British Actors Archives - Page 103 of 126

Nigel Havers

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.

Roddy McDowall was born in 1928 in London. He was a child actor in British films who wnet to Hollywood. With the onset of World War Two his parents took him and his sister to Hollywood where he continued his career. He gave a terrific performance for John Ford in 1941 in “How Green Was My Valley” with Maureen O’Hara. He went on to make “Lassie Come Home” and “The Keys of the Kingdom”. As an adult he had great success as a character actor and made sever of the Planet of the Apes series. He also starred in “The Posidon Adventure”. He died in 1998.

Tom Vallance’s obituary in “The Independent”:

TALES ARE legion of child stars who found the transition to adulthood one of disillusion, disappointment and tragedy. Roddy McDowall was one of the happiest of exceptions.

As a child actor, his large, expressive eyes, polite English tones and earnest sincerity made him world-famous in such classic films as How Green Was My Valley, Lassie Come Home and My Friend Flicka. With the end of adolescence, he fled Hollywood to study the craft of acting in New York and became an accomplished performer on stage and television, winning both Tony and Emmy awards. He won praise in such films as Cleopatra, The Poseidon Adventure and Planet of the Apes, and enjoyed a secondary career as a fine photographer.

He never married and said that his commitment was to his career, his friends and his voracious collecting of movie memorabilia. One of the most popular of actors, he maintained lifelong friendships with several of his co-stars. “He has more friends than anyone I know,” said the actress Ruth Gordon.

He was born in London, in 1928, his Scottish father an officer in the Merchant Marines. His Irish mother had once dreamed of going on the stage, and determined that her children should be in films. “My mother had complete control over us,” said McDowall late. “She would make all the decisions and pretend that my sister and I were making them.” He was only nine when he made his debut on the screen in Murder in the Family (1938), the first of 17 British films including I See Ice (1938) with George Formby, and two Will Hay comedies, Convict 99 and Hey Hey USA (both 1938).

In some he was only an extra (something his mother never admitted), but he had good roles in Just William (1939), an engaging version of Richmal Crompton’s children’s stories featuring McDowall as Ginger, and You Will Remember (1940), a biography of the composer Leslie Stuart (Robert Morley) in which McDowall’s character, a bootblack who becomes Stuart’s lifelong friend, was played in adulthood by Emlyn Williams. Williams wrote the screenplay for McDowall’s last British film, a morale-boosting piece about the country’s defence of its freedom through the ages, This England (1941).

Though some accounts state that McDowall was signed for Hollywood while still in England, the actor himself told the interviewer Michael Buckley that he sailed from Liverpool with his mother and sister on 24 September 1940 (his father was serving in the war) to live with friends of his mother’s in White Plains, New York. “My mother contacted agents, one of whom sent me to the MGM office to test for The Yearling. They said that I was too English, but that at 20th Century-Fox they were looking for a child for How Green Was My Valley.” A test reel was made in New York and William Wyler, then scheduled to direct the film, saw it and asked for the child to be brought to California so that he could do a test himself.

McDowell was fifth-billed as a cabin boy, and his sister Virginia played a small role as the postmistress’s daughter, in this Fritz Lang thriller based on Geoffrey Household’s book Rogue Male. How Green Was My Valley was then re-activated, with John Ford now directing and McDowell playing the pivotal role of Huw, the young boy through whose eyes we see the disintegration of a Welsh mining family. His part was originally to be brief, with Tyrone Power playing the character as an adult, but the studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, after early script conferences, wrote in a memo to his staff: “I feel that our only chance of capturing the right mood is to see the story through the eyes of Huw the boy . . . keeping him a young boy throughout the story is essential.”

The Oscar-winning film turned out to be a masterpiece, and McDowall described Ford as “a miraculous director. He was probably the most masterful film- maker I ever worked with.” As the youngster who is forced to leave school and work in the mines, McDowall projected a winning combination of wide- eyed sensitivity and inner grit. “Little Roddy McDowall is superb,” said the New York Times.

It was the first of several roles in which he played a child who had to shoulder responsibility all too soon in life, such as the courageous lad who gets a vital message to a war correspondent before being killed by the Nazis in Confirm or Deny (1941) and the boy who inspires a self- centred bachelor to shepherd a batch of refugee children from France to England in The Pied Piper (1942). He later told the former child star turned writer Dickie Moore that, after the release of his films, “the kids on the block wouldn’t play with me. They wouldn’t even talk to me. Double jeopardy because I was English and talked funny and also because I didn’t go to school.” McDowall played several film heroes as a child – he was the young Tyrone Power in Son of Fury (1942), Gregory Peck in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), and Peter Lawford in The White Cliffs of Dover (1944).

In 1943 he made one of his best-remembered films, Lassie Come Home, in which he is forced to part with his beloved dog, but is movingly reunited with the animal after it makes its way home from Scotland to Yorkshire. McDowall’s portrayal was appealingly devoid of precocity or mawkishness and he was similarly effective displaying love for his horse in two popular films, My Friend Flicka (1943) and its sequel Thunderhead, Son of Flicka (1945). “I loved Pal, the dog who played Lassie,” said the actor years later. “He was a lot smarter than some of the people I know. But I hated the main Flicka horse; she was mean, kept stepping on my feet.”

Lassie Come Home marked the start of a friendship with his co-star Elizabeth Taylor which was to be lifelong, and when he played Jane Powell’s boyfriend in the musical Holiday in Mexico (1946) it was the start of another. “Roddy’s been like a brother to me,” Powell wrote.

In the mid-Forties, after making Molly and Me (1945) with Gracie Fields (“a woman of extraordinary spirit, courage, stamina and fabric. I worshipped her and stayed friendly with her until she died”) McDowall was released from his Fox contract: “At 17 my childhood career was over. My agent told me I would never work again, because I’d grown up.”

He turned to the theatre, making his stage debut in Young Woodley (1943) in Westport, Connecticut, then did a six-month vaudeville tour. In 1947 he played Malcolm in Orson Welles’s production of Macbeth in Salt Lake City, and played the same role in the subsequent film. He regarded Welles as “too clever by half. He did a lot of damage to his own genius, for some perverse reason that I don’t particularly understand.”

Joining a minor studio, Monogram, McDowall played David Balfour in Kidnapped (1948), in which his mother had a small role, but his six other Monogram films (on which he was also executive producer) were mediocre. He later stated that he would have attended college had he been able:

There was not enough money. Who was going to do the work? I had no money,

though I had made over a hundred thousand a year. Had my father not been so mesmerised by my mother I would have had every dime I ever made. My father was scrupulously honest, but mother had such control over him that he was powerless.

Jane Powell described Wynn as

a classic stage mother . . . I . . . realised it was terribly important for Roddy to get away from home. She was destroying him as a man, as a person and as a talent. The whole family was under her thumb. Every time the family didn’t do what she wanted, she’d feign a heart attack.

In 1952 McDowall gave his Los Angeles home to his parents and went to New York to study acting with Mira Rostova and David Craig (“I was not without talent, but didn’t seem to have any craft”) and next year made his Broadway debut in a revival of Shaw’s Misalliance.

McDowall had made his television debut in 1951 on Robert Montgomery Presents, and later stressed the importance of television. “It was in that arena that I had the chance to fail and grow. Without it, I don’t think I’d have had the opportunity to make a bridge between one period of my life and the other.” He was a guest on many major series, starred in productions of Heart of Darkness (1958) and Billy Budd (1959) and won an Emmy award for his performance as Philip, son of Alexander Hamilton in Not Without Honour (1960). “Working in television,” he said, “you could be in two or three stage flops a year and not starve.”

Nineteen fifty-five was to be “the big turning-point” of his adult career, with four highly praised stage performances. He played in The Doctor’s Dilemma off-Broadway, Ariel in The Tempest and Octavian in Julius Caesar in Stratford, Connecticut, and in October opened as Ben Whitledge, the zealous best friend of the bumpkin hero of Ira Levin’s hit comedy No Time for Sergeants. In 1957 he co-starred with another former child actor, Dean Stockwell, in Meyer Levin’s gripping play based on the Leopold-Loeb thrill-killing, Compulsion, playing Artie Strauss (the Loeb character).

He finally returned to the screen in 1960, with roles in The Subterraneans and Midnight Lace. The same year he rang the stage director Moss Hart to ask for the role of Mordred in the upcoming Lerner-Loewe musical Camelot. The composers gave him a song solo, “The Seven Deadly Virtues”, at the last minute. McDowall and Richard Burton both left Camelot after a year to join Elizabeth Taylor in Rome to film Cleopatra (1963), McDowall as the evil Octavian receiving reviews which were second only to Rex Harrison’s.

During the long shooting schedule, he was given time off to film his part of Private Merris in The Longest Day (1962), and was now in constant demand for both film and television work. Films included The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965, as Matthew) and George Axelrod’s offbeat comedy Lord Love a Duck (1966). In 1966 he played a CIA agent in The Defector, the last film made by his longtime friend Montgomery Clift, who later stated that he could never have finished the film without McDowall’s moral support.

In 1967 McDowall played the intelligent talking ape Cornelius in Planet of the Apes, and was in three of the four sequels plus a television series based on the film. He missed the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) because he was in London directing a film, though he did provide the voice for one of the apes. His directorial effort Tam Lin (later retitled The Devil’s Widow) starring Ava Gardner as an old witch who uses her powers to surround herself with young friends, was not well received. He was Acres the steward in the hit disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure (1972) – its director, Ronald Neame, had been cameraman on McDowall’s first released film, Murder in the Family.

His performance as a nasty lawyer in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) was lauded and he followed with John Hough’s horror film The Legend of Hell House. An admirer of Barbra Streisand, he played her assistant in Funny Lady (1975), and he did a cameo as an old gypsy woman in Rabbit Test (1978) as a favour to its director, his close friend Joan Rivers. More recent films included the comedy-thriller Fright Night (1985) and its sequel, and Overboard (1987), on which he was executive producer as well as playing butler to Goldie Hawn.

For many years McDowall also pursued another career. From childhood, he had a great passion for photography and eventually the actress Gladys Cooper persuaded him to do something commercial with his talent. One of his earliest assignments was to shoot pictures on the set of Cleopatra, after which he worked for Look, Life, Harper’s Bazaar and Architectural Digest. In 1966 he published his first book, the best-selling Double Exposure.

He loved acting, and until recently was still touring the theatres of America in such plays as Harvey and Dial M For Murder. Some years ago he told a columnist,

I don’t regret any part of my childhood career. I loved it! The problem for a child actor is to overcome one’s initial success. All I’m trying to do now is the best I can with what I’m doing. I hope I can keep working as long as possible.

Roderick Andrew Anthony Jude McDowall, actor: born London 17 September 1928; died Los Angeles 3 October 1998.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Jean Heywood was born in 1921 in Northumberland. Her films include “Billy Elliott” and “Our Day Out”. On television she has starred in the very popular series “When the Boat Comes In”. Jean Heywood died aged 98 in 2019

“IMDB” entry:

Jean Heywood (born Jean Murray, 15 July 1921) is a British actress. Born in Blyth, Northumberland, Heywood has appeared in films such as Billy Elliot and Our Day Out. Her TV work includes roles in When the Boat Comes In, All Creatures Great and Small, Boys from the Blackstuff, Family Affairs, The Billand Casualty. In 2005, she starred alongside Richard Briers and Kevin Whately in a drama called Dad on BBC One as part of Comic Relief’s Elder Abuse campaign. In 2010 Heywood made a guest appearance in the ITV series Married Single Other.

Jean Heywood obituary in “The Independent” in 2019.

Jean Heywood, who has died aged 98, was a character actor who found herself catapulted to national fame in 1976 as Bella, the matriarch who holds the poverty-stricken Seaton family together in the BBC TV drama When the Boat Comes In, James Mitchell’s story of a recession-hit Tyneside community between the two world wars.

She and James Garbutt played Bella and Bill, parents of the unworldly teacher Jessie (Susan Jameson) who falls for Jack Ford (James Bolam), a disillusioned war veteran returning to the fictional Gallowshield and leading new battles, as a union leader. The traditional north-east of England folk song When the Boat Comes In provided a memorable theme, performed by Alex Glasgow.

Heywood was herself from the north-east, as were many others in the cast. She and her screen husband cherished the opportunity to mould their alter egos. “We modified the characters quite a lot from the original concept,” she said at the time. “Bella was a lot coarser than she has emerged. For example, she was really fond of the gin and could cut up rough. Bill, too, was a very rough diamond originally.”

They appeared in the first three series, screened in 1976 and 1977. Heywood described Bella as “more like me than I am”.

She was born Jean Murray in Blyth, Northumberland, to Elsie (nee Batey) and Jack Murray, a coalmine electrician. The family moved to New Zealand when Jean was six, but within six months her mother died. Several years later she returned to Britain after her father remarried, and she was brought up in Birmingham.

On leaving King Edward VI grammar school, she worked as a librarian until marrying Roland Heywood, a mechanical engineer, in 1945, moving to Surrey and joining the Camberley Players, an amateur company. Once her three children had grown up, Heywood realised her ambition to act professionally.

She joined the Castle theatre, Farnham (now the Redgrave theatre), in 1963 as acting wardrobe mistress and was given small acting parts. Further work followed with other rep companies. She made her first television appearances in 1968 in serialised adaptations of two Emile Zola novels, Nana and Germinal.

Switching to modern dramas, she appeared in Alan Plater’s Land of Green Ginger (1973) as the mother of Gwen Taylor’s young woman returning to her home town of Hull from London, and in Willy Russell’s Our Day Out (1977) in the leading role of Mrs Kay, a remedial class teacher determined that her children, resigned to the fate of becoming “factory fodder”, should have a good time on a coach trip from Liverpool to north Wales.

Jean Heywood had a short appearance in ITV’s Emmerdale Farm in 1978 as Mrs Acaster - seen with Ronald Magill as Amos Brearly. — Jean Heywood had a short appearance in ITV’s Emmerdale Farm in 1978 as Mrs Acaster – seen with Ronald Magill as Amos Brearly. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

In 1990 Heywood appeared throughout the final series of All Creatures Great and Small as the housekeeper, Mrs Alton, and a year later as Hilda Calder, mother of Freddy, in the police series Specials. She also played John Thaw’s mother, Marjorie, in episodes of Kavanagh QC in 1995 and 1996.

In sitcoms, she played David Roper’s landlady in Leave It to Charlie (1978-80) and two mothers – of Barry Jackson’s joke shop worker with learning difficulties in Horace (1982) and Dolly McGregor in The Brothers McGregor (1985-88).

Her stints in soaps were generally short: as Phyllis Acaster, mother of Dolly, in Emmerdale Farm during 1978; Alice Kirby (1982-83), a widow who dumped Chalkie Whitely for a retired all-in wrestler in Coronation Street; Sally Hart (1997), who drowned in a canal, in the first two weeks of Family Affairs; and Kitty Hilton (2000-02), mother of Ray, in Brookside.

In a rare film role she played the aspiring ballet dancer’s grandmother in Billy Elliot (2000). On stage she was Glenda Jackson’s mother in a West End production of Rose (Duke of York’s theatre, 1980) and Margaret, the nurse, in The Father with the National Theatre company (1988-89).

Heywood’s husband died in 1996. She is survived by their children, Bryon and Carolyn, and another son, Ian, from a previous relationship.

• Jean Heywood, actor, born 15 July 1921; died 14 September 2019

Kevin Whatley was born in Northumberland in 1951. He is a powerhouse actor on quality British dramas such as “Auf Wiedersehen Pet”, “Peak Practice” and “Morse”. Recently he has starred as “Lewis” in the follow up to “Morse”. His films include “The Return of the Soldier” and “The English Patient”. Currently starring as “Lewis”.

IMDB Entry:

Kevin Whately (born 6 February 1951) is an English actor. Whately is primarily known for his role as Robert “Robbie” Lewis in the crime dramas Inspector Morse and Lewis, his role as Neville “Nev” Hope in the British television comedy Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, and his role as Dr. Jack Kerruish in the drama series Peak Practice, although he has appeared in numerous other role.

Whately is from Humshaugh, near Hexham, Northumberland.^[His mother, Mary was a teacher and his father, Richard, was a Commander in the Royal Navy. His maternal grandmother, Doris Phillips, was a professional concert singer and his great-great-grandfather, Richard Whately, was Anglican Archbishop of Dublin.^[The BBC documentary Who Do You Think You Are?, broadcast on 2 March 2009, also revealed that Whately is a descendant, on his paternal side, of Thomas Whately of Nonsuch Park, a leading London merchant, English politician and writer who became a director of the Bank of England, and of Major Robert Thompson, a pioneer tobacco plantation owner in Virginia who was a staunch supporter of the Parliamentarian cause at the time of the English Commonwealth.

Whately was educated at Barnard Castle School,^[ and went on to study drama at the Central School of Speech and Dramain 1975. Before going professional, Whately was an amateur actor at the People’s Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne during the 1970s. His brother, Frank, is a drama lecturer at a London university.

Before turning to professional acting, Whately began his working life as a folk singer, and still plays guitar, performing for charity concerts.^[4] Along with other Auf Wiedersehen, Pet stars, he makes an appearance at the biennial benefit concert Sunday for Sammy in Newcastle. Before becoming an actor, he started training as an accountant.

His acting career includes several stage plays, among them an adaptation of Twelve Angry Men, and film appearances in The Return of the Soldier, The English Patient, Paranoid and Purely Belter.

Whately’s television appearances include episodes of Shoestring, Angels, Juliet Bravo, Strangers, Coronation Street, Shackleton, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Alas Smith and Jones, Look and Read, You Must Be The Husband, B&B, Peak Practice, Skallagrigg, The Broker’s Man, Murder in Mind, 2003 Comic Relief Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Lewis, New Tricks, Who Gets the Dog?, The Children and Silent Cry. Whately provided one of the voices for the English-language version of the 1999 claymation Children’s television series Hilltop Hospital. He has also done voiceovers for a WaterAid advertisement.

In 1985, Whately appeared in a 3-part Miss Marple adaptation (“A Murder Is Announced“) for the BBC. His part, Detective Sergeant Fletcher, opposite John Castle as Inspector Craddock, was very similar to what became the career-defining role he took two years later, when he was cast as Detective Sergeant Lewis, the down-to-earth complement to the eponymous Inspector Morse played by John Thaw. Whately starred opposite Thaw in 32 episodes over 13 years in the hugely successful series that established him as a household name in the UK.

He reprised the role in the spin-off series Lewis, in which Lewis returns to Oxford as a full Inspector. With his new partner, the Cambridge-educated Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (Laurence Fox), Inspector Lewis solves murder mysteries while trying to rebuild his life after his wife’s sudden death in a hit-and-run accident and to gain recognition from his sceptical new boss.

Richard Marson’s book celebrating fifty years of Blue Peter comments that Whately auditioned as a presenter for the show in 1980 but lost out to Peter Duncan.

Following the filming of the seventh series of Lewis, at the end of 2012, Whately and Laurence Fox announced that they would take a break of at least a year before filming more episodes. ITV indicated a continuing commitment to the series and that they wished to produce additional episodes of the programme. On 4 November 2012 Whately performed in a radio drama on BBC3 called The Torchbearers, which follows the circumstances of several UK citizens whose lives are changed through contact with the Olympic Torch.^[9] In 2013, Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live Theatre produced a series of performances of the unique, acclaimed one-person play, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, which is enacted as a cold reading with no sets or costumes by a different performer each night. Whately was the actor for the sold-out performance of 10 March 2013.

Whately was the patron of the Central School of Speech and Drama Full House Theatre Company for 2011.

Whately lives in Woburn Sands near Milton Keynes, with his wife actress Madelaine Newton, who starred in the 1970s BBC drama When the Boat Comes In. She also played Inspector Morse’s love interest in the 1990 episode “Masonic Mysteries,” in which she becomes a murder victim. The couple, who have been together since 1980,^[12] have two children: Catherine “Kitty” Whately, born in 1983, who appeared as Kevin’s on-screen daughter in the series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet for the first two seasons, now an operatic mezzo soprano and winner of the Kathleen Ferrier Award 2011; and Kieran, born in 1985. Kitty married tenor Anthony Gregory in September 2015.

Whately enjoys rock music and plays guitar; he has cited Pink Floyd and Dire Straits as bands he has particularly enjoyed, although he says he listens to classical music more now.^[He is a fan of Newcastle United and Burnley on the football field, but says that he likes rugby league better, and as a cricketer admitted to Inspector Morse writer Colin Dexterthat he would like to have played cricket professionally for England. Dexter devised the storyline for the Inspector Morseepisode “Deceived by Flight” (1989; season 3, episode 3) in which Sergeant Lewis had to go undercover in a cricket team to investigate drug smuggling.

Molly Lamont was born in 1910 in South Africa. She began her career in British films and her debut was in 1930 in “The Black Hand Gang”. In 1936 she went to Hollywood and the remainder of her career was in the U.S. Her films include “The Awful Truth” with Cary Grant and “The White Cliffs of Dover” in 1944. She died in 2001.

TCM Overview:

Throughout her entertainment career as an accomplished actress, Molly Lamont graced the silver screen many times. In her early acting career, Lamont appeared in such films as the Katharine Hepburn dramatic adaptation “Mary of Scotland” (1936), “The Jungle Princess” (1936) with Dorothy Lamour and “A Doctor’s Diary” (1937). She also appeared in the comedic adaptation “The Awful Truth” (1937) with Irene Dunne, “The Moon and Sixpence” (1942) and the George Raft musical “Follow the Boys” (1944). Her passion for acting continued to her roles in projects like “Minstrel Man” (1944) with Benny Fields, the Bette Davis drama “Mr. Skeffington” (1945) and “The Suspect” (1945). She also appeared in the Rosemary LaPlanche horror film “Devil Bat’s Daughter” (1946) and “The Dark Corner” (1946). Toward the end of her career, she tackled roles in “Christmas Eve” (1947), the drama “Ivy” (1947) with Joan Fontaine and the Bela Lugosi thriller “Scared to Death” (1947). She also appeared in “South Sea Sinner” (1950). Lamont was most recently credited in “Raising Hope” (Fox, 2010-14). She also worked in television during these years, including a part on “Modern Family” (ABC, 2009-). Lamont passed away in July 2001 at the age of 91.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

George Lazenby born in New South Wales, Australia in 1939. He had a career as a model before he was selected to play James Bond in 1969 in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”. Although the film was a major success, Lazenby did not continue as 007.

His IMDB entry:

George Lazenby was born on September 5th, 1939, in Australia. He moved to London, England in 1964, after serving in the Australian Army. Before becoming an actor, he worked as an auto mechanic, used car salesman, prestige car salesman, and as a male model, in London, England. In 1968, Lazenby was cast as “James Bond”, despite his only previous acting experience being in commercials, and his only film appearance being a bit-part in a 1965 Italian-made Bond spoof. Lazenby won the role based on a screen-test fight scene, the strength of his interviews, fight skills and audition footage. A chance encounter with Bond series producer Albert R. Broccoli in a hair salon in 1966, in London, had given Lazenby his first shot at getting the role. Broccoli had made a mental note to remember Lazenby as a possible candidate at the time when he thought Lazenby looked like a Bond. The lengths Lazenby went to to get the role included spending his last pounds on acquiring a tailor-made suit from Sean Connery‘s tailor, which was originally made for Connery, along with purchasing a very Bondish-looking Rolex watch.

Lazenby quit the role of Bond right before the premiere of his only film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), citing he would get other acting roles, and that his Bond contract, which was fourteen pages thick, was too demanding on him.

In his post-Bond career, Lazenby has acted in TV movies, commercials, various recurring roles in TV series, the film series “Emmanuelle”, several Bond movie spoofs, TV guest appearances, provided voice for several animated movies and series, and several Hong Kong action films, using his martial arts expertise.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Geoffrey Keen was born in Oxfordshire in 1916. He is the son of stage actor Malcolm Keen. Geoffrey was a most profilic character actor during the 50’s and 60’s. His films include “Treasure Island” in 1950, “Cry, the Beloved Country”, “A Town Like Alice”, “Yield to the Night”, “Sink the Bismarck” and “The Angry Silence”. Geoffrey Keen died in 2005 at the age of 89.

Anthony Hayward’s obituary in “The Independent”:

One of the screen’s leading character actors for four decades, Geoffrey Keen was forever typecast as dour authority figures. After 20 years perfecting the type in British films, he landed a starring role on television in Mogul (1965), a topical drama about an oil conglomerate, at a time when drilling was just beginning in the North Sea.

Keen played the shrewd and ruthless Brian Stead, one of the company’s bosses, in a 13-part series that gained increasing popularity – and sales to more than 60 countries, as well as many awards – after it was retitled The Troubleshooters (1966-72) and ran for a further 123 episodes. The BBC’s initial publicity hailed:

Exciting stories about oilmen and the world they work in. The oilmen are everywhere. They walk in the corridors of power, drill wells in the desert, serve on the motorways. They sustain governments, dominate the Exchange, alter the face of the Earth, and keep most of the human race on the move. Oilmen are prospectors, tearing across rugged country in huge trucks; they also work in offices and have pension schemes. Some are scientists, some politicians, some are engineers, and some are very rich – and every oilman with a major company like the Mogul corporation is a subject of a vast feudal kingdom.

Over seven years, filming took place in glamorous locations as far-flung as Venezuela, Antarctica and New Zealand. Although Keen did some location shooting, he was often stuck at Mogul’s head office in London, where he would be seen stepping in and out of his Rolls-Royce.

Stead, a widower who had to battle health problems – including two heart attacks – rose from his position as the company’s deputy managing director and director of operations to become managing director, but the actor was frustrated at playing what he considered to be a dictator. So merciless was Stead that Keen’s own daughter, Mary, refused to watch her father on television and would sit on the stairs with her hands over her ears. The actor also found the grind of making a weekly programme very hard. “At present, I have no domestic life at all – you have to give yourself completely to a series,” he said at the time.

Keen soon switched back to films to play his most enduring screen role, as the Minister of Defence, Sir Frederick Gray, in six James Bond pictures. At the end of the first one, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), set at the Polaris submarine base in Scotland, he is seen peering into an escape pod to discover 007 under the sheets with a naked “Bond girl”, Barbara Bach. “Bond, what do you think you’re doing?” he asks. “Keeping the British end up, sir,” Roger Moore retorts.

The sight of an embarrassed minister occurred several times over the following 10 years, as the dignified, by-the-book, upper-class Sir Frederick wrestled with Bond’s playful attitude to his job and refusal to take missions seriously, in Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985) and The Living Daylights (1987, in which Timothy Dalton took over as Ian Fleming’s secret agent).

Born Geoffrey Knee in London in 1916, he had a difficult childhood. His mother and father, Malcolm – a stage actor also seen in films as doctors, detectives and aristocrats – split up before his birth. (Father and son both changed their surname to Keen by deed poll.)

He and his mother moved to Bristol, where he attended the city’s grammar school and worked briefly in a paint factory, before joining the Little Theatre there and spending a year in repertory productions, making his stage début as Trip in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1932) at the age of 16.

Briefly unsure about acting as a career, Keen started studying at the London School of Economics but left after two months and was awarded a scholarship to Rada, where his father was teaching, and won the prestigious Bancroft Gold Medal (1936).

He then joined the Old Vic Theatre, playing Florizel in The Winter’s Tale (1936) and Edgar in King Lear (1936), and continued on stage until fighting with the Royal Army Medical Corps as a corporal during the Second World War and performing with the Stars in Battledress concert party. During that time, he made his film début, directed by the legendary Carol Reed, as a corporal in The New Lot (1943), an army training film that starred Bernard Lee (later to play 007’s boss, M, in the Bond films).

After the war, Reed cast Keen in two thrillers, as a soldier in Odd Man Out (starring James Mason, 1947) and a detective in The Fallen Idol (written by Graham Greene and featuring Ralph Richardson, 1948). Once he played an MP in The Third Man (another Reed-Greene collaboration), the actor was on the way to becoming typecast.

“It got around the studios that I only played the type of character who scowled and thumped tables,” he explained, adding:

I accepted any role that came my way. This is a tough profession. You can’t be too choosy – you may never get another chance.

As a result, he was seen as policemen in The Clouded Yellow (1950), Hunted (1952), Genevieve (1953), Portrait of Alison (1955), The Long Arm (1956), Nowhere to Go (1958), Deadly Record (1959), Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and Lisa (1962), soldiers of all ranks in Angels One Five(1952), Malta Story (1953), Carrington V.C. (1954) and The Man Who Never Was (1955), the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff in Sink the Bismarck! (1959), a doctor in Storm Over the Nile (1955), priests in Yield to the Night (1956) and Sailor Beware!(1956), a solicitor in A Town Like Alice (1956), headmasters in The Scamp (1957) and Spare the Rod (1961), a prison governor in Beyond This Place (1959), the Prime Minister in No Love for Johnnie (1961), a magistrate in The Cracksman (1963) and a British ambassador in The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (1980).

So prolific was Keen as a character actor, at the height of British film- making, that in one year, 1956, he appeared in 12 pictures. The following year, he and his father both acted together in Fortune Ii a Woman, playing the Young and Old Abercrombie in the crime drama starring Jack Hawkins.

Keen’s starring role on television in Mogul and The Troubleshooters came as British cinema was passing its heyday. He had already acted many character parts on the small screen, including a short run as Detective Superintendent Harvey in Dixon of Dock Green during 1966, and later took the role of Gerald Lang, the managing director of a merchant bank, in The Venturers (1975). But he was less happy acting on television and, by the 1980s, was working little except for in the Bond films. He retired in 1987, after making The Living Daylights.

His first wife was the actress Hazel Terry and his third the actress Doris Groves, who died in 1989.

Anthony Hayward

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Telegraph obituary in August 2021.

Patricia Hitchcock is the actress daughter of Alfred Hitchcock. She was born in London in 1928. When her father went to Hollywood in 1939 to make “Rebecca”, she and her mother went with him. She was featured in such Hitchcock classics as “Stage Fright” in 1949, “”Strangers on a Train” and “Psycho”. She died in 2021 aged 93.

Patricia Hitchcock, the only child of the film director Alfred Hitchcock, who has died aged 93, was an accomplished actress in her own right, taking supporting roles in three of her father’s best-known films as well as appearing on television in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

She made her screen debut as a jolly acting student called Chubby Bannister in her father’s Stage Fright (1950), because cast and crew were rehearsing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she was a student. She would also feature in the film as Jane Wyman’s double in a stunt involving a speeding car: “I drove right into the camera and had to stop at a plate-glass window.”

But she was best known for her role in Strangers on a Train (1951) as Barbara Morton, the inquisitive and chubbily bespectacled younger sister of Ann (Ruth Roman), the woman Guy Haines (Farley Granger) wants to marry, who witnesses the psychopathic Bruno (Robert Walker) attempting to strangle a woman at a cocktail party.

Pat Hitchcock with her father on set in 1950 during filming of Strangers on a Train based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith CREDIT: Alamy

Favourable reviews might have marked the beginning of a career as a character actress. But within a year she had met her husband, Joseph O’Connell, and married him, and a year after that had the first of three children. Though she had a small role in Psycho (1960) as the office worker who offers to share her tranquillisers with Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, she gave up thoughts of a serious acting career to devote herself to her family.

Alfred Hitchcock, reflecting years later on his daughter’s marriage in 1952, said that he and his wife Alma had been “relieved, in a way” when Pat decided that “being a mother of sticky-fingered children required all her creative attention.”

Pat Hitchcock had a small role in the film as a witness in spectacles CREDIT: Moviepix/Getty

After her father’s death in 1980, the job of upholding his memory and protecting his reputation largely fell to Pat. She also co-authored a biography of her mother, Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man (2003), in which she maintained that her father would never have achieved such acclaim without the contribution of his wife of 54 years and mostly silent professional partner.

Patricia Alma Hitchcock was born in London on July 7 1928. Her mother, Alma Reville, had been a respected film editor, first at Twickenham Studios, and then at Islington Studios, where in 1923 she met Hitchcock, then little more than a script assistant. They had married in 1926.

Pat would relate that her father was so stricken by anxiety when her mother went into labour that he immediately left their Cromwell Road flat to go for a long walk, explaining afterwards: “Consider my suffering. I nearly died of the suspense.”

She attributed her early interest in acting to being brought on the set by her father if she remained very quiet: “I have a picture of me, with Margaret Lockwood and my dog, on The Lady Vanishes. I was absolutely fascinated.”

When she was eight, she was dispatched to boarding school, where she played Rumpelstiltskin: “It never occurred to me that I’d do anything else but act.”

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1939 when Pat was 10, but she recalled that she was brought up as an English child: “I knew what was expected, and I pretty much always did it. You didn’t speak unless spoken to, but it didn’t bother me or have any repercussions. I didn’t know anything else.”

She was very close to her father, who would take her out every Saturday, shopping and to lunch, and to (Catholic) church every Sunday. She attributed her lifelong religious faith to him.

She played teenage leads in two short-run Broadway plays, Solitaire (1942), and Violet (1944), the latter written and directed by Whitfield Cook, whom Hitchcock would later engage as a screenwriter on both Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train.

When she was 18 Pat was sent back to England to train at Rada, where her contemporaries included Lionel Jeffries and Dorothy Tutin, and in 1950 played a palace maid in the Jean Negulesco drama The Mudlark (1950), starring Irene Dunne and Alec Guinness.

Back in the US, she had an uncredited part in Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). She also appeared in television productions and was cast in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “whenever they needed a maid with an English accent”, as she put it.

She felt, however, that being Hitchcock’s daughter had been a “minus” in her career. “I wish he had believed in nepotism,” she told an interviewer. “I’d have worked a lot more. But he never had anyone in his pictures unless he believed they were right for the part. He never fit a story to a star, or to an actor. Often I tried to hint to his assistant, but I never got very far. She’d bring my name up, he’d say, ‘She isn’t right for it’, and that would be the end of that.”

Pat Hitchcock described her father as “very quiet. Incredible sense of humour. Very loving. He put his family first before everything else, and we led a very quiet life.”

Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell (daughter of Alfred) speaking to fans of Alfred Hitchcock during a DVD signing in Hollywood, 2005 — Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell (daughter of Alfred) speaking to fans of Alfred Hitchcock during a DVD signing in Hollywood, 2005 CREDIT: Matthew Simmons/Getty Images

On Alma’s death in 1982, two years after her husband, Pat and her family inherited her father’s estate.

She was angered by later suggestions that Hitchcock had been a sadistic and manipulative director who tried to control his leading ladies in real life and made sexual overtures toward some of them. “I know a lot of people insist that my father must have had a dark imagination,” she said. “Well, he did not. He was a brilliant film-maker and he knew how to tell a story, that’s all.”.

Yet even by her account the director had a bizarre sense of humour. When she was a child, he would creep into her bedroom late at night and paint a clown’s face on her sleeping features so that she would be surprised when she woke up and looked in the mirror. Returning from a wartime visit to England, he brought back an empty incendiary bomb as a present for his young daughter.

If she did have a criticism (though she denied it was any such thing) it was that he was content that her mother was never given the credit that Pat believed was her due.

Alfred Hitchcock with his wife Alma Reville and their daughter Pat Hitchcock aboard the Queen Mary at Southampton, before departure to America in March 1939 CREDIT: AFP/GettyImages

Alma was credited with screenplay or continuity work on almost half of Hitchcock’s films until 1950, and she continued her role as collaborator for 25 years after that, advising Hitchcock on “script material, casting and all aspects of the production” and working with other directors. But during the period of her husband’s most sustained creative activity, 1951-1960, Alma’s name disappeared.

Among other things Pat claimed that her mother had saved Psycho from an embarrassing faux pas after noticing, at a screening, that Janet Leigh was still breathing after having been killed off in the shower.

In later life Pat Hitchcock did volunteer work with a cystic fibrosis charity, her eldest granddaughter having been diagnosed with the disease

Her husband Joseph O’Connell, who was in the transportation business, died in 1994. She is survived by their three daughters

Patricia Hitchcock. Wikipedia.

Pat Hitchcock was born in 1928 and is an English actress and producer. She is the only child of English director Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville, and had small roles in several of his films, starting with Stage Fright (1950).

Hitchcock was born in London in 1928, the only child of film director Alfred Hitchcock and film editor Alma Reville. The family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1939. Once there, Hitchcock’s father soon made his mark in Hollywood.

As a child, Hitchcock knew she wanted to be an actress. In the early 1940s, she began acting on the stage and doing summer stock. Her father helped her gain a role in the Broadway production of Solitaire (1942). She also played the title role in the Broadway play Violet (1944).

After graduating from Marymount High School in Los Angeles in 1947, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and also appeared on the London stage.

In early 1949, her parents arrived in London to make Stage Fright, Hitchcock’s first British-made feature film since emigrating to Hollywood. Pat did not know she would have a walk-on part in the film until her parents arrived. Because she bore a resemblance to the star, Jane Wyman, her father asked if she would mind also doubling for Wyman in the scenes that required “danger driving”.

She had small roles in three of her father’s films: Stage Fright (1950), in which she played a jolly acting student named Chubby Bannister, one of Wyman’s school chums; Strangers on a Train (1951), playing Barbara Morton, sister of Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), Guy Haines’s (Farley Granger) lover; and Psycho (1960), playing Janet Leigh‘s character’s plain-Jane office mate, Caroline, who generously offers to share tranquilizers that her mother gave her for her wedding night.

Patricia had a small uncredited role as an extra in her father’s 1936 Sabotage. She and her mother, Alma Reville, are in the crowd waiting for, then watching, the Lord Mayor’s Show parade.

Hitchcock also worked for Jean Negulesco on The Mudlark (1950), which starred Irene Dunne and Alec Guinness, playing a palace maid, and she had a bit-part in DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments (1956).

As well as appearing in ten episodes of her father’s half-hour television programme, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock worked on a few others, including Playhouse 90, which was live, directed by John Frankenheimer. Acting for her father, however, remained the high point of her acting career, which she interrupted to bring up her children. (Hitchcock has a small joke with her first appearance on his show – after saying good night and exiting the screen, he sticks his head back into the picture and remarks: “I thought the little leading lady was rather good, didn’t you?”)

She also served as executive producer of the documentary The Man on Lincoln’s Nose (2000), which is about Robert F. Boyle and his contribution to films.

She married Joseph E. O’Connell, Jr., 17 January 1952, at Our Lady Chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. They decided to have their wedding there because Hitchcock had many friends on the East Coast and O’Connell had relatives in Boston. They had three daughters, Mary Alma Stone (born 17 April 1953), Teresa “Tere” Carrubba (born 2 July 1954), and Kathleen “Katie” Fiala (born 27 February 1959). Joe died in 1994.She currently lives in Solvang, California.

For several years, she was the family representative on the staff of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She supplied family photos and wrote the foreword of the book Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal, which was published in 2002. In 2003, she published Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man, co-written with Laurent Bouzereau.

Ray Winstone. IMDB.

Ray Winstone was born in Hackney, London in 1957. He was nominated for a BAFTA as Best Newcomer for his performance in “That Summer” in 1939. He has become one of the best of British actors and his films include “Nil By Mouth”, “The War Zone”, “Sexy Beast” and “Ripley’s Game”.

IMDB entry:

Ray Winstone was born on February 19, 1957, in Hackney Hospital in London, England, to Margaret (Richardson) and Raymond J. Winstone. He moved to Enfield, at age seven, where his parents had a fruit and vegetable business. He started boxing at the age of twelve at the famous Repton Amateur Boxing Club, was three times London Schoolboy Champion and fought twice for England, UK. In ten years of boxing, he won over 80 medals and trophies.

Ray studied acting at the Corona School before being cast by director Alan Clarke as Carlin in the BBC Play production of Scum (1977). He has appeared in numerous TV series over the past 20 years including Robin Hood (1984), Palmer (1991), Birds of a Feather(1989), Between the Lines (1992), Ghostbusters of East Finchley (1995), Births, Marriages and Deaths (1999), and Vincent (2005). His film career has burgeoned since his award-winning role in Gary Oldman‘s Nil by Mouth (1997), and he has appeared in multiple films including Fanny and Elvis (1999), Tim Roth‘s The War Zone (1999), The Departed (2006), Hugo (2011), and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). Known for his signature gritty voice, Winstone has also done a number of voiceover roles includingRango (2011), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), as well as the Beowulf (2007) film and video games.

He married Elaine Winstone in 1979, and the couple have three children: Lois Winstone(born 1982), a singer with the London-based hip-hop group “Crack Village” who also played his on-screen daughter in Last Orders (2001) and got a part in four episodes ofThe Bill (1984), Jaime Winstone (born 1985) also an actress with ambitions to be a director, and Ellie Rae Winstone (born 2001).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Alys-2 <acarter@dhac.prestel.co.uk>

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Nigel Havers

Roddy McDowall

Jean Heywood

Jean Heywood obituary in “The Independent” in 2019.

Kevin Whatley

Molly Lamont

George Lazenby

Geoffrey Keen

Patricia Hitchcock

Telegraph obituary in August 2021.

Patricia Hitchcock. Wikipedia.

Ray Winstone

Ray Winstone. IMDB.

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