Susan Hampshire has had a long and steady career in British films and television. She was born in London in 1937. She appeared as a child actress in the film “The Woman in the Hall”. As a young adult she had small parts in “Expresso Bongo” and “Upstairs and Downstairs”. In 1961 she went to Hollywood to guest star in the popular TV series “Adventure in Paradise”. It did not lead to further offers in the U.S. and she returned to resume her career in Britain. She was Cliff Richard’s leading lady in “Wonderful Life”. She has had tremendous successful run in TV series in the UK. “The Forsyth saga”, “The First Churchills”, “The Pallisers”, “Yhe Grand”, “Monarch of the Glen” and “The Royal” have all starred Susan Hampshire and they span from 1967 to 2009. This is a very impressive feat. Her films include “The Fighting Prince of Donegal” and “Violent Enemy”. Susan Hampshire recalls her “This Is Your Life” here.
TCM Overview:
Best known to American audiences for her portrayal of sturdy upper crust Brits on public TV imports, Susan Hampshire was a celebrated British actress of stage, screen and TV, mostly in her native land. American audiences came to know her through such serials as “The Forsyte Saga” (PBS, 1969-70), in which she was Fleur, the stalwart member of a merchant family, “The First Churchills” (PBS, 1971), in which she was Sarah, the focused member of the Duke of Marlborough’s clan, and as Becky Sharpe in the TV rendition of “Vanity Fair” (PBS, 1972).
She won Emmy Awards for all three portrayals, and is also remembered as Agnes Wickfield in the “David Copperfield” adaptation shown on NBC in 1970. Additionally, Hampshire was the outspoken Glencora in “The Pallisers” (PBS, 1977), a series about a Victorian family with political leanings.
Hampshire’s work in feature films is less well-known to American audiences. After an appearance as a child in the British-made “The Woman in the Hall” (1947), she appeared in ingenue roles beginning with “Upstairs and Downstairs” (1959). She was the mother in “The Three Lives of Thomasina,” a 1963 Disney film about a girl in a Scottish village who heals animals through love. Her career transformed when she starred in Pierre Granier-Deferre’s “Paris in the Month of August/Paris au mois d’Aout” (1966), in which she appeared in a nude scene. Hampshire later married Granier-Deferre (they divorced in 1974). Her portrayal of African-based naturalist Joy Adamson in “Living Free” (1972), the sequel to “Born Free” in which Elsa the lion has died, received some notice in the States. Some of her other appearances in film, including her work in several French films are almost unknown to US audiences.
Hampshire’s work on stage in England began in the late 50s, and has included Shakespearean interpretations, from Rosalind in “As You Like It” to Katherina in “The Taming of the Shrew” (both at the Shaw Theatre). She played Peter Pan in a 1974 production of the classic musical as well. For most of the 80s, her performing career was virtually inactive. Hampshire devoted herself primarily to writing gardening and children’s’ books, including the “Lucy Jane” series. She authored “Susan’s Story” (1982), which recounted her struggle with dyslexia, and “The Maternal Instinct” (1985), about coping with her daughter’s fatal illness. Hampshire returned to the theatre in a 1990 production of “A Little Night Music” and was on stage at the Savoy Theatre in London in “Relative Values” (1993).
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:
Original Cinema 1-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters
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.
There was a time in ther sixties when it looked that Barbara Ferris was going to have a major film career. It di not happen to the level it should have but she did have the lead in three good movies. John Boorman cast her in “Catch Us If You Can” with the Dave Clark Five, “Interlude” with Oskar Werner and “A NIce Girl Like Me” in 1969. Since then she has worked regularly on the stage and television in the UK. Her “Wikipedia” page can be read here.
TCM Overview:
t the tender age of 16, Barbara Ferris began her entertainment career as an actress. Ferris kickstarted her acting career in various films such as the drama “Children of the D*mned” (1963) with Ian Hendry and the Laurence Olivier dramatic adaptation “Term of Trial” (1963). She was nominated for a BAFTA Award for “Having A Wild Weekend” in 1965. Ferris also brought characters to life with her vocal talents in the adaptation “Tom Thumb” (1958) with Russ Tamblyn.
She continued to work steadily in film throughout the sixties and the eighties, appearing in “Interlude” (1968) and “A Nice Girl Like Me” (1969). She also worked in television around this time, including a part on “The Strauss Family” (ABC, 1972-73). Film continued to be her passion as she played roles in “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and “A Chorus of Disapproval” (1989). Ferris more recently acted in “The Krays” (1990) with Billie Whitelaw.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
David Royle was born in 1961 in Salford, Manchester. He spent three years in the British army (Royal Artillery)before studying acting at the Drama Centre in London. He is best remembered for featuring in 29 episodes of “Dalziel & Pascoe”. The series was not the same since he left the show. Sadly David Royle died of MS in 2017. His IMDB page can be accessed here.
Googie Withers obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.
Googie Withers was one of the great stars of the Golden Age of British Cinema. She was born in 1917 in Karachi in now Pakistan. Her father was British and her mother Dutch. She acted on the London stage and made her film debut in 1935 in “The Girl in the Crowd”. She was one of Margaret Lockwood’s chums in “The Lady Vanishes”. Some of her best remembered films include “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing”,””Pink String and Ceiling Wax”, “It Always Rains On Sundays” and “Miranda”. She married the Australian actor John McCallum and went to live there with him. However they acted on the stage in Britain and were acting on Broadway when they were in their eighties. John McCallum died in 2010. Googie Withers died at the age of 94 in her home in Sydney, Australia in July 2011.
“Guardian” obituary:
Dead Of Night, poster, bottom left from left: Ralph Michael, Googie Withers, right top to bottom: Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, 1945. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers’s striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. A bored wife, she gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, played by John McCallum, soon to be her real-life husband. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards.
What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped, she acquired great skill at playing wives in various states of dissatisfaction because of the implied sexual shortcomings of their husbands.
She was especially effective as the not entirely unsympathetic wife of a judge in the stage version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952). “Respectable” but emotionally unsatisfied, she throws herself at a weak and irresponsible ex-RAF wonderboy.
Another Rattigan creation that might have gone to Withers was the part of the wife of the dried-up and professionally despised schoolmaster in the film of The Browning Version (1951). In the event, Jean Kent provided one of the most harrowing moments to that date in British cinema when she tried to destroy her husband’s remaining hopes with such vicious hatred that the scene was often booed and hissed in 1950s cinemas. Withers, while making the cause of the wife’s frustration just as plainly sexual, might well have conveyed a certain residual warmth and humanity that would have transformed melodrama into drama.
Withers was a loss to the British stage and screen when she followed her husband to his native Australia in the late 1950s. They had married in 1948, and had two daughters, Joanna and Amanda, and a son, Nicholas. From 1955 onwards, she alternated between productions in the southern and northern hemispheres, including Broadway. But while her touring work focused more on Australia and New Zealand, she still made the first three seasons of a British TV series, Within These Walls (1974-75), as the governor of a women’s prison, which provided her biggest national and international audience.
Georgette Lizette Withers was born in Karachi, in pre-partition India, to a British naval captain who hated the thought of his daughter going on the stage and a Dutch mother who quietly encouraged her. The captain, who tried to run a Birmingham foundry after leaving the Royal Navy through poor health, was a high-handed man who clashed with fellow directors whom he openly despised, and lost his job. His daughter inherited his imperious inability to keep his opinions to himself, but in her case it was softened by her feminine humour.
At 12, while a boarder at Fredville Park private school near Dover, she took dancing lessons, initially to straighten bandy legs. At the same age she made her first professional appearance, in the chorus of a children’s show at the Victoria Palace, London. She persuaded her parents to send her to the Italia Conti school after she had worked her normal school day at the Convent of the Holy Family in Kensington.
A fall during dancing class permanently weakened an arm and indicated a less arduous form of dancing. She did cabaret in Midnight Follies at the Mayfair hotel and the Kit Kat Club. At 16 she was the youngest member of the chorus of Nice Goings On and was soon appearing in other popular musicals.
From 1935 onwards, she appeared in more than 60 films and television productions, including some of the finest movies of their time: One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), They Came to a City (1944, from the JB Priestley novel); Miranda (1948), in which Glynis Johns played the mermaid and Withers the all-too-normal woman; and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), with Richard Widmark.
On the stage she was a beguiling Beatrice in Stratford-upon-Avon’s production of Much Ado About Nothing (1958), and though her move to Australia often brought her under the umbrella of her husband’s theatre management, she continued to play in adventurous work in Britain, including Ionesco’s Exit the King for the Edinburgh Festival and the Royal Court theatre. A production of Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the Chichester Festival theatre in 1976 was so successful that it went to the West End, Canada and on tour in Britain. Withers’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1979) at Chichester managed to step out of the shadow of Edith Evans’s high-camp shadow without losing impact.
In the 1970s, when traditional leading ladies were less in demand, Withers’s career became more variable. In 1971 she starred in a film produced and directed by her husband, and featuring her daughter Joanna, called Nickel Queen, otherwise known as Ghost Town Millionairess, an examination of socialites and riff-raff in an Australian town dominated by nickel production. It was not well received, one comment being that it was an appalling bit of Australiana that made Barry Humphries’s film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) look like a refreshing can of Foster’s.
The role of Faye Boswell in Within These Walls three years later proved to be a sounder vehicle. Giving her formidability a greyer hue, Withers played a prison governor striving to be, as well as a disciplinarian, as sensitive as possible to the problems of the prisoners. The series led to further successes in the 1980s, when on television she appeared in distinguished productions including adaptations of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up.
She continued to be active in the 1990s, appearing in two highly praised films. Country Life (1994), directed by Michael Blakemore, was a version of Uncle Vanya set in Australia in 1919, showing what was on the collective mind of one part of the British Empire as Chekhov had shown what was on the minds of a fading Russian social class.
Shine (1996) was based on the career of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, beset by struggles against family pressures and mental instability. His real-life interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto was used in the film and became a controversial attraction in the concert hall. Withers played the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, who helped Helfgott in his ambition to get away from his possessive father and to London for his higher musical training, but died before she could enjoy his success.
Withers was a great trouper of the old school who, coming back to England in 1967 to play the forceful mayoress in Shaw’s Getting Married, found the country “changed and lacking in energy”. The woman who was once called “the best bad girl in British films” was always prepared to help make up any deficiency in that respect. At 85 she was still commanding attention on the West End stage, in Lady Windermere’s Fan.
In 1980 she was appointed AO, and in 2001 CBE. Her husband died last year, and she is survived by her children.
• Googie (Georgette Lizette) Withers, actor, born 12 March 1917; died 15 July 2011
The “Guardian” obituary on Ms Withers can also be accessed here.
Anita Harris had a neat reputation as a ballad singer when she also began an acting career on film. She was born in Somerset in 1942. She was part of the Cliff Adam Singers and made several television appearances on British television with the group. She then began a solo singing career and in 1967 has a massive hit with “Just Loving You”. In thelate sixties she became part of the “Carry On” group and starred in “Follow that Camel” and “Carry On Again Doctor”. She still continues to appear on stage and concert halls in Britain. Interview with “Express Newspapers” can be read here.
Anita Harris. Wikipedia.
Anita Harris was born in 1942 and is an English actress, singer and entertainer.
Harris was born in Somerset; her family moved from Midsomer Norton to Bournemouthwhen she was seven. She won a talent contest at the age of three. However, it was her penchant for figure skating which led to her performing career, she began skating at the neighbourhood rink, eventually becoming a regular at the Queens Ice Rink in London. Seen by a talent scout shortly before her sixteenth birthday, she was offered a chance to skate in Paris or to travel to Las Vegas where she would be a dancer in a chorus line. She accepted the latter, danced at the El Rancho Hotel in Las Vegas. We did three shows a night and on the 12th night, we had the night off”, she said years later.
On returning to the UK, she performed in a vocal group known as the Grenadiers and then spent three years with the Cliff Adams Singers.She was still in her teens when John Barry’s manager, Tony Lewis, offered her a recording contract by EMI and made her first recordings with the John Barry Seven — a group which was a successful chart act. This first single, a double A-side of “I Haven’t Got You”, written by Lionel Bart and “Mr One and Only”, did not reach the charts.
Subsequent to their meeting, when they both auditioned for a musical revue, Mike Margolis and Harris formed a personal and professional relationship marrying in 1973. He became her manager and wrote the songs which served as her second and third singles: “Lies”/”Don’t Think About Love”(Vocalion, September 1964) and “Willingly”/”At Last Love” (Decca, February 1965).
In January 1965 she performed at the San Remo Music Festival. Her duet with Beppe Cardile, “L’amore è partito”, failed to reach the finals but even to participate in such a star-studded event augured well for her stardom. She made her label debut for Pye Records with the May 1965 release “Trains and Boats and Planes“, although rival versions by both the song’s composer Burt Bacharach (with vocals by the Breakaways) and Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas eclipsed her recording. She had four subsequent releases on Pye, including the only evident recording of the Burt Bacharach/ Hal David composition “London Life”.
In 1966, she moved to CBS Records where her debut release was also her debut album: Somebody’s in My Orchard. Her chart breakthrough came in the summer of 1967 with the single “Just Loving You“, a Tom Springfield composition which singer Dusty Springfield had suggested that Tom (her brother) give to Harris after Dusty and Harris had performed on the same episode of Top of the Pops.
Recorded at Olympic Studios in a session produced by Margolis and featuring harmonica virtuoso Harry Pitch, Just Loving You” had been released in January 1967 but did not reach the UK Top 50 until 29 June 1967.[10] Even after peaking at No. 6 on 26 August 1967 “Just Loving You” remained in the UK Top 40 until the end of the year, and was reported to have accumulated UK sales of 625,000 in six months. Besides charting at No. 18 in Ireland, “Just Loving You” was a Top Ten hit in South Africa where sales reached 200,000 copies. The disc was released in September 1967 in the United States where it rose to No. 20 on the “Easy Listening” chart in Billboard and approached the mainstream Pop “Hot 100” chart. It rose no higher than No. 120 on the “Bubbling Under” chart. In January 1968 Harris made her only appearance on the UK album chart when her Just Loving You album reached No. 29.
The sustained interest in “Just Loving You” predicated a mild chart impact for her follow-up single “The Playground”, released in September 1967. This reached its chart peak of No. 46 by 28 October 1967, the same week “Just Loving You” (which had dropped out of the Top 20 at No. 21) returned to the Top 20 for three more weeks. However she did score a substantial hit with her 5 January 1968 release, a remake of the standard “Anniversary Waltz“, which spent eight weeks in the UK Top 40, peaking at No. 21.
After just missing the UK Top 50 with the single “We’re Going on a Tuppenny Bus Ride” (released 17 May 1968), she made her final chart appearance with her rendition of “Dream a Little Dream of Me“. Released on 26 July 1968, her single version peaked in the UK Top 50 at No. 33,[10] whilst the Mama Cass Elliot version peaked at No. 11.
A third album, Cuddly Toy, was released in 1969.
Since 1961 she has made numerous television appearances, mostly as a performer, occasionally as an actress, and her few film roles included a cameo as a casino singer in Death Is a Woman (1966) and co-starring roles in the comedy films Follow That Camel (1967) and Carry On Doctor (1968). Harris gained her role in the latter film while working in a revue Way Out in Piccadilly with Frankie Howerd. Backstage, he introduced her to the producer and director of the series resulting in the decision to cast Harris as well as Howerd.[2][4] In December 1970, Thames Television debuted the children’s TV series Jumbleland which she co-produced and in which she starred as Witch Witt Witty.
In 2014, Harris appeared in a lead guest role in the prime-time BBC drama, Casualty . She continues to perform with her band around the country, including at the Royal Albert Hall, London. She performed in pantomime over Christmas 2014-15 by appearing as the wicked Baroness in a production of Cinderella at the Grand Opera House in York. “I’ve played Aladdin, Jack and Dick Whittington and Robinson Crusoe. I’ve loved playing principal boy and I’m sorry that boys are now playing that role”, she told a York press meeting at the time.
On 12 January 2015, The Mail on Sunday reported that Anita Harris and her husband and manager Mike Margolis were, or were about to be, declared bankrupt by HM Revenue and Customs over historic tax arrears of £14,000 and £25,000 respectively.[13] The bankruptcy order of 11 August 2014 was annulled when an IVA was approved on 27 May 2015.
Anita Harris
During 2016, Harris toured with her show across the UK, An Evening with Anita Harris. With musical accompaniment, she revealed anecdotes from her life in showbusiness, the people she has met and the places she has been. She appeared in ITV‘s Last Laugh in Vegas, and was a contestant in the BBC‘s Celebrity MasterChef 2018.
In 2019, Harris guest starred in the first episode of Series 20 of Midsomer Murders’ entitled “The Ghost of Causton Abbey” as Irene Taylor, an accomplice to the killer.
She will guest star as a medium in an episode of EastEnders which is due to be aired in August 2019.
Anita will be starring in the UK Tour of Cabaret, alongside John Partridge from August 2019 to early 2020.
Ben Daniels was born in 1964 in Nuneaton, England. On TV he has appeared in plays such as “The Lost Language of Cranes” and in the TV series “Cutting It” and “Law & Order UK”. On film he has been in “Beautiful Thing” and “I Want You”. Website on Ben Daniels can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
Ben Daniels first became enamored with acting when he took drama lessons in comprehensive school. After graduating, his love for the craft led him to carry on studying at the well-respected London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. When he finished there, he found success on various stages around the United Kingdom. His portrayal of a murderer in the production of “Never the Sinner” earned him a nomination for a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor, boosting his theater career even further. He first appeared on screen with a role as a policeman in the dramatic comedy film “Wish You Were Here.” From there, he began to make his mark on television with a string of appearances. He could be seen in such productions as the 1988 TV movie “Freedom Fighter,” the military drama “Soldier Soldier” in 1992, and playing Mercutio in the 1994 TV movie production of “Romeo & Juliet.” His first recurring role came in 1994 in the short-lived comedy series “Outside Edge.” It was his performance from 2002 to 2004, however, in the lauded drama “Cutting It,” playing Finn Bevan, the ex-husband and business rival of a hair salon owner, that exposed him to a wider audience. He went on to have recurring roles in many other productions, such as crime drama “Law & Order: UK,” the mini-series “The Passion,” and the war thriller “The Sate Within.” Some of his other films include 2002’s drama “Fogbound,” 2005’s action film “Doom,” and the fantasy drama “Luna.”
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Barbara Shelley is an English actress best known for her roles in many of the Hammer horror films of the 1960’s. She was born in London in 1933. Her film career began in Italian movies in the mid 1950’s. She then gained smal parts in international films like “The Little Hut” with Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger in 1957. Among her notable fims we must mention “Dracula, Prince of Darkness”, “The Gorgon”, “Rasputin the Mad Monk” and “The Camp at Blood Island”. She has now retired from acting. Interview with Barbara Shelley in “Express Newpapers” can be read here.
Barbara Shelley obituary: Actor who traumatised and tantalised
Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 00:26
Barbara Shelley and Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), which ‘traumatised and tantalised’ generations of viewers. Photograph: Everett/Rex
Barbara Shelley (Barbara Kowin)
Born: February 13th, 1932
Died: January 4th, 2021
During the heyday of Hammer, the Berkshire-based film production company that transformed the horror genre, there were few surer signs of a film’s integrity than Barbara Shelley’s name in the credits. The copper-haired Shelley, who has died aged 88 after contracting Covid-19, brought elegance and conviction to her work. She possessed a grounded, rational quality that instantly conferred gravitas on whatever lunatic occurrences were unfolding around her.
In Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), she gave a deft two-sided performance as the straitlaced Helen, who becomes a ravenous bloodsucker after being taken under the bat-wing of the Count, played by Christopher Lee. When next we meet her in his Karlsbad castle, she assures a stricken friend that “nothing’s wrong”, only for her lips to part to reveal tiny pointed fangs.
Generations of viewers were traumatised and tantalised by that scene, as well as a later one in which Helen taps on her friend’s window in the middle of the night. “Please let me in,” she pleads. “It’s cold out here. So cold. Everything’s all right now.” Shelley makes the appeal sound so reasonable that any one of us would surely have unfastened the latch.
She should be much bigger than she is, but I don’t think she really cares whether she is a star or not. She can act, God, she can act!
Helen’s eventual demise, held down on a table by monks as a stake is driven into her heart, was physically demanding on Shelley, who suffered from chronic back pain. Nevertheless, she was proud of that scene. “There’s absolute evil in there when she’s struggling,” she told Mark Gatiss in his 2010 documentary series A History of Horror, “and then suddenly she’s staked.
She also recounted how she and Lee, who prided themselves on being “un-corpseable”, would compete to make one another laugh during takes.
For Quatermass and the Pit (1967), her last of eight films for Hammer, Shelley was part of a team of scientists investigating an alien spacecraft found during an expansion of London’s underground transport system. She kept her cool while decomposing aliens were disinterred from the tunnels and ferried past her, dripping with green goo. When she fell under the electro-magnetic spell of the spacecraft, her body convulsing as images of alien life were fed into her brain, she made the ordeal look painfully believable.
Shelley named the picture’s director, Roy Ward Baker, as her favourite of all the film-makers she had worked with. He, in turn, told Bizarre magazine in 1974 that he was “mad” about her. “Mad in the sense of love,” he said. “We used to waltz about the set together, a great love affair. It puzzles me about her. She should be much bigger than she is, but I don’t think she really cares whether she is a star or not. She can act, God, she can act!”
Italy
She was born Barbara Kowin in London. She worked as a model but found that precluded casting directors from taking her seriously, despite her theatrical training. A fleeting role in the Hammer whodunit Mantrap (1953) came her way but she enjoyed better luck in Italy, where she worked as both model and actor after being discovered by the Italian comic Walter Chiari while on holiday in Rome.
Returning to the UK four years later, Shelley was put under contract by British Lion and cast in Cat Girl (1957), an unofficial remake of Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People. To prevent too much of her body being shown during nude scenes, she wrote “STOP” on her chest. She also refused to appear topless in Blood of the Vampire (1958), in which she was menaced by Sir Donald Wolfit, and threatened to sue the studio if it went ahead with a body double.https://8d2c73e993bd21e28fd0c48fbcdc9094.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
She had no issue, however, with a revealing seduction scene in Rasputin, The Mad Monk (1966). “That scene was in the script when I read it,” she told Fangoria magazine in 2010. “The scenes I refused to do were when they suddenly would say to me, ‘Oh, you take your clothes off here’. The answer to that was always no.”
In Village of the Damned (1960), adapted from John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, she was heartbreaking as a woman who gives birth to one of a breed of malevolent telepathic children. For one of her first woman-turned-monster roles, in The Gorgon (1964), she offered to have snakes draped over her. “I wouldn’t need any makeup,” she told the studio, “just a green face and the headdress of real snakes.”
Surprised enough when her proposal was rejected, and another actor (Prudence Hyman) cast as the monster into which her character transformed, she was positively crestfallen when she saw what the effects department produced instead. “They came up with these terrible sorts of rubber snakes dancing around, and it just looked awful. It wasn’t frightening at all.” She called it “probably the biggest regret I’ve had in any film I ever made” though she admired the look of the picture, noting that “every shot . . . resembles a Rembrandt painting”.
Her numerous television appearances included roles in The Man from UNCLE (1965), Crown Court (1972), Z Cars (1973), Doctor Who (1984) and EastEnders (1988). She was also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1975 and 1977.
Shelley claimed not to have grasped the reach of her horror movies until she began attending fan conventions. “I realised that my work had been appreciated and that I had – through those horror films – actually reached a far bigger audience than I would ever have done if I’d stuck to the theatre.”https://8d2c73e993bd21e28fd0c48fbcdc9094.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Any irritation she felt stemmed from the emphasis placed on the sexual component of her films. “I had one or two dissertations on horror sent to me by students, and all the discussion ever seems to be concerned with is exploitation and the licking of blood and a scene of people making love, and it’s not right. It annoys me intensely, because my career was not built on exploitation and sex. It was built on working very hard.”
She retired from acting in 1988. Though she never got around to writing her autobiography, she had a title in mind: What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Film Like This? – Guardian
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
The sexy lady subsequently dubbed “The First Leading Lady of British Horror” was born Barbara Kowin in 1933 in London, England. With her beautiful looks and stature, she worked as a model during her salad days. Her film career began in Italy in the mid-1950s in such tempting fare as New Moon (1955) [New Moon] and Nero’s Mistress (1956) [Nero’s Mistress], but when it seemed like she was going to remain in the minor ranks, she returned to England to try to better her career. After appearing in the minor sex farceThe Little Hut (1957) with Stewart Granger, David Niven and Ava Gardner
Barbara Shelley & Martin Stephens
, Barbara caught a bit of film notoriety in the title role of Cat Girl (1957), a low budget production in which she played a woman possessed by a family curse who develops psychic links with a leopard. This paid off and she quickly evolved into a popular Gothic glamour woman at Hammer Studios. Starting things off with The Camp on Blood Island (1958) and Blood of the Vampire (1958), the lovely actress proceeded to stake out her own lucrative territory in the horror genres. Throughout the 1960s she co-starred in the classic Village of the Damned (1960), along with The Shadow of the Cat (1961), The Gorgon (1964), The Secret of Blood Island (1964) (which was the sequel to her aforementioned Camp on Blood Island), Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966) andFive Million Years to Earth (1967). By the late 60s, however, Barbara’s film career had fallen aside and she turned to TV. Retired now, she has pursued interior decorating in recent years. Whether playing female monsters or their intended victims, Barbara played it straight and handled it all with requisite style and grace. For this, she is now occasionally seen by film fans at conventions as an integral figure of camp horror history.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Kitty McShane was part of the famous British double bill “Old Mother Riley and her daughter Kitty”. She was born in Dublin 1897. She was the fourth of seventeen children. In 1913 she married Arthur Lucan (Old Mother Riley). They became a popular music hall act. They began making films together in 1937 with”Old Mother Riley”. Together they made 13 Mother Riley films together. Their off-screen fights were legendary. Kitty McShane did not appear in the final Mother Riley film. Kitty McShane died in 1964. Radio recording of Arthur Lucan & Kitty McShane can be heard here. Very good article on Arthur Lucan & Kitty McShane can be accessed here on the Britmovie website.
