Hy Hazell was born in 1919 in London. “Meet Me at Dawn” in 1947 was her first film. Her other films include “The Franchise Affair”, “The Yellow Balloon”, and “Anastasia”. She died aged 50 in 1970.
Hilary Tindall was born in 1938 in Manchester. She is best remembered as the bitchy Ann Hammond in the very popular television series “The Brothers” which ran from 1972 until 1976. She also won glowing reviews for her performance in the television series “A Kind of Loving” in 1982. She sadly died in 1992 at the age of 54.
“Independent” obituary from 1993:
Hilary Tindall, actress, born Manchester 1936, married 1963 Robin Lowe (one son, one daughter), died Selborne Hampshire 5 December 1992.
HILARY TINDALL became one of television’s most popular actresses when she played Ann Hammond in the successful television series The Brothers which ran from 1972 to 1974 (and is now being repeated on UK Gold).
When Tindall won the role of Ann Hammond she little realised that it would be a turning-point in her career. Appearing in 50 episodes, she played the part of the bored and restless wife married to one of the brothers of the family- owned road-haulage company, and captured the imagination of the viewers with her adulterous affairs.
It was a part that afforded her a full range of emotions and was to make her a star wherever the series was sold in Europe and the Far East. Her family life precluded her from undertaking the many offers of work abroad which were offered at the time.
Hilary Tindall was born in Manchester and trained at RADA. Her first appearance on the professional stage was at Richmond Theatre, and she went on to play the juvenile lead in William Douglas-Home’s controversial comedy Aunt Edwina at the Fortune Theatre. This was followed by the lead in A Trip to the Castle at the Arts Theatre in 1960, where she played opposite Terence Stamp. Television roles at that time included Dear Octopus, with Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, and The Tempest, with Michael Redgrave. Leading roles followed at the Old Vic, and she appeared in the American musical Little Mary Sunshine at the Comedy in 1962.
After her success in The Brothers, Tindall was offered a starring role in a Swedish television serial, The Ship Owner. The Brothers had been a big hit in Sweden and she became an overnight celebrity there with her new series. She returned to the stage in Britain with Parent’s Day, at the Globe, and found herself in great demand, starring in several national tours of plays including Verdict, The Gentle Hook, My Cousin Rachel, The Owl and The Pussy Cat and Getting Married.
Tindall returned to musicals and starred in A Little Night Music and Company, at Colchester, and South Pacific, at the Connaught. More television followed including: Tales of the Unexpected, A Kind of Loving, The Max Headroom Show and, her last appearance, an episode of Maigret. Her last stage appearances were Dangerous Obsession (1988), at the Fortune, The Heiress (1989), at Chichester, and How The Other Half Loves (1990), at Leatherhead.
Hilary Tindall was married to Robin Lowe, the literary agent, and had two children, Kate and Julian. She was a delightful actress whose vivacity and charm endeared her to everybody she worked for.
Lionel Blair was born in 1931 in Montreal. His family came to England where he was an infant. His films include “The World of Suzy Wong” in 1960 with William Holden and Nancy Kwan. His sister was the actress Joyce Blair.
“Guardian” interview in 2013:
I was born in 1932 and we grew up in Stamford Hill, north London. When the war began we were evacuated to Oxford – just me and my sister and my mother – while my dad stayed in London working. I remember playing in the garden with my younger sister, Joyce, and we saw a German plane crash. My father said, “If that can happen there, what’s the point of being in the country away from each other?” So we came home to Stamford Hill.
My father’s parents were Russian and he was the archetypal north London barber – “Something for the weekend, sir?” and all that. From an early age Joyce and I were taken to the pictures, – it was always Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Shirley Temple. We used to go home and try to copy them. That’s how we learned to tap dance.
We were Jewish but not orthodox. During the war, Dad brought bacon home and we’ve eaten it ever since. I think that was frowned upon by certain people in the community when they got a sniff of our bacon sandwich. But every Friday we had chicken and my mother would light candles.
My father died when I was 13. He had a hernia and thought he’d cured it but he hadn’t and it became strangulated and he had a duodenal ulcer as well. He went into an operating theatre and came out dead. It was a huge shock for the whole family. It changed everything. It was the first time I’d ever thought, I’m never going to see him again. It was so awful and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a loss like it.
After Dad died, I had to grow up artificially fast. We had no money so I had to work. I’d started work as a boy actor and my dad had been thrilled about that, but I became too old for little boy parts and too young for grown-up parts. I could dance so I got into musicals and started performing with Joyce. But just as we were becoming well known on television, my mother died and so we were orphans. Then Joyce met her first husband, Eddie, so I was on my own.
I will have been married to Susanfor 46 years in March. The secret of a successful marriage is memories. You must have memories together. That’s why my dad insisted that we went everywhere together, so we could talk about things. I’m so lucky to have a wife who is a nest builder. Her nest is the most important thing in the world to her.
When my first son was born I was driving home and I suddenly said to Susan, “We’ve got another life in our family,” and it was just wonderful. My children are 43, 40 and 30 and the youngest is still at home. We’ve got three grandchildren too and it’s heaven. I love them to distraction.
My children didn’t like seeing me on the telly. When they first started going to school – a state school – having a famous father was not the best thing in the world. They were teased because I was a dancer and my persona didn’t help. Then we sent them to Italia Conti [Academy of Theatre Arts], which was a different sort of thing altogether and there were kids there who were almost jealous because they had a famous father. We’ve got a very, very normal family, and for me everything comes back to family. If they’re sad, I’m sad. I want them to be happy all the time.
• Lionel Blair performs a one-man show at London’s Hippodrome Casino on 23 March, hippodromecasino.com. Box office: 020-7769 8866
The above “Guardian” interview can also be accessed online here.
Isabel Dean was born in 1918 in Staffordshire. Her film debut came in 1949 in David Lean’s “The Passionate Friends” with Ann Todd and Trevor Howard. Her other films included “The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan”, “Out of the Clouds”, “Virgin Island” and “Light in the Piazza” with Olivia de Havilland in 1962. She died in 1997.
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:
In a career spanning 50 years, Isabel Dean demonstrated talent and versatility while never fulfilling the great promise initially indicated. With large eyes and classically chiselled features, she became best known as an exponent of somewhat steely patrician ladies of elegance and breeding. That she was capable of much more was demonstrated by her work on stage in both the classics and contemporary drama, but most of this was done in provincial theatres, partly no doubt because early in her career she offended “Binkie Beaumont”, the West End’s leading theatrical manager.
She was born Isabel Hodgkinson in Aldridge, Staffordshire, in 1918. Her first ambition was to be an art teacher. She studied painting at the Birmingham Art School and in 1937 joined the Cheltenham Repertory Company as a scenic artist. Soon she was taking both acting lessons and small parts with the company. “It was inevitable, with her ravishing looks,” commented one of the company later.
After appearing with repertory companies in Brighton and Norwich, she made her London debut on 1 May 1940 as Maggie Buckley in an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s thriller Peril at End House, following this with a Shakespearean role, Mariana in Robert Atkins’s Regent’s Park production of All’s Well That Ends Well. A major break came in 1943 when she played Jenny in John Gielgud’s celebrated production of Congreve’s Love for Love at the Phoenix.
The following year she was asked to join Gielgud’s repertory company at the Haymarket, again playing Prue in Love for Love, but also understudying Peggy Ashcroft as Ophelia to Gielgud’s Hamlet (the last time the great actor played the role). She played Ophelia several times when Ashcroft was sick and followed this with a performance as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream which, according to Harold Hobson, was “as pretty and sharply defined as it was lovely”.
When Beaumont asked her to go with Gielgud’s company to tour India, but only to play the role of the maid in Coward’s Blithe Spirit and again to under-study Ophelia, she refused and Beaumont made it clear he considered her ungrateful. She never worked for his management again and made few more West End appearances. Instead she played leading roles in Oxford, Brighton and the Boltons Theatre, including a luminous Juliet.
She returned to the West End in 1956 to play Mary Dallas in the thriller The Night of the Fourth at the Westminster, and three years later played Miss Frost, the Catholic lodger seduced by a young student, in the hit production of J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man at the Fortune.
She had meanwhile become a familiar face on television. She had the principal female role in Nigel Kneale’s enormously popular blend of science-fiction and horror The Quatermass Experiment (1953), six 30-minute episodes which went out live, with filmed inserts. Dean played the scientist whose astronaut husband returns from a mission with an alien infection that causes him to mutate into a vegetable-like creature.
When A Life of Bliss, a successful radio comedy series, was transferred to television with its original star, George Cole, as the bumbling bachelor hero, Dean was cast as his forthright sister Anne.
Other television roles included Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, David Mercer’s The Parachute (as mother to John Osborne), Julian Bond’s 13-part series A Man of Our Times and a high-toned soap-opera, 199 Park Avenue, sat in a luxury apartment block where the stories of the inhabitants are linked by a gossip columnist searching for stories. Created and written by Dean’s husband, William Fairchild, it went out twice weekly, but lasted only nine weeks. (Dean’s 1953 marriage to Fairchild, who wrote such screenplays as Morning Departure, The Malta Story and Star!, was dissolved in the early Seventies.)
In the theatre, she had successes in several contemporary plays, including the Royal Court production of John Osborne’s A Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), which moved into the West End, and in provincial productions of Orton’s What the Butler Saw and John Bowen’s chilling Robin Redbreast. She had a particularly notable triumph as Hester in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (at Guildford in 1971 and Nottingham in 1972), once more following in the footsteps of Peggy Ashcroft. Her wrenching portrayal of the clergyman’s daughter, married to a High Court judge, who leaves her husband to pursue a hopeless and obsessive affair with a young air force pilot, clearly demonstrated that Dean’s gifts had not always been appropriately exploited.
In 1977 she played with Gielgud, for the first time since she had been his Ophelia, in Julian Mitchell’s Half Life at the National Theatre.
Dean’s film career began in 1943 with a tiny role in The Man in Grey. Later films included Lean’s The Passionate Friends (1948), and Sidney Gilliatt’s The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953), in which she was the epitome of droll elegance as wife to Robert Morley’s Gilbert. “How does it feel to be married to a transcendent genius?” asks her husband as he puts the finishing touches to The Mikado. “I suppose I’ve always taken it for granted, dear,” is her reply.
In Alexander Mackendrick’s A High Wind in Jamaica, she presented a beautiful and touching picture of Victorian motherhood in the film’s early sequences. Her last appearance on the West End stage was as the tragic mother of Alan Turing (Derek Jacobi) in Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code (1986).
A few years earlier the critic Harold Hobson had written: “Our own stage is rich in actresses of whom the chief jewel is Peggy Ashcroft – and the most undervalued is Isabel Dean.”
Isabel Hodgkinson (Isabel Dean), actress: born Aldridge, Staffordshire 29 May 1918; married 1953 William Fairchild (two daughters; marriage dissolved); died 27 July 1997.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Sally Thomsett was born in 1950 in Sussex. She will be best remembered for her key role in “The Railway Children” in 1970. She was also featured the following year in “Straw Dogs”. Between 1973 and 1976 she starred in “Man About the House”.
Interview on the making of “The Railway Children” with Anne Tims:
I was 20 when I was cast as Phyllis, and the director called me back at least four times to be sure I looked young enough. My contract forbade me to reveal my age; I was not allowed to be seen with my boyfriend, to drink in public or drive the sports cars that were my passion. I’d always played girls, so acting 11 was no particular challenge; the Edwardian smocks usefully concealed any bust line.
Even the film crew didn’t know how old I was and treated me as a kid, which was frustrating. They’d ask Jenny how she thought a take had gone, even though she was three years younger than me, and they’d give me sweets. But actually Jenny was as motherly as the character she played and looked after me. I’ve always had a childish side. Bernard Cribbins liked to go fishing, and I’d creep up on him and say, “Boo!”
They put us all in a remote hotel near Haworth in north Yorkshire so we couldn’t stray into any nightclubs. One evening I got fed up and dragged a reluctant Jenny along for a night out in Leeds. We crept out of a back door and went to a club where a girl was dancing in a bird cage, and sitting on a mezzanine above us we saw Lionel Jeffries and the producerRobert Lynn dropping sixpences on her head.
The scariest scene to shoot was the landslide, which took a whole day to set up. There were explosives hidden in the trees, and I was petrified. After the film was released, Lionel rang to congratulate me on being nominated for a Bafta. I didn’t believe him because he was a joker. We thought it was a little film for kids: we had absolutely no premonition of the success it would have.
The above 2013 “Guardian” interview can also be accessed online here.
Geoffrey Bayldon was born in 1924 in Leeds. He is best known for his role in the children’s television series “Catweazle” in 1971 and also for “Worzel Gummidge”. His films include “A Night to Remember” in 1958, “The Camp on Blood Island” and “To Sir with Love” in 1967 with Sidney Poitier and Patricia Routledge.
IMDB entry:
Born Leeds, England and trained at Old Vic Theatre School, 1947-1949. First stage appearance in “Tough at the Top” (C.B. Cochran’s last musical) in 1949, followed by seasons at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; Glasgow Citizen’s and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. First in London’s west end in “The Happy Time” (1952) and more recently in “Worzel Gummidge”, “A Month of Sundays” “Maria” and “Unfinished Business”. Overseas: played Caesar in “Caesar and Cleopatra” (International Festival, Paris, 1956); Ravinia Shakespeare Festival (Chicago, 1964); Pickering in “My Fair Lady” (Houston, 1991). In 1998 he was nominated as “Best Actor” for the Royal Midland Television Awards for his role as Alby James in an episode of Peak Practice (1993).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gordon Lilley <glilley@magma.ca>
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Obituary in “The Telegraph” in 2017.
Geoffrey Bayldon, who has died aged 93, was an austere-looking actor with a penchant for absent-minded or eccentric types, none more so than Catweazle, the bungling medieval wizard he played in the children’s television series of the same name, which ran on ITV from 1970 to 1972; he then delighted young viewers as the Crowman in Worzel Gummidge (ITV, 1979-81).
In the first episode of Catweazle, the deliciously bewhiskered and bedraggled old magician (played with convincing battiness by the 46-year-old Bayldon) has time travelled from the 11th to the 20th century after jumping into a moat to escape Norman invaders.
Bayldon as Catweazle CREDIT: ITV/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Having woken up in a pond, he finds himself on a farm and is soon befriended by a teenage farmer’s son, Edward “Carrot” Bennett (Robin Davies). Their first conversation begins with Catweazle saying: “Art thou Norman?”, to which Carrot replies: “No, my name’s Edward.”
An amusing feature of the pair’s subsequent adventures is Catweazle’s need to have modern technology explained to him – he calls the telephone the “telling-bone” and electricity “electrickery”; another is Carrot’s need to prevent the jumpy Catweazle from pulling his dagger on strangers.
Catweazle was created by the screenwriter Richard Carpenter, who wrote the series with Bayldon in mind, although the actor was initially sceptical about the project.
Bayldon in 2011 CREDIT: TONY KYRIACOU/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
“I knew he was writing something for me,” Bayldon recalled, “and I thought, ‘Poor dear, he must be hard up. It’s going to be dreadful.’ But my agent rang and said, ‘Geoffrey, I’ve read the first page and I’ve never read anything so magical in my life. I tingled with joy. I’m sending it to you straightaway.’ I read the first page and … I thought it was wonderful.”
Part of the appeal of the series lay in the gentle friendship forged between Catweazle and Carrot, but Bayldon, a fine stage actor, stole the show as the eccentric and endearing wizard. At a time when, as Bayldon later observed, “everything was serious, working-class” Catweazle had “magic, comedy and a little tinge of tragedy”. More than 40 years on Catweazle continues to have a cult following and a loyal and active fan club.
The son of a tailor and a headmistress, Geoffrey Bayldon was born in Leeds on January 7 1924 and educated at Bridlington School and Hull College of Architecture. He began acting in amateur theatricals, and spent his war years stationed with the RAF in Yorkshire before moving to London in 1947 to train at the Old Vic Theatre School. His first professional role was in C B Cochran’s last production, Tough at the Top (1949).
Catweazle: an eccentric and bumbling wizard CREDIT: ITV/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Bayldon then joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (appearing, in 1950, in Measure for Measure and Julius Caesar with John Gielgud) before moving to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre.
By the late 1950s he was working regularly in television and he had roles in the ITV Play of the Week, as well as in The Avengers (1961, 1967) and Z-cars (1963, 1968). In 1963 he was offered the role of the first Doctor Who, but turned it down thinking – erroneously, as it turned out – that he was not suited to playing an eccentric old man. (In 1979 he did eventually appear in three episodes of the show, playing Organon the astrologer.)
After the success of Catweazle, he was offered the part of the mysterious Crowman, the scarecrow maker in Worzel Gummidge. This time Bayldon was the straight man to Jon Pertwee’s delightfully bonkers Worzel, whose antics are kept in check by the wise Crowman (“I am the Crowman, Worzel, and I know when you’re telling the truth”) and of whom Worzel is more than a little nervous, calling him “Mr Crowman, sir, your worship, sir, your holiness”.
Bayldon in The Avengers, 1961
Bayldon continued to work regularly on the small screen in shows such as Tales of the Unexpected (1980 and 1983), All Creatures Great and Small (1983), Blott on the Landscape (1985), Rumpole of the Bailey (1987) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1989). He was also involved in a number of BBC Schools programmes.
He played memorable character parts in countless films including Dracula and A Night to Remember (both 1958), To Sir, with Love (1967), Casino Royale (1967, in which he played “Q”, opposite Peter Sellers), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), Porridge (1979) and Bullshot (1983).
His later theatre work included, in 1986, a performance described by The Daily Telegraph’s John Barber as “beautiful”, opposite George Cole in Bob Larbey’s A Month of Sundays. Bayldon played one of two old codgers manfully resisting dehumanisation in an old people’s home.
In 1986, he recorded the vocals for the synth-pop composer Paul Hardcastle’s The Wizard. Among his later television appearances were the role of the Professor in the Channel Five game show Fort Boyard (1998-2001), and in Waking the Dead (2004), Heartbeat (2004) and several episodes of Casualty. He recorded a number of audiobooks, including Doctor Who, and worked on several radio plays.
Geoffrey Bayldon lived for many years in Putney, where he enjoyed gardening, walking and painting.
In the late 1940s he was briefly married, to Joan, and the marriage was dissolved; he is survived by a brother.
Geoffrey Bayldon, born January 7 1924, died May 10 2017
Peter Grenville obituary in “The Guardian” in 1996.
Peter Glenville was born in 1913 in London. His father was the Irish actor Shaun Glenville. He was both an actor and director. On film he acted in “His Brother’s Keeper” in 1940, “Madonna of the Seven Moons” in 1945 and “Good-Time Girl” with Jean Kent, Diana Dors and Flora Robson. As a directed, he directed “The Prisoner”, “Me and the Colonel”, “Summer and Smoke”, “Term of Trial”, “Becket”, “Hotel Paradiso” and “The Comedians”. He died in 1996.
“Independent” obituary by Derek Granger:With his dark, Celtic matinee-idol looks, Peter Glenville was a glittering figure in the post-war London theatre. He had made promising beginnings as a young actor in the Thirties and Forties, but achieved his greatest success as a director of West End plays for the management of H.M. Tennent. Under Binkie Beaumont, the head of that prolific firm, Glenville became one of a select team of young directors who could be relied on to give a Tennent production the immaculate standards prized by Beaumont – starry casting, high visual impact and a veneer of conspicuously polished taste. A natural flair, gave the authentic Tennent stamp to a large number of important London productions. Among them were five plays by his friend Terence Rattigan, including The Browning Version and Harlequinade (both 1948), Adventure Story (1949) – Rattigan’s extravagant reworking of the life of Alexander the Great starring Paul Scofield – and Separate Tables (1954), with a cast led by Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman.
In 1948, he directed John Gielgud in a revival of St John Hankin’s witty Edwardian morality play The Return of the Prodigal, with sets by Cecil Beaton, and in 1951 a delicately judged presentation of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke with Margaret Johnson as the wistfully ill-adjusted Southern heroine. A broodingly thoughtful study of domestic decay and lost faith provided the theme for Graham Greene’s The Living Room (1953), with a cast headed by Eric Portman and the 23-year-old Dorothy Tutin.
He directed Alec Guinness (who was to become a lifelong friend) in Sam and Bella Spewack’s 1951 version of Karel Capek’s Insect Play, entitled Under the Sycamore Tree; the production was designed by another friend, Oliver Messel. Guinness had also appeared for Glenville in 1950 in The Prisoner by Bridget Boland, playing the Cardinal tortured for his faith in a Communist state. In 1952, Glenville directed an adaptation from Henry James’s The Reverberator, Letter From Paris, again with decor by Messel.
From 1949, Glenville frequently directed plays in New York. Among them were another Henry James adaptation, The Innocents (from The Turn of the Screw); The Island of Goats; Romeo and Juliet, with Olivia de Havilland; and his own adaptation of the Feydeau farce Hotel Paradiso, starring Angela Lansbury and Bert Lahr, which he co-presented in 1957 and later produced in London.
His greatest Broadway success was Jean Anouilh’s Becket, which he directed in 1960 with an outstanding cast in which Anthony Quinn played the mercurial and exasperated Henry II and Laurence Olivier his troublesome prelate. Olivier was later to change roles and play the King. Becket was filmed by Glenville four years later with Richard Burton as Becket and Peter O’Toole as Henry II.
The choice of Glenville’s theatre work was eclectic, reflecting his own enquiring taste and his well-articulated belief that a good director should be a true interpreter of the playwright, intuitive and delicate when the nature of the work required an unobtrusive approach, but ready to use all the broad and colourful strokes of theatrical magic if the material so demanded.
Peter Glenville was the son of the Irish comedian Shaun Glenville and the musical star Dorothy Ward, the tall, beautiful, thigh-slapping Principal Boy of innumerable pantomimes, who often appeared with her husband playing the Dame. Glenville liked to boast that he came from a line of Irish vaudevillians (his grandmother, Mary Glenville, was a frequent player at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin), but the older Glenvilles were actually a prodigiously successful theatrical couple and it was Glenville’s luck that their success gave him financial independence, a fact which did nothing to quench either his application or ambition.
Educated by Jesuits at Stonyhurst College (he retained his strong Catholic faith throughout his life), he went on to study Law at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became President of Oxford University Dramatic Society. His many roles for them included Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Max Reinhardt.
It seemed inevitable that Glenville would swiftly become a major young actor. Between 1934 and 1947 he played professionally a succession of leading roles – classical, romantic and invariably showy – ranging from Tony Pirelli in Edgar Wallace’s gangster drama On the Spot and Stephen Cass in Mary Hayley Bell’s horror thriller Duet For Two Hands to Romeo, Prince Hal and an intense Hamlet in a production which he also directed for the Old Vic company in Liverpool, where in 1946 he had been appointed a director. Here, at the age of 34, his experience confirmed that he had probably reached his limits as an actor and that his future career lay in direction.
After the mid-Fifties, Glenville lived and worked chiefly in New York. The varied productions he directed there included the Japanese Samurai revenge drama Rashomon, the French comedy Tchin-Tchin, a musical version of Tovarich starring Vivien Leigh, John Osborne’s A Patriot For Me and Dylan, a study of the last days of Dylan Thomas, with Alec Guinness as the disintegrating poet.
In 1970, he returned to London to direct his last play there, Rattigan’s Bequest to the Nation, about Emma Hamilton. His last production in New York was the ill-fated two-hander Out Cry (1973) by Tennessee Williams.
Glenville directed several films but his touch was never as sure as for his work for the stage, and even with stars like Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret (in Term of Trial, 1962) and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (in Graham Greene’s The Comedians, 1967) his films leave one with a sense of expectations unfulfilled.
Glenville retained into old age his youthful appearance and zest; he had a seductively engaging manner, an air of brilliance and worldly assurance, lightened by an infectious sense of mischief and irony, when stories and gossip would tumble forth in gleeful, swooping bursts of emphasis.
He had always lived in style, first as a young man in his thirties in a fine house, complete with butler, in Brompton Square, and afterwards for more than three decades in New York in a vast, grand apartment in the town house he owned in the East Sixties, decorated in sombrely impressive style by Geoffrey Bennison.
Within this somewhat Proustian context Glenville was eagerly embraced by New York society and it came to seem that no gossip column or social event was complete without him. Recently he had created a second delectable haven, a house in the picturesque Mexican town of San Miguel. In the last two decades, although he had given up directing, the grand, the smart and the beautiful still flocked to his East Side drawing-room where it probably seemed to him that the human comedy provided almost as much stimulation as the theatre.
Peter Glenville, theatre and film director: born London 28 October 1913; died New York 3 June 1996
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Jane Merrow was born in 1941 in Hertfortshire. “Don ‘t Bother to Knock” in 1961 was her movie debut. Her other other films include “The Wild and the Willing”, “The System” and “The Lion in the Winter”. In the 1970’s she went to Hollywood and acted there for a number of years. She is now back living in England.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
British actress Jane Merrow studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the onset of her career and became a classical heroine in the 1960s on both stage and TV. Portraying such soulful lasses as “Lorna Doone” and “Jane Eyre” on TV, she mixed in a few Shakespearean ingénues and brought forth a gift for bringing a noticeable fragility and honesty to her roles. A trendy presence on all the swinging spy shows of the time including The Saint (1962), The Prisoner (1967), Secret Agent (1964) and The Avengers(1961), the last for which she was once entertained a leading role. Best known to film-goers for her Golden Globe-nominated role in the classic costume drama The Lion in Winter (1968) as “Alais”, the young adoring mistress to “King Henry”, Jane moved to America in 1971 and enjoyed a transcontinental career for nearly two decades. Here, she appeared on such stalwart series as Mission: Impossible (1966) and Hart to Hart (1979), among others. She also starred as Vivien Leigh in a one-woman stage tribute that opened in, of course, Atlanta. She divides her time between homes in London and Boise, Idaho.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Patti Clare is currently to be seen as the hilarious Mary Taylor in “Coronation Street”.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Clare was born in the city of Manchester. Her stage acting credits include playing Edith in a production of Noël Coward‘s Blithe Spirit at the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow in 2000 and the role of Mrs. Micawber in a 2005 production of the stage play David Copperfield at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.[2] Having built up extensive experience in theatre, Clare subsequently expressed interest in transitioning to television.[1]
“I was told I had to take a gamble for a year and turn theatre work down and sit it out. It was terrible. I didn’t do any acting for nine months so I worked in an office and the job [on Coronation Street] came in the September.”
Clare was told that to achieve her goal in working in television it would be in her short-term interest to turn down theatre work. In September 2008, whilst working as an office receptionist, she was offered the part of Mary Taylor in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street.[1] She made her first appearance on 26 November 2008. The character was initially only meant to appear in five episodes.[1] After an initial stint which ended in 2009 Clare was offered a new contract and returned to the serial in January 2010.[4] Television roles prior to and between her appearances as Mary included small roles in the children’s fantasy seriesYoung Dracula, a 2008 episode of the science-fiction series Torchwood, an episode of the historical medical drama Casualty 1909 and an episode of the BBC daytime soap opera Doctors.
Clare has been recognised for her comic scenes on Coronation Street. She was nominated for ‘Funniest Performance’ at the 2011 Inside Soap Awards and won ‘Best Comedy Performance’ at the 2013 British Soap Awards.
