British Actors Archives - Page 127 of 128

Kenneth Branagh

Kenneth Branagh TCM Overview.

Kenneth Branagh was born in Belfast in 1960. When he was nine his parents moved to the UK. In 1982 he starred on television in three plays about the one character Billy written by Grahan Reid. The same year he starred in “Another Country” on stage. He had made his film debut in a small part in 1981 in “Chariots of Fire”. Throuout the 80’s and 90’s his career continued on a steller path – films like “A Month in the Country”, “Dead Again” and Peter’s Friends” and television work such as “Fortunes of War”kept him in the public eye. In recent years he scored huge praise for his title performance in “Wallander” a tale of a tired Swedish police officer.

His TCM biography:

Once hailed as the “new Laurence Olivier,” Shakespearean-trained actor and director Kenneth Branagh struggled throughout his career to balance his near-obsessive drive to work with the need for a somewhat normal, settled life. After his directorial breakthrough with his excellent interpretation of The Bard’s “Henry V” (1989), Branagh had what appeared to many to be the picture-perfect life: a beautiful wife in Emma Thompson, a thriving career – thanks to his deft thriller “Dead Again” (1991) – and a reputation replete with an air of seriousness and unerring artistic credibility. But on the inside, Branagh claimed to have been going a bit mad – a realization exacerbated by his separation from Thompson and the debacle of “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1995). Later in life, he learned how to relax every now and then, but continued to push himself to greater artistic heights, sometimes to the point of failure, as with “Hamlet” (1996) and “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (2000). He rebounded, however, with a marvelous performance as a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt in “Warm Springs” (HBO, 2005), followed by an acclaimed turn as a brilliant but dysfunctional detective in the “Wallander” (PBS, 2009) miniseries and a return to the director’s chair for the superhero smash “Thor” (2011). With his heralded body of work as an actor, writer and director, Branagh had long emerged from Olivier’s shadow to be recognized as one of the more formidable filmmakers of his generation.

Born on Dec. 10, 1960 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Branagh was raised in a working class home devoid of any form of artistic expression; surprising for someone later intimately linked to the greatest writer of the English language. Branagh moved to England with his family when he was 10 and began his love affair with Shakespeare, reading 25-cent paperback volumes of his plays as an escape from schoolyard bullies who taunted him for being too much of a joker on the playground. An isolated child who sat enraptured in front of the TV, watching movies with James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy, Branagh later brought his desire to engage in fantasy to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he won the Bancroft Gold Medal for Outstanding Student of the Year and later earned Britain’s prestigious Best Newcomer award for his 1982 performance as Judd in “Another Country.” In a short time, Branagh had made a quick rise to become one of England’s promising new talents.

Branagh soon became a familiar face on British television, becoming a star of the acclaimed 1984 BBC trilogy “Too Late to Talk to Billy,” “A Matter of Choice for Billy” and “A Coming to Terms for Billy.” After making a name for himself with “Another Country,” he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at age 23, opening its 1984 season at Stratford-upon-Avon as the youngest “Henry V” in the troupe’s history. He also wrote and directed his first play, “Tell Me Honestly” (1985), presented as part of the inaugural season of “Not the RSC.” Deeming the RSC too large and impersonal, Branagh co-founded the Renaissance Theatre Company with David Parfitt. Though disbanded in 1994, Branagh successfully played “Hamlet,” staged his original play “Public Enemy,” which nearly bankrupted the company before it began, and mounted an acclaimed interpretation of “King Lear” – all before the age of 30.

He continued acting in high-quality British TV ventures such as the 1986 small screen version of Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the BBC’s acclaimed seven-part drama, “Fortunes of War” (1987), which joined him for the first time with frequent co-star and future wife, Emma Thompson. Finding time for two features, he played a bungling British agent posing as one-half of the archetypal English tourist couple in the weak-scripted “High Season,” but fared far better in his first leading role as a homosexual tormented by his World War I experiences in the plush period drama, “A Month in the Country” (both 1987). Branagh gained international recognition and dual Oscar nods as the director and star of the 1989 screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s lyrical “Henry V.” Strikingly dark and atmospheric, the pared-down film contrasted sharply with the lavishness and optimism of Laurence Olivier’s 1945 version, which reflected England’s enthusiasm for the war effort.

Branagh traveled to the United States to helm his next feature, the contemporary thriller “Dead Again” (1991). Dismissed by many reviewers for its overly complex story and emphasis on style over substance, “Dead Again” nonetheless was a commercial success. Branagh, however, came away disenfranchised with Hollywood, returning home to make “Peter’s Friends” (1992), a fey and overbearing British variation on “The Big Chill” that somehow managed to make the usually intelligent Thompson appear shrill. The same year, Branagh directed “Swan Song,” a short based on a Chekhov short story, starring John Gielgud as an aging actor who takes the stage in a closed theater to revisit the great Shakespearean characters he performed throughout his career. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Film – Live Action.

In his autobiography Beginning, written at age 28 in part to raise funds for his theater company, Branagh described himself as a “short-assed, fat-faced Irishman.” Lacking the matinee idol looks of the young Olivier, his somewhat plebeian features (pug nose, weak chin, and slightly jowly countenance) brought an earthy reality to his roles which did not always enhance the films. For instance, the 1940s segment of “Dead Again” would have benefited from more old-fashioned glamour and star power. In contrast, Branagh vividly recreated “Henry V” for modern audiences. His theater and TV work – such as his Jimmy Porter in a telecast of John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger” airing on Bravo in 1993 – consistently demonstrated that he was just as comfortable with modern types as with classic characters.

Branagh went back to his love of Shakespeare in adapting “Much Ado About Nothing” (1993) as a big-screen, all-star romp through Tuscany with Thompson, Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves. As he did for “Henry V,” Branagh largely dispensed with the traditional declamatory style in favor of more naturalistic line readings. The art-house hit enhanced his reputation as a canny popularizer of Shakespeare for modern movie audiences, paving the way for such things as Baz Luhrmann’s version of “Romeo and Juliet” in 1996 and “Shakespeare in Love” in 1998. He then took on a big budget, special effects, a name producer (Francis Ford Coppola) and a major star (Robert De Niro) in hopes of snaring a potentially wider audience with his “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1994), even transforming himself into a long-haired, muscled hunk for his portrayal of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Critical and popular responses were brutally unenthusiastic for his indulgent and ham-handed take on the classic novel.

Returning once again to Shakespeare, Branagh won critical acclaim for his turn as Iago to Laurence Fishburne’s “Othello” (1995) and also won praise for writing and directing “A Midwinter’s Tale” (1995). Filmed in black and white, the latter followed the travails of a troupe of actors attempting to mount a production of “Hamlet” with generally comic results. Branagh appeared as himself in Al Pacino’s documentary “Looking for Richard” (1996), which explored the Bard’s work through rehearsals for a filmed version of Richard III, then followed with his own big screen version of “Hamlet,” setting it in the 19th Century and playing the tortured, over-the-top Dane amidst an all-star cast that included Charlton Heston, Julie Christie, Kate Winslet, Jack Lemmon, Rosemary Harris, Derek Jacobi and many others. For his “Hamlet” – the first to use the complete Shakespearean text – Branagh won his fourth Oscar nomination (for Best Adapted Screenplay), but unlike the profitable “Much Ado,” the four-hour film failed to make back even half of its investment.

Branagh next collaborated with director Robert Altman, working from an original screenplay by John Grisham on “The Gingerbread Man” (1998). Though its January release was a box-office kiss of death, critics marveled at his dead-on Savannah accent and convincing portrayal of a lawyer who gets in hot water when he tries to protect a woman (Embeth Davidtz) he has just met. He then signed on with another legend and gave a performance that brought to mind the stuttering, neurotic persona of Woody Allen in Allen’s “Celebrity” (1998). Unfortunately, most people felt him hopelessly miscast as the messed-up New York magazine writer and that Allen was simply coasting, recycling ideas about infidelity dating back to his 1970s-era pictures. That year also saw Branagh in “Theory of Flight,” acting opposite his then-love Helena Bonham Carter, with whom he began a much-publicized relationship after his divorce from Thompson. “Theory of Flight” told the story of an uneasy friendship between a con man trying to construct his own backyard airplane and a motor-neuron disease sufferer who wants to lose her virginity before she dies. The film resolved itself in a funny, touching way, with the airplane serving as a metaphor for escape from earthly afflictions.

Returning to dreaded Hollywood, Branagh embarked on his biggest picture to date, portraying the villainous, legless Dr. Arliss Loveless, nemesis to Will Smith and Kevin Kline in “Wild Wild West” (1999). Despite the gargantuan investment, the flick turned out to be an embarrassment; all concept, no content. He reunited with Kline, however, to provide the voices for the leading characters in the animated film “The Road to El Dorado;” then contributed his distinctive vocals as the narrator of the Oscar-nominated animated short “The Periwig-Maker” (2000). In 1998, Branagh had announced plans to film three Shakespeare adaptations under the new banner of the Shakespeare Film Company, established in partnership with Intermedia and Miramax. He delivered the first of these in 2000, recasting “Love’s Labour’s Lost” as a breezy, 93-minute Hollywood musical, taking out some of the more impenetrable verse and substituting classic songs by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. While he clearly had not lost his touch for making Shakespeare accessible and whetted appetites for his “Macbeth” and “As You Like It;” the dismal box-office returns made it unlikely that the other proposed films would appear.

Branagh was well cast as a quick-tempered, chain-smoking playwright in the comedy “How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog” (2002) and offered a neat cameo as an English bureaucrat in the based-on-fact “Rabbit Proof Fence” (2001), about three Aboriginal girls who walked to freedom in 1930s Australia. On the small screen, Branagh was mesmerizing in an Emmy-winning performance as Reinhard Heydrich, the man who led the notorious Wannsee Conference in the HBO original “Conspiracy” (2001), a role which earned him an Emmy for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Miniseries. He portrayed British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton in a Channel 4/A&E jointly produced miniseries “Shackleton.” (2002), another part for which he won much critical praise. Branagh next stepped into the fantasy realm as the vainglorious Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in the much anticipated family feature “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (2002).

Branagh made for a convincing Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the HBO telepic “Warm Springs” (2005), which chronicled the president’s life from his diagnosis with polio at age 39 through his fruitless quest for a miracle cure before pursing the high office. His compelling performance earned the actor Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Sticking with the small screen, Branagh managed to bring to life Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy “As You Like It” (HBO, 2006), setting the film in the 19th century and starring Kline and a game Bryce Dallas Howard as the beguiling Rosalind. Continuing to enjoy working more behind the camera, Branagh directed the remake of “Sleuth” (2007), a comic game of cat-and-mouse between a brilliant writer and man of society (Michael Caine, assuming the role from Olivier from the 1972 version) seeking revenge on an out-of-work actor (Jude Law, taking over the part originally played by Caine) for stealing his wife.

After co-starring alongside Tom Cruise in “Valkyrie” (2008), he starred in and executive-produced three feature-length adaptations of Henning Mankell’s best-selling Wallander crime novels for the BBC. The three-part miniseries, “Wallander” (2009), later aired on PBS and earned the esteemed actor another Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of an existential detective whose empathy for murder victims takes its toll on his already dysfunctional personal life. That same year, he played a conservative government minister intent on shutting down off-shore broadcasting operations in the 1960s set docu-comedy “Pirate Radio” (2009). Branagh then took some time away from the spotlight to focus on his latest directorial effort, the big-budget adaptation of Marvel Comics’ “Thor” (2011). Although some fans of the property initially found Branagh an odd choice to helm the blockbuster, the classically-trained actor-director’s experience with bombastic, stylized period epics proved just the ticket, resulting in huge box-office business. In a bit of serendipity, he returned to screens later that year as the actor he had most often been compared to, Sir Laurence Olivier, in “My Week With Marilyn” (2011), a fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe’s (Michelle Williams) week touring London with a young film assistant (Eddie Redmayne) during the production of 1957’s “The Prince and the Showgirl.” Branagh’s performance earned him a number of accolades, including nominations at the Golden Globes and Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor.

His TCM biography can also be accessed online here.

Young Bess, poster, Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Deborak Kerr is rightly regarded as one of the most foremost of British actresses to reach true international stardom. Her CV of both British and U.S. films is extremely impressive. She was born in Glasgow in 1921. She originally trained as a ballet dancer with the Sadler Well’s Ballet Company. However she changed careers and in 1940 made her first film “Contraband” when she 19. She was soon in major roles in such films as “Major Barbara”, “Hatter’s Castle”, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and “Black Narcissus” in 1947. She then went to Hollywood and had to wait a few years before she obtained topflight roles. This was achieved with “From Here to Eternity” in 1953 and for the next eight years she gave some terrific performances e.g. “Tea and Sympathy”, “The King and I”, “An Affair to Remember”, “Seperate Tables” and “The Sundowners”. In the late 60’s her cinema career was waning and she returned with great success to the stage. She did though in the 80’s return to film with “The Assam Garden”. Sadly illness curtailed her later career and she died in 2007.

Her “Independent” obituary:

One of the few British actresses to become an internationally successful film star, in 1957 Deborah Kerr was named “The world’s most famous actress” by Photoplay magazine. She had had a highly successful career in British cinema before being poached by Hollywood. There she was regarded as little more than classy, patrician decoration before she famously shocked the town – and many of her admirers – with a steamy performance as the unfaithful wife of an army captain in From Here to Eternity (1953).

Her beach scene with Burt Lancaster, in which they make love as the raging surf envelops them, has become an iconic screen sequence, imitated and parodied as well as celebrated. Kerr’s accomplished skill and versatility resulted in six Oscar nominations (the most for any star in the Best Actress category who has not actually won).

Her many memorable performances included the bewitchingly determined Irish spy of I See a Dark Stranger (1946), the repressed nun of Black Narcissus (1947), the downtrodden sheep-drover’s wife in The Sundowners (1960) and the ambiguous governess in The Innocents (1961). Perhaps best of all she is remembered for her work in two perennial classics of romantic cinema, the musical The King and I (1956), and the tear-jerker supreme, An Affair to Remember (1957). “I adore not being me,” she once said. “I’m not very good at being me. That’s why I adore acting so much.”

The daughter of a civil engineer, she was born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer in 1921 in Helensburgh, overlooking the Firth of Clyde. As a child, she studied dance at a drama school in Bristol run by her aunt, winning a scholarship to Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells ballet group, with whom she made her London stage début at the age of 17.

Watching the progress of her fellow pupils Margot Fonteyn and Beryl Grey convinced Kerr that she would never be a great ballerina, so she concentrated on developing her acting skills and in 1939 did walk-on roles in several Shakespearean productions at the open-air theatre in Regent’s Park. She was spotted there by the powerful film agent John Gliddon, who signed her to a five-year contract.

Michael Powell’s lively thriller Contraband (1940) would have marked her screen début, but her role was excised from the final print. “The film was full of restaurants and night-clubs,” Powell wrote, “in one of which was an adorable little cigarette girl, all lovely liquid eyes and nice long legs, who had a tiny scene with Conrad Veidt that ended up on the cutting room floor.” Kerr was acting with the Oxford Repertory Players when spotted while dining at the Mayfair Hotel by a producer, Gabriel Pascal. Kerr recalled,

He came over to me and said, “Sweet virgin, are you an actress?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Then take down your hair, you look like a tart!”

Publicising her as “The Botticelli Blonde”, Pascal cast her as a Salvation Army officer, Jenny Hill, in Major Barbara (1940), based on Bernard Shaw’s play and starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. Kerr’s Jenny was described by her biographer Eric Braun as “a signpost to the kind of part in which she would excel – moral fortitude concealed by a frail appearance”. Her impressive performance led to her being given the leading role of Sally Hardcastle in a screen adaptation (much delayed by British censors) of Walter Greenwood’s bleak story of the working-class, Love on the Dole (1941), directed by John Baxter. Kerr’s spirited yet touching performance as a girl who becomes the mistress of a wealthy bookie to escape poverty established that a major British star had arrived.

Leading roles in Penn of Pennsylvania (1941), Hatter’s Castle (1941) and The Day will Dawn (1942) followed, before the first of her film classics, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). When Wendy Hiller, originally cast, became pregnant and had to drop out, Powell gave to Kerr the challenging assignment of the colonel’s ideal woman, who comes into his life in three separate incarnations over a 40-year period. Each incarnation was given individuality by her incisive playing. During the filming, she and Powell became lovers. “I realised,” said Powell, “that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for.” The film was controversial (Churchill thought it would ruin wartime morale, and the British army refused co-operation), but it proved an artistic and commercial triumph.

Powell had hoped to reunite Kerr and Roger Livesey, who had played Blimp, in his next film, A Canterbury Tale (1944), but Gabriel Pascal had sold her contract to MGM. According to Powell, his affair with Kerr ended when she made it clear to him that she would acccept an offer to go to Hollywood if one was made.

Her first film for MGM paired her with Robert Donat in the British production Perfect Strangers (1945), about a dull couple whose personalities are changed by their wartime experiences. Stewart Granger, who was filming Caesar and Cleopatra at the time, recounts in his autobiography Sparks Fly Upward (1981) that during this period Kerr (whom he described as “devastatingly beautiful”) seduced him in the back of a taxi. Whenever this was mentioned to Kerr by interviewers, she would smile wryly and reply, “What a gallant man!”

In 1945 she and Granger made an eight-week tour of theatres of war in Belgium, Holland and France starring in Patrick Hamilton’s thriller Gaslight. During the tour Granger introduced her to the Battle of Britain pilot Anthony Bartley, who became her first husband. Kerr’s next film was Launder and Gilliatt’s thriller I See a Dark Stranger (1946), in which she was Bridie Quilty, a high-spirited Irish lass. With Kerr and her co-players Trevor Howard and Raymond Huntley all making the most of the witty script, it was a delight.

MGM then loaned her to Powell to star in Black Narcissus (1947). He had initially thought of trying to lure Greta Garbo out of retirement to play the part of troubled Sister Superior, in charge of a group of nuns who try to establish a community from a dilapidated palace in a remote part of the high Himalayas (created entirely at Pinewood). Black Narcissus was a hit in the US as well as the UK, and Kerr won the New York Film Critics’ Award as Actress of the Year. MGM was now ready to launch her American career, and she departed for Hollywood with her husband.

Advertisements for her first film, The Hucksters (1948), proclaimed her as “Deborah Kerr (rhymes with star)” and her photograph was on the cover of Time magazine, tellingly set against a background of English roses. The screenwriter Luther Davis recalled, “The studio were rather in awe of Deborah, treating her like this great legitimate actress who’d deigned to join MGM.” The Hucksters, a satire on radio advertising, was a moderate success, but it was followed by If Winter Comes (1949), a clumsily told melodrama that received limited release.

Kerr had the meaty role of a wife who descends into alcoholism in the screen version of Robert Morley’s play Edward, My Son (1949), and her uncompromising performance won her an Oscar nomination, but the downbeat tale, co-starring Spencer Tracy, did not attract large audiences. Her next film, Please Believe Me (1949), was a minor comedy with Peter Lawford and, unhappy, she told the studio head Dore Schary that there was a story she would love to do, The African Queen.

He replied that the property was owned by Warners, but that he had another African tale, King Solomon’s Mines (1950). “The next thing I knew I was on location 25,000 miles into darkest Africa.” Co-starring Stewart Granger, the film was a great success, and was followed by another blockbuster, the big-budget epic Quo Vadis? (1951), to which she brought her best patrician nobility as Lygia, the Christian slave girl. She was stoic again in Richard Thorpe’s excellent remake of The Prisoner of Zenda (1952).

She was happy to play the small role of Portia in Julius Caesar (1953), but was then given the role of Catherine Parr in Young Bess (1953), in which both she and Stewart Granger played second fiddle to the performances of Jean Simmons (as Bess) and Charles Laughton (as Henry VIII). “I came over to act,” she said, “but it turned out all I had to do was to be high-minded, long-suffering, white-gloved and decorative.”

After asking for MGM to let her freelance between assignments, she was delighted when a new agent, Bert Allenberg, persuaded the Columbia chief Harry Cohn to cast her as Karen Holmes in From Here to Eternity when Joan Crawford, originally given the part, walked out after requesting her own cameraman. Under Fred Zinnemann’s direction, Kerr effectively conveyed the sad, quiet desperation of her character, an alcoholic nymphomaniac. Said Kerr, “I studied voice for three months to get rid of my accent and I changed my hair to blonde. I knew I could be sexy if I had to.”

A third Oscar nomination resulted, and she consolidated her new status with her début on the Broadway stage in Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), as Laura Reynolds, the schoolmaster’s wife who offers compassion to a troubled pupil suspected of homosexuality. In the controversial closing scene, she seduces the boy for his own good, and has one of the most famous closing lines in modern drama, “Years from now, when you talk about this – and you will – be kind.” The performance earned her two Donaldson Awards, (Best Actress and Best Début), the Variety Drama Critics’ Poll, and when she toured in the play she won Chicago’s Sarah Siddons Award.

She returned to the screen in Edward Dmytryk’s British-made The End of the Affair (1955), and followed this with one of her greatest triumphs, as Anna Leonowens, the governess who travels to Siam to teach the King’s many children, in The King and I, Walter Lang’s screen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Victorian determination sparked her spirited exchanges with the King (Yul Brynner), genteel warmth pervaded her scenes with the children, and the voice of Marni Nixon blended seamlessly with Kerr’s own recitative introductions to the songs, resulting in one of Hollywood’s finest dubbing achievements. Kerr was nominated for an Oscar, and Brynner won one for his forceful portrayal.

In 1957 Kerr was seen in the screen version of Tea and Sympathy. Although stylishly directed by Vincente Minnelli, the project inevitably suffered from the screen censorship of the time. Kerr’s Hollywood career was now at its peak. She starred with William Holden in The Proud and Profane (1956), Holden describing her as “the most no-problem star I ever worked with, and she has a salty sense of humour which surprises everyone”. She played a nun again, teamed with Robert Mitchum (“Such a wonderful actor”) in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1956), for which she received her fourth Oscar nomination, then starred with Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember (1957), one of her best-loved films. As a couple who fall in love during an ocean trip, and promise to meet in six months if they feel the same, Grant and Kerr merge a delightfully light bantering touch with suggestions of genuine passion.

The following year Kerr won her fifth Oscar nomination, for her depiction in Separate Tables of a dowdy spinster cowed by a domineering mother. It is one of the actress’s most debated performances, detractors finding it too studied, though few will deny the frisson of the moment when she finally defies her mother and consorts with the disgraced, phony major (David Niven, in another instance where Kerr’s co-star won a statuette but she did not). She had an entirely different role with Niven in Otto Preminger’s under-rated version of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958), playing the glamorous widow Anne, whom Niven’s daughter (Jean Seberg) sees as a threat to the life-style she enjoys with her father.

She partnered Brynner again in the cold war thriller The Journey (1958), co-written by Peter Viertel, who was to become her second husband. She played the columnist Sheilah Graham in Beloved Infidel (1959), based on Graham’s account of her tempestuous love affair with the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the film was diluted when Gregory Peck agreed to play Fitzgerald only on condition that the first part of the script, dealing with Graham’s fascinating rise to fame, was excised.

In 1960 Kerr submerged completely any trace of her patrician persona with an immensely moving depiction of a downtrodden sheep-drover’s wife in Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners. It features one of the most memorable moments in Kerr’s career, as her weatherbeaten Ida, sitting on a station platform, sees an elegant woman adjusting her make-up in a train compartment, and the ladies’ eyes meet in mutual rapport.

It is the performance which many think should at last have won her the Oscar – it was the year Elizabeth Taylor won for Butterfield 8. “I should have won that year,” she told the writer Christopher Frayling, “I should’ve!” It is an undoubted miscarriage of justice that Kerr was not made a Dame, though she was appointed CBE in 1997. She won the New York Critics’ Awards for her performances in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison and Separate Tables, was given a British Film Institute Fellowship in 1986, and received a Bafta Special Award in 1991.

In 1961 Kerr made Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, arguably (with Robert Wise’s The Haunting) one of the two best ghost stories of the Sixties. She was superb as the enigmatic governess who comes to believe that her two charges are possessed by an evil spirit in this superb transcription of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Although she was fine as the mysterious Miss Madrigal, a governess with a criminal past, in The Chalk Garden (1963), and particularly as the kind and gentle artist in The Night of the Iguana (1964), based on Tennessee Williams’s play, a string of second-rate movies caused her career to dim in the mid-Sixties.

Marriage on the Rocks (1965), Eye of the Devil (1966), in which she replaced Kim Novak, Casino Royale (1967) and Prudence and the Pill (1968) were all poorly received, and John Frankenheimer’s The Gypsy Moths (1969) pleased critics more than audiences. It was her last film for 13 years, Kerr announcing her retirement from films and stating afterwards, “I didn’t want to do disaster movies, ending up in an airplane at the bottom of the sea.”

She returned to the theatre in 1972, recreating her role in Separate Tables in a one-performance Midnight Matinee in honour of Sir Terence Rattigan. Later that year she had a personal success in a West End production of The Day After the Fair, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s short story “On the Western Circuit”. The following year she toured the United States and Canada in the same play. In 1975 she starred on Broadway in Edward Albee’s short-lived Seascape, and in London she played the title role in Shaw’s Candida (1977). She returned to film in a television movie of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution (1982).

She was honoured by the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, and the following year she made her last feature film, The Assam Garden. In a revival of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green (1985), she portrayed the admirable school-teacher Miss Moffat who recognises the talent in one of her miner pupils, but the run was marred by apparent nerves and fluffing of lines. On television she had particular success with the mini-series A Woman of Substance (1983), sharing with Jenny Seagrove the role of the founder of a department store dynasty.

In 1994 Kerr was finally awarded an honorary Oscar. Elia Kazan, who directed her on stage in Tea and Sympathy and on screen in The Arrangement (1968), said,

Deborah Kerr is a great lady. Let that stand by itself. She is also a fine actress, a joy to work with, devoted, understanding and gifted with a sense of humour. She is outstandingly fair to her fellow performers. She is regally handsome. That’s enough. If I say any more it might embarrass her or swell her head. And I wouldn’t want that.

Tom Vallance

This obituary can also be accessed on-line here.

Margaret Rutherford is one of the greatest character actresses ever on film. She was born in 1882 in Balham, London. She worked as an elocution teacher and did not become a professional actress until she was 37 when she joined the Old Vic in 1925. She gained major film fame in 1n 1945 with her performance as Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit”, a part she had created on the stage. Throughout the late 40’s and into the sixties she created a gallery of characterisations on film ranging from the Miss Marple series to her Oscar winning performance in 1963 with “The V.I.P.’s”. She made one film in Hollywood, “On the Double” with Danny Kaye. Margaret Rutherford died after a lengthy illness in 1972 at the age of 80.

TCM Overview:

Gifted, endearing character player, in films since the mid-1930s. A master scene-stealer, Rutherford personified the eccentric English spinster in a number of famous comedies, including David Lean’s classic “Blithe Spirit” (1945), as the enthusiastic, bicycle-riding psychic, Madame Arcati. In “The Happiest Days of Your Life” (1950), she teamed beautifully with Alistair Sim for a rollicking secondary school farce.With her plump figure, small and piercing eyes, and bulldog expression, Rutherford could embody a spirit of prim, stiff-upper-lip efficiency or could play a classic, fidgety bungler with equal ease. She made a memorably nervous Miss Prism in a sterling film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s farce, “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1952). Rutherford is perhaps best known as the indomitable title character in four “Miss Marple” mystery films of the 60s. Most of Rutherford’s credits are British, but she won an Academy Award for her hilarious rendition of a daffy duchess down on her luck in the old-fashioned, all-star Hollywood anthology drama, “The V.I.P.s” (1963). This much-loved trouper was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the late 60s shortly before her death.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

Mikey North is best known for his part as Gary Windass in “Coronation Street”. He was born in 1986 in Yorkshire. His first professional stage work was in “Bottle Universe” in London’s West End. He has also featured in episodes of “The Bill”. His films include “A Mind of her Own ” in 2006 and a year later in “The Mark of Cain”. Interview on “Digital Spy” can be accessed here.

Kenneth Haigh obituary in “The Guardian” in 2018.

The actor Kenneth Haigh, who has died aged 86, was the original Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in May 1956, the game-changing new play that gave voice to a new generation, disaffected, provincial, working class, alienated by the Sunday newspapers, disgusted by the dreariness and hypocrisy of public life and private behaviour.

The play, in some ways, was a rant, but it was also a call to arms and, in Haigh, Osborne found his ideal representative on the stage: as abrasive as he was bright, Haigh was a “school of hard knocks” Yorkshireman who, like Osborne, had served time in weekly rep and the touring theatre of the 1950s and disliked most of what he had been required to do.

Osborne’s play showed a new direction, very different from the other plays Haigh had signed up to perform with the newly formed English Stage Company that season in Sloane Square; these were Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (he was the Rev John Hale) and, even more remotely to his experience, two new plays by middle-class novelists, The Mulberry Bush by Angus Wilson and Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis.Advertisement

He became synonymous with the “angry young men” (a phrase coined by a Royal Court PR man) of the time. To a large extent he was Jimmy Porter. When he went to Broadway with the play in 1958, a young woman in the audience, Joyce Greller, climbed on the stage and slapped him around the face. The scene she interrupted, she explained to the New York Times, “reminded me of all the rotten men I’ve known – it was a composite of every one of those fine rats”; which is just how people take actors in television soap operas “for real” these days, forgetting about fiction. It emerged later, however, that the interruption was a publicity stunt rigged by the producer David Merrick, who had paid Greller, an out-of-work actor, $250 in order to boost the sagging box office, which she did … the play ran for another 15 months.

Haigh’s other signature role was Joe Lampton in the ITV series Man at the Top (1970-72), in which he embodied John Braine’s womanising northern antihero first seen in the film Room at the Top. It was Haigh’s bad luck that both Jimmy Porter and Joe Lampton were more easily identified on celluloid with Richard Burton and Laurence Harvey, the respective stars of the movie adaptations.

Haigh had a double Richard Burton connection: with the great actor when he played Brutus in the Burton/Elizabeth Taylor blockbuster Cleopatra (1963), and with the explorer of the same name who competed with David Livingstone to discover the source of the African river in one of the best ever BBC documentaries, The Search for the Nile (1971). This was narrated by James Mason, and Haigh was Burton to Michael Gough’s Livingstone.

He was at least lionised in New York for a while after Look Back. He played the title role of Caligula by Albert Camus in 1960, directed by Sidney Lumet, missing the madness (according to the critic Kenneth Tynan) but worrying at his lines like a dog with a bone and surveying the patricians with contemptuous aplomb. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 to play in Harold Pinter’s The Collection at the Aldwych and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar at Stratford-upon-Avon. But he was more at home as a Liverpudlian wildcat strike leader in Lionel Bart and Alun Owen’s underrated musical Maggie May, co-starring Rachel Roberts, in 1964.

Haigh was born in Mexborough, South Yorkshire, the son of Margaret (nee Glyn) and William Haigh, and educated at Gunnersbury grammar school in London. After national service, he trained at the (now Royal) Central School of Speech and Drama and in 1952 toured in Ireland with Anew McMaster’s repertory company; he played Cassio to McMaster’s Othello, succeeding Pinter in the role as Pinter moved on to play Iago.

Haigh had returned to Britain after a period of teaching and performing at Yale drama school in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was encouraged by the critic Robert Brustein to play Prometheus and Pirandello’s Henry IV. His film career was insignificant, but he was superb as an embittered, exiled Napoleon in Eagle in a Cage (1972), though his last UK stage appearances, in Strindberg’s The Father at the Leicester Haymarket in 1975 and as a bland and chubby Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing in Manchester Cathedral in 1976, were disappointing.

[Look Back in Anger Alison PorterMary Ure Jimmy PorterKenneth Haigh

After Look Back, Haigh became soul mates with Tynan, whose review of the play – “I doubt if I could love anyone who did not want to see Look Back in Anger” – transformed so many lives, inside and outside the theatre, and he often dined with him at his home in South Kensington. Haigh also befriended another critic, Michael Billington, after they met at a Christmas party at Tynan’s house in 1973. They occasionally dined together and some years later Haigh cheerily remarked to Billington, on turning up one night for supper: “I don’t know. Same house, same job, same wife. Why haven’t you fucked your life up like the rest of us?”

He suffered the misfortune of spending the last 15 years in a care home as a result of brain damage incurred after swallowing a chicken bone in a Soho restaurant and suffering oxygen loss.

In 1974 he married the model Myrna Stephen. She and their son survive him.

• Kenneth Haigh, actor, born 25 March 1931; died 4 February 2018

• This article was amended on 14 February 2018. Yale drama school is located not in Boston, as originally stated, but in New Haven, Connecticut.

Michael Gambon. TCM Overview.

Michael Gambon was born in Cabra, Dublin in 1940. His family moved to live in London when he was five. At the age of eighteen he went on to study at RADA. He made his preofessional debut in 1962 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in “Othello”. He spent three years at the Old Vic and then joined the Birmington Repertory Company. In 1974 he had a huge success with “The Norman Conquests”. He made is fil debut in 1965 with Laurence Oliver and Maggie Smith in “Othello”. In 1986 he starred on television in Dennis Potter’s “The Singing Detective” to great acclaim. Among his films are “The Gambler”, “Dancing at Lughnasa” and “Sleepy Hollow” and the “Harry Potter” series where he took over from Richard Harris. 2013 article on Michael Gambon in “MailOnline” here.

TCM Overview:

One of the most respected and accomplished actors on stage, film and television since the 1960s, Sir Michael Gambon essayed men of complex passions, flaws and appetites in projects ranging from classical theater and “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” (1989) to the “Harry Potter” franchise, where he replaced Richard Harris as the fatherly wizard Dumbledore

. An acolyte of Laurence Olivier, he honed his craft on the British stage in productions of plays by Samuel Beckett and Alan Ayckbourn; major theater awards precipitated celebrated turns on television in “The Singing Detective” (BBC1, 1986), which in turn launched a film career as dastards like his brutal gangster in “Thief” or men hobbled by regret in “Dancing in Lunghnasa” (1998).

Hits in Hollywood like “Sleepy Hollow” (1999) boosted his profile, which led to Emmy nominations for “The Path to War” (HBO, 2002) and “Emma” (BBC1, 2009) as well as steady work on stage and in front of the camera. While most moviegoers recognized him as Dumbledore, his vast and storied career displayed a breadth of talent that made him an actor worthy of his late mentor’s mantle of the world’s finest working actor.

Alan Cuthbertson was a great character actor in British films. He was especially good as sneering public officials or smarmy businessmen or bossy military types. He was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1920. He came to England in 1947 and appeared in many plays on London’s West End. He appeared in army uniform in such films as “Carrington VC” in 1955, “Ice Cold in Alex” in 1958 and three years later “The Guns of Navarone”. He was particularly good as Simone Signoret’s condescending husband in “Room at the Top”. In 1960 he travelled to Hollywood and formed part of the British contingent in Danny Kaye’s “On the Double”. The other British stars included Margaret Rutherford, Dana Wynter and Diana Dors. He has a very extensive filmography and his last film was “Invitation to the Wedding” in 1985. He died in 1988 at the age of 67. An article on Allan Cuthbertson can be accessed here.

Gabrielle Drake is a very talented and attractive actress who starred in some of the more popular televsion series in Britain in the 70’s ioncluding “The Brothers”. She was born in India in 1944 and lived in other countries in the East before moving to England. Her film credits include is “Connecting Rooms” with Bette Davis, “There’s a Girl in my Soup” with Peter Sellers, Goldie Hawn and Diana Dors and “The Steal”. Recently she has appeared on television as the mother of Lynley in “The Inspector Lynley Mysteries”. She is the sister of the late cult songwriter and singer Nick Drake.

“Telegraph” interview with Gabrielle Drake from 2004:

“Wikipedia” entry

Drake was born in Lahore, British India, the daughter of Rodney Drake and amateur songwriter Molly Drake. Her father was an engineer working for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. As a child she lived in several Far Eastern countries. In 1942 her family had to flee Burma for Britain to escape advancing Japanese forces. She later commented that,

Until then, life was fairly easy out east. There were lots of servants … not that I remember having a spoilt childhood. Then suddenly we were back in England and in the grips of rationing. And yet, we were lucky in a way. We came back with my nanny who knew far more about England than mummy did. I remember the two of them standing over the Aga with a recipe book trying to work out how to roast beef, that sort of thing

On the ship travelling to Britain she appeared in children’s theatrical productions, later saying of herself “I was a dreadful exhibitionist.”^[2] She attended Edgbaston College for Girls in Birmingham, Wycombe Abbey School, Buckinghamshire and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. She has had a long stage career beginning in the mid-1960s, and has regularly appeared in television dramas.

Drake first gained wide attention for her portrayal of Lieutenant Gay Ellis in the 1970 science fiction television series UFO, in which her costume consisted of a silver suit and a purple wig.^[3] In the series, the character of Lt Ellis is the commander of Moonbase, which is Earth’s first line of defence against invading flying saucers. Drake appeared in roughly half the 26 episodes produced, leaving the series during a break in the production to pursue other acting opportunities.

In 1971 Drake appeared in a short film entitled Crash!, based on a chapter in J. G. Ballard‘s book The Atrocity Exhibition. The film, directed by Harley Cokeliss, featured Ballard talking about the ideas in his book. Drake appeared as a passenger and car-crash victim. Ballard later developed the idea into his 1973 novel Crash.^[4] In his draft of the novel he mentioned Drake by name, but references to her were removed from the published version.^[4] In 2009, Ballard appeared on the BBC documentary series Synth Britannia and played Gary Numan‘s song Cars. He interspersed clips of Drake from Crash! with Numan’s 1979 video. A reviewer in The Scotsman commented that the presence of Drake “brought serious glamour to urban alienation”.

In the early 1970s Drake was associated with the boom in British sexploitation movies, repeatedly appearing nude or topless. She played a nude artist’s model in the 1970 filmConnecting Rooms, and was one of Peter Sellers‘ conquests in the film There’s a Girl in My Soup. She also played one of the lead roles in the sex comedy Au Pair Girls (1972) and appeared in two Derek Ford films, Suburban Wives (1972) and its sequel Commuter Husbands (1973), in which she played the narrator who links the disparate episodes together.

Her early television appearances include The Avengers (1967), Coronation Street (as Inga Olsen in 1967) and The Saint (1968). In 1970, she auditioned for the part of Jo Grantin Doctor Who, reaching the final shortlist of three, but did not get the part. She had roles in The Brothers (1972–74, in a regular leading role), She also appeared in an episode of Brian Clemens’ ’70s series Thriller, in The Kelly Monteith Show (as Monteith’s wife 1979–80), a television version of The Importance of Being Earnest (1985, for LWT/PBS),Crossroads (1985–87, as motel boss Nicola Freeman) and returned to Coronation Street in 2009 as Vanessa. In The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2003–05) she played the protagonist’s mother.

Drake made her stage debut in 1964, during the inaugural season of the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, playing Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1966, she joined the Birmingham Repertory Company and played Queen Isabella in Marlowe’s Edward II. She also had roles in Private Lives (with Renee Asherson), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (with Linda Marlowe and Patrick Mower), Twelfth Night and Inadmissible Evidence.^[ The following year, she was Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park.^] In the 1974-5 season at the Bristol Old Vic, she played in Cowardy Custard, a devised entertainment featuring the words and music of Noël Coward In 1975, she appeared as Madeline Bassett in the original London cast of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn musical Jeeves. She also appeared in French Without Tears at the Little Theatre, Bristol.^[9] In 1978, she played Lavinia, opposite Simon Callow in the title role, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, directed by Adrian Noble, at the New Vic, Bristol. She also appeared at the Bristol Old Vic in that year, in Vanbrugh‘s The Provok’d Wife.

She was directed by Mike Ockrent in Look, No Hans!, alongside David Jason, during the 83-84 season at the Theatre Royal, Bath. She made a second appearance in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Royalty Theatre, London, in a production directed by Donald Sinden, which also starred Wendy Hiller, Clive Francis, Phyllida Law and Denis Lawson (87-88).^[10] In 1988, she played Fiona Foster in a revival of Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves, first at the Greenwich Theatre, then at the Duke of York’s Theatre.^[11]During the 1990-91 season at the Theatre Royal, Bath, she played in Risky Kisses with Ian Lavender.^[12] She was in the Mobil Touring Theatre’s official centenary production ofCharley’s Aunt in 1991, with Frank Windsor, Patrick Cargill and Mark Curry.^[13] In 1993, she was Monica in Coward’s Present Laughter at the Globe Theatre, London, in a revival directed by and starring Tom Conti.^[14] She co-starred with Jeremy Clyde in the 1995 King’s Head Theatre tour of Cavalcade, directed by Dan Crawford.^[15] In 1999, she was Vittoria in Paul Kerryson’s production of The White Devil at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester.^[16] She also toured with the Oxford Stage Company in that year, as Hester Bellboys in John Whiting‘s A Penny for a Song, alongside Julian Glover, Jeremy Clyde, and Charles Kay.^[17] She played Mrs Malaprop in the 2002 touring production of The Rivals with the British Actors’ Theatre Company, whose artistic director, Kate O’Mara, was Drake’s co-star in the TV series The Brothers.^[18]

She has made regular appearances at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, since her debut there in a non-pantomime version of Cinderella, written by Trevor Peacock, in 1979.^[ That same year, she co-starred with Sorcha Cusack and Susan Penhaligon in Caspar Wrede’s production of The Cherry Orchard. In 1986, she was Madame Gobette in the British premiere of Maurice Hennequin‘s Court in the Act, which subsequently played at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, and the Theatre Royal, Bath, before transferring to the Phoenix Theatre in London (1987). Other roles at the Royal Exchange include Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1996);^[ Anna in The Ghost Train Tattoo (2000);^[ Fay in Loot (2001);^[25] Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (2004);^[26] and The Comtesse de la Briere in What Every Woman Knows (2006). At the same theatre in 2001, Drake replaced Patricia Routledge as Mrs Conway during the rehearsal period for J. B. Priestley‘s Time and the Conways, when Routledge was forced to withdraw from the production due to illness.

Elsewhere, she has appeared in her one-woman show, Dear Scheherazade, as the 19th century writer Elizabeth Gaskell (2005, 2007, 2010). At the Chipping Campden Literature Festival in 2011, she and Martin Jarvis read extracts from the letters and diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann in the recital, Beloved Clara. She had appeared in the same piece the previous year, again with Jarvis and the pianist Lucy Parham, at the Wigmore Hall in London.

Drake has helped to ensure the public renown of her brother Nick Drake and her mother Molly Drake. She can be heard accompanying her brother Nick on a number of songs that he recorded privately, and which have since been released on the album Family Tree. After the release of songs written and performed by her mother, she said “Her creativity was a personal thing, and she was lucky to be able to develop it in an environment where that side of her was totally accepted. Indeed, my father encouraged it. He was so proud of her. On one occasion, he even made the 20 mile drive to Birmingham to get four songs pressed onto a disc.”^[ In 2004 she published Nick Drake: Remembered for a While, a memoir of her brother.^[2]

She lives in Wenlock Abbey in Much Wenlock, Shropshire with her husband of over 40 years the South African-born artist Louis de Wet. The couple bought the house in 1983. She and her husband have renovated their home over several years as an artistic project. In 2004 he described it as “the most beautiful building site in the world”. Drake was the producer of In the Gaze of the Medusa, a 2013 film by Gavin Bush about the renovation project and her husband’s designs for the house.

“There are many different ways of being frightening.” Gabrielle Drake says this in a low, menacing purr, leaning slightly forward and then slightly to one side, like a spinning-top about to keel over. “The obvious way, she says, is the gorgon, the battleaxe, the ugly old boot. “We’ve all seen that.” Her Lady Bracknell will be different: the gorgon with charm. “A woman can be more frightening if she is superbly turned out, superb looking and immaculately polite. You know what her values are and it is very unlikely that you are going to come up to scratch.”

Even as herself, Drake sounds very grand and cut-glass, as if she is about to tick one off for not having the right gloves. Very few actresses talk like this any more and the ones who do would never admit, as she does, that they hate the way they speak. “I think my accent is particularly horrible,” she says, with a shudder. Her voice is actually quite seductive – breathy, conspiratorial and deep. It’s not surprising that she was once invited to read the Kama Sutra on an audiotape of erotic literature. But she has a quaint repertoire of archaic phrases like “thereby reduced” and “raised the ire” – expressions that make her sound like her heroine, Mrs Gaskell, rather than a luvvie having a chat over a cup of tea at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.

Still, with her mane of chestnut hair and sparky form, Drake is a cheerful advertisement for the alluring possibilities of middle age. Braham Murray, director of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Exchange, says he chose her to play Lady B because he wanted a spirited, attractive woman and not some “dried up old prune”.

He first met her in 1978 when she was playing Lavinia in Titus Andronicus at Bristol Old Vic and was swept away. “Gaby was stunningly beautiful – still is – but people didn’t take her seriously as an actress. I thought: this is a great, great lady and I used her for some heavy roles such as Time and the Conways.”

Since her debut – as Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest at Liverpool’s new Everyman Theatre in the Sixties – Gabrielle Drake has deployed her fine vowels in a huge range of modern classic comedies, period drama and minor films (including Suburban Wives and Steal). Her television credits are a catalogue of old faithfuls – The Brothers, Coronation Street, Crossroads, UFO.

Recently, she played Lady Asherton in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. Last year, she was Mrs Malaprop in Kate O’Mara’s touring production of The Rivals, and now Lady B, a part she was born for. “It’s good fun to be coming into the great comic roles for older women,” she says gamely, though the competition is stiff.

As well as all this, Drake has a non-theatrical role that is only now becoming apparent. Listed in one of her web biographies under the heading “Trivia”, it is “Sister of the late singer-songwriter Nick Drake”. Her younger brother died from an overdose of anti-depressants at the age of 26 in 1974, and she has been the guardian of his reputation and his estate ever since.

At first, this was not too onerous. Nick had a pitifully brief career. Unappreciated in his lifetime, he recorded only three albums – gently melancholic folk-rock songs with an unusually pure guitar accompaniment. His fan base was tiny, though a persistent trickle of followers would turn up at their family home in Warwickshire on the anniversaries of his birth and death.

“Young people would just show up on the doorstep and we would have to be there with tea and cakes. One or two said that if it had not been for his music, they would have ended up as he did.

“His music was an enormous comfort to them. My mum was receiving people at her house almost up to the day of her death. She used to love that.”

In his depression at what he saw as the world’s rejection of his music, Nick seemed to move beyond the reach of family and friends. His parents felt they had failed him. “Other people have had businesses and hobbies,” said his bereaved father. “We’ve had Nick.”

Then, in 1995, something puzzling happened. Nick Drake’s reputation started to take off and has been rising ever since. Gabrielle is suddenly very busy indeed. Recently, she was in London for two days to promote an album of rare and previously unreleased songs to mark the 30th anniversary of his death.

“Wretched boy!” she says, in mock annoyance. “Here I am, still doing his publicity. One of the most difficult things is trying to work out what he would have wanted.

“If I meet him again, I will probably get into terrible trouble. I will have to say to him: ‘Listen, I did my best.’ My deepest sorrow is that he’s not here to do it himself.”

Contemporary musicians such as Paul Weller, Travis, Beth Orton, David Gray and REM are falling over themselves to acknowledge Nick Drake’s influence.

Last month, his first single, Magic, was released and Brad Pitt narrated an hour-long radio documentary of his life, Lost Boy – In Search of Nick Drake. There has been tremendous excitement over the discovery of possibly his last song, Tow the Line, which was found at the end of a reel.

“I am sad,” says his sister, “that the whole Nick thing started after my mother died. She would so loved to have known about it.”

Gabrielle was born in 1944 in Lahore, where her father, an engineer, was building a sawmill. Nick arrived four years later. The family returned to England when Gabrielle was eight. On board the ship home, she loved taking the stage in children’s concerts.

“I was a dreadful exhibitionist,” she says. “My brother was far shyer.”

Their comfortable upbringing in Tanworth-in-Arden seems to have been without a tremor of angst or disharmony. Gabrielle went to Wycombe Abbey School for Girls; Nick to Marlborough College, where he was head boy and a champion sprinter.

She trained at Rada; he dropped out of Cambridge to pursue a musical career under the producer Joe Boyd. For a while, they shared a flat in Hampstead where he showed her his first album, Five Leaves Left.

She says she admired her brother for never trying to disguise his middle-class origins by sounding American or cockney in his songs. “He was what he was and that stood him in good stead with time.

“He was an unfashionable figure; we were both unfashionable figures. To be at Rada and speak with my sort of accent was almost synonymous with lack of talent. I understood his battle from my side.”

But Nick hated the self-exposure of touring and performing live as much as she thrived on it, and gradually he retreated into himself at the lack of public recognition.

“He was a funny combination of not wanting to compromise his work and go commercial, yet wanting his work to be well known. I can’t help but be pleased that it now is.”

She doesn’t subscribe to the theory that his songs in any way prefigured his early death.

“I don’t think The Fruit Tree was necessarily written about himself. After all, that is what happens to a lot of young poets: they don’t flourish till after their death.”

And she believes that although he may have committed suicide, it was not premeditated.

“He was in a pretty low state and I feel that he just threw a whole lot of pills into his mouth and thought: `Either I die or I come out of this and things will be different.’ I think he was always wanting new starts.”

With more sensitivity than most siblings would show, Gabrielle doesn’t lay claim to a special understanding of her brother or his work.

“I try not to talk too much about his music. It would be presumptuous of me and he can’t stand up and defend what I say. I am led by journalists at times to be more definite than I actually feel.”

In musical and business matters, she is happy to take the advice of Nick’s posthumous “manager”.

Besides, she has a career of her own to promote and, as Mrs de Wet, a medieval priory in Shropshire to keep up. Twenty years ago, she and her husband, the painter Louis de Wet, moved into what he described as “the most beautiful building site in the world”.

They have been labouring on it ever since. “It is a mad project and will probably never be finished. It is my husband’s vision to restore it and take it back to something of its medieval beauty – but it is also representative of the way he sees art and his work: making a new link in an old chain.” He is currently building a medieval library.

His wife, meanwhile, is safeguarding against lean times by compiling her own one-woman show about the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. She tried it out at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford and it went down “rather well”, so she will take it touring after her stint as Lady B.

“There are hardly any parts written for women of my age. Work was patchy, so I decided to construct something for myself,” she says, with Bracknellian determination. “Work breeds work.”

This “Telegraph” interview can also be accessed online here.

by Pete Stampede and David K. Smith

Born 30 March 1944 in Lahore, Pakistan, Gabrielle Drake had the distinction of being tested to play Emma Peel and Tara King. She was best known for The Brothers, a 70s BBC evening soap, and was a purple-wigged regular on Gerry Anderson’s UFO(1970). More recently she was a “consultant” on Medics (1995). Her guest turns on TV include The Saint, “The Best Laid Schemes” (1968), The Champions, “Full Circle” (1969) and The Professionals, “Close Quarters” (1978).

Although she usually had minor film parts, particularly sex dramas such as Derek Ford’s Suburban Wives (1971) and Commuter Husbands (1973), she also frequently and successfully played lead roles in the theatre, including Alan Ayckbourn’s How The Other Half Loves and most recently Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. Whatever possessed her to make a full-frontal appearance as “Randi from Denmark” in Au Pair Girls (1972, with Norman Chappell, Ferdy Mayne and John Le Mesurier), an atrocious soft-core romp, goodness knows! The last credit on record for her is in the “documentary” A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake (2000) as herself, being Nick Drake‘s sister

Gary Bond obituary in “The Independent” in 1995

Gary Bond was born in 1940 in Alton, Hampshire. He spent most of his career on the stage but has one major classic film to his credit the terrific Australian “Wake in Fright” released in 1971. His other films include “Zulu” and “Anne of a Thousand Days”. Gary Bond died in 1995 at the age of 55.

His “Independent” obituary:Gary Bond was one of the most enduringly handsome actors of his generation. He was also a resourceful and sensitive performer of wide range and polished technique. But perhaps in the dramatic era of the kitchen sink and, in John Osborne’s cutting phrase, the “white tile” university, such dazzling good looks were no longer quite at such a premium.

Bond also possessed a strong, warm and pleasing tenor voice; and he earned his greatest fame in musical theatre, notably in the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. This phase of his career achieved its peak in the revival last year of Aspects of Love at the Piccadilly Theatre, and subsequently on tour. In this second production Bond finely recreated the role of the philandering hero, George Dillingham, causing mild shock to his admirers who, accustomed to Bond’s perennial youthfulness, found it somewhat surprising to see him interpreting the role of a loveable roue in his sixties.

Bond was born in Hampshire in 1940, the son of a soldier, and educated at Churcher’s College, Petersfield. His father, who wanted a steady career for him, died when Bond was 16, leaving him free to pursue his ambition to become an actor.

He trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at the age of 23 got his first job in that forcing-house of young talent, the Connaught Theatre, Worthing. The play was Not in the Book and was followed by Doctor in the House, in which Bond took the role of the light-hearted Dr Simon Sparrow. A year later he appeared at the Royal Court Theatre, London, as Pip in Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything, one of the theatrical landmarks of the Sixties.

Bond was a natural charmer and the combination of his good looks and debonair manner made him ideal casting in light comedy and in romantic leading roles. These included John Shand in J.M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows (1967), Giles Cadwallader in The Man Most Likely To . . . (1968) and a trio of sharply contrasting roles in Noel Coward’s We Were Dancing, Red Peppers and Family Album at the Hampstead Theatre in 1970, and at the Fortune Theatre, London, in the following year.

Invited to join the Prospect Theatre Company in 1968, Bond had a welcome opportunity to try his hand at classical roles and he appeared as Sebastian in Twelfth Night and as a fiery Sergius in Shaw’s Arms and the Man. In 1970, at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, he was a lively Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, and a passionate and youthful Byron in The Lord Byron Show.

Bond’s first success as a singer and dancer came in the musical revue On the Level, put on at the Saville Theatre, London, by the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. But it was not until 1972 that he enjoyed a huge and sudden hit in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This highly original early musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber opened to great acclaim on the Edinburgh Fringe, was then brought to the Roundhouse in Camden Town and finally moved into the West End to enjoy a long run at the Albery Theatre. In the role of the young biblical hero abandoned by his brothers in the wilderness, Bond achieved a new popularity, establishing himself as a most versatile and personable musical performer.

His association with Rice and Lloyd Webber was to continue with the musical Evita when in 1978 he took over, from the pop star David Essex, the role of the revolutionary hero Che Guevara, who acts both as character and narrator. Bond’s handling of this pivotal part was greatly admired by the show’s American director, Hal Prince. After the exhausting rigours of a long-running West End musical, Bond gave a series of concert performances with Marti Webb of Lloyd Webber’s songs.

But Bond had not abandoned his first love of straight theatre, and in State of Affairs (1983), a study of marital turmoil which transferred from the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, to the Duchess Theatre, he found an unexpected edge of anger and frustration. In 1982 he played Otto in Noel Coward’s Design for Living opposite Maria Aitken at the Globe Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. At the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1988 he appeared opposite Keith Michel in The Baccarat Scandal, which transferred to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. And in 1992 he appeared as the Count in a revival of Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal at the Garrick Theatre.

For one so obviously photogenic it was curious that Bond did not have a more substantial career in films and television. In his first television role in 1963 he made a poignant young suitor to Natalia in Granada’s production of War and Peace and in 1964 he won an important role in the film Zulu playing opposite Michael Caine and Stanley Baker. For BBC Television he was Pip in Great Expectations and the young suitor in Anouilh’s Colombe; and in 1968 for Thames Television he took the role of a young Indian army colonel in the military adventure series Frontier. But it was in the theatre that he chose to make his real mark.

Alan Bond had a twinkling humour and a sometimes wicked sense of fun. His easy warmth of manner made him a popular figure among his friends and fellow actors. For 16 years he shared his home with the distinguished American artist and illustrator E.J. Taylor, who sustained him through a long and painful illness.

Derek Granger

Gary James Bond, actor, singer: born Liss, Hampshire 7 February 1940; died Ealing, London 12 October 1995.

To view “The Independent” Obituary on Gary Bond, please click here.

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