Maxwell Caulfield was born in 1959 in Duffield in Derbyshire. He made his film debut as a child actor in Joseph Losey’s “Accident” in 1967. He made his Broadway debut in 1981 in Joe Orton’s “Entertaining Mr Sloane”. The following year he had the lead in “Grease 2”.
From 1985 until 1987 he played Miles Colby in the U.S. series “The Colbys”. Most recently he has been seen on British television in “Emmerdale”. He is married to actress Juliet Mills. To view interview with Maxwell Caulfield, please view here.
TCM Overview:
With flawless “pretty boy” good looks, Caulfield has had to prove on stage that he is an actor while often being relegated on TV and in film to handsome second leads. He got the big Hollywood build up when he made his screen debut in the musical sequel “Grease 2” (1982), opposite the equally neophyte Michelle Pfeiffer. The film was unsuccessful and Caulfield’s career stalled.
He seemed to be more in the news for marrying Juliet Mills (of “Nanny and the Professor” fame), 18 years his senior, and for breaking into show business as a nude dancer, than for his performances. He returned to the stage, touring in the title role of “The Elephant Man” and appearing in “Entertaining Mister Sloane” in both NYC and L.A.
He was featured (mostly in the nude) opposite Jessica Tandy and Elizabeth Wilson in “Salonika” at the Public Theatre in New York and in “Loot” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 19: Actress Juliet Mills (L) and actor Maxwell Caulfield attend the 2021 Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ Film Festival Screening of “The Sixth Reel” at the DGA Theater Complex on August 19, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images)
Caulfield’s second film was “Electric Dreams” (1984), a modern-day retelling of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” He scored a critical success in the underrated “The Boys Next Door” (1985), in which he and Charlie Sheen portray two bored, alienated California boys who embark on a series of violent escapades.
He subsequently appeared in such undistinguished features as “Mind Games” (1989), “Project: Alien” (1990), “Animal Instincts” (1992), “Midnight Witness” (1993) and “No Escape, No Return” (1994). He appeared as Col. Strong Vincent in the epic “Gettysburg” (1993) and offered a wonderfully wicked turn as a self-involved, bubble-gum pop star in Allan Moyle’s “Empire Records” (1995).
Caulfield was perfectly cast as bad boy Miles Colby first introduced on the ABC sudser “Dynasty” and then on its spinoff “The Colbys/Dynasty II: The Colbys” (ABC, 1985-87). He reprised the role for the miniseries sequel “Dynasty: The Reunion” (ABC, 1991). Other credits include featured roles in “The Parade” (CBS, 1984) and the CBS miniseries “Judith Krantz’s ‘Till We Meet Again'” (1989). In 1996, Caulfield joined the cast of the ABC daytime soap opera “All My Children” as the troubled artist Pierce Riley, a role he played until June 1997.
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Simon McCorkindaleMichael York & Simon McCorkindale
Simon McCorkindale was born in 1952 in Ely in Cambridgeshire. His father was a Group Captain in the Royal Air Force and he hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps but he was shortsighted and unable to enlist. He made his West End stage debut in “Pygmalion” with Sir Alec MacCowan and Dame Diana Rigg. His film breakthrough came with the higly popular “Death on the Nile” where he was caught in a love triangle with Mia Farrow and Lois Chiles. He went to Hollywood where he made the TV series “Manimal” which was not a success. He was then part of the cast of “Falcon Crest” with Jane Wyman. After some years he returned to the UK and was cast in the long running “Casualty” as clinical lead consultant Harry Carpenter. Simon MacCorkindale died in October 2010. He was long married to actress Susan George.
His “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:
In common with his contemporaries Jeremy Irons, Michael York and Hugh Grant, the actor Simon MacCorkindale, who has died of cancer aged 58, on screen projected the very English persona of an ex-public schoolboy. But unlike them, MacCorkindale never made it big in films. Nevertheless, his “posh” accent, his suave demeanour and patrician good looks made him a natural for roles in television soap operas, from the opulent mansions of Falcon Crest (1984-1986), to the hospital corridors of Casualty (2002-2008). In the latter, he played the autocratic clinical consultant Harry Harper, who ran Holby City hospital’s emergency department. A doctor of the old school, he sweeps through the wards, advising, cajoling, admonishing and seducing colleagues and patients alike.
In 2007, having already been diagnosed with bowel cancer, MacCorkindale learned that it had spread to his lungs and that he had no more than five years to live. It was cruelly ironic that he continued to play Harry Harper, sometimes being required to inform patients that they had an incurable disease. “I don’t want people to think that I’m pale, losing my hair, losing weight and on the way out,” he commented in 2009. “I’m not. I’m as active as I’ve ever been.”
Immediately after leaving Casualty, and refusing to let his illness interfere with his work, MacCorkindale toured in the strenuous part of Andrew Wyke in Sleuth, took over the role of Captain Georg Ludwig von Trapp in the London Palladium production of The Sound of Music, as well as appearing in a couple of films and television plays. This stoicism may be put down to his upbringing.
MacCorkindale was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, the son of Scottish parents. He spent much of his early childhood moving around because his father, a group captain and a station commander in the RAF, had postings at various bases in Britain, Germany and Belgium. Eventually, Simon was sent to Haileybury school, Hertfordshire, where he played rugby and was head boy. His desire to follow his father into the RAF was thwarted when he failed an eyesight test, so he decided to train for the stage, despite his father’s conviction that it was “not a sensible job”.
While in his early 20s, MacCorkindale started to get small parts on stage (“a sarcastic bystander” in Pygmalion, 1974) and on television (Paris in Romeo and Juliet; Lucius in I, Claudius, both 1976). But his breakthrough came with the role of the charming cad Simon Doyle in Death on the Nile (1978), in which he was in no way outshone by the starry cast of murder suspects under the scrutiny of Peter Ustinov’s Hercule Poirot. The following year, MacCorkindale appeared as an astronomer in The Quatermass Conclusion, co-starring with John Mills, a hero of his, and in The Riddle of the Sands, based on Eskine Childers’s adventure novel, wherein he and Michael York were two British yachtsman who foil a German plot to invade Britain in 1901.
In 1982, following his divorce from the actor Fiona Fullerton, to whom he had been married for six years, MacCorkindale went to live in California. There, along with Joan Collins in Dynasty, MacCorkindale found himself in the first wave of British stars to make an impact in American television shows. After appearances in one episode each of Hart to Hart and Dynasty, he was given the lead in Manimal (1983), which had the rather absurd conceit of having MacCorkindale as a British college professor at New York University who has the unusual ability to transform himself into any kind of animal in order to help the police battle crime. Not surprisingly, despite some clever special effects, the show ran only eight episodes. Fortunately, MacCorkindale, who always refused to Americanise his accent, got the part of Greg Reardon, a conniving British lawyer employed by Angela Channing (Jane Wyman), the equally conniving matriarch who runs the family winery in the glossily extravagant Falcon Crest.
However, after a few more soaps, he and the actor Susan George, whom he had married in 1984, decided to return to Britain, where he set up a production company called Amy International Artists, named after the character his wife had played in the controversial Straw Dogs (1971). In 1995, they bought and took over a 45-acre stud-farm on Exmoor, where they bred Arabian horses. Then came the six-year run in Casualty, which required a relatively more realistic acting style than in American soap operas.
MacCorkindale is survived by his wife.
• Simon MacCorkindale, actor, born 12 February 1952; died 14 October 2010
The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Dirk Bogarde obituary in “The Independent” in 1999.
His “Independent” obituary:
Dirk Bogarde
LIKE GARBO before him, Dirk Bogarde mysteriously exceeded the sum of his parts. Many of his 63 films were forever banal, while others initially thrilling and controversial were tamed or stultified by time. In a career spanning almost 60 years he willingly switched disguise, but neither wigs nor breeches, the officer’s khaki nor the doctor’s white coat, could long conceal his limitations of range. When he offered subtlety and suggestiveness instead of versatility those limitations appeared almost a virtue; but with the failure of that exchange in the mid-1970s his acting became almost intolerably arch and repetitive.
Yet he could never be dismissed – and his stature involved something more than the fact that to critics and colleagues he suggested stylish professionalism, or that in 1955 and 1957 his popularity made him Britain’s principal box-office attraction, or that he rejected formulaic heroism in Hollywood and Pinewood to redeem himself in the European cinema he found more inquisitive.
Dirk Bogarde was a major figure because, wherever they were made, his finest films are all somehow about him. He was a great self- portraitist and the screen persona he fashioned, a stylisation of his private being, not only dominated its surroundings but spoke subliminally and powerfully to British audiences about the tensions of the time, about the connivances and cruel respectabilities of England in the Fifties and Sixties.
By the time he renounced acting for writing his numerous renditions of acquiescers, outsiders, self-doubters and repressors of secrets constituted a poetic enquiry into the dramas of pragmatic dishonesty and subterranean emotion and had made Bogarde emblematic, a man who might have been born to play exiles from happiness.
Indeed when he took to writing in his fifties Derek Jules Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde’s first impulse, in A Postillion Struck By Lightning, was to depict his childhood as a lost paradise, only later conceding that despite its contentment he had learnt before adolescence “every lesson needed to get through adult life, from courage, to control, to determination and deceit”.
His Scottish mother, Margaret Niven, daughter of Forrest Niven, actor and painter, was compelled by her husband to abandon acting, despite her Haymarket appearance in Bunty Pulls The Strings and despite an invitation from Hollywood to join the Lasky Players. Her regret was lifelong and she looked to alcohol for the mitigation three children could not always provide. Besides, her half-Dutch husband, art editor of The Times, worked too hard; soon Dirk and sister Elizabeth sought amusement in nursery theatricals.
While still a schoolboy, and perhaps with encouragement from his actress godmother Yvonne Arnaud, Dirk appeared in an amateur production of Alf’s Button and every summer, when the family retreated to a cottage in Sussex, he and his sister animated the enchanted countryside with make-believe.
Innocence, inevitably, was doomed. A new-born brother Gareth usurped attention and Dirk, installed at the Allan Glen’s School in Glasgow, was bullied into chronic self-doubt. Further patchy schooling in London culminated in a course of commercial art at Chelsea Polytechnic, where he was taught by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland (who later found his features too anodyne to merit portraiture).
Despite Ulric’s hopes that his son would pursue a career in art or diplomacy Dirk wanted to act: in 1939 he was an extra in the George Formby comedy Come On, George and months later, when he made his West End debut in J.B. Priestley’s Cornelius, The Stage praised his “sulky true-to-life office boy”.
Engagement to the actress Annie Deans quickly failed and following conscription into Ensa he was called to war at Catterick army camp. He proved an inept signaller, but eventually became a major in Intelligence; he was in Normandy for D-Day, was decorated, and demobbed in Singapore. Distinction notwithstanding, military life taught advanced disenchantment: off-duty war paintings (some of which now belong to the Imperial War Museum) helped channel distress but many experiences registered anguish too great for anything but later flippancy. As for witnessing the liberation of Belsen, “We never spoke of it again to anyone”.
He returned to civilian life without much hope or many credentials, yet within two years he had anglicised his name, acquired a first agent, won Noel Coward’s admiration for his proletarian murderer in Power Without Glory at the New Lindsay Theatre and appeared in a television adaptation of Rope, playing the first of many homosexuals.
Coward urged that the beginner’s destiny lay on stage but events swiftly confounded him. Wessex Films offered Bogarde a part in Esther Waters (1947); then with Stewart Granger’s defection the leading role was thrust upon him; then J. Arthur Rank, which distributed Wessex Films, proffered a contract, despite anxieties about its new recruit’s skinny neck, uneven leg length and asymmetrical head.
His 14 years with Rank proved a glamorous apprenticeship. Beginning in 1947 on pounds 30 a week, he emerged a decade later as Britain’s principal star: each film gained him about pounds 10,000, his off-set publicity involved the land-owning accessories of dogs, Bentleys and big houses and Rank appointed the actresses he dated.
Of the 36 films he made with the studio few merited his or his audience’s attention: The Blue Lamp (1949), paean to the British bobby, made his name; Doctor in the House (1954), based on Richard Gordon’s novels about medical students, his fortune; and Victim (1961) his reputation, as an actor prepared to venture his popularity in a film which at the dawn of the Sixties appeared almost self-destructively controversial and conscientious.
Nevertheless he learnt the technicalities of filming and understood why whole sets rose around his gentler left profile. He developed a confidant intimacy with the camera and enriched every film he made with his exotic prettiness, his thoroughness and his tense, truculent style.
After Victim, which confronted homosexuality as a certainty and exposed the evils of its illegality, there was no returning to studio fantasias. Bogarde left Rank in 1961, and for the next 17 years devoted himself freelance to the films which brought him international fame, films which taxed his sensitivity of interpretation and showed him willing, in his forties and fifties, to address the controversial preoccupations of a youthful and liberal age.
The social allegory of Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963) may now seem dated but Bogarde’s performance (which won him his first British Film Academy Award) retains its stealthy menace. Death in Venice (1971, directed by Luchino Visconti) has its longueurs but Bogarde’s Von Aschenbach remains a virtuoso rendition of almost wordless yearning. For all its flamboyance, The Night Porter (1973) is a determined investigation, structured around Bogarde’s Max, into the passions of sado-masochism.
Yet as his European prestige grew so, despite the direction of Losey, Visconti, Resnais and Fassbinder, did his mannerisms; and his celebrated facial inflexions, which began as disclaimers of involvement and passion, developed into an unwitting but almost declamatory spinsterishness.
In any case, he was retreating – from England and from film. Along with Anthony Forwood, the former husband of Glynis Johns who became his manager and lifelong companion, he restored a 15th-century farmhouse near Grasse and recreated the paradise of distant Sussex; and in 1977 he began his successful career as an autobiographer and novelist with Postillion, his first volume of memoirs.
He was retreating also from people. He had never cultivated the common touch, never welcomed fame’s intrusions into privacy; and unscheduled digressions in later interviews revealed with what asperity he manned his fortress. But he was an illusionist by trade and he outmanoeuvred curiosity with dexterity.
His best-selling autobiographies won him a reputation for self- revelation when in fact they camouflage: Postillion (which merits survival) beautifully evokes his childhood, indeed is generous with its harmless secrets and sins; but the sequels, which could have explained the mature Bogarde’s inner workings and should have given some account of Tony Forwood, the most important figure in his life, are in varying degrees thespian anecdotage.
His excursions into the more revealing medium of fiction (inspired by experience) were smooth; but although the slickness of his novels is occasionally animated by accounts of female domination, male narcissism and male prostitution, their author’s true pleasures remained classified.
Even as he guarded it, Dirk Bogarde’s neat world crumbled. Having been ill since 1983 Forwood died in 1988, doubly stricken with cancer and Parkinson’s disease. The French house was sacrificed to medical bills and proximity to London hospitals and Bogarde’s last years passed in a flat in Chelsea. Planning ahead, he espoused euthanasia in 1991 and in 1992 he received a knighthood. He reviewed books for The Sunday Telegraph, contributed irritable, anglophobic articles elsewhere and testily reiterated his heterosexuality – but discreetly friends thought him unbearably embittered by Forwood’s death.
It was a grief he could not allow himself to acknowledge, a grief which united with his early and frequently reinterpreted disillusion to lend to his public appearances a great disenchantment. Off-duty, he seemed even more poignant – squeamishly skirting Sloane Square, his hair as black as the dying Von Aschenbach’s, his manner no less fussy, frail and furtive; and Chelsea’s pavements, like Visconti’s Lido, a lonely place for yearning.
Derek Jules Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde (Dirk Bogarde), actor and writer: born 28 March 1921; Kt 1992; died London 8 May 1999.
“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Marianne Stone’s list of film credits must be the longest of any actor in British film. At one time she seemed to pop up in every film made in the UK between the late 1940’s and the late 1980’s. She played minor roles but they were always choice and she could do a lot in a few minutes. She usually played charladies, office typists, waitresses, clerks in the civil service, bar ladies and often appeared in crowd secenes where she would stand out with a few words. Her films include “Brighton Rock” in 1947, “The Clouded Yellow”, “The Good Die Young” and several Carry On’s. She retired in 1989 and died in 2010 at the age of 87. She was the widow of the show business writer Peter Noble.
Tom Vallance’s obituary on Marianne Stone in “The Independent”:
The accomplished character actress Marianne Stone had the distinction of being the most prolific actress in the UK, appearing in over 200 films, an achievement that earned her a place in the latest Guinness Book of World Records as “the actress with the most screen credits”. She has also been hailed in the book English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema for her contribution to the horror movies that flourished in the Sixties, but most of her screen roles were as working-class characters. In two of her earliest films she was respectively a shop assistant in When the Bough Breaks (1947), and a sluggish waitress in Brighton Rock (1947).
Though she occasionally had lines to speak, many of her roles were wordless and uncredited, but she had some pithy roles in the Carry On films (nine of them) and she had a small, but striking, role in Lolita (1962), directed by her friend Stanley Kubrick and adapted from the controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Stone played Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of the author’s name), a mysterious lady who is seen dancing with the jaded writer Clare Quilty, played by Peter Sellers. (In the 2001 fantasy Donnie Darko, Maggie Gyllenhaal attends a fancy dress Halloween party as “Vivian Darkbloom”, Stone’s character.) For 50 years Stone was the wife of the film and theatre reporter, gossip columnist and bon vivant Peter Noble, and the parties they used to give at their rambling house in Abbey Road were legendary.
She was born Mary Stone in London in 1922, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she became friends with fellow student Richard Attenborough. From 1943 to 1945 she was part of the company performing at the Intimate Theatre in Palmers Green, where she won particular accolades for her performance as the cunning Cockney trollop Betty Watty in Emlyn Williams’ The Corn is Green. Noble was a young journalist who covered the Intimate’s productions for a local paper, and Stone began to notice that he always gave her favourable reviews, even when her part was minuscule. They began going out together, often joining the Attenboroughs at the Arts Theatre Club, and in 1947 they were wed. They had two daughters, Kara and Katrina, and the marriage lasted until Noble’s death in 1997.
In 1946 Stone appeared at the St James Theatre in two alternating plays in repertory produced by the actor-manager John Clements: John Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode (in which Moira Lister and Stone played sisters) and the premiere of Margaret Luce’s The Kingmaker, a biography of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the key protagonist in the Wars of the Roses. Stone then played Betty Watty again when The Corn is Green was staged at the New Theatre, Bromley, where the actor playing the young miner who is given the chance of a university education was played by the then little-known Bryan Forbes.
Throughout these years she was billed as Mary Stone, but as her career in films got underway she changed her first name to Marianne, though her friends still knew her as Mary Noble.
She made her screen debut in the Arthur Askey musical comedy Miss London Ltd. (1943) and her early roles included a factory girl in Miss Pilgrim’s Progress (1950), a “woman in a phone box” in the apocalyptic drama Seven Days to Noon (1950), and in 1954 she played barmaids in three films, You Know What Sailors Are, The Good Die Young and The Gay Dog. Her first foray into the Carry On franchise was in Carry on Nurse (1959), and her flair for comedy was particularly apparent in Carry On at Your Convenience (1971). She was typically a “woman in a scarf” in The Jokers (1967), and in Oh, What a Lovely War (1969), directed by Richard Attenborough, she was a mill girl. Her finest opportunity to display her prowess was probably as Lena Van Broecken in three episodes of the BBC television series Secret Army (1977/8). Her last film appearance was in the gothic tale set in the world of ballet, Deja Vu (1985).
At the parties she and Noble gave, it was quite likely that one would run into top stars, in London to make or promote a film, to appear on stage or just to visit. The Kubricks were good friends, and the family have three paintings by Christiane Kubrick that she gave to the Nobles. One of their regular guests remembers meeting Lana Turner and Sean Connery (the latter not yet a major star), who were filming Another Time, Another Place, and stars who could always be found at the Abbey Road dwelling when in town included such illustrious names as Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Roger Moore, Shelley Winters, Paul McCartney and Herbert Lom, who was the best man at their wedding.
Stone is survived by her two daughters and a grandson, Nicholas Frew.
……… Tom Vallance
“The Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
‘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
Shani Wallis was born in Tottenham, London in 1933. She was avery popular singer in he 1950’s who made a few films at the time including “A KIng in New York” and “The Extra Day”. Surprisingly in 1968 she won the coveted role of Nancy opposite Oliver Reed as Bill Sykes in the musical “Oliver” directed by Carol Reed. Despite the huge success of the film, it did not lead to major roles in film musicals and Shani Wallis since then has concentrated on the U.S. stage with occasional roles on television. She has lived in the U.S.A. for many years. Video interview from 2013 with Shani Wallis here.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
A popular musical name noted on film for one delightfully feisty Cockney lass, Shani Wallis was born in 1933 in Tottenham (North London), England, and initially studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on a scholarship. On stage from age 4 and performing in repertory as an early teen, she became one of the brighter young singing voices of her day. She made her West End musical debut at age 18 with “Call Me Madam” at the Coliseum in 1952, and immediately established herself in the role of Princess Maria, the leading ingénue. Following other starring roles in the mediocre musicals “Happy as a King” and “Wish You Were Here,” she scored again in “Wonderful Town” (1955) playing a comic soubrette, and as another spirited ingénue in “Finian’s Rainbow” (1958). In between were a number of musical revue shows. In 1960 she replaced Tony-winnerElizabeth Seal in the title role of “Irma La Douce” at London’s Lyric Theatre. After the show closed, few offers seemed to come her way so she decided to try her luck in America.
She went about rebuilding her name on the cabaret, concert and club circuits, and added more musical roles such as “South Pacific,” “The King and I” and “Bells Are Ringing” to her credits. She finally made it to Broadway in 1966, co-starring with the legendaryTessie O’Shea in “A Time For Singing,” a musical version of “How Green Was My Valley.” Backed by three strong numbers, she had a chance to shine in the Maureen O’Haracolleen role, but the show closed after a disappointing run of 41 performances.
A few inconsequential film roles had come her way earlier in England, including The Extra Day (1956) and Ramsbottom Rides Again (1956), not to mention a minor singing bit inCharles Chaplin‘s A King in New York (1957). Other than assorted variety show appearances and a televised performance supporting Carol Burnett in Once Upon a Mattress (1964), she found only a modicum of on-camera work. All the more astounding then when she nabbed the role of a lifetime as the ill-fated Nancy in the Oscar-winning picture Oliver! (1968). Successfully replacing the seemingly irreplaceable Georgia Brown, Shani made a durable marquee name for herself while giving her all in the rousing “Oom-pah Pah” number and putting her own indelible stamp on the show-stopping “As Long As He Needs Me,” now considered her signature song. Having never played the part before, she went on to perform Nancy on the theatre stage as well.
Shani was seen only sporadically in films following this breakthrough, including the horror opus Terror in the Wax Museum (1973), for the live stage was still her first love. Over the years she has gamely performed in a number of musical staples, including “42nd Street” and “Follies,” and toured with Liberace for five years during the 1980s. Lately she is a regular on the day-time soap The Young and the Restless (1973) as a nanny type. Long married to agent and former actor Bernard Rich, their daughter Rebecca Rich is a costume designer.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
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
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
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.”
