British Actors Archives - Page 121 of 138

Barry Foster

Barry Foster was a very popular British television actor. He is chiefly known for his playing of the title character in the series “Van der Valk” which began in 1972. He has though done some great work on film e.g. “Ryan’s Daughter” in 1970, “Robbery”, “The Family Way”, “Heat and Dust”, “Maurice” and Alfred Hitchcock’s penulimate film “Frenzy”. He was born in 1927 and died in 2002 at the age of 74.

Philip Purser’s obituary of Barry Foster in “The Independent”

The sudden death of Barry Foster at the age of 70 robs the acting profession of one of its most adaptable stalwarts, equally at home on stage or screen, just as content to play in a difficult or experimental production as to star in a popular television series – and, indeed, unhappy if he couldn’t continually be switching from one to the other.

As Nicolas Freeling’s stolid Amsterdam detective Van der Valk, Foster carried 25 hour-long episodes in the Thames Television version over the years 1972-73 and 1977, quietly eclipsing a rival German series with the same hero, then in 1991 resumed the role in a batch of two-hour stories.

In the interim, he made an appearance, invariably on the wrong side of the law, in almost every other respectable detective saga on the air. The great interrogator was himself interrogated by Inspectors Morse and Dalgleish, and by Detective Sergeant Bergerac. He turned up in John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People, and played Elliott McQueen, the dazzling villain of Sweeney! (1977), the first movie spin-off from the TV series of approximately the same name.

Born in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, but brought up in Hayes, Middlesex, where his toolsetter father had moved to find work during the depression, the young Foster was all set for a career in industry when, secretly hankering for something more creative, he won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama. There his fellow students included Harold Pinter, with whom he went on to tour rural Ireland in a fit-up company whose members also included Kenneth Haigh and Alun Owen.

His stocky frame, bristly curls and rank-and-file origins brought him a stream of bit parts in the second world war films that were still being churned out, including Battle Of The River Plate (1956), Sea Of Sand and Dunkirk (both 1958), and better roles in the plays about service life which figured prominently in the new TV drama of the 1950s and 60s. He was a young officer in Incident At Echo Six (1959), by Troy Kennedy Martin, set in Cyprus during the troubles, and a soldier again that year in the film Yesterday’s Enemy, harking back to the war in Burma.

From shooting wars he stepped deftly to the class war, and a part in David Mercer’s first – and seminal – script, Where The Difference Begins (1961). Now the credits jostle to demonstrate his versatility. He starred as Cornelius Christian in Fairy Tales Of New York in the West End at the Comedy Theatre (1961). At the National Theatre in 1983 he played Ulysses in Jean Giraudoux’s 1935 play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, directed by his old mate Pinter; and he appeared in several works from the same man’s pen.

In 1994-95 he was Inspector Goole in Stephen Daldry’s fabled production of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls at the Aldwych, which went on to tour in Australia. And until he was taken ill last Friday, he was appearing in the stage show Art, written by Yasmina Reza and translated by Christoper Hampton, at the Whitehall.

Foster’s notable film credits included Ryan’s Daughter (1970), Frenzy (1972) and The Whistle Blower (1986). But perhaps his best – and worst – role in any medium was as the legendary bundle of paradoxes, Orde Wingate. Epic movies had been planned to tell the story of this extraordinary British soldier who founded the Israeli army before Israel existed, restored the Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne of Judah, and led the Chindit operations against the Japanese in Burma until he was killed in a plane crash in 1944.

None of these films was realised, but in 1976 the gifted producer Innes Lloyd finally persuaded the BBC to stump up enough for a stylised (ie cheap) studio production in three 75-minute instalments, entitled Orde Wingate. Written by Don Shaw, directed by Bill Hays and with Foster inhabiting the part, it remains a landmark in television drama. Alas, Foster went on to repeat the characterisation, to much less effect, in an inferior but infinitely more lavish American biography of Golda Meir (A Woman Called Golda, 1972).

Foster was married to the singer and former actress Judith Shergold, in one of show business’s happiest and most durable alliances. One of their recipes for its success was never to be apart for too long. If Barry was working on Broadway or in Hollywood, she would endeavour to join him. They had two daughters, Joanna and Miranda, who followed him into the theatre, and a son, Jason. His wife and children survive him.

Foster loved music, and acted as reciter in performances of such works as Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and – under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle – Berlioz’s rarely played sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique, Lélio. His favourite place, he once said, was Venice – “a jewel-encrusted treasure house built on water”.

· Barry Foster, actor, born August 21 1931; died February 11 2002

This “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Anthony Singleton is a British actor whose first film was “Sapphire” in 1959 with Nigel Patrick and Michael Craig. His other films include “Beat Girl”, “The Mindbenders” and “Masquerade” in 1966.

Annette Badland

Annette Badland was born in 1950 in Birmingham. She is a terrific actress who has distinguished each film and television show she has been in. She was part of the cast of “Bergerac”. Her films include “Jabberwocky” in 1977 and “Little Voice” in 1998.

Barbara Knox is one of the stalwart’s of the long running “Coronation Street”. She first made her appearance there as Rita Littlewood in 1964. She was featured in the 1969 remake of “Goodbye Mr Chips”,

James Booth obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.

James Booth was born in 1927 in Croydon, Surrey. His movie debut came in 1956 in “The Narrowing Circle”. In 1960 he gained favourable reviews for his role in “The Trials of Oscar Wlde” as Alfred Wood. In 1963 he won the leading role opposite Barbara Windsor in Joan Littlewood’s “Sparrrows Can’t Sing”.

He then had a series of leading roles in such films as “Robbery” with Stanley Baker and “The Bliss of Mrs Blossom” with Shirley MacLaine. He went to Hollywood to continue his career. Towards the end of his life he returned to England. His last film was “Keeping Mum” in 2005, the year he died at the age of 78.

His “Guardian” obituary by Eric Shorter:

It was amid the social and political upheavals of the postwar British drama – Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at Stratford East, George Devine at the Royal Court and Peter Hall in London and at Stratford-on-Avon – that James Booth, the character actor who has died at 77, burst on the scene.

Booth seemed to excite the theatre like a fountain of high spirits, with his cockney voice and his mischievous way of expressing himself, sometimes teasing, sometimes truly.

He appeared to conquer whatever he touched, and being at Theatre Workshop the plays could be difficult. Whether old Spanish marital discord in Celestina; Shavian argument (The Man Of Destiny), Irish high farce (Brendan Behan’s The Hostage), low English musical (Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be) or Dickens’ sentiment A Christmas Carol, they were a challenge to a small and largely untrained troupe.

But Booth’s manner with an audience, which he took into his confidence, was so personal. It proved the same in Royal Court revivals of the old British jokes, Box And Cox, or the European ironies of The Fire Raisers, or the call-up humour of Henry Livings’ Nil Carborundum at the Arts. The reason for Booth’s success lay simply with his personality.

His height also helped. He would loom over the footlights with a commandingly wide grin. And his unpretentious manner added to the ease with which these early performances were accepted.

Yet Booth was hardly experienced as an actor. After two years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art he did eight Shakespeare plays as an Old Vic sword carrier before joining Theatre Workshop at Stratford East. And as Tosher, the lead, in Lionel Bart and Frank Norman’s cockney musical, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (a Stratford transfer that had a long West End run), Booth landed one of his richest roles in 1959.

In 1962 he was in two plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Critic Kenneth Tynan reckoned that, for him, The Comedy Of Errors, directed by Clifford Williams, gave the company its first sign of “a house style”.

In Peter Brook’s production of King Lear, the arch-villain Edmund was perhaps literally beyond Booth’s technical reach in arguing the difference between Regan and Goneril. At any rate his treatment of Shakespeare’s verse defeated Tynan. His tangled liaisons struck the critic as handling the verse “with the finesse of a gloved pugilist picking up pins.”

Joan Littlewood remarked of Booth at the time: “At all hours you’d find him propping up the bar; a cynical, witty, impossible character, lanky and agile, with his own peculiar life, and acting.” Booth stood for the rebellious spirit of the age, its attitude to middle-class authority, and his nasal speech and clownish instinct usually put him on what he himself would have rated matey terms with his audience – if not the critics. And by failing to regard Shakespeare or Pinter, Behan or Livings, as cherished text, he was being himself.

After another spell with Littlewood as a cheery cockney Robin Hood in her ill-fated staging of a West End musical, Twang!, Booth returned to the classics, though he seemed a far from classical actor. He played Face in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist at Chichester, Osip in Gogol’s The Government Inspector for the Welsh Drama Company and Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer.

In 1974, he played Chief Supt Craddock in Ken Hill’s Gentleman Prefer Anything, the last of his shows at Stratford East. He returned to the RSC the following year, and appeared in Measure For Measure and David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come. He then went to the United States, and was James Joyce in the Broadway production of the RSC’s Travesties by Tom Stoppard. Booth then stayed in the US, writing film and television scripts.

Booth’s films included Littlewood’s screen version of Stephen Lewis’s Sparrers Can’t Sing (1962), opposite Barbara Windsor, Alfred Wood in The Trials Of Oscar Wilde (1960); Ken Russell’s French Dressing and, playing Private Henry Hook, Zulu (both 1964). He was a Scotland Yard inspector in Robbery (1967) and Shirley MacLaine’s secret lover in The Bliss Of Mrs Blossom (1968).

On television he featured in such shows as Minder (1985), Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1986) and Bergerac (1990), he also played the ex-convict Ernie Niles in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990).

Born David Geeves-Booth at Croydon, Surrey the son of a probation officer, Booth quit Southend Grammar School at 17 and joined the army, and left with the rank of captain. He was interested in amateur dramatics and, while working for a mining company, he won a place at RADA at 24. Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates and Richard Harris were his fellow students.

· Booth married Paula Delaney in 1960. They had two sons and two daughters. James Booth (David Geeves-Booth), actor, born December 19 1927; died August 11 2005The avove “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

David Farrar was born in 1908 in Forest Gate, London. His most well known films are those that he made for Powell & Pressburger, “Black Narcissus” in 1947 with Deborah Kerr, “The Small Back Room” with Kathleen Byron and “Gone to Earth” with Jennifer Jones in 1952.He retired from acting in 1962 and died in 1995 in South Africa at the age of 87.

His “Independent” obituary:

With his dark, saturnine good looks, distinctively clipped tones and what Michael Powell described as “the kind of physical appeal which is rare among British actors”, David Farrar was a popular leading man in the cinema of the Forties. He was particularly adept at conveying the weaknesses and human qualities in figures of authority and intelligence as in two of his finest films, Black Narcissus (1947) and The Small Back Room (1948), and he could be considered an early exponent of “anti-hero” roles.

Born in Forest Gate, London, in 1908, Farrar joined the Morning Advertiser on leaving school at 15 and worked as a journalist until deciding on a stage career in 1932. With his wife he ran a repertory company until he entered films in 1937 with a role in the Jessie Matthews musical Head Over Heels, the first of several minor roles as he learnt the differences between stage and screen acting.

In the enjoyable Boy’s Own adventure tale Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938) he was Granite Grant, an agent on the track of the Black Quorum, “the greatest crime organisation of the century”. Later he starred as Detective Blake himself in two films, Meet Sexton Blake (1944) and The Echo Murders (1945). In Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942) Farrar was one of the Germans masquerading as British soldiers in an English village, chillingly ordering the execution of five children as a reprisal for an attempted escape; but he was more typically cast as an heroic commander of an air-sea rescue unit in Charles Crichton’s fine piece of wartime propaganda For Those In Peril (1944) and an intelligence officer fighting the Nazis in The Lisbon Story (1946).

Farrar’s breakthrough from reliable leading man to star came the following year with his casting as the officer who brings home a German wife in Basil Dearden’s Frieda, and as the agent overseeing the Himalayan palace converted to a nunnery in Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece Black Narcissus. Clothed only in khaki shorts for most of the film, he represents the world the nuns have forsaken: “Ever since you came here you’ve all gone crazy,” he tells the nuns’ leader Deborah Kerr. “Well, drive one another crazy and leave me out of it.” Ultimately he provokes such sexual hysteria in one of the nuns (Kathleen Byron) that in the film’s delirious climax she dons vivid make-up and attempts murder. His final parting with Kerr is touchingly tinged with unspoken regret, while the film’s penultimate close- up of Farrar’s rain-streaked face watching the nuns go is extraordinarily moving.

Powell and Pressburger had signed Farrar to a three-film contract and he was impressive as the government backroom scientist with a tin foot in their excellent adaptation of Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room convincingly combining integrity and self-pity. Farrar was given a true star’s entrance in the film, the camera tracking along a bar of customers until coming to rest upon the actor’s back. His character’s name is called and he turns to face the camera in full close-up. In the film’s most controversial sequence his fight to resist easing his pain with alcohol is depicted by a surreal dream sequence in which Farrar is threatened by a 15ft-high whisky bottle.

In the team’s wildly melodramatic Gone to Earth (1950) Farrar entered the spirit of things with his wicked squire who seduces an innocent country girl then tries to hunt down her pet fox.

Farrar later cited these three films along with Frieda and Basil Dearden’s Cage of Gold (1950), a thriller co-starring Jean Simmons, as the artistic highlights of his career. In Cage of Gold he had argued successfully with the producer Michael Balcon that he be allowed to play the villain rather than the less colourful hero. Three years later, perhaps in light of the Hollywood successes of Simmons, Kerr, James Mason and Stewart Granger, Farrar went to the United States and, although he professed to love the “money, glamour and star treatment as only Hollywood can do it”, his career declined into supporting and mainly villainous roles in undistinguished adventure and costume pictures.

He returned to Britain for two minor films, including Beat Girl (1959), but after his role as Xerxes in The 300 Spartans (1960) he retired, eventually settling in South Africa.

Never ashamed to admit to an actor’s conceit, Farrar told one interviewer, Brian McFarlane: “I’d always been the upstanding young man and I was afraid of the parts that were being hinted at for uncles or for the girl’s father instead of her lover! I just felt ‘the hell with it all’ and walked out into the sunset.”

Tom Vallance

David Farrar, actor: born London 21 August 1908; married 1931 Irene Elliot (died 1976; one daughter); died 31 August 1995.

To view “The Independent” Obituary on David Farrar, please click here.

The Golden Horde, poster, US poster art, from left: David Farrar, Ann Blyth, 1951. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Florence Desmond was born in London in 1905. She was known prinarily for her stage performances but she did star also in films. Her first film in 1930 was “The Road to Fortune”. She made a film in Hollywood. Her last film was “Some Girls Do” in 1969. Florence Desmond died in 1993.

Her “Independent” obituary:

Florence Dawson (Florence Desmond), actress, singer, dancer and impersonator, born London 31 May 1905, married 1935 Tom Campbell Black (deceased), 1937 Charles Hughesdon, died Guildford 16 January 1993.FLORENCE DESMOND was not only the best impersonator of her generation, but by far the best. Television comics today try everyone from Eddie Murphy to George Formby; but some hope to get away with merely a famous catch-phrase. In Desmond’s day male impersonators could and would do James Cagney, Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh and Charles Boyer saying ‘Come wiz me to the Casbah’ at the drop of a hat. It was performers like these which Tony Hancock sent up in his gleeful impersonation of Robert Newton as Long John Silver.

Florence Desmond certainly tackled the easy ones – Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo – but it was with a satirical talent which other impersonators lack. She could draw a whole portrait with just a few strokes. I was delighted to come across her some years ago at the National Film Theatre in a Will Rogers vehicle, Mr Skitch. She played an English actress called Florence Desmond whom Rogers and family encounter in a trailer-park. She was on her way to Hollywood, she said, hoping to break into movies as an impersonator – and she did a stunningly accurate and funny Garbo and Zazu Pitts. The film was made in 1933, and she was in it because someone at Fox had seen her on the London stage.

She had already appeared in New York. She had started her career as a child dancer at the age of 10. Just out of her twenties she was appearing solo and in cabaret with Naunton Wayne. In 1928 she appeared in the Cochran revue This Year of Grace, written by Noel Coward, and she went with it when Coward and Beatrice Lillie took it to New York, understudying Lillie and performing ‘Dance, Little Lady’ with Coward. Over the next dozen or so years she consolidated her position as one of the brightest stars of the London stage, also appearing in variety and doing several stints as principal boy in pantomime. She was among the stars of the Royal Variety shows of 1937 and 1951.

Eventually it had become clear that while she was equally efficient as singer or dancer she was unique as an impersonator. It was in that capacity that she took New York by storm in what was said to be her debut there, at The Blue Angel night-club in 1946. The New York World-Telegram noted that ‘(Her) name is as much a household word in England as Gracie Fields’ or Beatrice Lillie’s’ – names advisedly chosen since these were two of her most brilliant impressions. After only three days her engagement was doubled. What she did then was what she did in her music-hall act – play all the guests at a Hollywood party. She moved from one to the other, using the minimum of props – gloves, a scarf – and miming drinking, smoking or the removal of glasses. She was as witty as she was accurate. As James Gavin says in his book on the clubs of that era,

Her most celebrated impression was of Hildegarde. Desmond entered with an armful of dying zinnias, which she dumped on the piano as she took her place on the bench. Lowering her head with a perplexed look, she found enough correct keys to approximate a Rachmaninoff prelude. Then scooping up some crumbling flowers, she stepped to ringside and smiled at an elderly man seated with his wife: ‘Tell me, the man in the grey flannel suit, are you in love?’.

I saw Hildegarde on the stage for the first time just two years ago, but have known her since childhood because of Desmond; 50 years I had waited to see Hildegarde pull off her elbow-length gloves the way Desmond did. There was neither ridicule nor malice in Desmond’s art – though I will make one exception, her job on Elisabeth Bergner in the 1940 Max Miller movie, Hoots Mon] She exaggerated that lady’s affectations, already too much, so that had Bergner seen them she would have retired on the spot. In that film she also did Cicely Courtneidge (just before her appearance at The Blue Angel she had taken over from Courtneidge in the musical Under the Counter), Davis specifically in Jezebel and Syd Walker. She wasn’t afraid to take on the men, and did a delicious parody of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in Private Lives.

But she was mainly affectionate. In 1948 a packed house at the Palladium was waiting to see Betty Hutton, heading the bill and making a sensational success of it. Desmond closed the first half offering, as we expected, her Hollywood party. Suddenly and audaciously she changed herself into Hutton, something a lesser artist would never have dared or got away with. But that was why we cherished her: not for the Hepburns and Tallulah Bankheads, but for those the others never attempted – Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy.

Even so she was simply too good an actress and comedienne to limit herself. ATP – the forerunner of Ealing – cast her as George Formby’s leading lady in his first important movie, No Limit (1935), and again in Keep Your Seats Please] (1936). Also in 1936 she played a temperamental French singer in Accused, with Douglas Fairbanks Jnr – so temperamental, in fact, that she gets murdered in reel two. After a long absence from the cinema she played a serious role in Three Came Home (1950), produced and written from Agnes Newton Keith’s autobiographical book by Nunnally Johnson and directed by Jean Negulesco. Keith was played without glamour by Claudette Colbert, and Desmond made a handsome contribution as her best friend in the internment camp.

After her debut at the Blue Angel, Desmond was as much in demand in the US as in Britain. She was one of the handful of cabaret performers to be seen time and again – unlike, say, Marlene Dietrich – because she was very funny and seldom the same twice. The golden age of the New York night-club ended, if not as quickly and decisively as the British music hall. Desmond appeared occasionally on television for a while. In 1952 she was in a play at the Comedy, The Apples of Eve, in fact taking on seven different roles. A little later her name disappeared from the trade reference books. We supposed she had retired, which she confirmed in a radio interview only about five years ago. Yes, she said, she was happily married and she had nothing to prove to anybody any more.

Apart from two late film appearances – Charley Moon (1956) and Some Girls Do (1958) – she came out of retirement just once, in 1958, to appear in Auntie Mame, at the Adelphi, opposite Beatrice Lillie’s Mame, as her friend and rival Vera Charles. Doubtless she was paid a small fortune to do so, since, by Coward’s own account, Lillie was so undisciplined in 1928 that he wanted ‘to wring her neck’ and she didn’t improve with the years. This was noticeable on stage, if hilariously so, but she was more precise in her scenes with the needle-sharp Desmond.

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

The Times obituary in 2012:

Dinah Sheridan played elegant, well-bred English women in many routine films before Genevieve allowed her to be funny and made her a star. With her career at its height she gave up acting to marry John Davis of the Rank Organisation, but returned in the 1960s, still elegant, as a character actress.

With her blonde hair and green eyes she was seen as the prototypical English rose, but she was the daughter of a Russian father and German mother who had settled in England after the First World War. Her parents were photographers talented enough to secure commissions from the Royal Family.

She was born in Hampstead in 1920 and her real name was Dinah Nadyejda Mec. After overcoming tuberculosis, which blighted her childhood, she trained at the Italia Conti stage school, picked the name Sheridan out of the telephone directory and made her stage debut in Where the Rainbow Ends at the Holborn Empire at the age of 12.

At 14 she played Wendy in Peter Pan, in a touring production with Jean Forbes-Robertson as Peter. Two years later she played Peter at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford and became the first actress to take the two roles. She later reverted to Wendy opposite Elsa Lanchester’s Peter and in 1940 recorded Wendy on disc for HMV.

The order of service at the memorial for actress Dinah Sheridan at St Paul’s Church in Central London. (Photo by Steve Parsons/PA Images via Getty Images)

She entered films while still a teenager in 1936 and six years later played George Formby’s girlfriend in the Home Guard spoof, Get Cracking (1943). Beryl, the star’s formidably protective wife, approved Sheridan’s casting after establishing that she was married. Beryl kept a close eye on a scene in which Sheridan, in modest pyjamas, lay on a bed with George hiding under it.

Her film career developed slowly and did not start to take off until well after the war. She appeared with her first husband, Jimmy Hanley, in For You Alone and 29 Acacia Avenue, and played Steve in two cinema spin-offs from Francis Durbridge’s radio series about the detective Paul Temple. But she rarely escaped from the mediocrity of second features.

That changed when she was cast as the gamekeeper’s wife, the only female character, in Where No Vultures Fly (1951), an Ealing Studios homage to the British Empire which was chosen for the Royal Film Performance. She had a supporting part in David Lean’s The Sound Barrier and played a WAAF who falls for Dirk Bogarde in the Second World War drama, Appointment in London.

She was second choice for the part after a pregnant Margaretta Scott dropped out and was second choice again, after Claire Bloom, for Genevieve (1953), on which she finally achieved top billing. A spirited comedy built around the London to Brighton veteran car run, it became one of the most popular films of the year and an enduring classic. Sheridan had a potentially unrewarding role as the bickering, put-upon wife of John Gregson, particularly when set against Kay Kendall’s flamboyant free spirit. But she played it to great effect, adding a flair for comic timing to her usual charm and poise. Although this did not show on the screen, the film was shot in bitterly cold weather which compelled Sheridan to wear several layers of clothing.

In the following year she announced that she was giving up her career to marry John Davis, the managing director of the Rank Organisation. He was 13 years older and had been married four times before. Her marriage to Jimmy Hanley had been dissolved in 1953. After Genevieve the film offers came pouring in, but, true to her agreement with Davis that she abandon acting on marriage, she instructed her agent to turn them all down.

At first she seemed content to fulfil the duties of an executive’s wife and to look after her two young children by Hanley, as well as Davis’s children from his previous marriages. But the relationship with Davis was a volatile one and they divorced on the ground of his cruelty in 1965. She later returned to court to apply, successfully, for an increase in her lump sum settlement to the then considerable sum of £25,000. This was on top of £8,500 a year maintenance.

The marriage over, she resumed her acting career, though this time more for stage and television than the cinema. Although apprehensive about returning to the stage after so many years away, she made her comeback in a comedy, Let’s All Go Down the Strand, in the distinguished company of Gladys Cooper, Hugh Williams and Evelyn Laye.

Also on the stage, she played opposite Tony Britton, who would later partner her on television, in A Boston Story and the comedy, Move Over, Mrs Markham, toured with John Gielgud in Julian Mitchell’s Half-Life and supported Donald Sinden’s Garry Essendine in Present Laughter. In 1986 she was on the London stage in a revival of Shaw’s The Apple Cart with Peter O’Toole.

In 1968 she returned to television for the first time since before the war in an ITV play, The Contact. Other television included Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and The Winning Streak, a family drama about the garage trade in Yorkshire. But her best-known role was the estranged wife of Dr Latimer (Tony Britton) in the BBC comedy, Don’t Wait Up, which also starred Nigel Havers as her also divorced doctor son.

Written by George Layton, and drawing on his own experience of divorce, Don’t Wait Up was an easygoing and immaculately performed show which ran for a number of series during the 1980s. Sheridan later had guest spots in TV series such as Keeping Up Appearances, Lovejoy and Jonathan Creek.

She gave an engaging performance as the mother in Lionel Jeffries’s affectionate version of The Railway Children (1970), her first film since Genevieve, but apart from joining the all-star cast on an Agatha Christie whodunnit, The Mirror Crack’d (1980), she was virtually neglected by the cinema thereafter.

Beautifully turned out and wearing her years lightly, in 1983 she was named as one of Britain’s five most sophisticated women by the London fashion house Butte Knit.

After her divorce from Davis, she had a long relationship with the actor Jack Merivale, nursing him through a kidney disease. After 18 years together they married in 1986. He died in 1990. Two years later she married her fourth husband, Aubrey Ison, an American businessman, and retired to California. She moved back to England after his death in 2007.

Her son, Jeremy Hanley, was elected a Conservative MP in 1983, became party chairman under John Major and was knighted. Her daughter, Jenny Hanley, was an actress

Michael Anderson Jnr

Michael Anderson Jnr was born in 1943 in Hillingdon, Middlesex, He is the son of the reknowned film director Michael Anderson. His first film was “The Moonraker” in 1958 with George Baker, Sylvia Syms and Gary Raymond. He made “Tiger Bay” and “In Search of the Castaways” with Hayley Mills and won critical praise as the son of Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum in the Australian drama “The Sundowners” in 1960. He went then to Hollywood and made such films as “Major Dundee” and “The Glory Guys”. In 1965 he was improbably cast as the brother of John Wayne and Dean Martin in “The Sons of Katie Elder”. He had a critical sucess with the television series “The Monroes” in 1966. He has guested on many of the premier television series.

“Wikipedia” entry:

He was born in Hillingdon, Middlesex, into a theatrical family. His grandparents and great-great-aunt were actors. His father is the film director Michael Anderson, Sr. He is the stepson of actress Adrienne Ellis, and stepbrother of actress Laurie Holden. His brother is producer David Anderson.

Anderson trained at the Arts Educational School in drama and ballet. He appeared in seventy-two films between 1956 and 1998, the most notable of which include The Sundowners(1960), In Search of the Castaways (1962), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Major Dundee (1965) and Logan’s Run (1976, which his father directed).