Brittish Actors
Gladys Henson was an Irish born actress whose career was on the British stage and in character parts in movies. She usually played careworn housewives. Her films include “The Captive Heart” and “The Blue Lamp”. She was especially good in Sidney Furie’s “The Leather Boys” in 1964. She died in 1982 at the age of 85. Her “Wikipedia” page can be viewed here
Patrick Malahide was born in Berkshire, England the son of Irish parents in 1945. He made his television debut in 1976 in “The Flight of the Heron”. His many television appearances including “Middlemarch”, “The Singing Detective”and the title role of “Inspector Alleyn” in the 1993 series. His films include “Comfort and Joy” “and the James Bond thriller “The World Is Not Enough”. His website can be accessed here.
Appraisal:
Patrick Malahide is one of Britain’s most distinguished and versatile actors, known for his ability to embody both fastidious authority figures and deeply complex, often unsettling, characters. Born Patrick Gerald Duggan in 1945, his career has spanned over four decades across stage, film, and television.
Career Overview
The Formative Years (1970s)
After studying experimental psychology at the University of Edinburgh, Malahide pivoted to acting, working extensively in regional repertory theatre. His early television roles in the late 70s—including appearances in The New Avengers and The Sweeney—established him as a reliable presence for high-stakes drama.
The Breakout: “Cheerful Charlie” (1979–1988)
Malahide became a household name playing Detective Sergeant Albert “Cheerful Charlie” Chisholm in the hit series Minder. As the persistent, often exasperated foil to the lead characters, he turned a supporting role into a masterclass of comedic frustration and bureaucratic rigidity.
The Leading Man and Genre Icon (1980s–2000s)
The 1980s saw Malahide transition into heavyweight dramatic roles:
The Singing Detective (1986): In Dennis Potter’s landmark series, he played a triple role (Finney/Binney/Raymond), showcasing a chilling ability to blur the lines between reality and psychological projection. This earned him a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor.
Literary Adaptations: He became a staple of prestige period dramas, notably as the dry, emotionally stunted Rev. Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch (1994) and as Inspector Roderick Alleyn in The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries.
Film Success: He transitioned into Hollywood with ease, appearing in blockbusters like The World Is Not Enough (1999) as a Swiss banker, U.S. Marshals (1998), and Billy Elliot (2000).
Contemporary Presence (2010s–Present)
Malahide found a new generation of fans through major television franchises:
Game of Thrones: As Balon Greyjoy, he brought a cold, hard-bitten gravitas to the Lord of the Iron Islands.
Luther: His recurring role as George Cornelius, an aging but lethal crime boss, highlighted his ability to command the screen with minimal dialogue.
Critical Analysis of His Work
1. The Architecture of Authority
Malahide is the preeminent actor for roles defined by intellectual or moral rigidity. Whether playing a detective, a minister, or a king, he often utilizes a “clipped” delivery and a piercing gaze. Critically, his strength lies in showing the cracks in these facades—his characters are rarely just “in charge”; they are often desperately trying to maintain control over a world (or a psyche) that is falling apart.
2. The Master of the Unsettling
One of Malahide’s most celebrated traits is his ability to play “villains” who aren’t traditional antagonists. In The Singing Detective, his performance is deeply unnerving because he represents the protagonist’s repressed anxieties. He doesn’t rely on shouting or physical intimidation; instead, he uses a calculated stillness and a precise, almost clinical tone that suggests hidden depths of malice or sorrow.
3. Comedic Precision through “High Status”
His comedy, particularly in Minder, is rooted in the conflict between self-importance and reality. Malahide plays Chisholm as a man who believes he is the hero of a serious police procedural, while everyone else around him is in a farce. This “high-status” approach to comedy makes the character’s inevitable failures both hilarious and oddly sympathetic.
4. Physicality and Presence
Despite having what he describes as “rather severe features,” Malahide is a highly transformative actor. In Game of Thrones, his physical posture—rigid, weathered, and unyielding—conveyed the harsh environment of the Iron Islands before he even spoke a word. This economy of movement is a hallmark of his later career, where he commands scenes through sheer atmospheric presence.
Catherine Woodville was born in London in 1938. She featured in many television series in Britain in the 1960’s. In the late 60’s she went to Hollywood and made the terrific Western “Posse” with Kirk Douglas. She has guest starred in several of the U.S. television series. She was at one time married to the actor Patrick Magee of “Avengers” fame and was married for several years to the late actor Edward Albert. She died in 2013.
Her “Times” obituary:
The actress Catherine Woodville was an attractive presence on television and in the cinema. She was in the first episode of The Avengers in 1961 and made a glamorous one-off appearance as the priestess Natira in Star Trek.
She was born in London in 1938 and started acting at the age of 16 in a touring production of T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. Her first important television role was Helena Landless in the 1960 adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and she appeared with Ian McShane, John Hurt and Samantha Eggar as university students in the 1962 film, The Wild and the Willing.
In 1961 she was in the first episode of the secret agent spoof, The Avengers, opposite the bowler-hatted Patrick Macnee, and her character’s death helped to launch the series. She had a small part in a later episode and in 1965 she became Macnee’s second wife, though the marriage lasted barely a year and ended in divorce after four.
She was busy in television through the 1960s. She played Estelle opposite Harold Pinter (one of his occasional acting roles) in a BBC adaptation of Sartre’s In Camera and had guest spots in popular series including Z-Cars, Danger Man, The Saint and No Hiding Place. Her other films included the thriller, The Informers, the political drama The Crooked Road, with Robert Ryan and Stewart Granger, and the frontier adventure, The Brigand of Kandahar.
During her British career she was credited as Catherine Woodville and on moving the US in 1967 she changed her professional name to Kate Woodville. She made an early mark on American television playing Natira, the priestess who rules the people of the asteroid Yonada and falls in love with Dr McCoy, in the 1968 Star Trek episode, For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.
Other American television credits included Mission: Impossible, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Little House on the Prairie and Wonder Woman. She played Betty Gow, nurse to the family, in the TV movie, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, with Cliff de Young as the aviator and Anthony Hopkins as Bruno Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. In 1975 she returned to the cinema in the western Posse, starring and directed by Kirk Douglas. She became a life member of the Actors Studio.
In 1979 she married the actor and environmentalist, Edward Albert, son of the actor Eddie Albert. She gave up acting and started a business breeding and training horses.
Edward Albert died in 2006, aged 55, and she is survived by their daughter, Thaïs, a poet and songwriter.
Katherine Woodville, actress, was born on December 4, 1938. She died of cancer on June 5, 2013, aged 74
Ann Bell was born in 1938) and is a British actress, best known for playing war internee Marion Jefferson in the BBC Second World War drama series Tenko (1981–84).
She was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, the daughter of John Forrest Bell and Marjorie (née Byrom) Bell, and educated at Birkenhead High School.
She played the title role in a BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre (1963) in addition to many guest roles on television, including Edgar Wallace Mysteries, Gideon’s Way, The Avengers, The Sentimental Agent, The Saint, Armchair Theatre, For Whom the Bell Tolls(1965), Danger Man, The Baron, Mystery and Imagination, The Troubleshooters, Callan, Journey to the Unknown, Sherlock Holmes (the 1968 episode “The Sign of Four” with Peter Cushing), Department S, The Lost Boys, Enemy at the Door, Shoestring, Tumbledown, Blackeyes, Inspector Morse, Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Midsomer Murders, Casualty, Holby City, The Forsyte Saga (2002 miniseries), The Bill and Waking the Dead. In 1968 she appeared in the Dennis Potter play Shaggy Dog, part of The Company of Five, a London Weekend Television anthology series of six plays featuring the same five actors.
She was married to character actor Robert Lang from 1971 until his death in 2004. The couple had two children. Bell appeared on screen with Lang in Tenko Reunion, in which he played Teddy Forster-Brown. They also appeared together in an episode of Heartbeat (“Bread and Circuses”, 2002).
In 2010, Bell featured in the Doctor Who audio drama A Thousand Tiny Wings as well as the 2012 audio play Night of the Stormcrowwhich also featured her Tenko castmate Louise Jameson.
Although Billy Idol is known primarily as a rock singer, he has made anumber of acting appearances on film and television. He was born in 1955 in Stanmore, Middlesex. His films include “Mad Dog Time” and “The Doors”. Billy Idol’s website here.
Geraldine McEwan was born in 1932 in Windsor. She began her threatical career at the age of fourteen. She has worked for many years on the stage and played opposite Laurence Oliver in “The Dance of Death”. In 1965 she appeared with Kenneth Williams in “Loot”. She has had three very succesful television series, “The Prime of Jean Brodie”, “Mapp and Lucia” and “Marple”. Her film career is not extensive but it does include “There Was a Young Lady” in 1953 and “The Magdalene Sisters” as Sister Brigid.
She died in 2014.
“Guardian” obituary
Geraldine McEwan, who has died aged 82, could purr like a kitten, snap like a viper and, like Shakespeare’s Bottom, roar you as gently as any sucking dove. She was a brilliant, distinctive and decisive performer whose career incorporated high comedy on the West End stage, Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, and a cult television following in EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1985-86).
She was also notable on television as a controversial Miss Marple in a series of edgy, incongruously outspoken Agatha Christie adaptations (2004-09). Inheriting a role that had already been inhabited at least three times “definitively” – by Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury and Joan Hickson – she made of the deceptively cosy detective a character both steely and skittish, with a hint of lust about her, too.
This new Miss Marple was an open-minded woman of the world, with a back story that touched on a thwarted love affair with a married man who had been killed in the first world war. Familiar thrillers were given new plot twists, and there was even the odd sapphic embrace. For all her ingenuity and faun-like fluttering, McEwan was really no more successful in the part than was Julia McKenzie, her very different successor.
Although she was not easily confused with Maggie Smith, she often tracked her stylish contemporary, succeeding her in Peter Shaffer roles (in The Private Ear and The Public Eye in 1963, and in Lettice and Lovage in 1988) and rivalling Smith as both Millamant and Lady Wishfort in Congreve’s masterpiece The Way of the World in 1969 and 1995.
And a decade after Smith won her Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, McEwan scored a great success in the same role on television in 1978; Muriel Spark said that McEwan was her favourite Miss Brodie in a cluster that also included Vanessa Redgrave and Anna Massey.
McEwan was born in Old Windsor, where her father, Donald McKeown, was a printers’ compositor who ran the local branch of the Labour party in a Tory stronghold; her mother, Nora (nee Burns), came from a working-class Irish family. Geraldine was always a shy and private girl who found her voice, she said, when she stood up in school and read a poem.
She had won a scholarship to Windsor county girls’ school, but she felt out of place until she found refuge in the Windsor Rep at the Theatre Royal, where she played an attendant fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1946. After leaving school, she joined the Windsor company for two years in 1949, meeting there her life-long companion, Hugh Cruttwell, a former teacher turned stage manager, 14 years her senior, whom she married in 1953, and who became a much-loved and influential principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1965.
Without any formal training, McEwan went straight from Windsor to the West End, making her debut in Who Goes There? by John Deighton (Vaudeville, 1951), followed by an 18-month run in For Better, For Worse… (Comedy, 1952) and withDirk Bogarde in Summertime, a light comedy by Ugo Betti (Apollo, 1955).
Summertime was directed by Peter Hall and had a chaotic pre-West End tour, Bogarde’s fans mobbing the stage door every night and in effect driving him away from the theatre for good; McEwan told Bogarde’s biographer, John Coldstream, how he was both deeply encouraging to her and deeply conflicted over his heartthrob star status.
Within a year she made her Stratford debut as the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost and played opposite Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, replacing Joan Plowright as Jean Rice when the play moved from the Royal Court to the Palace. Like Ian Holm and Diana Rigg, she was a key agent of change in the transition from the summer Stratford festival – playing Olivia, Marina and Hero in the 1958 season – to Peter Hall’s new Royal Shakespeare Company; at Stratford in 1961, she played Beatrice to Christopher Plummer’s Benedick and Ophelia to Ian Bannen’s Hamlet.
Kittenish and playful, with a wonderful gift for suggesting hurt innocence with an air of enchanted distraction, she was a superb Lady Teazle in a 1962 Haymarket production of The School for Scandal, also starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, that went to Broadway in early 1963, her New York debut. She returned to tour in the first, disastrous, production of Joe Orton’s Loot, with Kenneth Williams, in 1965, and then joined Olivier’s National at the Old Vic, where parts over the next five years included Raymonde Chandebise in Jacques Charon’s landmark production of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, Alice in Strindberg’s Dance of Death (with Olivier and Robert Stephens), Queen Anne in Brecht’s Edward II, Victoria (“a needle-sharp gold digger” said one reviewer) in Somerset Maugham’s Home and Beauty, Millamant, and Vittoria Corombona in The White Devil.
Back in the West End, she formed a classy quartet, alongside Pat Heywood, Albert Finney and Denholm Elliott, in Peter Nichols’s Chez Nous at the Globe (1974), and gave a delightful impression of a well-trained, coquettish poodle as the leisured whore in Noël Coward’s broken-backed adaptation of Feydeau, Look After Lulu, at Chichester and the Haymarket.
In the 1980s, she made sporadic appearances at the National, now on the South Bank, winning two Evening Standard awards for her fresh and youthful Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (“Men are all Bavarians,” she exclaimed on exiting, creating a brand new malapropism for “barbarians”) and her hilariously acidulous Lady Wishfort; and was a founder member of Ray Cooney’s Theatre of Comedy at the Shaftesbury theatre.
In the latter part of her stage career, she seemed to cut loose in ever more adventurous directions, perhaps through her friendship with Kenneth Branagh, who had become very close to Cruttwell while studying at Rada. She was a surprise casting as the mother of a psychotic son who starts behaving like a wolf, played by Will Patton, in Sam Shepard’s merciless domestic drama, A Lie of the Mind, at the Royal Court in 1987. And in 1988 she directed As You Like It for Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, Branagh playing Touchstone as an Edwardian music-hall comedian.
The following year she directed Christopher Hampton’s under-rated Treats at the Hampstead theatre and, in 1998, formed a fantastical nonagenarian double act with Richard Briers in a Royal Court revival, directed by Simon McBurney, of Ionesco’s tragic farce The Chairs, her grey hair bunched on one side like superannuated candy floss.
She was a brilliant but controversial Judith Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever (1999), directed as a piece of Gothic absurdism at the Savoy by Declan Donnellan; McEwan tiptoed through the thunderclaps and lightning like a glinting harridan, a tipsy bacchanalian with a waspish lust and highly cultivated lack of concern (“My husband’s not dead; he’s upstairs.”)
Other television successes included Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990), playing Jeanette Winterson’s mother, and an adaptation of Nina Bawden’s tale of evacuees in Wales, Carrie’s War (2004). Her occasional movie appearances included Cliff Owen’s The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1975), two of Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptations – Henry V (1989) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) – as well as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); Peter Mullan’s devastating critique of an Irish Catholic education, The Magdalene Sisters (2002), in which she played cruel, cold-hearted Sister Bridget; and Vanity Fair (2004).
McEwan was rumoured to have turned down both being appointed OBE and a damehood, but never confirmed this.
Hugh died in 2002. She is survived by their two children, Greg and Claudia, and seven grandchildren.
The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
Brian Bedford was born in Morley, West Yorkshire in 1935. His first film role was “Miracle in Soho” in 1957. He had a good supporting role as a thug menancing Richard Attenborough in “The Angry Silence”. He has though spent the majority of his career on the U.S. stage with just the occasional film role. Article on Brian Bedford in “The New York Times” website here. He died in January 2016.
“New York Times” obituary:
Brian Bedford, the British-born actor, reared in working-class misery, who became a stellar portrayer of the princes, kings, fops and faded aristocrats of Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov, died on Wednesday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 80.
The cause was cancer, said one of his agents, Richard Schmenner.
A dapper, handsome man with a comfortingly resonant speaking voice, Mr. Bedford was an understated and perhaps undersung star. He was a protégé of John Gielgud and a theater-school classmate of Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole, sharing their elaborate gifts but not their celebrity, probably because he performed only occasionally in movies and on television.
Sylvan Barnet, Scholar, Is Dead at 89; Edited Signet Shakespeare PaperbacksJAN. 13, 2016
His stage career, however — in England, in the United States (Off Broadway as well as on) and in Canada, where he was a mainstay at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival for nearly four decades — had few equals. Playing comedy or tragedy, pathos or hilarity, Mr. Bedford was known for controlled and layered performances, and for finding the depth and subtlety in monumental characters, from King Lear to Tartuffe.
Mr. Bedford, left, as Lady Bracknell and Charlotte Parry as Cecily Cardew in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” a 2010 production at the American Airlines Theater. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
He won only one Tony Award, in 1971, for playing Arnolphe, the desperately jealous and insecure spouse-seeker in Molière’s “School for Wives,” but he did it against especially formidable competition; Gielgud and Ralph Richardson were among the other nominees.
In 2011, Mr. Bedford, who appeared in 18 Broadway productions, earned his seventh Tony nomination for his drag performance as Lady Bracknell, Oscar Wilde’s often-wrong, ever-certain social arbiter, in “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
“With his long jaw and listening eyes, Bedford, now 75, uses his physiognomy to tell the stories that no playwright or director can prefigure; that is, he allows himself to be transformed by the theatrical moment,” Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker in a brief, admiring article about the show.
He added: “As a kind of magistrate in a tall wig and a false front, Bracknell lives for her younger charges’ attempts to contradict her. But how can they scale the wall of imperiousness that Bedford builds with his silences and his disapproving glances? Life doesn’t stand a chance in the face of such brutally honest artifice.”
Mr. Bedford was also the director of “Earnest,” a production that originated at Stratford (now simply called the Stratford Festival) and was itself nominated for a Tony as best revival. And though his career as a director was consequential — Mr. Bedford staged more than 20 shows at Stratford — he craved performing most of all.
“I’m most alive when I’m acting,” he said. “I can’t deny it, it’s where I belong.”
His résumé was vast. His Shakespearean roles included Hamlet, Brutus, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Shylock, King Leontes, Timon of Athens, Benedick, Ariel and Dogberry. His Chekhov included Astrov in “Uncle Vanya,” Tusenbach in “The Three Sisters” and Trigorin in “The Seagull.”
In more modern roles he was Elyot in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” Vladimir in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” Henry in “The Real Thing” by Tom Stoppard, Martin Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” Salieri in Mr. Shaffer’s “Amadeus” and the title character in Simon Gray’s “Butley.”
A student of theater history, Mr. Bedford played not just the roles that the great writers wrote, but also the writers themselves in one-man shows about them.
“He is perhaps the finest English-language interpreter of classical comedy of his generation, and he seems to pick up a Tony nomination every time he steps on a Broadway stage,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times in 2011. “Yet he is as likely to be found on a cruise ship performing a one-man show about Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde, or in Prague, in high summer, appearing in a supporting role in a traveling musical production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ starring Kelsey Grammer.”
For an actor who became known for interpreting classic works, his background might be considered surprising.
Mr. Bedford was born on Feb. 16, 1935, in the mill town of Morley, near Leeds and Bradford, in Yorkshire — “a pretty awful place,” he told The New York Post in 1971, comparing it to Lawrence, Mass., another city that played a grim role in his family history. “Only much dirtier. Chimneys belching smoke night and day.”
His father, Arthur, was a postal worker; his mother, the former Eleanor O’Donnell, was a factory weaver. Two of his three older brothers died of tuberculosis. Sometime after Brian left home and began his acting career, his father took his own life.
“Suicide runs in the family,” Mr. Bedford said in a Times interview in 1971. “My father’s brother also committed suicide. He got a girl into trouble when he was 22, and in order to save face for both families, he emigrated to America, took a boat to Boston, went to a tiny place — Lawrence, Mass. — booked into a hotel and shot himself in the mouth.”
The austerity of his upbringing fostered a lively fantasy life. “I used to spend all my time pretending to be a radio,” Mr. Bedford said. He attended a Roman Catholic school in Bradford but left at 15, working in a warehouse by day and performing in amateur theater at night. At 18, he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
“I did a bit of Romeo and a bit of ‘Boy With a Cart’” — a verse drama about a saint by the 20th-century playwright Christopher Fry — “and I got a scholarship,” he recalled. “That was the beginning of my life. I moved to London.”
At RADA, as the academy is familiarly known, Mr. Bedford joined a generation of actors who came of age at a turning point on the British stage, when class conflict and the lives of young people in hardscrabble circumstances became central subjects, realism displaced escapism, and gentility was no longer a watchword for writers or performers.
The shift was given impetus with the first performance, in 1956, of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” about life in a cramped city flat. It propelled a movement of playwrights and novelists, joined by Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, Kingsley Amis and David Storey, who became known as the angry young men.
Alan Bates, who was Mr. Bedford’s roommate in their own cramped flat, appeared in Osborne’s play; to do so he had to give up a role in another play, based on stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, called “The Young and the Beautiful,” and Mr. Bedford took over for him.
From there, Peter Brook cast him as Rodolpho, the young swain, in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” and as Ariel in “The Tempest,” which starred Gielgud, whom Mr. Bedford had met while at school and who had counseled him when, at 21, he played Hamlet at the Liverpool Repertory Theater.
Gielgud later directed him in “Five Finger Exercise,” Peter Shaffer’s play about an imploding family, which brought him to New York for the first time in 1959; the play ran for 10 months on Broadway.
Mr. Bedford appeared again on Broadway in the early 1960s — in “Lord Pengo,” a comedy by S. N. Behrman, and in an evening of one-acts by Mr. Shaffer, “The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye.” He also appeared Off Broadway in “The Knack,” a frisky bachelor-pad comedy directed by Mike Nichols (fresh from his triumph with Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park”), after which he decided to move to New York.
“I found England dreary,” Mr. Bedford later explained. “I suppose it’s understandable if your childhood was as mean as mine.”
In the movies, Mr. Bedford appeared in “Grand Prix” (1966) with James Garner, and as Clyde Tolson, associate director of the F.B.I., in “Nixon” (1995), whose title role was played by his fellow Briton Anthony Hopkins.
His best-known film role may be the voice of the title character in the Disney animated feature “Robin Hood” (1973), who was portrayed as a fox. On television he made occasional guest appearances on prime-time series, including “Ben Casey,” “Judd for the Defense,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Cheers,” “Frasier” and “The Equalizer.”
In 1975, after his debut performance at Stratford as Malvolio in “Twelfth Night,” the festival became his artistic home. He performed in more than 50 productions there, taking on many of his grandest and most celebrated classic roles.
He also displayed a wide range as a director at Stratford, staging not just Shakespearean tragedies like “Titus Andronicus,” “Othello” and “King Lear” but also 20th-century classics, including “Waiting for Godot” and “Blithe Spirit,” and Michael Frayn’s contemporary farce “Noises Off,” not to mention “Earnest.”
He toured internationally in one-man shows of his own creation; in a tour of Shakespeare’s life and works called “The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet”; and in “Ever Yours, Oscar,” drawn from the letters of Oscar Wilde.
Mr. Bedford is survived by his partner of 30 years, the actor Tim MacDonald. They married in 2013.
In 2013, illness forced Mr. Bedford to withdraw from a Stratford production of “The Merchant of Venice,” in which he was cast as Shylock.
“We were hoping he would bounce back,” Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director, said in an interview on Wednesday. “He was a great actor, a brilliant comedian, a tragedian and comedian of equal measure. For many of us here, he was the reason we went into the theater, an inspiration and a mentor.”
“Onstage he was luminous,” Mr. Cimolino added. “You could feel he was a theater animal — he had such a sense of ease. He was like a fish in water on that stage.”
The above “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Brian Murray was born in South Africa in 1937. He began his acting career in Britain and had a prominent supporting role in “The Angry Silence” as one of the thugs menancing Richard Attenborough. His career though has been primarily on the stage in the U.S.A.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
This wonderfully witty, enormously talented, classically-trained theatre actor has yet to find THE film project to transition into twilight screen stardom; yet, at age 70 plus, there is still a glimmer of hope for Brian Murray if one fondly recalls the late-blooming adulation bestowed upon such illustrious and mature stage stars Judi Dench, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.
Born Brian Bell in September of 1937 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Shakespearean titan attended King Edward VII School, while there. It must have been a sign. He made his stage bow in 1950 as “Taplow” in “The Browning Version” and continued on the South African stage until 1957. Though he made his film debut fairly early in his career with The League of Gentlemen (1960) and showed strong promise and presence in The Angry Silence (1960), his first passion was, and is, the theatre and instead chose to join the Royal Shakespeare Company where his impressively youthful gallery of credits included those of “Romeo”, “Horatio” in “Hamlet”, “Cassio” in “Othello”, “Edgar” in “Lear” and “Lysander” in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
Eventually Broadway (off- and on-) took notice of this mighty thespian and utilized his gifts quite well over the years. A three-time Tony nominee (for “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, “The Little Foxes” and “The Crucible”), not to mention a recipient of multiple Obie (“Ashes” and “The Play About the Baby”) and Drama Desk (“Noises Off”, “Travels with My Aunt” and “The Little Foxes”) awards, this lofty veteran continues to mesmerize live audiences with a wide range of parts, both classical and contemporary. Two of his later roles, that of “Sir Toby Belch” in “Twelfth Night” and “Claudius” in “Hamlet”, were taken to TV and film. A more recent movie project was a nice change of pace — voicing the flamboyant role of “John Silver” in the animated feature, Treasure Planet (2002).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Roy Kinnear was one of Britains best and busiest character actors. He was born in Wigan, Lancashire in 1934. In 1951 he began studying at RADA. One of his first feature films was “Sparrows Can’t Sing” with Barbara Windsor. He also starred in the television satirical revue “That Was the Week That Was”. His many films include “The Bed Sitting Room” and “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” with Gene Wilder. In 1988 while filming “The Return of the Musketeers” in Spain, he fell off his horse and was killed.He was 54 years of age when he died. His son Rory Kinnear is a popular actor. His obituary in “The New York Times” can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
Portly, sometimes mustached, stage-trained British character actor of film and TV of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Kinnear first gained notoriety on British TV as a regular on the groundbreaking weekly topical satire series, “That Was the Week That Was” in the early 60s. With his large, round face and often bulging eyes, Kinnear sweated and flustered his way through many a frantic comedy, as well as dramas and period fare, playing characters both sympathetic and not. Children of a certain age may best recall him in “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) as Mr. Salt, the pompous, indulgent father of the bratty Veruca Salt. His non-comedy credits include “The Hill” (1965), director Sidney Lumet’s hard-hitting military prison drama starring Sean Connery, and the Hammer horror entry, “Taste the Blood of Dracula” (1969).
Kinnear had a rather broad performing style which some reviewers quickly found tiresome. In contrast he seemed to positively enchant American expatriate director Richard Lester who cast him in eight features including the Beatles vehicle “Help!” (1965) as the bumbling assistant to mad scientist Victor Spinetti, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966), “How I Won the War” (1967) and “The Four Musketeers” (1975) and “Return of the Musketeers” (1989). Kinnear died during the shooting of the latter when he fell off a horse.
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
