Elizabeth Allan was born in England in 1908. She began her career in British films with “Alibi” in 1931. By 1934 she was in Hollywood where she tended to play gentle roles such as Clara Copperfield, mother of David in “David Copperfield” and Lucy Manette in “A Tale of Two Cities” opposite Ronald Coleman. In 1938 she returned to England and resumed her career there. Among her British films, the better known are “Went the Day Well” in 1942 and “The Heart of the Matter” in 1953. She was married to the famous theatrical agent Bill O’Brien. Elizabeth Allan died in 1990 aged 82.
“Quinlan’s Movie Stars”:
Genteel, gracious dark-haired English leading lady adept as frightened misses early in her career. She was under contract to MGM in Hollywood where she played well-bred heroines, often in period dramas. Returning to Britain in 1938 after a dispute with her studio after she was dropped from “The Citadel”. In the UK she appeared as upper-class wives often in undistinguished films. Latterly become popular on TV on game shows.
A Reminiscence by longtime friend Rob McKay:
Elizabeth Allan was an amazingly beautiful creature. with a perfect 36-24-36 figure. To really understand Liz, you have to realize that the center of her life for 47 years was her husband, theatrical agent Bill O’Bryen. Actor Herbert Marshall introduced Liz and Bill in 1930, and it was truly a marriage made in heaven.
In later years, Liz and Bill helped establish many younger artists in the London Theatre, most notably Paul Scofield.
When Bill suffered several strokes in the early 1970s, Liz nursed him at home until his death in 1977. Afterwards, she went into a very deep depression that lasted for some years. I knew her from this time until her death. She was very religious, a Roman Catholic, and went to church almost every day. I used to stay with her at her seaside house in Hove (Brighton) during my trips to Britain.
Liz was a lovely, dear woman who cared much more for others than herself. Once when I was visiting her, I mentioned that my mother was interested in Majolica pottery. Unknown to me, Liz called all over Brighton and Hove so she could present me with a list of antique dealers who had Majolica in stock.
I really miss her.
The “George Formby” website article on Elizabeth Allan can be accessed online here.
Edward Duke was born in 1953 in London. His first film was “Silver Bears” in 1978. His other films inclunding “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “Invitation to the Wedding”. Edward Duke died in 1994 at the age of 40.
The “Independent” obituary:
Edward Duke, actor: born 17 June 1953; died London 8 January 1994.
A rarity among English stage actors under 40. He could enter a drawing-room. He could dress. He could light a cigarette. He could ask the butler for a whisky and soda; and he could sink into a sofa with a copy of the Times (before it was reduced to running news on the front page) and look at home.
Half the art of acting English comedies of manners consists in making those manners seem normal; and it is because so few actors since the Second World War have been able to do so that drawing- room comedy has grown so scarce. Duke had it at his fingertips. Not that he had reached the heights of a form of theatre which may one day return to fashion if more players of his quality can be found to practise it; but he had made such steady progress by way of Wodehouse, Pinero and Coward that it seems sad indeed that his career should have been cut so short.
What could have been a truer sign of his value to the theatrical drawing-room than that he should have had a role as apparently vacuous as the bachelor house guest in the present West End revival of Relative Values and fill it with the kind of languorous charm and drawling speech rhythms that made Coward’s characters seem intolerably snobbish in their day (1951) but so funny now? All he had to do was to butt in on other people’s conversations, throw in a sardonic observation or two, and just be present when someone needed someone to talk to.
Older playgoers might have once cast Hugh Williams for such a part, or Ronald Squire; for it takes real skill on the stage to look at ease when one has nothing much to say and even less to do; and Duke, who played the part so ably at Chichester but was too ill to resume it for the transfer to the restored Savoy, conferred precisely the mixture of dry courtesy and amused disdain necessary to such a socially conscious occasion.
He had seemed to possess it from the start. It is certainly not easy for an actor to acquire it. No one was surprised to learn that his father had been a diplomat, that the family had lived abroad, or that the novels of PG Wodehouse had been among the favourite reading of the young actor to be during his days in rep. What did raise eyebrows was his monocled assumption, alone in his mid-twenties in the studio of the Lyric, Hammersmith, of Bertie Wooster and the rest of the Master’s chumps and blighters, squirts and coves, and good and baddish eggs in a show called Jeeves Takes Charge.
It took charge of him on and off for 12 years; and though Jeeves did not in fact take charge of the entertainment so much as all the uncles and aunts, schoolgirls and chums, of the redoubtable Wooster, it remained a clever adaptation of the story and it made an unknown actor famous.
Having begun it in a Putney pub one lunchtime in the late 1970s, he took it round the world – North America, Australia, Taiwan – winning, apart from prizes abroad, the Laurence Olivier Award as the West End’s most promising actor of 1980.
While such one-man shows give an actor something to fall back on as well as every chance to show his paces, Duke also knew how to revive with the correct kind of social poise and elegance Coward’s characters – Victor, for example, in Private Lives (Aldwych, 1990) – and Pinero’s people in Preserving Mr Panmure at Chichester and Trelawney of the ‘Wells’ in the West End.
Who can say what he might not have done had he been able to act in Lonsdale, Maugham, or William Douglas Home if their chance ever came round again?
The above “Independent” obituary by Adam Benedick cn also be accessed online here.
Although David Knight is a U.S. born actor, virtually all his cinema career has been in the British Isles.
Julia-Arnall & David Knight
He was born in 1928 in Niagara Falls. He had lead roles from his first film “The Young Lovers” in 1954 with Odile Versois.
His best film is probably “Lost” in 1955 with Julia Arnall. This film features a wonderful collection of British actors in small parts e.g. Barbara Windsor, Joan Hickson, Shirley Anne Field, Thora Hird, Joan Sims and Marjorie Rhodes.
David Knight’s last UK feature was “Nightmare” in 1964. After a further few years of television work, he returned to theatre work in the U.S.
IMDB entry:
David Knight was born on January 16, 1928 in Niagara Falls, New York, USA as David Stephen Mintz. He is an actor, known for Nightmare (1964), Chance Meeting (1954) andAcross the Bridge (1957). He is married to Wendy McClure. They have two children.
Obituary in “Rundus” in 2020.
On Sunday, December 20, 2020 David Stephen Knight, actor and professor of theatre, loving husband to Wendy McClure Knight, and father of two children passed away at the age of 92. David Knight was born January 16, 1928 in Niagara Falls, New York to parents The Reverend Eugene Mintz and Leticia Knight-Mintz. He grew up in New Jersey and attended college at Syracuse University in New York and Whittier College in California before receiving a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London in 1952.
He was quickly contracted to The Rank Organization and acted in more than 10 movies including The Young Lovers (1954), On Such a Night (1956), Across the Bridge (1957), A Story of David: The Hunted (1960), and Nightmare (1964). He also starred in numerous television shows and theatre productions in London’s famous West End, including starring as Bud Frump in the original London production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” at the Shaftesbury Theatre (1963-1964) and The Lives of Benjamin Franklin (1974). He was a member for the British Actors’ Equity organization in the United Kingdom since the 1950s, and the U.S. Actors Equity Association since the mid-1970s.
David met Scottish dancer and actress Wendy McClure and the two were married on November 25, 1963. The couple had two children, Eugene and Moyra, while living in London. In 1975, during the economic downturn in the United Kingdom, he moved with his family to Winnipeg, Manitoba to teach theater at the University of Manitoba. A year later, in 1976, the family moved to Urbana, Illinois where he was professor of theatre and subsequently became Head of the Theatre Department at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois. There, he partnered with his wife to develop the nationally-ranked professional acting program and the Illinois Repertory Theater where he was Artistic Director.
David and his wife Wendy retired from the university in August 20, 1997 as Professor Emeritus in Theater, and where the David and Wendy Knight undergraduate endowed scholarship remains to assist aspiring acting students. He influenced hundreds of students throughout his tenure, many of whom have highly successful careers in the arts today. After retirement, David and Wendy moved to Westminster, Colorado, where they had previously worked at the University of Colorado Shakespeare Festival. David starred in “Macbeth” and codirected “Comedy of Errors” with Wendy in 1982 and 1983 respectively. In retirement, they traveled extensively, and continued to support the arts by attending the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and the Central City Opera. They celebrated 57 years of marriage on November 25, 2020.
In addition to being a brilliant actor with a remarkable natural talent, David was a gifted teacher with a powerful work ethic who was dedicated to the craft of acting. In his personal life, he was a loving father, a dedicated husband, a voracious reader, and a leader in his community. He is survived by his wife Wendy, children Eugene Knight (wife Chutima) and Moyra Knight (husband Michael MacLean), grandchildren Ewan and Annabelle MacLean; Jupiter, Joseph, and Jasper Knight, and brother Eugene Mintz.
“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Corinthians 13
Clive Francis was born in 1946 in Eastbourne and is the son of the actor Raymond Francis. His films include “A Clockwork Orange” with Malcolm McDowell in 1971 and “Girl Stroke Boy”. He is married to actress Natalie Ogle.
Valerie French was born in London in 1928. Her first film was the Italian “Maddalena” in 1954. She subsequently went to Hollywood and made films such as “Jubal” opposite Glenn Ford in and “Decision at undown” with Randolph Scott. Her last major film was “Shalako” with Sean Connery. Brigitte Bardot, Stephen Boyd and Honor Blackman. Valerie French died in 1990 at the age of 62 in New York.
“New York Times” obituary:
Valerie French, who began her career as a much-publicized starlet for Columbia Pictures and became a screen, stage and television actress who specialized in playing a diverse collection of English characters, died Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 59 years old. She died of leukemia, said a friend, Tom Seligson, a television producer. Miss French was born in London and spent her early childhood in Spain, returning to England to attend Malvern Girls’ College in Worcestershire and then join the BBC drama department.
After several years in television production, she joined the Theater Royal Repertory Company in Windsor, where she played small parts. After a screen test and a role in the film “The Constant Husband” in 1955, she went to Hollywood and became a contract actress with Columbia Pictures. She starred opposite Glenn Ford and Rod Steiger in “Jubal” (1956) and with Lee J. Cobb in “The Garment Jungle” (1957). On Broadway she acted in “Inadmissible Evidence” (1965) and “Help Stamp Out Marriage!” (1966). In “The Mother Lover,” at the Booth Theater in 1969, she caused something of a sensation by appearing onstage nude with her back to the audience.
Miss French starred Off Broadway in Harold Pinter’s “Tea Party” and “The Basement” in 1968, in a 1980 revival of Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” and as the mother, Helen, in a production of “A Taste of Honey” in 1981. Her television credits include roles in “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “The Prisoner,” “The Nurses,” “Edge of Night” and “Brighter Day.”
Miss French was twice married and twice divorced. In a 1981 interview she said that she and her second husband, the actor Thayer David, had been planning to remarry when he died in 1978.There are no immediate survivors.
Her obituary in “The New York Times” can also be accessed here.
The 27th Day, poster, US poster, Valerie French (bathing suit), 1957. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Christopher Guard was born in London in 1953. He is perhaps best known for his role in the television series “Casulty” on BBC. His films include “Vienna 1900”, “A Little Night Music” in 1977 amd “Memoirs of a Survivor” with Julie Christie in 1981.
Anne Heywood was born in 1932 in Birmingham. Her real name is Violet Pretty. She made her movie debut in 1951 in “Lady Godiva Rides Again” which has some of the future leading ladies of British films in the cast, Joan Collins, Diana Dors, Kay Kendall and Dana Wynter. As the 1950’s progressed, she graduated from featured roles to leading lady status. By 1959 she was the leading lady to Howard Keel in “Floods of Fear” and to Robert Mitchum in “A Terrible Beauty”. In 1968 she won terrific critical plaudits for her performance in an adaltation of D.H. Lawerence’s “The Fox”. She then was leading lady to Gregory Peck in “The Chairman”. She moved to the U.S. where she continued her career. Her last acting part was in an episode of Edward Woodward’s “The Equaliser”.
Her IMDB entry:
Befitting her original name (Violet Pretty), the knockout English brunette Anne Heywood won the coveted “Miss Great Britain” beauty title in 1950 at the young age of 17. Born on December 11, 1932, the daughter of a violinist, she originally trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She gained early experience on the stage with the Highbury Players in Birmingham and moved on to some TV work. The Rank Organization caught sight of her and offered the former beauty queen a seven-year contract. During that time, however, she was pretty much relegated to playing ‘nice girl’ types in the 50s and 60s.
In later career, her film appearances courted controversy and she seemed drawn toward highly troubled, flawed characters. Very popular with Italian audiences, Anne never endeared herself to American filmgoers although she did stir up some curiosity with one of her more noteworthy films, the pioneer lesbian drama The Fox (1967). Starring Anne with Sandy Dennis, the two were quite believable as an unhappy, isolated couple whose relationship is irreparably shattered by the appearance of a handsome stranger (Keir Dullea). At the height of the movie’s publicity, Playboy magazine revealed a “pictorial essay” just prior to its 1967 release with Anne in a nude and auto-erotic spread. The film won a “Best Foreign Film” Golden Globe Award (it was made in Canada) and Anne herself earned a “Best Actress” nod.
Despite being aggressively promoted in its aftermath by husband/producer Raymond Stross, who was instrumental in reshaping her image with such sexy, offbeat dramas asThe Night Fighters (1960), The Very Edge (1963), Ninety Degrees in the Shade (1965),Midas Run (1969), I Want What I Want (1972) and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979), Anne has remained a distinct European film product. Following her husband’s death in 1988, Anne remarried (to a former New York Assistant Attorney General) and begged away from the camera. The couple settled in Beverly Hills.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
British movie actress Anne Heywood on the cover of “Picturegoer” magazine, the National Film and Entertainment Weekly, published in London, circa June 1957. (Photo by Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images)
Danny La Rue was born Daniel Carroll in Cork in 1927. When he was six, his family moved to London. He served in the British Royal Navy as a young man. He began performing in nightclubs in the late 1950’s and soon had built up a following for his a female impersonations. He was very popular in the 1960’s and had his own nightclub. In 1972 he starred in his only film “Our Miss Fred”. Danny La Rue died in 2009 at the age of 81.
His “Guardian” obituary:
Danny La Rue, who has died aged 81, flouted the usual showbusiness rule that, to be funny, every female impersonator needed to have an obvious suggestion of –hobnailed boots beneath a long frock. In a variation on this tradition, he appeared attired in sequinned dresses, but immediately said “wotcher, mates!” in a gruff voice. Yet what La Rue achieved was to replace a traditionally derisive mocking of women, that showed them as faintly grotesque, with glitter and elegance. He did it to such an extent that, apart from his height of over 6ft, he might easily have been a beautiful woman trying her luck with saucy jokes and sentimental songs. He became the first performer for many years to base his entire career on impersonating women.
“Vulgar, yes, but there is nothing crude about me,” was his guiding maxim, as he flounced around variety stages, clubs, pierheads and pantomimes, doing a dozen changes a show, sometimes with stylish but over-the-top dresses which cost £5,000 each. At his peak, in the 1970s, he was earning the equivalent of £2m a year, and had four homes, a Rolls-Royce and an entourage of 60. La Rue was never a gay icon, nor a butt of the feminist movement, which sometimes surprised him. His core audience was, in fact, blue-rinsed ladies of a certain age who sent gushing letters congratulating him on his awards: showbusiness personality of the year in 1969, theatre personality of the year in 1970, 25 years in show business award in 1976 and entertainer of the decade in 1979. They wrote saying how much they admired his legs or his self-manufactured rubber bosom, presumably because they identified with him and were comfortable with his act – though it sometimes included raucous jokes which, coming from anyone else, might have caused deep offence. He got away with it, he claimed, because everyone knew that everything he did and said was just a pretence: he regarded himself as an actor.
Although Paul Scofield tried to –persuade him to act in “legitimate” –theatre, and Laurence Olivier wanted him to play Lady Macbeth, La Rue did not risk trying to escape his limitations. He would explain that taking off –Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Bette Davis and Joan Collins, or Sophie Tucker singing My Yiddisher Mama, was acting enough. As a cabaret perfomer, he could be decidedly risqué, earning himself the nicknames Danny La Rude and Danny La Blue. Offstage, he could also be reckless and get away with it. Once, he was appearing at a London club and in a –Coventry pantomime simultaneously. At the same time, the royal family were asking for an increase in the civil list. When the Duke of Edinburgh, visiting La Rue’s show, asked him if he was doing it for the cash, La Rue replied that it seemed to be all the fashion. A Guardian critic said in the 1960s that La Rue’s material was “dirty night-club jokes for drunks and bored people and other actors, and yet it is truly cleansing and cathartic”. To which a reader from Hampstead – not usually regarded as the centre of La Rue’s core audience – inquired acidly whether the critic was “going through a period of severe mental strain”. The reader –obviously regarded La Rue’s material as neither filthy nor psychologically significant, just funny. This was the received opinion throughout a long career which, he said, was sustained by discipline and application.
Born Daniel Patrick Carroll in Cork, Ireland, La Rue was the youngest son of a Roman Catholic cabinet-maker, who had five children. La Rue never knew him. His father went to New York in the 1920s with the idea of bringing his family over later, but died before this could happen. Danny was then 18 months old. His mother, whom he described as his life’s inspiration, decided to compromise by seeking the family’s fortunes in England. She lived in Soho, central London, struggling on her widow’s pension and wages as a seamstress to provide for the large family, while young Danny attended schools in London and then, evacuated from London during the blitz, in Exeter. One day he found his mother in tears because she didn’t know where the money for his new school uniform was going to come from. On leaving school, he earned £1.50 a week in a –bakery; wartime rationing was in place and he was allowed to take cakes home as a perk. He got a job in Exeter as a window-dresser, then moved back to London, doing the same job for an Oxford Street store.
Called up for the Royal Navy, he made his first stage appearance, aged 18, as a native girl in a comic send-up of the serious play White Cargo. John Gielgud saw it in Singapore and told La Rue that he should take his ability to make people laugh more seriously. Once he left the navy, he did so. An old naval friend told him about auditions for an all-male chorus in the show Forces Showboat. Harry Secombe was in the same show.
Forces Showboat went on tour for months, but La Rue saw little point in dressing up as a woman in the –provinces. It didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere, so he returned to the Oxford Street store and initiated lunch-time fashion shows. Then the promoter Ted Gatty persuaded him to do a West End revue in drag. He would do it, said La Rue, as long as it were not under his real name. When he arrived for rehearsals he found that Gatty had already given him the name Danny La Rue. The producer Cecil Landau saw the show and got La Rue a two-week slot at Churchill’s club in Mayfair, which turned into a three-year engagement as top of the bill. La Rue spent the 1950s appearing on stage, often in –pantomimes staged by the impresario Tom Arnold. He also appeared in cabaret in clubs with such success that, in the early 1960s, he opened Danny’s, his own club in Hanover Square, which lasted nine years.
This was in contrast to a later business venture, in the 1970s: restoring the derelict stately home Walton Hall near Stratford-upon-Avon, which he had bought for £500,000 – much of his considerable savings. He poured the rest into restoration and turning it into a hotel and arts centre, only to find that the two Canadian managers were conmen who had left him with a pile of unpaid bills, for which La Rue was legally responsible. The day after his 56th birthday, La Rue’s company went into voluntary liquidation and he was forced to sell his home in Henley to pay off the debt. It got worse. In 1984 he took the lead in Hello, Dolly! which was critically panned and closed soon after. Later that year, his manager of 30 years, Jack Hanson, whom he described as “the love of my life”, died of a stroke. La Rue drank himself to sleep every night until a –psychic told him that his pet dog was the reincarnation of Hanson. Taking –further comfort from his Catholic religion – he kept a little shrine by his –bedside – La Rue resumed his disciplined routine of personal appearances at pierheads and in pantomime, rationing his television appearances as always. Why, he asked, should people pay to see him on stage when they could see him for free on TV?
He never married and was angry at those who called his announced, but later called-off, engagement to an American millionairess in 1987 a publicity stunt. In 2000, his companion Wayne King, an Australian pianist, died aged 46, of Aids. Two years later, in recognition of the thousands of pounds he raised for Aids charities, La Rue was appointed OBE (the Queen was said to be a great admirer of his act). Suffering from the eye condition macular degeneration, in 2006 he also suffered a stroke, though even then his agent said that La Rue was “dying to get his old frocks out, dust them off and get back in the limelight”. Shortly afterwards, in poor health and receiving financial assistance from an actors’ charity, he moved in to the home of his former dresser and longtime friend Annie Galbraith, who cared for him until his death.
• Danny La Rue (Daniel Patrick Carroll), female impersonator and actor, born 26 July 1927; died 31 May 2009
The above Dennis Barker obituary on Danny La Rue can also be accessed online here.
Daniel Massey was born in 1933 in London. He was the son of actors Adrianne Allen and Raymond Massey. He made his film debut in 1942 in “In Which We Serve”. His other films include “Mary, Queen of Scots”, “The Cat and the Canary” and “Vault of Horror”. His best remembered film role was in “Star” where he played Noel Coward. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. Daniel Massey died in 1998 at the age of 64.
“Independent” obituary:
ALL, lean and strikingly handsome, with a languidly caressing voice, the versatile and enormously talented actor Daniel Massey displayed remarkable range in a long and distinguished career in film, television and, primarily, theatre, both in New York, where he starred in such shows as She Loves Me (1963) and Taking Sides (1995), and London, where his work embraced plays classic and modern, revues and musicals.
The son of the famous Canadian actor Raymond Massey and the actress Adrienne Allen, and the godson of Noel Coward, he was born in London in 1933 and educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge (where he acted with the university’s Footlights Club). After two years in the Scots Guards he decided to follow in his parents’ footsteps, appearing at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. He made his London debut at the Cambridge Theatre in 1957 with an outstanding performance as a gauche young American aristocrat in The Happiest Millionaire, a delightful comic portrayal which earned the cheers of first-nighters and rave reviews.
The same year, he made his adult screen debut (as a boy he had had a role in Coward’s In Which We Serve) in Girls at Sea and the following year he displayed his song and dance ability in the revue Living for Pleasure starring Dora Bryan (who named her oldest child, adopted during the run, after him). One of the show’s highlights was Massey’s smooth rendition with Janie Marden of the Richard Addinsell/Arthur Macrae duet “Love You Good, Love You Right”, and it led to the starring role in the Wolf Mankowitz musical Make Me An Offer (1959). With a stylishly witty performance as Charles Surface in John Gielgud’s revival of The School for Scandal at the Haymarket in 1962, Massey demonstrated his versatility, and throughout his career would prove equally adept in musicals, dramas, comedies and classics.
In 1963 in New York he created the role of Georg, the young salesman conducting a pen-pal romance with, unknowingly, his own shop assistant colleague (Barbara Cook), in the musical She Loves Me, now regarded a classic though it initially ran for only nine months. “When we came to the last performance,” said Massey later, “I cried right through the show . . . perhaps because it is so rare in one’s work that one can persuade oneself you say, ‘Hey, that was good.’ “
He returned to London to play Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (1964) at the Royal Court, then starred in Neil Simon’s comedy Barefoot in the Park (1965), as Captain Absolute in The Rivals (1966) and Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest (1967).
He returned to musicals with Popkiss (1972) in London and a stage version of the film Gigi (1973) in New York, though neither was a great success. Sporadic film appearances included The Entertainer (1960) and Moll Flanders (1965), and in 1968 his performance as his own godfather Noel Coward in Star!, the film biography of Gertrude Lawrence, was indisputably the best thing about the film, winning him a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actor, plus an Oscar nomination. Coward himself wrote after seeing it,
Daniel Massey was excellent as me and had the sense to give an impression of me rather than try to imitate me. He was tactless enough to sing better than I do, but of course without my special matchless charm!
In fact, Massey both sang well and purveyed a lot of charm, and had the film been more successful it might have led to more prolific screen work. Instead, he concentrated on the theatre where his Lytton Strachey in Peter Luke’s Bloomsbury (1974), and Othello in Birmingham (1976) and a memorable Rosmer in Rosmersholm (1977) found him successfully tackling weightier roles. Joining the National Theatre, he played in The Philanderer (1979), The Hypochondriac (1981) and won the Swet award as Best Actor for his John Tanner in Shaw’s Man and Superman (1981). Two seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company (1983-84) included works by Shakespeare, Saroyan (The Time of Your Life) and Granville Barker (Waste). “The Shaws, the Shakespeares and the Chekhovs are meat and drink to me,” Massey stated. “It’s the ambiguities in roles that are so important.” In 1987 he played the tortured hero Ben in the London production of Follies, introducing a new song written for the character by Stephen Sondheim, “Make the Most of Your Music”.
Massey’s own private life had its share of anguish. His parents divorced when he was six, and his mother, a noted beauty and a major star, gave glittering parties but was cold to him. Massey later described her as “an evil woman, a psychopath”, comparing her emotionally with Myra Hindley; such criticism totally estranged him from his actress sister Anna. (“It’s not Anna’s, it’s my problem,” he would admit.) Massey did not see his mother for the last 10 years of her life and did not go to her funeral.
In the mid-Fifties he married the actress Adrienne Corri (his mother refused to attend the wedding). “We were agonisingly incompatible but we had an extraordinary physical attraction,” he stated. The tempestuous marriage ended in 1968, and after another relationship which produced a son, Paul, he married the actress Penelope Wilton, with whom he had a daughter Alice. After his divorce from Wilton, he formed a relationship with her younger sister Lindy in 1984, the same year he started an ultimately successful course of psycho-therapy to combat acute depression. Later he and Lindy married, but in 1992 Massey was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. With typical wit and charm he joked about it: “If you’ve got to have a serious illness, that’s the one to get, because it’s get-at- able”. And he successfully fought it off with chemotherapy, returning to the stage with an acclaimed performance as Wilhelm Furtwangler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third Reich, in Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides (1995), which raised the question of the ambivalent conductor’s motives in playing for Hitler’s regime.
After the London run, Massey want to Broadway with the play, for what was sadly to be his last theatrical triumph.
Daniel Raymond Massey, actor: born London 19 October 1933; married first Adrienne Corri (marriage dissolved 1968), (one son), second Penelope Wilton (one daughter; marriage dissolved), third Lindy Wilton (two stepdaughters); died London 25 March 1998.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
