Liz Smith

Liz Smith obituary in “The Guardian” in 2016.

‘Being discovered” by the director Mike Leigh when she was about to turn 50 changed Liz Smith’s life. Bleak Moments (1971), his first film, seemed an appropriate title for an actress who was brought up in poverty after the death of her mother and lived a hand-to-mouth existence raising her own children single-handedly – “hard labour” she called it.

Smith, whose face could go from doleful to riotously expressive with a sudden quirky or quizzical look, regretted never playing young female leads but was grateful for the long list of dotty old women that came her way, most famously “Nana” in The Royle Family. In the sitcom created by Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash, she played Norma Speakman, mother of Barbara (Sue Johnston), the long-suffering wife of Jim (Ricky Tomlinson). She frequently feuded with Jim, especially after moving in with the family when her health declined. Smith appeared in all three series (1998-2000), but her character died in the subsequent Christmas special, “The Queen of Sheba” (2006).

The actress, who died on Christmas Eve aged 95, played a string of mothers on screen, beginning in Bleak Moments. Another was Maggie Smith’s in A Private Function (1984), Alan Bennett’s comedy about a pig being fattened secretly and illegally during the days of post-war food rationing. She landed the role after sending her son to Bennett’s house with a postcard asking for a part in the film. It won her the 1984 Bafta Best Supporting Actress award.

However, Smith did not become a star until the 1990s, when she played church organist Letitia Cropley in The Vicar of Dibley’s’ first series (1994) and a 1996 Easter special. The batty old woman in a hat was renowned for the awful cakes she made – the subject of a tricky question she asked Dawn French’s pioneering female priest when Smith was written out: “My cooking. Was I a great experimenter, a pioneer, whose rich command of unorthodox mixtures will be the stuff of legend in the new millennium, or was my food just ghastly? You can tell a dying woman the truth, vicar.” The Reverend Geraldine Granger looked up appearing to ask for forgiveness as she gave a diplomatic answer.

Despite suffering three strokes over two days in 2009 and announcing her retirement, Smith continued taking occasional television roles for another four years.

The actress was born Betty Gleadle, an only child, in Crosby, Lincolnshire, now a Scunthorpe suburb. When she was two, her Yorkshire-born mother, Nellie (née Foster), died in childbirth (the baby girl also died) and she was aged seven when her father, Wilfred, a butcher, abandoned her and moved to Lancashire to marry Ellen Webster, who was also a widow. Smith recalled him telling her that he would write, but he never did.

She was brought up by her maternal grandparents, but more heartbreak came when her grandfather died in a flu epidemic. In a 2008 television interview with Mark Lawson, Smith reflected on losing her parents and her lonely existence as a child: “I’m sure it’s made me odd… I’m very wary of people because you feel a reject… you feel uncomfortable.”

Smith – she took the name when her grandmother adopted her – attended Scunthorpe Modern and Day Commercial Schools. Regular visits to the cinema, which screened silent films with stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy, and Scunthorpe’s Palace Variety Theatre made her want to act and she performed in church halls and in school plays at that theatre.

On leaving school, Smith worked as a seamstress before joining the WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) in early 1940, months after the outbreak of war. She served in the Fleet Air Arm in Scotland, then in South Africa and India.

During this time, when she was 20, Smith’s grandmother died, leaving her £2,500 to buy a house and be independent. This helped her after the war when she found herself bringing up two children alone. In 1945, she had married Jack Thomas, known as “JT”, who worked in a tax office but aspired to write plays.

Smith bought a house in London’s Westbourne Grove area and did jobs from home, such as painting lead model soldiers. She also followed her plan of studying art for a year, at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art, then training as an actress, at the Gateway Theatre.

In 1954, with two children, Sarah and Robert, the family moved to Epping Forest and Smith concentrated on bringing them up. Shortly afterwards, JT left her for another woman.

Seeking acting work again alongside daytime jobs, she joined London’s Unity Theatre, spent five years with Charles Marowitz’s company, which paid no money but gave her experience in improvisation that would be invaluable years later, and acted with the Forbes Russell Repertory Company at Butlin’s holiday camps for many summers, giving her children their first holidays.

While working at Hamleys toy shop in London, Smith received a telephone message that Mike Leigh was looking for an older woman to improvise the role of a mother. Bleak Moments opened the floodgates – she ended her Butlin’s seasons and became a prolific bit-part actress on television.

There were also recurring roles – in sitcoms as the matronly Mrs Brandon in I Didn’t Know You Cared (1975-79), Gran in Now and Then (1983-84), Mrs Anstruther in Mann’s Best Friends (1985), Mrs Giles in Valentine Park(1987-88) and the dual roles of Bette and Aunt Belle in 2point4 Children(1991-99), and in drama as Gran Turner in One by One (1984), Mrs Fisher in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986) and Zillah in the first series of Lark Rise to Candleford (2008). She also played Grandma Georgina in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and worked again with Mike Leigh in High Spirits (1988).

Smith won the 2007 British Comedy Awards Best Actress honour, a year after her memoirs, Our Betty: Scenes from My Life, were published, complete with her own drawings.

In 2008, Mark Lawson asked Smith whether she had had a happy life and she sadly responded: “No. I consider I’ve had too much struggle and too much loneliness and too much rejection, really, and I’m so thankful for the later half of it that it’s been so lucky, very lucky.”

Betty Gleadle (Liz Smith), actress: born Crosby, Lincolnshire 11 December 1921; MBE 2009; married 1945 Jack Thomas (divorced 1959; one son, one daughter); died 24 December 2016

Rosalind Knight was born in 1933 in London. She is the daughter of actor Esmond Knight. She began her acting career with the Midland Theatre Company in Coventry. She is best remembered for her roles in two Carry On films. “Carry On Nurse” in 1959 and “Carry On Teacher” released the same year. ms Knight died in 2020. Her “Wikipedia” page here.

Guardian obituary in 2020:

Rosalind Knight obituary

Veteran stage and screen actor who found new audiences with her roles in TV’s Gimme Gimme Gimme and Friday Night Dinner

Michael CoveneyTue 22 Dec 2020 17.47

In a career stretching over seven decades, the distinctive, cut-glass character actor Rosalind Knight, who has died aged 87, renewed her TV profile with younger audiences in two quirkily original comedy sitcoms: Jonathan Harvey’s Gimme Gimme Gimme (1999-2001) and Robert Popper’s Friday Night Dinner (in the second series, 2012).

She dressed down and mussed up her hair for Beryl Merit, a retired prostitute and landlady of the north London flat shared by Kathy Burke’s foul-mouthed Linda La Hughes and James Dreyfus’s acidulous actor; and reversed that process for Cynthia Goodman, aka “Horrible Grandma”, who aggressively stiffens the tone of the Friday night ritual hosted by her son (Paul Ritter) and his wife (Tamsin Greig).

Much earlier television work had included an extremely well-coiffed and more entitled dinner guest in David Mercer’s On the Eve of Publication (1968), one of the most bilious of the BBC Wednesday Play series, in which Leo McKern went magnificently large as a cynical alcoholic novelist; an adoption society officer, Mrs Ramsden, in a 1981 episode of Coronation Street; and another landlady, this time in Margate, in a Christmas special of Only Fools and Horses (1989).

Rosalind Knight, right, with Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts in Chekhov’s Platonov at the Royal Court theatre, London, in 1966. Photograph: Edwin Sampson/ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

Most recently she was Princess Alice of Battenberg, Prince Philip’s mother, in the first series of The Crown (2016).

Born in London, Rosalind Knight herself came of dynastic stock, as the only daughter of a distinguished theatrical marriage between Esmond Knight, a classical actor who lost an eye in action in the second world war and replaced it with a variety of coloured glass ones, and Frances Clare, a beauty of musical theatre who appeared in Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years. When her parents divorced in 1946, Rosalind immediately acquired a stepmother, Nora Swinburne, also an actor. Frances and Nora had long been best friends. Esmond was happy with both, and they with him.

While boarding at Cheltenham Ladies’ college, Gloucestershire, Rosalind was taken by her father in 1949 to see the Young Vic company perform The Snow Queen and As You Like It in the bombed-out ruins of the Old Vic. She knew instantly what she wanted to do. She auditioned, and was accepted by, the Old Vic Theatre school, run by Michel Saint-Denis and Glen Byam Shaw, shortly afterwards. It is a remarkable coincidence that she and two contemporaries at the school later married three future founding directors of the Royal Exchange in Manchester: Rosalind was married to Michael Elliott, Avril Elgar to James Maxwell and Dilys Hamlett to Caspar Wrede. This social and working nexus was formed in the late 1950s across several companies, culminating in the Royal Exchange in 1976.

Rosalind met Michael in television, where she was Fanny Squeers in a BBC 1957 10-episode series of Nicholas Nickleby (her father was Wackford Squeers, ideally cast with the glass eye). She had spent five years in weekly rep, two of them in Ipswich, where a fellow actor and assistant stage manager (an acting ASM) was Joe Orton.

Michael was moving back into theatre and encouraged his new wife – they married in 1959 – to do so, too. Rosalind had by then made a mark in three comic British movies: as a schoolgirl in Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (1957), with Terry-Thomas and Joyce Grenfell; and in the second and third of the Carry On film series, both in 1959. She was a myopic student nurse in Carry On Nurse and a prim school inspector with amorous proclivities in Carry On Teacher (in which she was confronted by Leslie Phillips brandishing a large pair of knickers).

A change of gear, then, came with Rex Harrison in Chekhov’s Platonov and John Arden’s This Happy Haven, with Edward Fox and James Bolam, and lots of mask work, at the Royal Court in 1960. In the second RSC season at Stratford-upon Avon in 1961, she was directed by Elliott in As You Like It as, said Michael Billington, a Celia of “sharp-witted intelligence, the perfect foil to Vanessa Redgrave’s heady romanticism” as Rosalind. In a Royal Court 1964 revival of Ben Travers’ A Cuckoo in the Nest, she played Barbara Wykeham, with a cast which included Arthur Lowe, Beatrix Lehmann, Alan Bennett, John Osborne and Nicol Williamson.

Vanessa Redgrave, left, and Rosalind Knight in As You Like It, 1963, for the RSC and BBC.Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

When she and Michael moved to Manchester with their two daughters, the 59 Theatre Company he had formed at the Lyric, Hammersmith, morphed into the 69 Company in Manchester – Knight was the Alcharisi to Redgrave’s Gwendolen Harleth in Elliott’s Daniel Deronda adaptation – and then finally the Exchange. There she was a scene-stealing Miss Erikson, in slippers, housecoat and droopy fag, in Noël Coward’s Present Laughter in 1977 and, in the same year, a grandly lubricious Mrs Prentice in Orton’s What the Butler Saw (the leg-spreading character of whom it is said that she would go to her grave in a Y-shaped coffin).

The best directors always wanted Knight in their casts, and the best of the newcomers were no exception. At the Sheffield Crucible in the 80s, she formed a fruitful relationship with Steven Pimlott as a spinsterish, hatchet-faced Charlotta in The Cherry Orchard – carrying the most hideous of little black dogs – and as a superbly ferocious and authoritative Paulina in The Winter’s Tale (Jim Broadbent as Leontes).

Under Jonathan Miller’s brief but brilliant tenure at the Old Vic (1988-90) she appeared in three extraordinary re-imaginings of European classics by the director Richard Jones: Ostrovsky’s savagely cartoonish Too Clever By Half in Rodney Ackland’s translation; John Mortimer’s version of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear on the stage where it was first seen 20 years previously, now transformed into an expressionist nightmare, testing the farcical genre to its limit; and Corneille’s The Illusion, in which she appeared as an oddly androgynous magician with slicked back hair and purple suit.

Rosalind Knight, third left, as Grandma Goodman in Friday Night Dinner. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel 4

Another great rediscovery, at the Almeida in 1992, was Griboyedev’s Chatsky (better known as Woe from Wit) in a new version by Anthony Burgess, directed by Jonathan Kent, in which she more than held her own in a cast including Minnie Driver, Colin Firth (as “the Russian Hamlet”) and John Fortune. In all these roles, as in most aspects of her life, she never followed convention. Her hobbies definitely included swimming against the tide.

She was reunited with Pimlott in a great 2007 National Theatre revival of The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams, playing the Sicilian village witch opposite Zoë Wanamaker’s tremendous Serafina. Pimlott died before the opening, but Nicholas Hytner, the NT’s artistic director, saw his friend’s work through to a resounding completion.

After her appearance as Mrs Fitzpatrick in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), her film work was sporadic, though she made incisive contributions to Stephen Frears’s Prick Up Your Ears (1987, with Gary Oldman as Joe Orton); two directed by Mark Peploe, Afraid of the Dark (1991) and About a Boy (2002, with Hugh Grant and Toni Collette); and in Hytner’s The Lady in the Van (2015), as an elderly nun in Alan Bennett’s meta-theatrical memoir of an unlooked-for dependent.

Rosalind Knight, second right, as Miss Prism, with, from left, Abigail Cruttenden, Patrick Godfrey, Roger Allam and Philip Franks in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Birmingham Repertory theatre in 1995. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

For many years, Knight was an active and constructive participant in the Actors’ Centre, established by Alan Bates in 1978 in memory of his son Tristan, and in the Theatre Guild, formerly the Theatrical Ladies’ Guild, which offers practical help and financial support to indigent backstage and front-of-house theatre workers.

Michael died in 1984. Knight is survived by their daughters, Susannah, an experience curator at the National Trust, and Marianne, a stage director of War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; and by a granddaughter, Eve.

Rosalind Marie Knight, actor, born 3 December 1933; died 19 December 2020

This article was amended on 23 December 2020. In 1977 Rosalind Knight played Miss, rather than Mrs, Erikson in Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, rather than Blithe Spirit

Lionerl Jeffries was born in Poole, Dorset in 1926. He served in the Brtish military during World War Two. He started acting on film around 1950. He can be seen in the Alfred Hitchcock film “Stage Fright” which starred Jane Wyman and Marlene Dietrich. He had a prominent role in “Bhowani Junction” in 1956 and from then onwards was a stalwart of many films during the late 50’s and through much of the sixties. He ventured to Hollywood in 1966 to make “Camelot ” with Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave. He played Dick Van Dyke’s father in “Chitty Chitty Bang Banf” even though he was less than two years older than Van Dyke. In 1970 he directed the much loved classic “The Railway Children” with Jenny Agutter as Bobby. He retired from acting in 2001 and died in Dorset in 2010.

His “Guardian” obituary:

As an actor Lionel Jeffries, who has died aged 83, was a master of comic unease. This was perhaps fuelled by the personal unease he felt in a sex-and-violence era which overtook the gentler sensibilities he sometimes brought to his acting. But he was able to bring these sensibilities fully to bear in his scriptwriting and film directing, particularly in his much-loved adaptation of the classic children’s novel The Railway Children. With the latter, he left an indelible mark on the British film industry and generations of teary-eyed viewers.

The son of two devoted workers for the Salvation Army, Jeffries disliked personal publicity and was a zealot when preparing a role (he ran two miles every morning before appearing in the musical Hello Dolly! after an absence from the London stage of 26 years). He deplored permissivism, and was not frightened of being quoted to that effect; he was a member of the British Catholic Stage Guild, and served as its vice-president for some time. In a profession sometimes characterised by the loucheness of its morals, he had only one wife, the former actor Eileen Walsh, with whom he had one son and two daughters.

With his hard-boiled egg of a head, barking voice, interrogator’s nose, demented moustache and apprehensive eyes, he was the British film industry’s archetypal officious policeman or half-unhinged bungling crook. For Hollywood, which he called “Shepherd’s Bush wrapped in cellophane”, and the domestic industry he adapted the act in more than 100 films to roles such as the Roundhead colonel in the British civil-war epic The Scarlet Blade (1963), the perfidious Inspector Fred “Nosey” Parker in The Wrong Arm of the Law (1962), and as Stanley Farquhar, the spy who was as inefficient as the dog in The Spy With a Cold Nose (1966).

Such broad comedy roles obscured his more thoughtful and intelligent side. He was a good-natured man who combined a formality of manner sometimes evocative of the constipated behaviour of his comic creations with an instinct for the warm and life-enhancing aspects of writing and direction. When first introduced to the actor and film director Bryan Forbes, on the set of the wartime escape film The Colditz Story (1957), he surprised him by addressing him as “sir”.

The two men and their wives, Eileen and Nanette Newman, became friends. In his polite way, in the 1950s a nd 60s, Jeffries also socialised at The Wick, the handsome Richmond Hill home of the actor Sir John Mills, where he and his wife mixed with the Oliviers, the Nivens, the Attenboroughs, Noël Coward, Deborah Kerr and the playwright Emlyn Williams. His friendship with Forbes was later to launch his own career as a film director.

Born in Forest Hill, south London in 1926, Jeffries attended Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school in Wimborne, Dorset. He grew up just in time to step into wartime service with the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the Royal West African Frontier Force in Burma, and rose to the rank of captain. After the war, he won the Kendal award at Rada — the first of many prizes for his acting and writing — and made his first London stage appearance in Carrington VC at the Westminster Theatre in 1949.

His West End appearances dried up in the early 1950s when his lucrative work for the British film industry took over; it did not resume until 1984, when he played Horace Vandergelder in Hello Dolly! at Birmingham Rep and the Prince of Wales theatre in London.

From 1954, he was in a stream of British and Hollywood films. Some roles, such as Lieutenant McDaniel in Bhowani Junction (1956), the Hollywood version of John Masters’s novel about India’s struggle for independence, were serious dramatic parts; others, such as Dr Hatchet in Rank’s Doctor at Large (1957), were slighter and more risible. He enhanced Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (1957), about the madcap girls’ school, and was Grandpa Potts in the successful children’s film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), alongside Dick Van Dyke. But he was far from comic as the splenetic Marquis of Queensberry, hounding Oscar Wilde to prison over his son’s liaison with the homosexual playwright, in The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960).

Three of Jeffries’s scripts were made into films. The first was based on E Nesbit’s novel The Railway Children, which Jeffries adapted in pursuit of his belief that there were more wise children than wise adults. When he took his script to Forbes, then head of production at Elstree, Forbes asked him who he visualised as the director. Jeffries replied: “I know it’s a crazy idea and not on, but I’ve always secretly harboured a longing to direct it myself.” The finished film impressed Forbes by its “great style and warmth” and was a financial and cult success, being shown year after year on television, especially at Christmas time.

The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972), which he also directed, was a science-fiction film in which Diana Dors played against glamorous type as the repulsive Mrs Wickens. The film won him a gold medal for best screenplay at the International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival in Paris in 1974. Wombling Free, which Rank made in 1977, was another children’s favourite. He also directed the films Baxter! (1973), and The Water Babies (1979), after Charles Kingsley.

He had many television roles, but his career never really took off in the medium. Although, among jobbing-actor roles in series such as Casualty, Lovejoy and Inspector Morse, he also appeared in the Dennis Potter drama Cream in My Coffee (1980), with Peggy Ashcroft; a TV version of Mr Jekyll and Hyde (1990) and Ending Up (1989), based on the Kingsley Amis novel about old buffers going grumbling to their doom. His constrained but explosive style of acting may not have been quite right for the domesticated small screen, added to which he tended to have bad luck, and twice sued TV companies: first Thames, for negligence, when he was nearly drowned on location; and second Harlech, when a comedy series was abruptly cancelled after the German backers pulled out. His gentlemanly manner did not mean he could not stand up for his rights.

Such an attitude was not the most comfortable one for an actor to have in the tiny world of British TV. But the fact that his directorial flair was so unused on TV, when many lesser talents were allowed to prosper, does not reflect at all well on the openness of that small world.

He is survived by Eileen and his children.

• Lionel Jeffries, actor, screenwriter and director, born 10 June 1926; died 19 February 2010

His “Guardian” obituary can be accessed here.

Peter Bowles was born in London in 1936. He trained as an actor at RADA. He has had a steller career on television and the stage. He guest starred in a few episodes of the iconic TV series “The Avengeers” in the 1960’s. He has had several successful series of his own including”Rumpole of the Bailey” as Gutherie Featherstone Q.C. “Only When I Laugh”, “The Irish RM”, “Lytton’s Diary”, “Perfect Scoundrals” and especially “To the Manor Born” as Richard Devere opposite Penelope Keith. His film credits include “Blowup”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “The Offence”. Interview with “MailOnline” is here.:

TCM Overview:

An alumnus of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, actor Peter Bowles has been refining his craft for over 50 years. Leaving the stage for the television in 1959, it wasnâ¿¿t until 1966 that Bowles landed a recognizable role. As Ron in visionary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioniâ¿¿s art house thriller and ode to mod London, “Blow-Up,” Bowles established himself as a rising young actor. After a string of television appearances Bowles co-starred in Tony Richardsonâ¿¿s war drama “The Charge of the Light Brigade” with “Blow-Up” co-star, Vanessa Redgrave. The following year Bowles was cast in Richardsonâ¿¿s “Laughter in the Dark,” adapted from Vladimir Nabokovâ¿¿s novel. Moving into the â¿¿70s, Bowles was cast in two strong supporting roles, alongside Sean Connery in Sidney Lumetâ¿¿s thriller “The Offence” and as Freddie in the endearing black comedy “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.” Gaining more substantial television roles in the late â¿¿70s, Bowles was cast as Guthrie Featherstone on the crime drama “Rumpole of the Bailey.” Taking a comedic turn, he was cast in two of his best-known roles, as Archie Glover on “Only When I Laugh” and as Richard DeVere on “To the Manor Born.” Working consistently and successfully on television in the â¿¿80s and â¿¿90s, Bowles continued with comedies as Major Sinclair Yeates on “The Irish R.M.” and on “Perfect Scoundrels.” Younger American audiences may recognize Bowles as Miles in the Jason Statham action thriller “The Bank Job.”

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed here.

Julia Lockwood obituary in “The Scotsman”.

The daughter of one of Britain’s biggest stars, Julia Lockwood made her film debut at four, went to acting school at five, had played the title roles in BBC television adaptations of Heidi and Alice in Wonderland by her early teens and was bracketed alongside Jane Fonda as a second generation of film stars.

Her mother was Margaret Lockwood, raven-haired lead in the Gainsborough studio’s period melodramas of the 1940s, including The Wicked Lady. These films have not worn particularly well, but they were considered risqué at the time and were extremely popular. Young women rushed to imitate the famous beauty spot painted high on Lockwood’s left cheek.

Her daughter enjoyed considerable success as a child and juvenile actress, both on stage and screen, helped by the chance to appear on film with her mum. It looked at one time like she was all set to relocate to Hollywood, and she even had dental work and surgery on her nose in preparation for a screen test with Columbia Pictures.

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But, like so many other juvenile film stars, Lockwood never quite made the leap to regular starring adult roles and her big-screen career ended along with her teens.

She went on acting for another decade in theatre and television – starring in a shortlived sitcom with Richard Briers on the BBC, before retiring from showbusiness in the early 1970s to concentrate on family life with actor husband Ernest Clark.

She was born Margaret Julia Leon in the market town of Ringwood in Hampshire in 1941. Lockwood was her mother’s maiden name, which Julia would also adopt. Her mother was already a star when Lockwood was born, but The Man in Grey in 1943 elevated her to another level.

Her father, Rupert Leon, was a commodities clerk, serving in the Army at the time of her birth. Neither parent was around much. Lockwood was born into a life of wealth and privilege, but regretted that parental contact and affection was rationed.

“My parents parted when I was about five and were divorced when I was eight,” she said in an interview in 1960. “I spent a great deal of time being looked after by Nanny. I think a girl needs a father even more than she needs a mother.” She also lamented being an only child. “I’ve been pretty lonely at times,” she said.

Sometimes she had to settle for seeing her mother in the cinema rather than in the flesh. “My earliest memory is being carried out screaming in the middle of one of her films because I was frightened when I saw someone strike her on the screen,” she said in the same interview, when the Sydney Morning Herald ran a piece on Lockwood and Jane Fonda, daughter of Hollywood star Henry Fonda, hailing them as “new stars in the firmament”.

One way that Margaret managed to carve out some time with her daughter was to have her cast in her films. Margaret had moved to a new big money contract with Rank and Julia was only four when she played her mother’s character’s daughter in Hungry Hill, an expensive adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel about a feud between two families in Ireland that lasts for generations.

Mother nad daughter also appeared together in The White Unicorn in 1947, by which time Julia was at acting school. It would be a few more years before she landed the starring role in the BBC’s 1953 series Heidi, which was followed by a sequel, Heidi Grows Up, and Alice in Wonderland. She had played Alice in Wonderland on stage in 1953, with Peter Butterworth as the Mad Hatter.

In the early 1950s Margaret Lockwood was the best-paid actress in Britain, but then she had a few flops and by the middle of the decade she was considered box-office poison. Margaret turned to theatre and television, which gave her the chance to work with her daughter again.

They played a mother and daughter, working in an exclusive London hotel, in The Royalty (1957-58) and a belated sequel called The Flying Swan (1965). In between Julia Lockwood turned up occasionally in films and more often on television, with a starring role in the short-lived sitcom Don’t Tell Father and a recurring role as a secretary involved in illicit office romance in 73 episodes of Compact, a BBC soap opera set in the offices of a magazine.

In the 1950s and early 1960s she appeared in several stage productions of Peter Pan, initially playing Wendy when her mother played Peter. But Julia also played Peter regularly in Christmas productions at the Scala in London and she reprised the role at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow in 1960. She was back at the King’s at the end of the decade in George Axelrod’s play Goodbye Charlie.

Lockwood’s Samantha had designs on Richard Briers, and his money, in the BBC sitcom Birds on the Wing. It ran for six episodes in 1971 and was to be her last screen credit. In 1972 she married Ernest Clark, who played the grumpy Professor Loftus in the Doctor in the House sitcom and its sequels and who was almost 30 years older than her.

Lockwood already had a child from a previous relationship and they would have three more children together. This was Clark’s third marriage. He died in 1994. Lockwood is survived by her four children.

Michael Petrovitch & Susan Hampshire

Michael Petrovitch’s first television was in an episode of the British TV series “Jason King” in 1972. That same year he had the leading role opposite Susan Hampshire in “Neither the Sea nor the Sand”. Most of his acting career was concentrated on television and he seems to have stopped acting in 1986. Forum about Michael Petrovitch here.

Mark Lester was born in 1958 in Oxford. He is forever associated with one film the musical “Oliver” where he played the title part of the angelic child at the mercy of Bill Sykes and Fagin but helped by the Artful Dodger and Nancy. He had a few small parts in films such as “Allez France” with Diana Dors and “Fahrenheit 451! with Julie Christie. He made a few films such as “The Prince and the Pauper” after “Oliver” but retired from acting at the age of 19. He studied to become an osteopath, Interview on “Express” online here.

TCM Overview:

At the age of eight, Mark Lester kickstarted his acting career. Lester’s career in acting began with his roles in various films like the Oskar Werner adaptation “Fahrenheit 451” (1966), “Our Mother’s House” (1967) and the dramatic adaptation “Oliver!” (1968) with Ron Moody. He also appeared in “Philip” (1969) and “Eyewitness” (1970). His passion for acting continued to his roles in projects like “Black Beauty” (1971), “Melody” (1971) and “Who Slew Auntie Roo?” (1971). He also appeared in “Senza Ragione” (1972). During the latter half of his career, he tackled roles in “Scalawag” (1973), “La Prima volta sull’Erba” (1975) and the Oliver Reed historical feature “Crossed Swords” (1978). Lester most recently worked on “Michael Jackson & Bubbles: The Untold Story” (Animal Planet, 2009-2010).

Dudley Sutton, Tony Garnett, Ronald Lacey and Jess Conrad

Jess Conrad was born in 1936 in Brixton, London. From the late 1950’s until the mid 1960’s he appeared in films that have now become cult classics including “Serious Charge” with Cliff Richard, “The Boys”, “Ragdoll” and “Konga”. He continues to perform as a singer in concerts all over the U.K. Jess Conrad’s website here. Interview in “Mallorca Life & Style” here.

Jess Conrad. Wikipedia.

Jess Conrad was born in 1936 and is an English actor and singer from Brixton, South London. As a boy he was nicknamed “Jesse” after American outlaw Jesse James; as there was already an actor named “Gerald James” in Actors’ Equity, a drama teacher who was a fan of Joseph Conrad suggested the stage name of “Jess Conrad”.

Having started his career as a repertory actor and film extra, Conrad was cast in a television play Bye, Bye Barney as a pop singer.^[2] He was noticed by Jack Good who included him in his TV series Oh, Boy,^[2] and then was signed to Decca Records and had a number of chart hits, including “Cherry Pie“, “This Pullover”, “Mystery Girl” and “Pretty Jenny”; also recording for Columbia, Pye President and EMI.

Between the late 1950s and mid-1960s Conrad appeared in a number of films such as Serious Charge (uncredited), The Boys, Rag Doll, (filmed in 1960, and released in 1961); K.I.L. 1 and Konga as well as Michael Powell‘s The Queen’s Guards. Conrad played Danny Pace in an episode of The Human Jungle called ‘The Flip Side Man’ in 1963.

During the 1970s he spent some time in the stage shows Godspell and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and also featured in a cameo role in the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. In 1977 no fewer than seven of Conrad’s singles were included in the ‘World’s Worst Record’ list, chosen by listeners to Capital FM DJ Kenny Everett‘s show, and “This Pullover”, voted 6th worst song ever, later featured on The World’s Worst Record Show, a 1978 LP dedicated to the songs voted for, together with two other Conrad recordings “Cherry Pie” and “Why Am I Living?” He also made an appearance in “Are You Being Served” as Mr Walpole head of sporting equipment in episode “Memories Are Made Of This” along with John Inman, Molly Sugden & Wendy Richards.

Conrad also appeared in the 1984 TV series of Miss Marple, in the episode entitled The Body in the Library as Raymond Starr. He also starred in the 1993 film The Punk and the Princess.

In the 1990s Conrad made regular cameo appearances on Jim Davidson‘s revived version of The Generation Game on BBC1. Also in 1992 Conrad appeared in the Christmas Special of Big Break, also presented by Davidson and John Virgo. He was the “booby” prize of the show presented to Hi-de-Hi! actress Ruth Madoc. Contestants who failed to make the final of Big Break were often nearly given a box set of Conrad’s hit singles.

Conrad is married to Renee and has two daughters, Sasha and Natalie.

Robert Newton was born in Dorset, England in 1905. He began acting at 16 with Birmingham Repertory Company. His first film was “Farewell Again” in 1937. His major films include “Jamaica Inn”, “Oliver Twist”, “The High and the Mighty”, “The Beachcomber”, “This Happy Breed” and his last film “Around the World in 8o Days”. His film career and indeed life was cut short by chronic alcoholism which led to his death from a heart attack in 1956 aged just fifty. His best remembered role is as the definite Long John Silver in Walt Disney’s “Treasure Island”.

TCM Profile:

To a generation of moviegoers, English actor Robert Newton is the personification of Long John Silver; he played the pirate in the Disney classic Treasure Island (1950), its sequelLong John Silver (1954) as well as in a 1950s TV series The Adventures of Long John Silver. But Newton’s career wasn’t limited to swashbucklers. He appeared in classic works by Shakespeare and Shaw and Dickens. He co-starred with British acting greats such as Charles Laughton and Laurence Olivier and he worked with a talented list of directors from Alfred Hitchcock to David Lean. For an actor best remembered as a pirate, Newton enjoys an extremely impressive filmography.

Robert Newton was born June 1, 1905 in Shaftesbury, Dorset, England. His mother was a writer and his father a painter. Newton began acting at an early age and made his stage debut at the age of 15. His first appearance was in Henry IV (Part One) for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Newton stayed with the company for three years, working as an assistant stage manager, and taking roles in Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet. He made his London debut at Drury Lane in 1924 in London Life. Newton’s star rose when he was cast in Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet in 1929. And just two years later, Newton made his Broadway debut, filling some pretty big shoes in the process Newton succeeded Laurence Olivier in another Coward production, Private Lives.

Newton made his first film in 1932 with the small British drama Reunion. He then returned to the stage for several years, appearing in Hamlet at the Old Vic and in other plays like Miss Julie. Newton’s next film came in 1937 when he played the Captain of Caligula’s Guard in I, Claudius. The film, which was never completed due to overwhelming production problems, was directed by Josef von Sternberg and starred Charles Laughton and Merle Oberon. Newton would make two more films with Laughton: Hitchcock’s last British film before immigrating to America, Jamaica Inn (1939), and Vessel of Wrath (AKA The Beachcomber) (1938). The latter film was based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel and, in 1954, Newton would star in a second film version of the story. This time, Newton took the role played by Laughton in the original.

In 1937, Newton had his first lead role in the film The Squeaker where he played a cat burglar. He also took a leading part in the original film version of Gaslight (1940) and he played husband to a pioneer aviatrix in Wings and the Woman (1942). Newton then returned to the theatre for a string of stage adaptations: he appeared in Shaw’s Major Barbara (1941) with Rex Harrison and Wendy Hiller; the family drama This Happy Breed (1944) by Noel Coward; and Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944), directed by and starring Laurence Olivier. Newton followed up his stage run with a turn in Carol Reed’s IRA suspense-drama Odd Man Out (1947).

Newton gave a memorably frightening performance as the villainous Bill Sikes in David Lean’s production ofOliver Twist (1948). He also played the merciless Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (1952) and, as previously noted, sailed under a pirate flag in Treasure Island, the film that marked the peak of his popularity. Newton was one of the top ten moneymakers in British cinema (as voted in the Motion Picture Herald-Fame Poll) from 1947 to 1951. After Treasure Island Newton played another pirate Blackbeard, in Blackbeard the Pirate(1952). In 1954, he returned to Treasure Island in a sequel called Long John Silver.

One of Newton’s last films was the high flying John Wayne suspense-adventure The High and the Mighty(1954). He made his final feature appearance in Around the World in 80 Days (1956); Newton lived just a month after shooting was complete. Officially, the cause of death was a heart attack, but Newton’s excessive drinking was certainly a factor. He died March 25, 1956.

by Stephanie Thames

The above TCM Profile by Stephanie Thames can also be accessed online here.

A tribute to Robert Newton here.