House of Brede” and “An American Werewolf in London”. She died in 2000 in Monaco.
Nigel Havers was born in 1951 in London. He is best known for his role in “Chariots of Fire” in 1981 and in the television series “The Charmer”. He has just recently finished a stint in “Coronation Street”.
TCM Overview:
This handsome, aristocratic British actor, with sandy hair and aquiline nose, has advanced from stage roles and film and TV bits in the 1970s to leads in films and –increasingly–TV in the 1980s and 90s. The son of a Lord Chancellor (from 1979-87), Havers acted in a radio show as a child and worked as a researcher before appearing in London stage productions of “Conduct Unbecoming” (1969), “Richard II” (1970), “Man and Superman” (1977) and “Family Voices” (1980).
Havers made his film debut as an unnamed monk in the British drama “Pope Joan” (1972), and appeared as another anonymous character in “Full Circle” (1977). After playing a “counterman” in “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?” (1978), Havers finally got a name–record producer George Martin’s–in “The Birth of the Beatles” (1979). He was Lord Andrew, one of the Olympic hopefuls, in Hugh Hudson’s “Chariots of Fire” (1981). In David Lean’s “A Passage to India” (1984), he was the son of Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), a city magistrate who expected to marry Adela Quested (Judy Davis) before she becomes enmeshed in scandal. Havers traveled to Australia to play an 1860s explorer in the biopic “Burke & Wills” (1985), then marked time before being cast in Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” (1987). Havers turned in a sterling performance as the doctor who (with Miranda Richardson) plays parental figure to the lost child Christian Bale in WWII Japan. Havers’ big-screen career petered out, though, with good roles in the largely ignored period dramas “Farewell to the King” (1989) and “Quiet Days in Clichy” (1990).
TV, however, has kept Havers quite busy. After small roles in “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “Look Back in Darkness”, Havers began playing good character parts with the title role in “Nicholas Nickleby” (BBC, 1977), in the superb musical fantasy “Pennies from Heaven” (BBC, 1977) and the popular mystery series “Rumpole of the Bailey” (PBS, 1981). Another lead came in an adaptation of R.F. Delderfield’s “A Horseman Riding By” (BBC, 1978), as a Devon estate owner in financial difficulties. He headlined the BBC sitcom “Don’t Wait Up” as a doctor whose father moves in with him when his parents separate. Havers had smaller roles in the biopic “Nancy Astor” (BBC, 1982) and “Hold that Dream” (London Weekend Television, 1986), co-starred with Judy Parfitt in the ocean-going romance “Bon Voyage” (1987) and had another large supporting role in the 1987 LWT production of “The Little Princess”.
Another starring role was given Havers in the 1987 docudrama “Lord Elgin and Some Stones of No Value”, as the controversial 19th-century archeologist. His TV work continued to pick up with some excellent leading roles, many shown on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” in the US. Havers played a sexual adventurer, the title role in “The Charmer” (a miniseries shown on PBS in 1989), a spy in the comedy thriller “Sleepers” (shown on PBS in 1991), and a disfigured, disillusioned “A Perfect Hero” in a WWII drama (PBS, 1992). He appeared in support of Raul Julia and Sonia Braga in the biopic of Chico Mendes, “The Burning Season” (HBO, 1994), and played Husband Number 2, Michael Wilding, in the NBC biopic “Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story” (1995).
The above TCM overviewcan also be accessed online here.
