Wilfrid Lawson was a reknowned British character actor. He was born in 1900 in Bradford in Yorkshire. His film debut came in 1931 in “East Lynne on the Western Front”. In 1936 he made a film in Hollywood “Ladies in Love” with Loretta Young, Simone Simon and Tyrone Power. His film highlights include “Pgymalion”, “Jeannie”, “The Prisioner” and “The Wrong Box”. He died in 1966 in London.
IMDB Entry:
A scene stealing actor of lugubrious countenance, Wilfred Lawson (born Wilfred Worsnop) made his debut on the stage in “Trilby” at the Pier Pavilion in Brighton at the age of 16. He served as a pilot in the RAF during the final months of World War I, before resuming his theatrical career, becoming a well-established character player by the end of the decade. Wilfred went on to perform at the West End in “Sweeney Todd” in 1928, followed by “Pygmalion” and “Major Barbara” at the Prince’s Theatre in Bristol. He appeared infrequently in films from 1931, but was not considered for leading roles until starring in the Edgar Wallace crime caper The Terror (1938).That same year, he recreated his part of Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion (1938) for Gabriel Pascal‘s popular film version, and thus attracted the attention of Hollywood.
After a brief sojourn in America, Wilfred returned to Britain and was cast in the titular role of a Technicolor biopic, The Great Mr. Handel (1942). After that, he reverted to form playing the eccentric or maniacal character parts, in which he truly excelled. Unfortunately, he was plagued for most of his remaining life by severe bouts of alcoholism, which affected his work. In spite of this, and though he became known as ‘the king of the dramatic pause’, he rarely forgot his lines and turned in several memorable performances towards the end of his career. He was indeed reputed to have had the unique ability to function reasonably well, while under the influence. After a decade long absence, Wilfred made a triumphant return to the stage, first in August Strindberg‘s “The Father”, and then in Joseph Losey‘s 1954 production of “The Wooden Dish”.
On screen, he is fondly remembered as the unhinged lighthouse keeper Rolfe Kristan inTower of Terror (1941); as the bearded, slouch-hatted Black George Seagrim in Tom Jones (1963), and as the hilariously pixillated, decrepit butler Peacock in The Wrong Box(1966). By the time he appeared as Peacock, Wilfred’s alcoholism had reached such alarming proportions that he could no longer obtain insurance. Fortunately, this did not deter producer/director Bryan Forbes from keeping him in the cast. Alas, Wilfrid died within five months of the film being released of a heart attack.
Greg Wise was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1966. His television debut was in 1992 with “A Masculine Ending”. In 1995 he made his film debit with “Feast of July”. His film highlights include “Sense and Sensibility” and “The Judas Kiss”. He is married to actress Emma Thompson.
Interview with “The Telegraph”:
Greg Wise doesn’t like being interviewed. Nothing personal, you understand, he just doesn’t like it. “To be honest, I don’t think I’d be sat here talking to you if it wasn’t for this piece of work,” he says, sipping water in a Soho restaurant.
He’s talking about A Place of Execution, a three-part thriller on ITV1 starting tonight. It’s good, watchable television of a kind that seems rarer nowadays; but more of that later. The other thing Wise (42 and greying slightly at the temples) doesn’t like doing is washing.
“We’ve just got back from our little cottage in Scotland and I didn’t wash my hair for seven weeks. You don’t need to, it’s self-cleaning. We all wash far too much. “I’m best when I’m feral, when I don’t wash or shave or change my trousers for a couple of weeks.”
All very un-Jane Austen. For those not terminally obsessed with the doings of actors and actresses, Wise is Mr Emma Thompson, her partner of 13 years.
He’s also a “breeches boy”, one of that stable of English actors who can be trusted to talk posh and look good in early 19th-century riding gear while standing in a muddy field with raindrops hanging from his nose delivering lines like “Miss Cardew, I must protest the depth and honesty of my affections.”
The two met on the set of Sense and Sensibility when Thompson’s once-glittering marriage to Kenneth Branagh had just hit the rocks. Em played sensible Elinor Dashwood, and Greg, seven years her junior, played caddish Willoughby.
Em was so taken with Greg and his chiselled looks that she made an entry in her diary about him “ruffling all the female feathers” on set. Up they shacked. Since then, Wise has dropped in and out of the public eye, enjoying long periods away from the limelight but maintaining a presence on television and, occasionally, film. A Place of Execution plays to his strengths.
He’s posh again, and darkly handsome, as Philip Hawkin, a squire in early 1960s rural Yorkshire accused of murdering his young stepdaughter. “He’s a very dark, upsetting guy,” says Wise of his character. And he’s stiff – emotionally detached.
The breeches boys do that rather well. The action moves between the Sixties and the present. Juliet Stevenson is a TV journalist drawn to the mystery of the girl’s disappearance who soon finds obstacles being put in her way. It is a good story, well told and holds the viewer. The drama was filmed in Northumberland, familiar to Wise from youth. The son of architects, he grew up in Newcastle before moving to York.
He trained as an architect in Edinburgh before switching to drama school in Glasgow. It took him just three years to reach the verge of the big time. His opportunity to break into Hollywood arrived in 1995 when Sense and Sensibility made him a potential rival to the likes of Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. But, says Wise, he blew it by telling the head of Sony Pictures that he had no desire to work in America.
The problem seemed to be an over-supply of contentment. “I have no ambition at all, except to be stretched occasionally – and interested,” he muses. “There’s no script, I just make it up as I go along. I never had any plans.”
Maybe, like all the breeches boys, he suffers from a lack of acting range, but it doesn’t seem to worry him unduly. You can go a long way on posh and stiff or posh and menacing. The star thing – and Oscar-winning Em being better at it – seems to interest him hardly at all.
“Seems” being the operative word, because you never quite know with actors. He is good at giving roughly the same interview time after time, never surrendering too many new facts while doing the job of promoting the project in hand.
“Don’t like going out. The last thing I want to do is get togged up, go out and be polite.” So he stays in with Em and Gaia, the couple’s young daughter, conceived through IVF. They wanted more children but had to admit defeat after we what he describes as an emotionally gruelling experience. “We are terribly fortunate that we spend a lot of time together, but that might be death to some couples.”
They live for three months a year up in Scotland, drinking tap water drawn from a nearby stream and ignoring the world. He fancies himself as a handyman and says he might have ended up in sustainable housing in the Third World if acting had not seduced him.
“There’s endless scope for me to hurt myself with power tools,” he says of the acres in Scotland. “I was stripping tin off a sheep shed roof before we came home.” Maybe he should concentrate on a power shower.
The above interview can also be accessed online at “The Telegraph” here.
Eileen Atkins was born in London 1934. Her stage debut came in 1953 at the Regents Park Open Theatre. She has had a profilic career on stage and television and more recently on film. She and Jean March were the creators of the hughly popularTV series “Upstairs, Downstairs”. She won critical acclaim in the West End and on Broadway in 1966 in “The Killing of Sister George” with Beryl Reid. Susannah York played her part on film. Ms Atkins film highlights include “The Dresser” in 1983, “Gosford Park” in 2001 and “Cold Mountain” in 2003.
TCM Overview:
Veteran British star of both stage and screen, Eileen Atkins rose from her working-class roots to become one of the most accomplished and decorated actresses to cross the Atlantic. Though not as well known across the pond as contemporaries Judi Dench or Helen Mirren, Atkins nonetheless thrived on the stage, earning numerous awards and nominations, especially for her several transformative performances as novelist Virginia Woolf. While acting remained her bread and butter, Atkins occasionally used her talents as a writer to create unforgettable television like the popular “Upstairs, Downstairs” (ITV, 1971-75), the acclaimed stage play “Vita & Virginia” (1994) and the well-regarded screenplay for “Mrs. Dalloway” (1997). All throughout her career, she remained in an unparalleled class, building a sterling resume that eventually earned her a place in the Theater Hall of Fame in 1998. While her feature career remained relatively muted compared to her stage work â¿¿ a few highlights like “Gosford Park” (2001) and “Cold Mountain” (2003) stood out â¿¿ Atkins nonetheless established herself as an actress of unending verve and talent.
“Richard Attenborough’s survival in the perilous world of the British cinema has been an admirable achievement. He has done it too on a modest talent – no glamourous film star he, no rugged good looks, no aura, no dash, just a conscientous lightweight actor, best in character roles and in them best in the coward parts in which he was once type-cast. He has simply battled on, head unbowed after some of the most bloody films ever made”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972).
Richard Attenborough has had a long and impressive career as an actor and then as a gifted director. He was born in 1923 in Cambridge and is the older brother of the wildlife broadcaster David Attenborough. Richard made his film debut in 1942 in “In Which We Serve”. His film career highlights include “Brighton Rock” where he was terrific as Pinkie the teenage gangster, “The Scamp”, “The ManUpstaits”, “The Angry Silence”, “The League of Gentlemen” and “The Great Escape”. He went to Hollywood to make “The Flight of the Phoenix” and “The Sand Pebbles”. He began his directing career with”OH, What A Lovely War” and went on to direct “Gandhi” in 1983, “A Chorus Line” and “Chaplin”. Sheila Sim was born in Liverpool in 1922. Her brother is the actor Gerard Sim. Among her film credits are the 1944 Powell & Pressburger classic “A Canterbury Tale” and “West of Zanzibar”. She has over the years been heavily involved in charity work. He died in 2014 aged 90.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Richard Attenborough, who has died aged 90, had three distinct personas for those who followed his career in the entertainment world: the baby-faced, pint-sized actor, at turns, cocky and cowardly, later rotund in mostly creepy character roles; the film director of epics such as Gandhi, and Chaplin; and Lord “Dickie”, ubiquitous, ebullient and lachrymose, presiding over a host of charitable organisations. However, each image merges into one complete picture of a cheerful humanitarian and imperishable idealist who, for over half a century, played an integral part in British cultural life.
In the history of cinema, the image of the actor will probably be the most enduring, though physically Attenborough lacked the requirements of a romantic leading man (ironically, his younger brother, David, the wildlife expert, had the film-star looks). In fact, Attenborough was in front of the camera for over a quarter of a century before his directorial debut, at the age of 46, with Oh! What a Lovely War in 1969.
His first screen role was as a callow stoker who deserts his post in Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942), told in flashback by survivors while they cling to a life raft after their ship has been sunk off Crete in May 1941. Small as the part was, the 19-year-old Attenborough made an impression as a cockney coward for Coward. A cockney he wasn’t, though he played mainly working-class characters throughout his career.
Attenborough’s father, Frederick, was a Cambridge don, who later became principal of University College Leicester. Richard, born in Cambridge, was exposed to culture early. His parents and grandparents were all musical, and one of his first memories was hearing The Messiah conducted by Malcolm Sargent in the De Montfort Hall in Leicester.
Above all, Richard and his two younger brothers, David and John, were brought up with a sense of social responsibility. Their mother, Mary, was chair of a committee to care for evacuee Basque children during the Spanish civil war, and she marched in protest against the bombing of Guernica. On the outbreak of the second world war, the Attenboroughs took two Jewish girls into their home, where they stayed for eight years. “That particular decision, not merely paying lip service but taking positive, responsible action to help other human beings, made a profound impression on me. It has, I suppose, affected my life and my attitudes ever since,” Attenborough wrote.
This is clear from most of his choices of subjects as a producer and director. He inherited his energy and non-stop activity from his mother, who died in a car accident, apparently suffering a heart attack as she was returning alone from a committee meeting.
Attenborough was educated in Leicester, at Wyggeston grammar school, and showed his acting skills early on, gaining a scholarship to Rada in 1940. His first part in the West End was Ralph Berger, the younger son of a Bronx Jewish family in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing. The Times said he played it “with sound understanding”, while the Daily Sketch thought he “showed an intensity of feeling and restraint for a youngster who has a big future”.
A few months before joining the RAF in June 1943, Attenborough achieved his greatest stage success in Brighton Rock, adapted from the Graham Greene novel by Frank Harvey. Attenborough as Pinkie Brown, the vicious young Catholic gangster, according to the New Statesman, “deserves to have won fame in a single night, for his study in abnormal psychology is thoughtful, delicate and powerful.” This forceful performance was recreated in the 1947 Boulting Brothers film version, and remains one of Attenborough’s most memorable creations.
In 1945, while in the RAF Film Unit, he married Sheila Sim, whom he had met at Rada. The year before, they had both been cast (though her role was cut out in the editing) in the wartime propaganda film Journey Together, directed by John Boulting, which was meant to demonstrate the special relationship between America and Britain. The US was represented by Edward G Robinson, who waived his fee for playing a flying instructor, while Attenborough was a would-be pilot who has to be content with being a navigator, reflecting his own frustration at never having become a pilot during the war.
After demob, Attenborough continued in uniform on screen in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (in one shot as an airman) and Peter Ustinov’s School for Secrets (both 1946). He was to play several soldiers and sailors into the 1970s. In The Man Within (1947), based on Greene’s first novel, one of Attenborough’s rare costume dramas, he was an adolescent member of a gang of smugglers, who betrays his leader (Michael Redgrave). He would continue to play teenagers into his late 20s.
Although he had not changed much physically since Pinkie on stage in Brighton Rock four years previously, he brought more maturity to his film performance. However, it was pushing it a bit to accept the 25-year-old Attenborough in the title role of The Guinea Pig (1948), a 15-year-old working-class scholarship boy at a posh public school, particularly as his wife Sheila played the house mistress.
This was followed by another well-meaning social reform melodrama, Boys in Brown (1949), in which “bad ‘uns” Attenborough and Dirk Bogarde were Borstal boys. In the same year, Attenborough took another neurotic role on stage, a mentally disturbed Jewish GI in Arthur Laurents’s Home of the Brave. Then, eight months after the birth of Michael, their first child, Richard and Sheila appeared together in Roger MacDougall’s farce To Dorothy a Son, which ran in the West End for over a year from November 1950.
Meanwhile, Attenborough reprised his cowardly sailor role of In Which We Serve in the submarine drama, Morning Departure (1950) as Stoker Snipe, who cracks under pressure. If John Mills represented the stiff-upper lip school, then Attenborough often had a quivering lower lip. “Pull yourself together, Stokes,” says Commander Mills, slapping the hysterical Snipe. “Thank you, sir. I needed that.” It worked, because Attenborough seldom let the side down again when below decks in Gift Horse (1952) and The Ship That Died of Shame (1955).
In 1952, Sheila and Richard (as Detective Sergeant Trotter) led the first cast of a play which was to became a theatrical phenomenon. They stayed two years at the Ambassadors with The Mousetrap, of which its author Agatha Christie prophesied that “we should get a nice little run out of it”. The Attenboroughs were still around to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the whodunnit’s run.
In the mid-1950s, Attenborough reunited with the Boulting brothers in a series of satirical comedies attacking some of Britain’s institutions. Attenborough, now having put on more weight, was a louche figure in all of them. In Private’s Progress (1956), on the army, he was a scrounger; in Brothers in Law (1957), on the legal profession, a smarmy barrister; and in I’m All Right Jack (1959), on management and unions, he was Sydney de Vere Cox, a shady munitions manufacturer.
In 1960, Attenborough formed Beaver Films with the actor and director Bryan Forbes, and an independent distribution company, Allied Film Makers, with Forbes, Guy Green, Michael Relph, Basil Dearden and Jack Hawkins. His first film as producer was The Angry Silence, an anti-trades union tract, in which Attenborough was a blackleg and yet a hero. Better was the delightfully piquant heist comedy The League of Gentlemen (1960) with a gallery of British ex-army types, including Attenborough in his spiv persona. Also for his own production company was Forbes’s Seance On a Wet Afternoon (1964), in which Attenborough was medium Kim Stanley’s weak husband.
The 1960s saw him break into Hollywood, with The Great Escape (1963), third-billed, after Steve McQueen and James Garner, as Squadron Leader “Big X” Bartlett, the master escape planner who is later executed. Further US movies were The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) in which he was an inept navigator whose alcoholism has led to a plane, piloted by James Stewart, to crash in the Sahara desert; in The Sand Pebbles (1966), supporting McQueen again, Attenborough was encouraged to go over the top as a crewman hopelessly in love with a Chinese girl bound for prostitution, and as circus man Albert Blossom in Dr Dolittle (1967).
These roles were taken on to help finance his long-cherished project, a film on the life of Gandhi. It was the only film he thought he would direct, but when offered Oh! What a Lovely War, he accepted the challenge gladly.
Although the film, with a dazzling all-star cast of British actors, rather softened Joan Littlewood’s scabrous stage satire on the first world war, its stylisation and clever seaside-postcard use of the Brighton pavilion and old pier made it Attenborough’s most audacious and artistically successful project. The closing scene, a helicopter shot of thousands of white crosses in a military cemetery, as a chorus sings They’ll Never Believe Me, is genuinely moving.
Attenborough appeared in four features in 1970, mostly antipathetic roles, notably as the serial killer John Christie in 10 Rillington Place. The sight of a chubby, bald Attenborough wearing thick glasses rubbing a corpse and moaning with orgasmic delight is particularly disturbing. Sir Richard – he was knighted in 1976 – with a broad Scots accent, played a British general sent to take over a small kingdom in Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players (1977). He had met the great Bengali film director in India during his long quest to set up Gandhi. “I count working for Ray as one of the milestones of my career.”
At the same time, Attenborough followed his directorial debut with two technically competent but illustrated schoolbook epics, Young Winston (1972) and A Bridge Too Far (1977), the latter about the allied defeat at Arnhem. Finally, in a similar mode, after 20 years, with Goldcrest having put up two-thirds of the £20m budget, Attenborough was able to make Gandhi (1982), which had a fine performance by Ben Kingsley in the title role. The film is dedicated to Lord Mountbatten, Pandit Nehru and an unknown Indian called Motilal Kothari, who suggested the subject to Attenborough in the first place in 1962.
Nehru’s advice to Attenborough was that it would be wrong to deify Gandhi: “He was too great a man for that.” The film won eight Oscars – best picture, best actor, best director, best original screenplay, best cinematography, best art direction, best editing, best costume design – the biggest haul ever for a British movie. In his acceptance speech, Attenborough said: “Gandhi believed if we could but agree, simplistic though it be, that if we do not resort to violence then the route to solving problems would be much different than the one we take.”
In the 1980s, he was an active and inspirational chairman of Channel 4 and the British Film Institute, as well as taking on a multitude of other duties with professional bodies and charities for film, theatre, drama and education.
With A Chorus Line (1985), Attenborough once again took on material that seemed intractably theatrical. But, as much as he tried to make the Broadway musical “cinematic”, such as using flashbacks, it defeated him, replacing cynicism with mawkishness.
He was more at home with another portentous biopic, Cry Freedom (1987), through which he was able to express his anger with apartheid in South Africa. The first half, dealing with the friendship between liberal white journalist Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (Denzel Washington), up to the murder of Biko while in police custody, is impressive, but the second half, following Woods’s escape from South Africa, descends into conventional thriller territory.
When Attenborough’s protracted attempts to make a film about Thomas Paine, the 18th century humanitarian and republican, fell through, he turned to another of his idols in Chaplin (1992), a sprawling, vacuous homage to the great comic. He continued on the biographical path, covering CS Lewis in Shadowlands (1993), the young Ernest Hemingway in In Love and War (1996) and the North American conservationist Archie Belaney in Grey Owl (1999), demonstrating that Attenborough’s heart was definitely in the right place as was his camera, most of the time.
He once told the film critic David Robinson that he derived the most pride from a back-handed compliment paid by an American critic. As Attenborough explained: “He said something like, ‘the problem with Attenborough’s work is that he is more interested in the content than the execution.’ Almost without exception that is true. I am glad to say I am sorry if I’m not more adventurous cinematically. But my concern is always, did the film say what I wanted to express or advocate?”
After a gap of 13 years, he returned to the screen as an actor in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), as the mad genius who runs the theme park featuring genetically recreated dinosaurs, a role which he was to repeat in the sequel The Lost World (1997). This introduced him to a new generation of filmgoers, as did his twinkly-eyed Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (1994), a pointless remake of the 1947 movie. In fact, it was not difficult to see something of Santa Claus in Attenborough, who disarmingly admits that the character is “not far from my own in terms of bonhomie”.
In his mid-80s, Attenborough was still active in film production. The last one he directed was Closing the Ring, released in December 2007. It is a love story, set in South Carolina and northern Ireland. A dying gunner, who was in a crash involving a US B-17 plane in 1943, gives a ring to a local to return to his American girlfriend. Fifty years on, a man finds the ring and tracks down the girlfriend and the history of this ring.
Attenborough was devastated by a triple tragedy that occurred on 26 December 2004 when his eldest daughter Jane, her daughter Lucy, and Jane’s mother-in-law, Jane Holland, all perished in the Asian tsunami disaster.
In 2008 he suffered a fall at his home in Richmond, south-west London and was rushed to hospital where he went into a coma, but recovered within a few days. Three years later, David said that his brother was confined to a wheelchair, and that it was unlikely he would be making any more films. In early 2012, he joined Sheila in a home for the care of elderly actors in London that they had both supported for many years. Attenborough was awarded a life peerage in 1993. He is survived by Sheila, his son Michael and daughter Charlotte.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
“MailOnline” article on Richard Attenborough & Sheila Sim can be accessed here.
William Tarmey is best known as the beloved Jack Duckworth on the long running British soap “Coronation Street”. He bowed out of the show in November 2010. After Bill Roach as Ken Barlow, Tarmey was the longest running male character in the series. He was born in 1941 in Manchester. He began his career as a singer and then became an extra on “Coronation Street”. Jack made his debut as Vera’s long suffering husband Jack in 1979 at the wedding of Gail to Brian Tilsey. He died in 2012.
“Guardian” obituary:
Bill Tarmey, who has died aged 71, made his name as Jack Duckworth, the endearingly lazy husband of the nagging motormouth Vera Duckworth, played by Liz Dawn, in Granada television’s Coronation Street. The former asphalt spreader began with the long-running soap as an extra in the mid-1970s, and came into his own as Duckworth in 1979. This was five years after Dawn joined the cast, and it soon helped to create a character duo that was stronger than the sum of its parts.
Vera and Jack met at Gail and Brian Tilsley’s wedding. Jack later became a cellar man at the Rovers Return, whose other stalwarts at the time included Hilda Ogden and Bet Lynch, played by Jean Alexander and Julie Goodyear. The health problems of his son, Carl, led to Tarmey’s departure from the series in November 2010, in a touching and memorable finale. Dawn started to become seriously ill with emphysema in the 1990s. When she found it difficult to get out of a chair, Tarmey would modify the script so that he walked over to her instead of vice-versa. Tarmey himself had struggled with health problems throughout his time on the programme. He had a coronary in 1976, a stroke in 1977, a bypass operation in 1986, and in 2002 a second heart attack, after which a pacemaker was fitted. He also developed sleep apnoea, disrupting his breathing while asleep.
He and his screen wife had followed similar career paths. Both began by singing in pubs, but whereas Dawn gave up smoking after a 30-a-day habit lasting 55 years, Tarmey persisted. He once said that he could make it easier for himself if he gave up smoking: “I could sit in a rocking chair. But that wouldn’t be me. That would kill me sooner than the old ticker. If I die tomorrow, they’ll have to prise the smile off my face because I’ve had such a good life.” Even in the 1990s, Tarmey carried on singing in his local pub in Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester. He maintained that after the doctors had “regulated” his problems, no one need worry, though regretted the effect on his wife when he went to bed in a breathing contraption, “looking and sounding like an alien”. Another thing that he and his screen wife had in common was an unapologetic belief that they were not really actors. “I’m just an ordinary guy who got really lucky,” he maintained. “I have two terrific children and six wonderful grandchildren.” In 2006 his sudden announcement that he was thinking of retiring prompted many protest letters from fans. When he relented, Granada TV announced that both he and Dawn had signed new contracts.
The sometimes stoically grizzled and bemused-looking Tarmey was born William Piddington in Manchester. His father, an army ambulance driver during the second world war, was killed in 1944 at the Battle of Arnhem. Shortly afterwards, Bill’s mother married their next door neighbour, Bob Cleworth. This caused Bill, who adored his stepfather, to change his name by deed poll to Cleworth-Piddington in 1992. His stage name of Bill Tarmey came from appearing at a club in Stockport where the manager insisted that Bill Piddington was too long to go on a poster. He had wanted to give him the surname of the singer Mel Tormé, but misspelled it as Tarmey. He met his future wife, Alma, when both were 14 and attending the same school in Manchester. They lost touch until 1963, when she began coming to the church that Tarmey’s Lads Brigade was attached to, and were married just before his 21st birthday.
Tarmey did not succeed at school. He left at 15 and then went to night school and a building college to get his City and Guilds qualification in construction, and was apprenticed to a building firm, for which he worked as an asphalter. But he had not been a complete stranger to the performing arts. From the age of four, his grandmother taught him to harmonise, and by the time he was nine he was appearing with a singing group called the Songsters, who performed for local charities. In the 1950s he was in a skiffle band, playing in pubs while also working in his in-laws’ greengrocery.
While he was still in the building trade, his wife persuaded him to sing in pubs and clubs. He accepted the challenge, though did not warm to the occasions when he found himself upstaged by the bingo caller. Always devoted to Alma, he sang the song The Wind Beneath My Wings when he featured on the TV show This Is Your Life in 1992. Colleagues from the cast of Coronation Street in the studio were reduced to tears. He started in television when a friend encouraged him to seek work as an extra, getting small speaking parts in series such as Crown Court, Strangers, The Ghosts of Motley Hall and The Glamour Girls. In a BBC Play for Today about a black pudding festival, Thicker than Water (1980), he played a slaughterer, and in the series Rising Star he sang with his own group, Take Ten. An opportunity to expand his range came in King Lear with Laurence Olivier, in a production commissioned from Granada for Channel 4 in 1983. His agent had been asked whether Tarmey rode a horse. Of course he did, the agent replied. In fact, Tarmey’s only relevant experience had been riding a donkey on Blackpool beach when he was four. Tarmey practised for 10 days before the first rehearsal with Olivier. The horse reared and bolted, and the last thing Tarmey remembered of the scene was Olivier saying fatalistically: “Bye, Bill.”
In Coronation Street, he had a brief speaking part as Jack Rowe in 1978, and the following year reappeared, now as Jack Duckworth. The idle Stan Ogden was written out of the script, but Tarmey soon established himself as a substitute national anti-hero and helped stabilise the show. Bill Roache, who has played Ken Barlow since it started, said: “He was the downtrodden loveable rogue who never got anything right but was loved by everyone. This was down to Bill’s skills as an actor. He had amazing comic timing and was a genuinely warm and wonderful human being.” In 1989, the year of his appearance in the Royal Variety Performance with Dawn, the two of them released a single of I’ll Be With You Soon. In 1993 he made another single, One Voice, for charity, with the St Winifred’s School Choir, from Stockport. He produced an autobiography, Jack Duckworth and Me: My Life on the Street and Other Adventures, in 2010.
Tarmey is survived by Alma, Carl and his daughter, Sara.
• Bill Tarmey (William Cleworth-Piddington), actor, born 4 April 1941; died 9 November 2012
Pete Murray the popular broadcaster had a career in British films before his radio years. He was born in London in 1925. He was an extra in the Powell & Pressburger classic “THe Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” in 1943. His films include “Caravan”, “Captain Boycott”, “Hungary Hill” and “My Brother Jonathan”. He joined Radio Luxembourg in 1949 and thus began a broadcasting career that lasted over fifty years. His “Wikipedia” entry here.
Lana Morris was born in 1930 in Ruislip in Middlesex. Her best known role was as Helene wife of Kenneth More in the BBC adaptation of “The Forsyte Saga” in 1967. She had made her film debut in “Trottie True” in 1949. Her other films include “Man of the Moment”. She died in 1998.
Her obituary in “The Independent” by Tom Vallance:
A PERKY, bright-eyed brunette, Lana Morris brought a refreshing liveliness and sense of humour to British films in the Fifties.
k starlets that included Barbara Murray, Rona Anderson and Honor Blackman, she was the below-stairs maid snatching moments to read racy novels in Spring in Park Lane, and Norman Wisdom’s girlfriend in Trouble in Store. Her marriage to the radio and television producer Ronnie Waldman was one of the happiest in show business. Later she was a star of television soaps such as The Forsyte Saga and Howard’s Way, and was about to appear in a new stage production at the time of her death.
Born Pamela Matthews in Ruislip, Middlesex, Morris came from a theatrical family. Her great-grandfather was in Irving’s Drury Lane company and her mother was the silent film actress Corinne Burford. At the age of 16 she played her first professional role in the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park and the same year made her screen debut (under her real name) as the wife of boffin David Tomlinson in School for Secrets (1946), but she first received major attention when she was given the part of the flirtatious maid in Spring in Park Lane (1948), the best of the Anna Neagle/Michael Wilding “London” films and an enormous success.
Though Morris was primarily a supporting player, with star roles only in B movies, her presence in such films as Trottie True (1949), The Chiltern Hundreds (1949) and The Woman in Question (1950) always provided extra sparkle, and she was rewarded with the female lead of the shop girl to whom Norman Wisdom sang “Don’t Laugh at Me” in his final starring film Trouble in Store (1953). “She was a sweet girl,” said Wisdom recently. Morris partnered the comic again in one of his best films, Man of the Moment (1955), and had leading roles in such supporting features as Black 13 (1953) and Radio Cab Murder (1964), but by the end of the decade her name had dropped well down the cast list of such films as No Trees in the Street (1958) and Passport to Shame (1959) .
Having starred on radio in The Forces Show, Morris now moved into television, working steadily both as actress and panellist. It was on the set of his television show Kaleidoscope that she met the BBC producer Ronnie Waldman, fondly remembered for his “Puzzle Corner” radio spots in the Forties, and later Head of BBC Light Entertainment. Waldman co-produced the television scripts about a hotel detective, The Inch Man (1951), in which Morris featured. Though he was 16 years her senior, their marriage was a successful one and their son Simon was born in 1957, after which Morris returned to acting – she and Waldman were publicised as a model example of a couple combining two media careers with a happy home life.
On stage, Morris played in Move Over Mrs Markham (1971), and her prolific television work included the role of barmaid at the luxury hotel run by Margaret Lockwood in The Royalty (1957-58) and a part in the distinguished BBC serialisation of The Forsyte Saga (1967). Waldman died in 1978 and Morris moved from their Hertfordshire home to a small London house. A decade later she revealed a new glamorous image as the powerful Vanessa Andenberg in the BBC’s series centred on a South Coast boatyard, Howard’s Way.
Pamela Matthews (Lana Morris), actress: born Ruislip, Middlesex 11 March 1930; married Ronnie Waldman (died 1978; one son); died Slough, Berkshire 27 May 1998.
“The Guardian” obituary can be accessed online here.
Jill Bennett was born in 1931 in Penang in Malaya. She trained in London at RADA and made her stage debut in 1949. Her film debut came in 1951 with “The Long Dark Hall”. She alternated her career between stage and film and television appearances. Her film appearances of note include “The Nanny” with Bette Davis in 1965, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Fr Your Eyes Only”. Jill Bennett died in 1990.
.
The Skull, lobbycard, from left: Peter Cushing, Jill Bennett, 1965. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)The Nanny, poster, US poster art, top: William Dix, bottom l-r: Bette Davis, Jill Bennett on poster art, 1965. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
TCM Overview:
Upper-crust beauty who established herself on the British stage and made her film debut in “Moulin Rouge” (1952). Bennett appeared in several plays written by her then-husband John Osborne, including “A Patriot for Me”, “Watch It Come Down” and “Time Present,” for which she won the London Evening Standard Award and Variety Club of Britain awards.
Wikipedia:
Jill Bennett (24 December 1931 – 4 October 1990) was a British actress, and the fourth wife of playwright John Osborne.
She made forays into television, such as roles in Play for Today (Country, 1981), with Wendy Hiller, and as the colourful Lady Grace Fanner in John Mortimer‘s adaptation of his own novel, Paradise Postponed(1985). In 1984 she co-wrote and starred in the sitcom Poor Little Rich Girls alongside Maria Aitken. Among several roles, Osborne wrote the character of Annie in his play The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) for her. But Bennett’s busy schedule prevented her from playing the role until it was screened on television in 1971.
Bennett was the live-in companion of actor Godfrey Tearle in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She was married to screenwriter Willis Hall and later to John Osborne. Bennett and Osborne divorced, acrimoniously, in 1978. She had no children.
Bennett died by suicide in October 1990, aged 58, having long suffered from depression and the brutalising effects of her marriage to Osborne (according to Osborne’s biographer).[2] She did this by taking an overdose[3] of Quinalbarbitone[4] Her death took place at home, 23, Gloucester Walk, Kensington, London W8, and she left an estate valued at £596,978.[5]
Osborne, who was subject during her life to a restraining order regarding written comments about her, immediately wrote a vituperative chapter about her to be added to the second volume of his autobiography. The chapter, in which he rejoiced at her death, caused great controversy.
In 1992, Bennett’s ashes, along with those of her friend, the actress Rachel Roberts (who also died by suicide, in 1980), were scattered by their friend Lindsay Anderson on the waters of the River Thames in London. Anderson, with several of the two actresses’ professional colleagues and friends, took a boat trip down the Thames, and the ashes were scattered while musician Alan Price sang the song “Is That All There Is?” The event was included in Anderson’s autobiographical BBC documentary Is That All There Is? (1992
Burt Kwouk was born in Manchester in 1930. Hi is most famous for playing Cato the man-servant of Inspector Clouseau in “The Pink Panter” films. He appeared in “Goldfinger” and “You Only Live Twice”. He died in 2016.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Anna May Wong, the first of the few Chinese actors to gain Hollywood stardom, explained why she retired from the screen: “I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain? And so crude a villain – murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How should we be, with a civilisation that is so many times older than that of the west?” Burt Kwouk, who has died aged 85, felt the same way but, as he remarked: “I look at it this way – if I don’t do it, someone else will. So why don’t I go in, get some money and try to elevate it a bit, if I can?” Kwouk, mostly seen in British films and TV, did manage to elevate many of his roles, finally transcending stereotypes such as his celebrated Cato, the foil to Peter Sellers’ bungling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies, to become a national treasure, this status being consecrated in 2002 by his joining the cast of the BBC’s longest running sitcom, Last of the Summer Wine.
Kwouk was born in Warrington, Lancashire, “because my mother happened to be there at the time,” but at 10 months old was taken back to the family home in Shanghai. There he remained until he was 17, when his well-off parents sent him to the US to study politics and economics. However, before he was able to graduate his parents lost all their money in the 1949 revolution, and he returned to Shanghai. A few years later, Kwouk took advantage of his dual nationality and returned to Britain, where he took various menial jobs before his girlfriend “nagged me into acting”. Capitalising on his oriental looks, he started getting roles mostly as villainous or comic Chinese or Japanese characters. One of his first TV appearances was a comic one, in a Hancock’s Half Hour (1957), as a Japanese man presenting two bowls of rice toTony Hancock, who has won a lifetime’s supply in a newspaper competition. A year later, Kwouk was fortunate, so early in his career, to have one of his better film roles in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, set in China but shot in Wales. Kwouk, one of the few genuine Chinese people in the cast, played Li, who helpsIngrid Bergman, as the English Christian missionaryGladys Aylward, escape from the Japanese with 100 children. After a long and arduous journey, he is shot and killed by Japanese soldiers when he tries to distract them from the children.
He was soon cast in a couple of Hammer Horror films, The Terror of the Tongs, as one of evilChristopher Lee’s hatchet men, and Visa to Canton (both 1961). Kwouk was subsequently to play the sidekick of Lee’s Fu Manchu in The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967) and The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969). But in The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu (1980), Sax Rohmer’s master criminal was played by Sellers, with Kwouk as his manservant. It was a best-forgotten, dismal ending to Sellers’ career, but it did give him and Kwouk a last chance to work together.
Their first chance had come 16 years before in A Shot in the Dark (1964), the second ofBlake Edwards’s slapstick comedies featuring Sellers as the extraordinarily maladroit Inspector Clouseau, who seemed unable to cross a room without breaking something. Kwouk played Clouseau’s Chinese “houseboy”, whose sole function was to ambush his master with kung fu attacks at the most unexpected moments from the most unsuspected places. These brilliantly choreographed running and jumping gags, which always resulted in the destruction of Clouseau’s apartment and Cato coming off worst, were the highlights of all the Pink Panther films, which included The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and The Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978).
“Peter and I fell about laughing so much that very often we were unable to complete the day’s work as scheduled, which the producers hated,” Kwouk recalled. “Cato and I are very different. He never stands still. I only move when I have to.” The death of Sellers in 1980 didn’t prevent Edwards from makingThe Trail of the Pink Panther(1982) by piecing together out-takes and clips from the previous films in the series. Kwouk was seen as Cato, bravely being interviewed about his boss, and again in Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), this time as proprietor of the Clouseau museum. Kwouk’s protracted association with the Pink Panther series ended with Son of the Pink Panther (1993), in which, in various disguises, he attacks villains on behalf of Roberto Benigni in the title role.Kwouk also appeared in three James Bond movies:Goldfinger(1964), as a nuclear scientist sent to oversee the bomb that China has given to Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) to blow up Fort Knox, but who is later double-crossed and shot; Casino Royale (1967), as a Chinese gene ral; and You Only Live Twice (1967), as one of Blofeld’s gang of Spectre henchmen. His other roles varied from Chairman Peng of the People’s Republic in Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) to a corrupt Laotian general who’s hoping to save up enough money to buy a Holiday Inn in the US in Air America (1990), to the trustworthy contact in Paris of Jet Li’s Chinese cop in the formulaic martial arts thriller Kiss of the Dragon (2001).
Parallel to his film career, Kwouk made a niche for himself on British television in series including The Saint (1965-68), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1977-78), Doctor Who (1982), and as himself in The Kenny Everett Show (1983-84) and The Harry Hill Show (1997-2000). But the role that revealed his underused talents as a dramatic actor was Major Yamauchi, the strict but honourable commandant of a women’s POW camp in Tenko (1981-84). In contrast was his Mr Entwistle, a philosophical electrical handyman from Hull inLast of the Summer Wine, a part specially written for him by Roy Clarke. “It is a very pleasant and easygoing programme, a lovely gentle comic show,” Kwouk remarked. “There is no one charging around, and even the slapstick is quite gentle – certainly more gentle than I am used to.” Kwouk’s voice was almost as famous as his face. It can be heard in the video game Fire Warrior, narrating the English version of the Japanese TV series The Water Margin (1976-78), the bizarre “interactive” gambling show Banzai! (2001-04) and in many TV commercials. Kwouk was appointed OBE in 2011 for services to drama.
He is survived by Caroline Tebbs, whom he married in 1961, and their son Christopher.
•Burt Kwouk, actor, born 18 July 1930; died 24 May 2016
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
