British Actors Archives - Page 108 of 137

Andrew Cruickshank

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.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Andrew Cruickshank (Junior) was born to Andrew and Mary Cruickshank, and was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School. He was to have entered the profession of civil engineering after completing his education, but instead joined provincial repertory theatres, leading to 1930 roles in Othello at the Savoy Theatre in London, as Maudelyn in Richard of Bordeaux at the Empire Theatre on Broadway in 1934, and culminating in his principal appearance (as three characters) on the London stage in 1935, at the Gate Theatre in the play Victoria Regina. He returned to Broadway in 1951 until 1952, as the Earl of Warwick in George Bernard Shaw‘s play Saint Joan, with Uta Hagen in the lead role.^[His first film role followed in 1937, as the poet Robert Burns in Auld Lang Syne. Subsequently, however, he would be typecast into portrayals of formal authority figures, such as judges and doctors.

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.

His films include Johnny Frenchman (1945), The White Unicorn (1947), La Forteresse (1947), Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Romantic Age(1949), The Reluctant Widow (1950), and Ti Coq (1953). He was also seen in the popular Quebec television series Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut.

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 Overview

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

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.

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