Colin Gordon was born in 1911 in Ceylon. He made his West End debut in 1934 in “Toad of Toad Hall”. His film debut came in 1949 with “Traveller’s Joy”. He made many British films usually as an official or civil servant of some sort. His major film roles were in “The One That Got Away” in 1957, “Make Mine Mink” in 1960 and “The Family Way” in 1966. Colin Gordon died in 1972 at the age of 61.
IMDB entry:
Sri Lankan-born Colin Gordon began acting on the West End stage as the hind legs of a horse in ‘Toad of Toad Hall’ in 1934. After wartime service, he returned to the stage, appearing in such plays as ‘The White Carnation’ and ‘The Little Hut’ (both 1953), ‘Misery Me!’ (1955) and ‘The Touch of Fear’ (1956). His award-winning stage role of teacher Rupert Billings in ‘The Happiest Days of Your Life’ was recreated for the film version by another bespectacled actor, Richard Wattis. From 1957, Colin worked as actor-director with the Guildford Repertory Theatre. Though he is usually described as a ‘light comedy actor’, Colin made his mark in the acting profession as much by playing countless supercilious or sneering bureaucrats, lawyers or haughty military types. His stock-in-trade became his ever-present horn-rimmed glasses, combined with a cynical or asinine manner and a precisely modulated voice. His best performances might include pompous BBC announcer Reginald Willoughby-Cruft in The Green Man (1956) and his bank manager, locked up in the Strongroom (1962) of his own bank during a robbery. He is likely best remembered for being a particularly sinister Number 2 to Patrick McGoohan in TV’s The Prisoner (1967) – twice.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Bryan Marshall obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.
The actor Bryan Marshall, who has died aged 81, was a solid character actor who brought integrity and realism to the parts he played on screen in Britain throughout the 1960s and 70s. Many will remember him best for his pivotal role as the duplicitous Councillor Harris in the classic film The Long Good Friday (1979), which made a massive impact at the box office with its brutal tale of a London gangland boss, Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins, seeing his empire being threatened by rivals from the IRA.
The drama, written by Barrie Keeffe and directed by John Mackenzie, brilliantly captures the dreary London of the 70s as it approaches a new decade of aspiration and docklands regeneration. Shand sees the development opportunities and Harris is on his payroll. For much of the film, Marshall is a silent presence, but that changes when his character gets drunk at a dinner with potential American mafia investors.
Describing himself as a self-made man who rose from the gutter, he tries to sell the idea of developing “a magnificent, high in the sky hotel, something to be proud of”, but is too loud for their liking. When it emerges that he had a hand in the IRA’s attempt to take Shand’s empire, Harris ends up being shot and killed.
Earlier, Marshall had put himself on the radar of James Bond fans when he was seen in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) as Commander Talbot, captain of a British nuclear submarine captured by a supertanker. It brought another grisly end for the actor when Talbot was killed by a grenade while storming the ship’s control room after Roger Moore’s 007 freed him and his crew.
Marshall’s talent was largely lost to British film and TV producers and directors after he moved to Australia in 1983, although he made a few returns to his homeland and was seen in Australian soaps broadcast in Britain.Advertisement
He was born in Battersea, south London, and on leaving the local Salesian college went through jobs in an insurance office and as a sales rep while acting with amateur companies. His ambition to act full-time was realised after he trained at Rada (1961-63). He found work in repertory theatres before coming to the attention of a nationwide audience during a six-month run as the fictional Brentwich United’s awkward club captain Jack Birkett in the BBC football soap United!, from its first episode in 1965 until 1966.
Marshall returned to soap in 1971 with a one-off role in Coronation Street as Trevor Parkin, who attended a horticultural lecture given by Albert Tatlock and upstaged the host by showing greater knowledge of the subject. In between, on television he played Captain Dobbin in Vanity Fair (1967), Detective Sergeant Peach in Spindoe (1968), Gilbert Markham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1968), Dr John Graham Bretton in Villette (1970) and Captain Wentworth in Persuasion (1971).
He showed that he could carry a drama himself when he starred in two 1972 Play for Today productions – as the striking Cornish clay miner Manuel Stocker in Stocker’s Copper and Bill Huntley in Better Than the Movies – as well as Commander Alan Glenn in the third series (1976) of Warship, the property developer Ray Campion in the thriller serial The Mourning Brooch (1979) and the air freight business’s chief pilot Tony Blair (before the future prime minister found fame) in Buccaneer (1980). He was back in soap as Clive Lawson for the first two runs (1974-75) of the afternoon serial Rooms, in which he and Sylvia Kay played the owners renting out bedsits in their London house.
Another pivotal role for Marshall came in the film Quatermass and the Pit (1967), a big-screen remake of the writer Nigel Kneale’s third sci-fi serial for TV about a scientist confronting alien forces. He played Potter, a bomb squad captain identifying an unexploded device unearthed during an archaeological dig as a German V-missile. It was his fourth appearance in a Hammer Films production. Earlier he was the Russian villager Vasily in Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), played Tom in The Witches (1966) and was Dominic in The Viking Queen (1967).
After moving to Australia in 1983, Marshall remained a prolific screen actor. Among many appearances in television dramas, he starred in Golden Pennies (1985) as a pioneering Englishman seeking his fortune in an 1850s gold-rush mining area, and played Duncan Stewart, Australian ambassador to a fictional south-east Asian country, in the first two series of Embassy (1990-91).
His soap roles included Piet Koonig in A Country Practice (1983), Dr Jonathan Edmonds in Prisoner (retitled Prisoner: Cell Block H in Britain, 1984), Gerard Singer in Neighbours (1987) and Ron Hawkins in The Flying Doctors (1988), and he took two parts in Home and Away – John Simpson (1998) and Trevor Bardwell (2003). In 1989 Marshall hosted the first series of Australia’s Most Wanted, featuring real-life unsolved crimes.
There were occasional returns to Britain for roles that included DSI Don Roberts in two 1997 episodes of Thief Takers and a vet with a drink problem in Heartbeat in 1998.
Marshall is survived by his wife, Vicki, and their three sons, Sean, Paul and Joshua.
• Bryan Marshall, actor, born 19 May 1938; died 25 June 2019Topics
Gary Miller was born in 1924 in Blackpool. He was a popular recoriding artist in the U.K. in the 1950’s. His hit songs included “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Robin Hood”. He acted in two British television series, “Gideon’s Way” in 1965 and “The Saint” in 1968. He died the same year at the age of 44.
Gary Miller, born Neville Williams (3 May 1924 – 15 June 1968)[1] was an Englishpopular musicsinger and actor of the 1950s and 1960s.[2] His career spanned only 15 years before he died of a heart attack in 1968. He released 24 singles and six EPs on the Pyelabel between 1955 and 1967. Pye released a further compilation EP after his death.
Miller abandoned football for a stage and radio career and he began touring the UK variety stages in 1953.[3] He had several Top 40 singles early in his career, his debut single in 1955, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” reaching No. 13 on the UK Singles Chart.[1] The most successful was “Robin Hood” (the theme to The Adventures of Robin Hood) which spent 28 weeks in the chart,[4] and peaked at No. 10, his only Top 10 hit.
Miller had a number of acting roles in the television seriesThe Saint and Gideon’s Way, and was a regular panelist on Juke Box Jury. He provided the singing voice for Troy Tempest in the Gerry Anderson series Stingray and recorded ‘Aqua Marina’, the end titles theme for the series. He also recorded vocals for two different versions of an ultimately-unused end titles theme for Thunderbirds. The song was later re-worked as ‘Flying High’ for the episode Ricochet; one of the original two versions appears on the Thunderbirds 2compilation album.
Miller appeared on stage as Steven Kodaly in the 1964 production of She Loves Me,[2] at the Lyric Theatre and on the cast album of that production.[5] He also began appearing in the musical Come Spy with Me with Danny La Rue and Barbara Windsor, shortly before his death from a heart attack at his south London home.[2]
He died shortly before production finished on an episode of The Saint, ‘The People Importers’, in which he was also playing a key part. The series’ associate producer, Johnny Goodman, later remarked that Miller was “working night and day” as a consequence of his twin commitments, and that production on the Saint episode had to be completed with a double in place of the actor
An English actress of stage, screen and television, sister to Hayley Mills and daughter of Sir John Mills, Juliet first came to notice in films, actually after her sister Hayley started her career. Juliet, however, was first plucked onto the screen and signing a contract with Warner Brothers and taking small roles in comedies like Nurse on Wheels (1963) andCarry on Jack (1963). It wasn’t until 1966, when Juliet Mills started getting attention in her role opposite James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara in the western film The Rare Breed(1966). She continued in television in the seventies as a recurring guest star on The Love Boat (1977), Wonder Woman (1975) and Fantasy Island (1977). She got her first starring television series, Nanny and the Professor (1970), in 1970, co-starring Richard Long, the series was top-rated, but was shortly canceled after two seasons by ABC.
She hit the screen again in 1974, playing the possessed “Jessica Barrett” in the Italian horror filmBeyond the Door (1974) (“Beyond the Door”) for Film Ventures International, but it was pulled from theaters because it resembled The Exorcist (1973), even though it was becoming a box office hit. She didn’t get very many roles after that and continued in television through the eighties. She did a small part in Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992) and then played Juliette Lewis‘s friendly maid in the 1999 major motion picture The Other Sister (1999), co-starring Diane Keaton and Tom Skerritt. Juliet Mills has recently been in the daytime drama (soap opera) Passions (1999), playing “Tabitha”, the witch. She is married to actor Maxwell Caulfield.
Peter Vaughan was born in 1923 in Shropshire, England. He made his film debut in 1959. He appeared on television in “Porridge” and “Citizen Smith”. He supported Frank Sinatra in the 1967 thriller “The Naked Runner”. He was part of the brilliant ensemble cast in “Our Friends From the North”. His films include “The Remains of the Day”, “Straw Dogs” and “The Mother”. He died in 2016.
“Guardian” obituary:
Peter Vaughan, who has died aged 93, was one of the most distinctive and menacing of character actors on stage and screen in a career spanning seven decades and ranging from West End comedy to Dickens and Our Friends in the North on television, and to movies with Frank Sinatra and Tallulah Bankhead, and encompassing a string of unpleasant authority figures. With his bulky figure, small eyes and prognathous jaw, he usually played the type of character you would not want to bump into on a dark night in a darker alley, even though, in real life, Vaughan was known for his conviviality, kindness to animals and devotion to his family.
For television audiences in the 1970s, he was a faux terrifying and hilarious Mr Big in Ronnie Barker’s prison comedy series Porridge: he ran the gaff as the glinting-eyed tobacco baron Harry Grout, who shared a cell with his budgerigar Seymour – until he ate him. And in the 1980s, he was equally memorable as another, less amusing, Mr Big, Billy Fox, in Trevor Preston’s series Fox, for Thames TV, lording over the manor with his wife, played by Elizabeth Spriggs, and five sons, including Bernard Hill and Ray Winstone.
More recently, and in his last job, he attracted a cult following as Maester Aemon Targaryen in HBO’s Game of Thrones. He played the centenarian blind sage, maester to the men of the Night’s Watch guarding the ice wall at Castle Black, for five seasons.
In his last movie, John Crowley’s Is Anybody There? (2008) he appeared – alongside Michael Caine, Sylvia Syms, Rosemary Harris, Leslie Phillips and Spriggs – as a first world war veteran in a 1980s old people’s home.
It had been a long journey for the only child of a bank manager, Max Ohm, an Austrian immigrant, and his wife, Eva (nee Wright), a nurse. Peter was born in a flat above the bank in Wem, Shropshire, moving with his parents to Wellington, then Uttoxeter, where he attended the grammar school.
Showing a talent for drama, he was recruited at the age of 16 to the repertory company in the Grand, Wolverhampton, to play Simon the pie-boy in Sweeney Todd in 1939. He stayed, became an actor, and changed his surname from Ohm to Vaughan, though he never did so by deed poll. This early start in the profession, without formal training, was interrupted by the war. He served in the Royal Signals, eventually as an officer, in Normandy, Belgium and the far east, before returning to the Wolverhampton rep, followed by seasons in Macclesfield, Leicester and the Birmingham Rep, where he played Algy to John Neville’s Jack, Lally Bowers’s Lady Bracknell and Donald Pleasence’s Canon Chasuble; he and Pleasence became lifelong friends. When Vaughan married the actor Billie Whitelaw, nine years his junior, in 1952 – they met while playing in the same company in a London fringe theatre that year – Pleasence moved in with the couple as a lodger before embarking on several marriages of his own.
Throughout the 1950s Vaughan was busy in theatre while his television career took root. He appeared with the actor/manager Donald Wolfit in The Strong Are Lonely, an Austrian play about Jesuits in Paraguay, at the Haymarket in 1955, and a French comedy, Paddle Your Own Canoe, at the Criterion in 1958; the critic Harold Hobson eulogised Vaughan’s performance and said that the play never recovered after his exit.
But his real breakthrough came when the actor Dudley Sutton, whom he knew, introduced him to the playwright Joe Orton in a theatrical drinking bar. Orton was scouting for a heavyweight heterosexual actor to play Ed, an ordinary-looking man who was interested in having sex with boys, in his forthcoming play, Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964). Vaughan fitted the bill perfectly, teaming in Patrick Dromgoole’s production at the Arts theatre with Madge Ryan as Kath, his sister, and Sutton as sullen, sultry Mr Sloane, shared object of their carnal attentions.
Either side of that performance (Harry Andrews played Ed in the subsequent 1970 movie), Vaughan gave his Bottom at the Glasgow Citizens and his Gladstone opposite Dorothy Tutin in Portrait of a Queen (1965) at the Vaudeville. His marriage to Whitelaw, never easy (according, at least, to Whitelaw in her autobiography) ended in divorce in 1966 and he married, in the same year, the actor Lillias Walker, whom he had known for some time. Having made a film debut in Ralph Thomas’s The 39 Steps (1959), a remake of the Hitchcock classic, he played the first of many big screen police chiefs in John Paddy Carstairs’s The Devil’s Agent (1962), followed by the Boulting Brothers’ Rotten to the Core (1965), with Anton Rodgers and Eric Sykes; a British agent in The Naked Runner (1967) with Sinatra; and in Jack Gold’s The Bofors Gun (1967), with Nicol Williamson, Ian Holm and David Warner.
Notable appearances in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) and Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) were followed by two outstanding fantasy movies by Terry Gilliam – Time Bandits (1981) and Brazil (1985) – in which his gift for manic extravagance was given full rein, playing an Ogre in the first and a minister of information retrieval in the second. His theatre work was maintained in a wonderful, diabolically possessed performance as the nearly-cuckolded Fitzdotterel in Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass at the Birmingham Rep and the National Theatre in 1976. A friendship formed with Robert Lindsay while playing his girlfriend’s father in Citizen Smith (1977-79) on television led to a brace of imposing performances – Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard and Luka in Gorky’s The Lower Depths – in a company headed by Lindsay at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.
Vaughan was a tetchy Aussie widower in Michael Blakemore’s tender production of David Williamson’s Travelling North at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1980 and a self-styled, crypto-fascist security guard in Alan Ayckbourn’s glorious Seasons Greetings at the Greenwich theatre, and the Apollo, in 1982.
Thereafter, his theatre work was confined to touring in Priestley’s An Inspector Calls and Brighouse’s Hobson’s Choice until his final West End flourish in Harold Pinter’s superb 1996 revival of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, in which he played a racist bigot, Juror No 10. In the same year, he was the trade unionist Felix Hutchinson, father to Christopher Eccleston’s Nicky and succumbing to Alzheimer’s, in Our Friends in the North, the BBC drama serial set over three decades by the writer Peter Flannery.
Many would consider Felix his finest performance. It certainly ranks alongside his exceptional turn – uncharacteristically quiet and intensely moving – as the old servant, father to Anthony Hopkins’s head butler, in James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993); an accident with a tea tray he sends flying across the garden patio results in a demotion, by his own son, to mops-and-brushes duty.
But he graced every movie he was in, really, including Nicholas Hytner’s The Crucible (1996) with Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Scofield, in which he played Giles Corey; Christopher Hampton’s The Secret Agent (1996) with Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette; Bille August’s Les Misérables (1997) with Liam Neeson, the ninth screen version of that Victor Hugo novel before the screen musical came along; and Stephen Hopkins’s The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2003), with Geoffrey Rush brilliant as Sellers, Charlize Theron as Britt Eckland and Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick.
Later in life, Peter and Lillias lived on the Costa del Sol in Spain, but returned to live in West Sussex. In 2016 he published a short book of anecdotal memoirs, Once a Villain.
Vaughan is survived by Lillias and their son, David,by two stepdaughters, Alexandra and Victoria, and four grandchildren.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
A true character actor in the best sense of the word, offbeat British thesp Peter Vaughan’s hefty frame could appear intimidating or marshmallow benevolent; his beady, hollow eyes menacing or tender; his mere presence menacing or avuncular. Adept at playing both sides of the law, his characters usually possessed a strange, somewhat wary countenance that seemed to keep his audience slightly off balance. A homely sort with a bloated face, jutting chin, sliver lips and pronounced nose, this veteran has been a stalwart presence for nearly fifty years. Born Peter Olm in 1923, he began on the stage and didn’t enter films until 1959, well into his thirties.
Married in 1952 to rising actress Billie Whitelaw, Peter was primarily in the background at first, offering a cheapjack gallery of thugs, unsmiling cops, and foreign agents in movies. An easily unsympathetic bloke, he played unbilled policemen in his first two films, then slowly gravitated up the credits list. He appeared as the chief of police in the spy dramaThe Devil’s Agent (1962), which also featured his wife, and then gained a bit more attention in a prime part as an offbeat insurance investigator in the programmerSmokescreen (1964), a role that propelled him into the higher ranks. Noticeably shady roles came with playing Tallulah Bankhead‘s seedy handyman who meets a fatal end in the Gothic horror Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) [aka Die! Die! My Darling!]; his villainous roles in the spy thrillers The Naked Runner (1967) opposite Frank Sinatra and The Man Outside (1967); a German thug in A Twist of Sand (1968); and Sgt. Walker in The Bofors Gun (1968).
Divorced from Whitelaw in 1966, he later married actress Lillias Walker, who had roles in a couple of his pictures: Malachi’s Cove (1973) and Intimate Reflections (1974). TV became a large source of income for Vaughan in the 1970s, particularly in his role of Grouty in Porridge (1974) on both the large and small screen, and his quirky demeanor fitted like a glove for bizarre director Terry Gilliam, who cast him as the Ogre in Time Bandits (1981) and then as Mr. Helpman in Brazil (1985). For the past few decades he has maintained a healthy balance between film (including standout roles in Zulu Dawn(1979), The Remains of the Day (1993) and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)) and TV mini-movies, both contemporary and period. He is still performing past age 80.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Matthew Marsden was born in 1973 in West Bromwich. In Britain he was Chris Collins in “Coronation Street” in 1997. When he left the series, he spent some time as a singer. He then went to the U.S. and resumed his acting career with parts in “Black Hawk Down” and the remake of “Rambo”.
“Metro” interview:
Matthew Marsden, 40, has appeared in Emmerdale, Coronation Street, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen and Rambo. He also had a brief pop career in the 1990s. He now in action adventure film Bounty Killer.
What were the challenges with making something as low budget as this? It was an 18-day shoot. It was full-on. It was only $1million and it all went on screen. In the movies I’ve done before they’d spend $1million on one action sequence so getting this all done for $1million is a testament to the producer and director.
There’s one scene where you can see a sandstorm in the background and we had to get it done before it hit us; we didn’t have the time to stop. With a budget like that there aren’t any fancy trailers and you have to do it all in one or two takes. You have to come together as a team – there’s no time for prima-donna moments.
You’ve done lots of action films – what’s been your worst injury? I got electrocuted when I did Anacondas. We were doing a night shoot, I was pretty tired, it was 5am and I was a bit dazed, they shouted action, and I got out of my chair and put my hand up to knock the light hanging over me out of the way and got electrocuted.
When I did Transformers I was on the movie for the whole shoot doing different stunts and none of them made it into the final movie. There were action sequences that were cut from that that would be the centrepiece of any other film.
A helicopter was on a line and supposed to be crashing into us but it started early – it was rapidly coming towards us, I ran and my gun lodged into a wall and smacked me in the mouth and I lost a tooth. I watched the monitor and the helicopter missed me by a few feet. It’s two seconds in the movie and I thought it would be this big slow-motion shot and it wasn’t.
Who have you learned the most from? Ridley Scott is a genius – he’s a gentleman. He’s one of the greatest directors of all time and he’s still humble. I went for dinner with him at The Ivy and he had fish and chips. That’s the kind of guy he is.
Michael Caine – I asked him to give me some pointers and he said: ‘You’re doing just fine.’ I heard later that he doesn’t give actors notes because someone once told him to pack it in. He’s technically brilliant and totally down to earth.
Michael Bay – he’s the best action director on the planet, to see him work with seven cameras going is incredible.
Sylvester Stallone – his work ethic is insane. He was writing the script in the car on the way to the set. He got a bit of bamboo stuck in his arm, it nearly ripped his bicep off, and he just carried on. He knew everything about different sniper rifles.
Do you miss anything about Britain now you live in Los Angeles? I miss the people. In Hollywood it can be difficult because people aren’t as sincere, shockingly, as in Britain – people tell you how it is back home. I miss going to West Bromwich Albion games and that camaraderie of walking there with all the other fans, I watch all the games on TV – I haven’t missed one yet.
It’s really difficult to get a good Indian meal here. When I was in Emmerdale I went to a pub there and had a Yorkshire pudding with beef in it with gravy – you can’t get that here.
Beyoncé did backing vocals on one of your singles – have you kept in touch? I did for a while but I haven’t seen her for a very long time. When we did the single together she was very reserved – she wasn’t like Sasha Fierce but I told someone in the studio she’d be the biggest star in the world because she was beautiful and über-talented.
I look at my entire career and it’s a pinch-yourself moment. You look at Hugh Jackman, who was discovered doing Oklahoma. Most of us who have had theatre training know that work is so s**t you better be able to sing so you can do musicals if you have to. I was offered a recording contract way before I went into Coronation Street.
There are so many cases of people who have no background in music cashing in on being in a soap so I understand the scepticism that came with that but it’s strange to look back and say I sang a song with the most gigantic, massive female artist. The same as doing Top Of The Pops.
Who was on it when you did it? Eagle-Eye Cherry and B*Witched. I wanted to have a long career in music, which is why I signed with Sony and they said they’d develop me as an artist. We saw it as a long-term thing then the guy who signed me left the label. It was a great couple of years going around Europe singing.
I’m just a working-class kid from a council estate who dreamed of being an actor and singing. The whole thing is surreal.
What are your ultimate career ambitions? As you get older different challenges come along – the roles you get are more serious. I’m known for doing action but I’d love to do more comedy.
I did a little bit on Two And A Half Men but I’d like to do more. I’d like to direct. I’ve already sold a screenplay. I want to keep challenging myself as an actor. My wife keeps saying I should do Downton Abbey – that’s her ambition for me.
Bounty Killer is out now on DVD and VoD, and on Blu-ray on Monday.
The above interview can also be accessed on “Metro” on line here.
Acting chameleon Sir Tom Courtenay, along with Sirs Alan Bates and Albert Finney, became front-runners in an up-and-coming company of rebel upstarts who created quite a stir in British “kitchen sink” cinema during the early 60s. An undying love for the theatre, however, had Courtenay channeling a different course than the afore-mentioned greats and he never, by his own choosing, attained comparable cinematic stardom.
Sir Tom Courtney
The gaunt and glum, fair-haired actor was born Thomas Daniel Courtenay of modest surroundings on February 25, 1937, in Hull, East Yorkshire, England, the son of Thomas Henry Courtenay, a ship painter, and his wife Anne Eliza (née Quest). Graduating from Kingston High School there, he trained in drama at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. His reputation as an actor grew almost immediately with his professional debut in 1960 as Konstantin in “The Seagull” at the Old Vic. Following tours in Scotland and London with the play, Tom performed in “Henry IV, Part I” and “Twelfth Night” (also at the Old Vic) before assuming the title role of Billy from Albert Finney in the critically-acclaimed drama “Billy Liar” at the Cambridge Theatre in 1961. The story, which tells of a Yorkshire man who creates a fantasy world to shield himself from his mundane middle-class woes, was the initial spark in Tom’s rise to fame.
The recognition he received landed him squarely into the heap of things as a new wave of “angry young men” were taking over British cinema during the swinging 60s. Singled out for his earlier stage work at RADA, he was eventually handed the title role in the war film Private Potter (1962), but it was his second movie that clenched stardom. Winning the role of Colin Smith in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Courtenay invested everything he had in this bruising portrayal of youthful desolation and rebellion. As a reform school truant whose solitary sentencing for robbing a bakery leads to a reawakening and subsequent recognition as a long distance runner, he was awarded a “Promising Newcomer” award from the British Film Academy, It was Courtenay then, and not Finney, who recreated his stage triumph as Billy Fisher in the stark film version ofBilly Liar (1963). British Film Academy nominations came his way for this and for his fourth movie role in King & Country (1964). Vivid contributions to the films King Rat(1965), the ever-popular Doctor Zhivago (1965), which earned him his first Oscar nomination, and The Night of the Generals (1967) followed.
Despite all this cinematic glory, Courtenay did not enjoy the process of movie-making and reverted back to his first passion — the theatre — beginning in 1966. Displaying his versatility with roles in such classic works as “The Cherry Orchard,” “Macbeth” (as Malcolm), “Charley’s Aunt,” “The Playboy of the Western World,” “Hamlet,” “She Stoops to Conquer,” “Peer Gynt” and “Arms and the Man,” he still found scattered work in films, including The Day the Fish Came Out (1967), A Dandy in Aspic (1968) and Otley (1968), but none matched his earlier brilliance. In 1971 he took a self-imposed, decade-long sabbatical from filming.
Tom Courtney
Forming a sturdy association with the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester that would last over a decade, he continued to impress with lead roles in “The Rivals” and “The Prince of Homburg”. Following his huge success as the libidinous Norman in “The Norman Conquests” in London, he made his Broadway debut with “Otherwise Engaged” (1977) and earned a Tony nomination and Drama League Award in the process. It was his second Tony-nominated triumph in “The Dresser” in 1980-1981, however, that lured Courtenay back to films when he was asked to recreate the role for the large screen. The Dresser (1983) co-starred Tom as the mincing personal assistant to an appallingly self-destructive stage star played by Albert Finney (Paul Rogers played the role with Tom on Broadway) who struggles to get the actor through a rigorous performance of “King Lear”. Both British actors received Oscar nominations but lost the 1984 “Best Actor” award to American Robert Duvall.
Over the years Sir Tom has excelled in solo stage shows as well. As a chronic alcoholic in “Moscow Stations,” he won the 1994 London Critics Circle Theatre and London Evening Standard Theatre awards for “Best Actor”. In 2002, he wrote the one-man show “Pretending To Be Me,” based on the letters and writings of poet Philip Larkin. In the past decade he has continued to distinguish himself on both the classical (“King Lear,” “Uncle Vanya”) and contemporary (“Art”) stages.
Courtenay’s marriage to actress Cheryl Kennedy lasted about a decade (from 1973 to 1982). In 1988 he married Isabel Crossley, a stage manager at the Royal Exchange Theatre in London. He has no children from either marriage. In 1999, Sir Tom Courtenay was awarded an honorary doctorate from Hull University and in 2000 published his memoir “Dear Tom: Letters From Home”, which earned strong reviews. Knighthood came a year after that.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Paul Rogers was born in 1917 in Plymouth, Devon. He trained at the Michael Chekhov Theatre School at the reknowned Dartington Hall. His film debut came in 1932 and his films include “The Beachcomber” in 1954 and “Billy Budd” in 1962. He died in 2012.
His “Guardian” obituary by Michael Coveney:
Few actors played as many major Shakespearean roles as did Paul Rogers, a largely forgotten and seriously underrated performer, who has died aged 96. It was as though he was barnacled in those parts, undertaken at the Old Vic in the 1950s, by the time he played his most famous role, the vicious paterfamilias Max in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at the Aldwych theatre in 1965 (and filmed in 1973).
Staunch, stolid and thuggish, with eyes that drilled through any opposition, Rogers’s Max was a grumpy old block of granite, hewn on an epic scale, despite the flat cap and plimsolls – horribly real. Peter Hall’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company was monumental; everything was grey, chill and cheerless in John Bury’s design, set off firstly by a piquant bowl of green apples and then by the savage acting.
The Homecoming was the play that best fulfilled Hall’s ambition of mixing modern drama with the classic repertoire in a common declamatory but still naturalistic style at the RSC, Ian Holm doubling his Lenny in the Pinter with his unforgettable Richard III; Rogers, who had already played Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear at the Old Vic, soon cashed in.
This was his golden period as he played a skilled, heavyweight Apemantus in the extraordinary Paul Scofield Timon of Athens (directed by John Schlesinger, 1965) and a perfect, brazenly orotund Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV at Stratford-upon-Avon (1966), followed by his bamboozled fruity Mayor in Hall’s wonderful revival of Gogol’s The Government Inspector (Scofield in the lead) at the Aldwych. In 1967 he reprised Pinter’s Max on Broadway and scooped the Tony award for best actor.
Rogers was born in Plympton, Devon, the son of Edwin Rogers, a headmaster, and his wife Dulcie Myrtle. He was educated at Newton Abbot grammar school before training for two years from 1936 at the Michael Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall. He made his professional stage debut at the Scala theatre in Tottenham Court Road in 1938, playing Charles Dickens in Bird’s-Eye View of Valour.
After a season of small roles at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1939, and a stint at the Colchester Rep, he served in the Royal Navy during the war, returning to Colchester in 1946. He made a West End debut as Jonathan Kail in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles at the Piccadilly (1947), and joined the Bristol Old Vic (1948) to play his first batch of leading roles: Sir Anthony Absolute in The Rivals, Tybalt, Bottom and Lord Porteous in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle.
He then joined the Old Vic in London and embarked on that astonishing roster of leading characters between 1949 and 1957: Malvolio, Dr Caius, Trouble-all in Bartholomew Fair, Aegisthus in Electra, Iago, Shylock, Henry VIII, Petruchio, Touchstone, Mercutio, Leontes, John of Gaunt – and, in 1958, King Lear.
It is the mixture of high tragedy and low comedy that is so striking; Kenneth Tynan described a vocal display “of rich and immaculate cunning” in his early Falstaff, the “bellicose ecstasy” of his Macbeth at the Edinburgh festival in 1954.
He made a particular impression in the plays of TS Eliot, introducing the First Knight in Murder in the Cathedral at the Edinburgh festival in 1953, Sir Claude Mulhammer in The Confidential Clerk in the following year, and Lord Claverton in The Elder Statesman, also at the Edinburgh festival, in 1958, a politician and tycoon with the right look, said Tynan, “of stoic dismay, as of a man staring past the fire into his own thoughts”.
His stage reputation did not translate into cinematic distinction, but his films did include such notable titles as Muriel Box’s The Beachcomber (1954), with Glynis Johns and Donald Sinden; Beau Brummell (1954), with Stewart Granger and Elizabeth Taylor; Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana (1959), with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward; Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), with Peter Finch and James Mason (Rogers played Wilde’s biographer, Frank Harris); and Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (1962), with Robert Ryan.
Rogers first joined the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1974, appearing in Jonathan Miller’s production of Peter Nichols’s The Freeway and as Boss Mangan in Shaw’s Heartbreak House, flitting back to the RSC for the remarkable rediscoveries of Harley Granville Barker’s The Marrying of Ann Leete (1975) and Gorky’s The Zykovs (1976) before opening the restored Lyric Hammersmith, in 1979, in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell. In the Shaw, he played Walter, the waiter, a study in discreet obtrusiveness so delicious that, having taken an order for drinks, he left the stage in receipt of what he was in fact seeking: a large round.
He returned happily to Broadway in 1981, playing the bombastic actor manager “Sir” (based on Donald Wolfit) in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, opposite a marvellously mincing Tom Courtenay. In the new National Theatre on the South Bank, he rejoined Peter Hall and Judi Dench in 1982 as a definitive Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest, greeting Algie’s supposedly dead brother with a vague semaphore routine perfected in years of fidgeting; and as an impassive doctor in Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska, waiting for Dench to come round from a 29-year-long coma, part of a triple bill in which he also played a cab-driver in Victoria station.
His last stage appearances were as Boanerges in Shaw’s The Apple Cart at the Haymarket (with Peter O’Toole as King Magnus) in 1986; in an Arthur Miller double-bill, Danger: Memory! at Hampstead in 1988; and as an imposing mogul again in an off-Broadway play, Jerry Sterner’s Other People’s Money, at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, in 1990. His last movie was Gillian Armstrong’s Oscar and Lucinda (1997), with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett.
On television, he was a leading light, the college dean, in the brilliant 1987 adaptation of Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue (starring Ian Richardson), and was a regular fixture in such series of the 1990s as Kavanagh QC and Lovejoy.
In 1939, Rogers married Jocelyn Wynne. They divorced in 1955, and that year he married Rosalind Boxall; she died in 2004. He is survived by two sons from his first marriage and two daughters from his second.
• Paul Rogers, actor, born 22 March 1917; died 6 October 2013.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
Jacqueline Bisset was born in 1944 in Weybridge, Surrey. She began her career in British films and came to prominence in 1967 in “Two for the Road” with Audrey Hepburn anf Albert Finney. The following year she was in Hollywood making “The Detective” with Frank Sinatra and Lee Remick followed by “Bullit” with Steve McQueen. She has had a very profilic career starring opposite major actors like Jon Voight, Charles Bronson, Paul Newman and Michael York. Her most recent film is “The Last Film Festival” with Dennis Hopper.
TCM Overview:
British actress Jacqueline Bisset rose to fame in the 1970s as the object of desire for numerous top actors in features like “Bullitt” (1968), “Airport” (1970), “The Deep” (1977) and “The Greek Tycoon” (1978). Few of these roles allowed her to express anything more than slow-simmering sexuality, but gradually films like Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” (1973), George Cukor’s “Rich and Famous” (1981) and John Huston’s “Under the Volcano” (1983) revealed her talent for intelligent, complex performances. Unlike many actresses as they approached their fourth and fifth decades, Bisset remained active and in demand, playing a wide range of parts from stalwart mothers to seductive socialites. What remained constant throughout her four-decade career was her cool elegance, which preserved her iconic status as one of the screen’s great international beauties.
Born Winifred Jacqueline Bisset in the town of Weybridge in Surrey, England on Sept. 13, 1944, she was the daughter of Scottish doctor Max Bisset and his French wife, Arlette, a former lawyer who taught her daughter to speak her native tongue fluently. Bisset’s initial passion was ballet, which she studied as a child, but as she grew into a willowy adolescent, she was considered too tall to pursue dance as a career. Bisset’s teenage years were marked by major upheaval in her family life. After her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, her father left the family, forcing his daughter to support her mother and younger brother, Max through modeling. The latter job led to an interest in acting, and Bisset made her screen debut as an uncredited extra in Richard Lester’s “The Knack and How to Get It” (1965), which also launched the film careers of Charlotte Rampling and Jane Birkin.
She earned her first lines in Roman Polanski’s “Cul-de-Sac” (1966), but soon settled into a series of ornamental roles that were largely defined by her next picture, the all-star James Bond spoof, “Casino Royale” (1966), which cast her as Miss Goodthighs. Bit roles soon blossomed into supporting parts in “The Detective” (1968), where she replaced Mia Farrow as the wife of a murder victim investigated by Frank Sinatra, and “The Sweet Ride” (1968), a counterculture drama that earned her a Golden Globe nomination as a mystery woman who came between beach bums Tony Franciosa, Michael Sarrazin and Bob Denver. In 1969, she was an innocent teen whose trip to America ends in romantic failure and prostitution in Jerry Paris’ relentlessly downbeat “The Grasshopper.”
Bisset’s star-making role finally came in 1968 with “Bullitt,” where her cool beauty was matched perfectly by Steve McQueen’s frosty dramatics as a tough San Francisco detective with a penchant for hard driving. The film’s popularity elevated Bisset to major Hollywood features in the 1970s, though not more substantive roles; she was pilot Dean Martin’s pregnant mistress – and perhaps the first actress to belt Helen Hayes across the face – in the big-budget disaster film “Airport” (1970), then played elegant love interests for such actors as Alan Alda in “The Mephisto Waltz” (1971), Paul Newman in “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” (1972), Ryan O’Neal in “The Thief Who Came to Dinner” (1973), Charles Bronson in “St. Ives” (1976) and Anthony Quinn, as a thinly disguised Aristotle Onassis, who romanced Bisset’s ersatz Jacqueline Kennedy in “The Greek Tycoon” (1978). Her most memorable turn of the decade came in “The Deep” (1977), Peter Yates’ adaptation of the popular thriller by Peter Benchley. The film boosted her status as a pin-up thanks to its opening sequence, in which Bisset appeared in a wet t-shirt that left little to the imagination. She later denounced the scene, stating that producer Peter Guber had assured her that it would not be shot in an exploitative way.
Feeling frustrated by the lack of quality projects from Hollywood, Bisset returned to Europe throughout the 1970s, where she played a British actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Francois Truffaut’s backstage drama “Day for Night” (1973). The picture, which she later declared as her most fulfilling film role, reversed most critics’ perception of her as little more than a pretty face, and led to more work overseas, including Philippe Broca’s spy spoof “Le Magnifique” (1973), with French movie idol Jean-Paul Belmondo; Sidney Lumet’s Oscar-winning, all-star adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974); and the German thriller “End of the Game” (1975) for director Maximilian Schell. She and Schell also later shared godparent duties for Angelina Jolie, daughter of the film’s star, Jon Voight. Bisset ended the 1970s with a Golden Globe nomination for her turn as a pastry chef targeted by a killer in the charming comedy-thriller, “Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?”
Bisset began the 1980s on a sour note with huge back-to-back flops in Irwin Allen’s disaster film “When Time Ran Out” (1980) and the epic Korean War drama “Inchon” (1981), which earned brickbats for receiving funding by the Unification Church. But she quickly rebounded with a string of successful and mature dramas, starting in 1981 with “Rich and Famous.” Directed by the legendary George Cukor, the film followed a pair of friends (Bisset and Candice Bergen) through four turbulent decades of romances, successes and failures. The film also marked Bisset’s sole effort as a producer in an earnest attempt to wrest control over her career.
Though “Class” (1983), an ironically class-free sex comedy about a prep school student (Andrew McCarthy) sleeping with friend Rob Lowe’s mother (Bisset) was undoubtedly her most financially successful film of the decade, her subsequent choices were critically acclaimed dramas, including several for American television, which helped to finally establish Bisset as a capable and versatile actress. She earned a Golden Globe nomination as the wife of an alcoholic consul (her “Two for the Road” co-star Albert Finney) in John Huston’s “Under the Volcano” (1984), and then received a CableACE nod as German countess Nina von Halder, who hid her Jewish boyfriend (Jurgen Prochnow) from the Nazis in “Forbidden” (1985). Clare Peploe’s “High Season” (1987) gave her a leading role as a photographer who becomes embroiled in small town dramas on the Greek island of Rhodes, while Paul Bartel’s “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills” (1989) allowed her a rare shot at comedy as a wealthy widow beset by everything from amorous employees to the ghost of her husband (Paul Mazursky).
As the 1990s ushered Bisset into her fifth decade, she worked largely in independent features and TV movies on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably in Claude Chabrol’s “La Ceremonie” (1995), which earned her a Cesar nomination as a wealthy woman whose cruel treatment of her dyslexic servant (Sandrine Bonnaire) is repaid with violence. In 1999, she received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations as Isabelle d’Arc, mother of French martyr “Joan of Arc” (CBS), then moved to a more historical matriarch – specifically, Mary of Nazareth and Sarah, wife of Abraham – in the miniseries “Jesus” (CBS, 2000) and “In the Beginning” (NBC, 2000), respectively. Her legendary allure also made her a go-to for mature, glamorous and sexually confident women of power, which she essayed in features like “Dangerous Beauty” (1998), where her 16th century courtesan instructed her daughter (Catherine McCormack) in the family business, and “Domino” (2005), which cast her as fashion model Paulene Stone, whose daughter, Domino Harvey, became a bounty hunter. Her versatility allowed her to play both the ruthless head of a black market organ ring in the fourth season of “Nip/Tuck” (FX, 2003-2010), and a kindly 19th century grandmother in “An Old Fashioned Christmas’ (Hallmark Channel, 2008). In 2010, she received the Legion of Honor from French president Nicholas Sarkozy. Bisset co-starred opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor in the 1930s period piece “Dancing on the Edge” (Starz 2013), a miniseries about a black jazz band’s arrival in London society. Her performance as Lady Cremone won Bisset the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television, but her win was overshadowed by her strange, meandering acceptance speech, punctuated by long silences. It became the most talked-about moment of the 2014 Golden Globes, including a parody on “Saturday Night Live” (NBC 1975- ).
The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.
