Brittish Actors
Jake Wood was born in 1972 in London. His first film role was in the 1985 film “Flesh and Blood”. He appeared in many television shows including “A Touch of Frost”, “Doc Martin” and “The Bill”. He is currently featuring as Max Branning in “Eastenders”. Interview on “Youtube” on “This Morning” here.
Helen Fraser was born in 1942 in Olham, Lancashire. She trained at RADAw with Tom Courtney and John Thaw. She starred in “Billy Liar” with Tom Courtney and Julie Christie in 1963. Over 40 years later she starred with Tom Courtney again as the parents of dozy Dave in a Christmas special of “The Royle Family”. She starred in “Bad Girls” from 1999 to 2006.
Interview with Helen Fraser on EADT24:
She’s been touring in Calendar Girls, played the villain in panto, played Timothy West’s widow in Coronation Street – and moved house.
When I arrive at her new home in Eye, she apologises for the way the house looks. It looks fine to me but she explains: “I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to sort things out properly. I’ve been here for months but what with Calendar Girls and Corrie I haven’t been home long enough to put things where I want them. Everything is still pretty much where the removal men left them.”
With a busy summer looming, it doesn’t look as if she will have much time to do anything to her new home before September.
At the moment the actress, who is best known for her role as tough prison warden Sylvia “Bodybag” Hollamby in Bad Girls, is dividing her time between preparing for her new one-woman show An Evening with Helen Fraser, which is touring over the summer, and promoting the restored re-release of Billy Liar, which has just been issued on Blu-Ray.
Her one-woman show will be weaving its way round Suffolk: it’s being staged in Aldeburgh by Alys Kihl’s Wonderful Beast company; Helen is then taking it to the Woolpit Festival, where she is patron, Diss Corn Hall, The Cut at Halesworth and ending up at the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, in the autumn.
“It’s crazy; life’s never been busier,” she says, putting down the phone from her agent, who has just rung to inquire how the interview with London newspaper Metro went the other day.
“They wanted to know what my five favourite films were. I was talking to this lovely person on the other end of the phone but he must have been very young because he didn’t seem to know anything I was talking about.”
Apart from Billy Liar – which occupies a special place in her heart not just because it’s a classic British film but because it was the film where she met her late husband, Oscar-winning soundman Peter Handford – her favourite film is Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, with Moira Shearer.
“This reporter on the other end hadn’t heard of it and was amazed I had chosen it. He asked me to explain when it was made and what it was about. There’s no reason, I suppose, why he should have heard of it. It’s fairly old but it’s not an obscure film and is frequently in top-10 film lists.
“For me it was a perfect film. As a young girl, growing up with dreams of being a ballet dancer, I could see my future up on the screen.”
Sadly the dreams Helen shared with her mother of becoming a star in the Festival Ballet were not to be.
“I had a Gypsy Rose Lee mother who was determined I was going on the stage. So I was sent to stage school at a fairly young age. I was a little show-off and she was determined I was going to make it as a dancer and get away from Oldham, where I was born and brought up.”
Helen spent her formative years at the Arts Educational School at Tring in Hertfordshire. “I remember telling everyone that my name was Victoria because I hated the name Helen. It’s funny what you remember.
“Putting my one-woman show together has triggered all sorts of memories and it takes me and the audience on a journey through my life. People say to me: ‘When did you know you wanted to be an actress? When did it all start?’ And if truth be told I had no choice in the matter. At the age of nine I was a boarder at the Arts Educational School at Tring.”
If Helen had a pushy mother, then Mum had an ally in Helen herself. Fired up with those images of Moira Shearer dancing like a woman possessed in The Red Shoes, Helen wanted a life on the stage almost as much as her mother wanted it for her.
But a dancer’s life was not for her. “In those days it was all very strict. You were measured and weighed; tested for suppleness; but I knew I wasn’t going to be a dancer.
“I wasn’t very supple and if I am honest I was a little podge. Coming from Oldham, suddenly let loose in the Hertfordshire countryside, all that fresh air, I developed an appetite. So they put me on the drama course and it was the best thing that they could have done. It was the era of the Rank Charm School. They liked to get you young. I got my Equity card at 15.
“I have been very fortunate. Apart from my two years at RADA, where I trained with John Thaw, John Hurt and Edward Fox, I haven’t done anything but work. I look back now and I think ‘How and why was I so lucky?’
“One of the things about satellite television, on channels like Gold they show all these old situation comedies and I keep popping up. I find myself thinking: ‘How many did I do?’ On The Buses, Doctor At Large, Man About The House, Rising Damp, they keep coming up.”
Helen Fraser first came to public attention in the mid-60s, when she played Tom Courtenay’s long-suffering girlfriend, Barbara, in John Schlesinger’s classic Billy Liar.
“I have lots of very fond memories of Billy Liar. It was a wonderful film and we were all so young, Tom, Julie Christie and myself. It really captured the spirit of the age.” But there are also personal memories as well as professional ones. It was on Billy Liar that Helen fell in love with the film’s sound-recordist, Peter Handford.
Peter had already worked with Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean, and was then making a name for himself as a specialist in the tricky business of location sound. He had already worked on other such ground-breaking movies as The Room At The Top; Saturday Night, Sunday Morning; The Entertainer and Tom Jones.
“It was one of those things that just happened. We were shooting the scene in the cemetery and it was the coldest day of the year. I was absolutely freezing and Peter, ever the gentleman, loaned me his coat in between takes. It was as simple as that. We both just fell for each other.
“We had a lot in common. We went to the ballet, theatre and the cinema together. He was very much in demand and was one of the key people in that English New Wave cinema pioneered by people like Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger.”
Helen is delighted that Billy Liar, what she calls their special film, is now being given a new lease of life on Blu-Ray.
The camera negatives and Peter’s sound have been cleaned up and it now looks as good as it did when it was premiered in 1963.
Another favourite of her late husband’s works is The Go-Between, made by Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter.
“That was another very special film. That was one of the first jobs he did after we moved to Suffolk. He was thrilled because they were shooting around Norwich and south Norfolk, and it meant that he could stay at home. Unfortunately, though, his car broke down and I remember having to drive him to all these different locations each day.
“This was long before sat nav – long before personal computers. It provided me with a crash course in the country roads of Suffolk. I got to know my way around very quickly.”
More recently, Helen firmly lodged herself in the nation’s consciousness as the mean-spirited Bodybag in Bad Girls, which ran for nine years.
It’s a role Helen loved, as she believes the villains are always the best parts – or at least more interesting characters to play.
The series also provided her with an unexpected opportunity to fulfil a personal ambition. “I had always wanted to be in a West End musical and it turned out that after the series finished there was such a lot of support for it that it was transformed into a musical.
“At first we didn’t think it would go into London because there wasn’t a theatre available, but then the Garrick became free and we were away. I even got a big showstopper number and a ballroom dance sequence, which was lovely.”
These stories and others like them form the backbone to her show, which is interspersed with songs from her previous show about the music hall star Vesta Victoria. She is accompanied by pianist Keith Monk, someone she discovered during her Christmas break at The White Lion.
He was playing during Christmas evening in the bar. “He played a couple of requests for New York, New York and Moon River right off the cuff and when he said he came from Ipswich I saw the stars aligning.
“I rather nervously asked whether he would be interested in accompanying me in my one-woman shows and he said he would be delighted – and he is absolutely brilliant.”
She has added some songs to the evening to provide some variation. “It would be too much if it was just the spoken word all evening. So I have put in a couple of my favourite Vesta Victoria songs from my previous show and then I do Adelaide’s Lament from Guys and Dolls – it’s my favourite number from that show.”
This year has already been extraordinarily busy for someone who is wanting to calm things down a bit.
The tail end of last year saw Helen on a 16-week tour with Calendar Girls which finished just before Christmas in Dundee. With just a brief pause to book herself into a hotel with friends for Christmas, the New Year then arrived, with an offer of a juicy guest role on Coronation Street – an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“I wasn’t really looking for anything at that point but my agent rings and says they want you for Coronation Street. The icing on the cake was that my scenes were with Sue Johnston, who I knew from my guest role on The Royale Family.
“Her character had been going out with Timothy West, who had just died, and she knew he had a bit of money because he was in vinyl flooring.
“The solicitor tells her he wants to meet her in The Rover’s Return and she thinks she’s come into some money. However, when he arrives, he says: ‘Sorry I’m late; I had to pick up Doris,’ and steps aside and I’m standing there.
“She says: ‘Are you a relative?’ I just smile and say: ‘You could say that, luv. I’m his wife.’ It was a lovely scene to do. It is what Coronation Street does so well and it was lovely for me because I got such wonderful feedback from being on it.”
Helen has enough stories to fill several evenings and has had a long history with Suffolk, having moved here in 1969. She has worked at the Wolsey and Colchester Mercury theatres, and the old Eye Theatre.
So, being an experienced actress who has shepherded many young hopefuls into the profession in Bad Girls, does she have a heroine or a role model? “Oh, I love Judi Dench. I have always admired her, but I saw Skyfall the other day and she is just amazing. The expressions on her face were wonderful. You’re used to her being bossy and in charge, but her reactions when she was trapped and frightened were incredible. What goes across her face is just indescribable – you get waves of fleeting thoughts and emotions. She’s brilliant.”
An Evening With Helen Fraser is at The Woolpit Festival on June 9; The Cut, Halesworth, on July 21; Diss Corn Hall, July 28 and at the New Wolsey Theatre on Saturday October 26.
The article can also be accessed online on the EADT24 website here.
Jean Marsh was born in London in 1934. She started her acting career on the stage. Her first film was “The Limping Man” in 1953. Throughout the 50’s and 60′ she guest starred in many of the television series of the day. In 1959 she went to Hollywood where she woked on television including an episode of “The Twilight Zone”. In 1971 she and her friend Eileen Atkins originated the concept for a television series based on the experiences of their parents who had worked in service in some of the garnd houses in England. Thus “Upstairs, Downstairs” was born. The series was hughely successful both in Britain and in the U.S. Jean Marsh played Rose the upstairs parlor maidn who eventually became the ladies maid. The series ran until 1974. hen then went to the U.S. where she acted in films and television in Hollywood and on the stage on Broadway. She returned to Britain to make the film “Willow”. jean Marsh is also a published novelist.
TCM Overview:
A genuine class act, Jean Marsh won raves in her native England and on American soil for taking on nuanced roles onscreen. The Emmy Award-winning actress first made her mark in British productions, from Shakespearean stage revivals, to sci-fi epics, to costume dramas. However, it was Marshâ¿¿s breakout performance on “Upstairs, Downstairs” (ITV, 1971-75), a period drama series she also created, that earned the actress favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Her role as a prim and proper housemaid to an aristocratic British family won Marsh an Emmy in 1975, establishing her presence in Hollywood. She parlayed her success on British television into big screen projects, often playing the villain in feature films such as “Return to Oz” (1985) and “Willow” (1985). In 2010, Marsh starred on the three-part revival of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” which garnered more critical praise and gave her the opportunity to reprise one of the best characters in her long revered career.
Jean Lyndsay Torren Marsh was born on July 1, 1934 in the Stoke Newington district in London, England. Her father was a printerâ¿¿s assistant and maintenance man, while her mother worked as a dresser for the theater and also tended a bar. Marsh studied acting and mime as a child before taking her first steps in the entertainment business as a cabaret singer, model and dancer. She first graced the Broadway stage in a 1950s production of “Much Ado About Nothing” with acclaimed British actor, director and producer John Gielgud. Marsh made her onscreen acting debut in the made-for-television movie “The Infinite Shoeblack” (BBC, 1952).
The actressâ¿¿ early career consisted of several appearances on television, from playing a female robot in an episode of “The Twilight Zone” (CBS, 1959-1964), to appearing on “Walt Disneyâ¿¿s Wonderful World of Color” (ABC, 1954-1961; NBC, 1961-1981; CBS, 1981-83; ABC, 1986-88; NBC, 1988-1990) and “I Spy” (NBC, 1965-68). Yet it was on British television where Marsh established her career with recurring roles on the original installment of the long-running science fiction drama “Doctor Who” (BBC, 1963-1989). She first appeared on the series in 1965 as a medieval crusader and continued to guest star until 1989.
In 1971, Marsh and fellow British actress Eileen Atkins created the drama series “Upstairs, Downstairs” about a wealthy family living in London and the housemaids who served them. Marsh played Rose Buck, the head parlor maid of an aristocratic household. Playing the prim and proper servant earned the actress an Emmy Award in 1975 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, a category she was also nominated for in 1974 and 1976. Additionally, she was nominated twice (1975 and 1977) for her work on “Upstairs, Downstairs” in the Best TV Actress
Drama category at the Golden Globe Awards. After several guest appearances on American television, Marsh landed a supporting role on the short-lived comedy series “Nine to Five” (ABC, 1982-83). Based on the 1980 film of the same name, “Nine to Five” followed three friends (Rachel Dennison, Valerie Curtin and Sally Struthers) as they navigated their careers, friendship, and love lives in the corporate world.
Marsh further enthralled audiences by playing a villain in feature films, including the wicked witch Mombi in “Return to Oz” and the evil sorceress Queen Bavmorda in “Willow.” Twenty years after “Upstairs, Downstairs” premiered, Marsh and Atkins reteamed to create “The House of Eliott,” about two dressmaking sisters living in 1920s London. Both Marsh and Atkins, however, did not act on the show. Marsh easily slipped back into a villainous character with a recurring role on the young adult series “The Tomorrow People” (ITV, 1992-95) as a mysterious and sinister doctor. The actress returned to her theater roots in 2007 with the West End revival of “Boeing-Boeing” (1960), about a Parisian architect juggling three fiancées. Marsh reprised her acclaimed role of Rose on the 2010 revival of “Upstairs, Downstairs.” The three-part series began with her character running her own maid service in London, but only to return as head housekeeper to the same house where she previously served, after discovering a new family had moved in. Marshâ¿¿s return to “Upstairs, Downstairs” earned her a 2011 Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Leading Actress in a Mini-series or Movie.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Hermione Baddeley was born in 1906 in Shropshire. Her older sister was the actress Angela Baddeley. She appeared in many British films throughout the 1940’s and 50’s including “Brighton Rock” and”Room at the Top” for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She then went to Hollywood and acted in such films as “Midnight Lace”, “Mary Poppins”, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and “THe Happiest Millionaire”, In the 1970’s she scored as the housekeeper in the comedy series “Maude” at the same time as her sister was starring in Britain as Mrs Bridges in “Upstairs, Downstairs”.
Her obituary in “The Times”:
Mistress of revue who never lost talent for straight acting
Hermione Baddeley, actress, who died on August 19 at the age of 79, began her career as a girl of precocious dramatic power, in her early teens, and went on to be an unexampled artist in the flowering intimate revue. There, she was irrepressible, with a virtuosity never richer than in the Herbert Farjeon productions at the Little Theatre during the late 1930s.
She knew everything about rapid make-up and the use of properties. Though she held to the Farjeon texts, in later years she could be unpredictable. A partner, Henry Kendall, recalled that again and again he had to stand shaking with laughter, his back to the audience, hoping for some cue that would return him to the script. Though she often acted in films, Hermione Baddeley was happiest in the theatre, developing from what Basil Dean described as a small child, dark and thin, with large eyes set in an impish face, to the ample and exuberant “Totie”, rarely the same in consecutive scenes. Yet, mistress of revue though she was, and in her heyday so socially fashionable that someone adapted to her Kipling’s line, “I am Town; I am all that ever went with evening dress,” she longed to become again the straight actress that she was originally.
Born in Shropshire on November 13, 1906, youngest of four sisters – of whom her immediate senior was the very successful actress, Angela Baddeley – she was educated privately and at an early age joined the Margaret Morris School of Dancing. Then she travelled for three years with the Arts League of Service She had a few small parts in Lndon before her overwhelming success under Basil Dean’s management, as the disorderly slum waif in Charles McEvoy’s “The Likes of ‘er” (1923). In this she had the celebrated scene where, as a curative exercise, the girl is encouraged to smash apile of china plates. Presently for Dean, also at the St Martin’s(1924), she was the murderous young half-caste in Galsworthy’s “The Forest”. When everyone was seeing her as the dramatic actress of the future she defected to revue: “The Punch Bowl” (Duke of York’s, 1924), “The Co-Optimists” (1925), and four productions by Cochran. Other things also: she was in a medley of comedies, farces and musicals from which the only valuable part to emerge was Sara in Bridie’s “Tobias and the Angel” (Westminster, 1932).
After a long run in “The Greeks Had a Word for it” (1934), with her sister Angela, revue largely possessed her: Beverley Nichols’s “Floodlight” (Saville, 1937), and especially in the Farjeon shows at
the Little (1938-40). Off stage she was now intensely involved in the West End social round.
In “Nine Sharp” and “The Little Revue”, Herbert Farjeon’s wit was matched exactly to her bravura in such characters as the valetudinarian wintering at Torquay, a windmill girl in “Voila les Non-stop Nudes”, and an agitated ballerina. When she was ill, Farjeon had to engage, briefly, five understudies to cover her parts. So it went on:partnership with the more astringent Hermione Gingold in “Rise Above It” (Comedy 1941); her work in Leslie Henson’s “The Gaities” (Winter Garden, 1945) after a long period with him abroad entertaining the troops for ENSA; and, in 1948, Alan Melville’s “A La Carte” (Savoy). Occasionally, before this, she had contrived to return to the straight theatre, as the warm-hearted Ida Arnold in a version of “Brighton Rock” (1943) and a double role in “Grand National Night” (1946). During 1949, she and Gingold amused themselves briskly in the revived “Fallen Angels”, behaviour which the author, Noel Coward, seeing in Plymouth thought intolerable but to which, when it did well in London, he gave a polite blessing. Hermione Baddeley found nothing important in various plays of the 1950s, but in 1953 she had her last revue triumph, a production called in Hammersmith “At the Lyric”, and at the St Martin’s “Going To Town”.
Here, a housewife, television-bemused, she could cope with domestic affairs only during a “technical hitch”. On her New York debut in 1961, she was the mother in “A Taste of Honey”; at the Spoleto Festival, Italy (1962) and on Broadway (1963) critics praised her moving creation of Flora Goforth, blend of bitter sadness and high comedy, in Tennessee Williams’s “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore”. She came back to London in 1966 to take over the radio actress in “The Killing of Sister George”, transferred to her mascot theatre, the St Martin’s. She had two other testing London parts: the appalling Mrs Peachum of “The Threepenny Opera” (1972), and the mother in a revived and far too verbose piece, “Mother Adam” (1973), at Hampstead. Later, she worked generally in Hollywood and for American television, but in 1982 she was on Broadway in Anthony Shaffer’s play “Whodunnit”.
She had made her film debut in “Guns of Loos” in 1928, and thought he cinema came second to her stage career she was often effective in character parts, exploiting her gift for comedy and making a
speciality of cheery, lower-class women. During the 1940s and early 1950s she was in such films as “Kipps”, “Brighton Rock” (repeating her stage role as Ida), “Passport to Pimlico”, “Quartet”, and “Scrooge”. She was nominated for an Oscar in 1959 for her portrayal as Elspeth, the actress friend of Simone Signoret, in “Room at the Top”. It was a comparatively small part which she made vivid. She was the housekeeper, Ellen, in “Mary Poppins”, and later films included “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and “The Black Windmill”. She became a familiar face on American television through her appearances in popular comedy shows like “Bewitched” and “Maude”. Her home during the last twenty years or so of her life was in Los Angeles, but she used to re-visit England at least once a year.
Both her marriages, to the Hon David Tennant and, later, to Captain J.H. Wills, MC, were dissolved. There was one son and one daughter from her first marriage. Her autobiography, “The Unsinkable Hermione Baddeley” (1984), was generously warm-hearted and cheerfully vague about dates.
Antony Sher was born in 1949 in Cape Town, South Africa. He came from a Lithuanian Jewish family. He came to Britain to study acting. He studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. His theatrical credis include “Richard the Third”, “Hello and Goodbye” and “Torch Song Trilogy”. On television he has great success in “The History of Man”. His film roles include “Three and Out”. In conversation at The National Theatre here.
His vivid and moving performances, including an Olivier award-winning Richard III, made Sher one of the world’s most respected theatre actors
His terminal illness was revealed in September, when the Royal Shakespeare company announced that its artistic director, Sher’s husband Gregory Doran, would be taking compassionate leave to care for him.
Sher’s death was announced on Friday. Catherine Mallyon, RSC executive director and Erica Whyman, acting artistic director, said: “We are deeply saddened by this news and our thoughts and sincere condolences are with Greg, and with Antony’s family and their friends at this devastating time. Antony had a long association with the RSC and a hugely celebrated career on stage and screen.”
Antony Sher in Henry IV Parts I and II: ‘Give me a cup of sack!’ Guardian
It is his vivid performances in productions over four decades with the RSC, many of them directed by Doran, which gained Sher his reputation as one of the great modern Shakespearean actors. In 1985 he won the Olivier award for a portrayal of Richard III on crutches, his image a striking realisation of the character’s description in the play as a “bottled spider”. For the same director, Bill Alexander, he played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Doran directed him as Macbeth and King Lear, and as Falstaff in Henry IV Parts I and II, and Iago in Othello. As Lear, performed between 2016 and 2018, he was praised as “unbearably moving” by the Guardian’s Michael Billington.
Sher played another great Shakespearean, Edmund Kean, in Sartre’s bio-drama Kean directed by Adrian Noble. But his range went well beyond the Bard. The 1985 Olivier award was given to him in honour of both his Richard III and his performance as a drag queen in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, enabling him to say in his acceptance speech: “I’m very happy to be the first actor to win an award for playing both a king and a queen.”
He was praised for his Cyrano de Bergerac and his Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, both with Doran and the RSC. He excelled as both Tartuffe and that play’s author, Molière (in a play by Bulgakov) in RSC shows. Lead roles as Brecht’s Arturo Ui and Kafka’s Joseph K came at the National Theatre. The real-life figures he portrayed included Freud in Terry Johnson’s play Hysteria at the Theatre Royal Bath and Primo Levi, both at the National Theatre (in a play Sher wrote himself) and on screen too.
Sher was born in 1949 in Cape Town, where his grandparents had moved after fleeing the Lithuanian pogroms. He revisited their journey in his novel Middlepost and returned to South Africa during his career with major theatre productions including The Tempest (playing Prospero), Titus Andronicus (in the title role) and Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, whose hero, said Sher, was as “uncomfortable in his own skin”.
He grew up fascinated by the performances of great Shakespearean actors – obsessively listening to an LP of Laurence Olivier’s Othello – and his understanding of drama was transformed by the plays of Harold Pinter. He arrived in London in 1968, at the age of 19. “I looked around me and I didn’t see any Jewish leading men in the classical theatre, so I thought it best to conceal my Jewishness,” he once said. “Also, I quickly became conscious of apartheid when I arrived here, and I didn’t want to be known as a white South African.” He concealed his sexuality in public, too, which meant “my entire identity was in the closet”.
Sher prepared one of Mick’s speeches from Pinter’s The Caretaker for his drama school tryouts but at his Rada audition “they urged me to seek a different career”. He studied instead with the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and gained early stage experience with the group Gay Sweatshop and at the Liverpool Everyman, playing Ringo in Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert.
While Sher’s principal commitment was to the stage, he could be seen regularly on TV (including in the series The History Man) and in films. He wrote plays and novels, the memoir Beside Myself and autobiographical accounts of some of his best known performances, including as Richard III and Falstaff, which opened up the craft of acting. Year of the Mad King: The King Lear Diaries won the Theatre Book prize in 2019. It featured a number of his own illustrations and Sher remained a passionate painter. He was knighted in 2000 for his services to the arts.
Sher and Doran entered into civil partnership on the first possible day of the new law, 21 December 2005, which he called “a great day for human rights”. The couple married in 2015.
His final roles on stage included that of a chilling torturer in Pinter’s One for the Road in the Pinter West End season, and in John Kani’s play Kunene and the King, which premiered in the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 2019, directed by Janice Honeyman. Its London run was curtailed by the first lockdown.
Sher’s love for language was always palpable in his performances. “To an actor, dialogue is like food,” he wrote in Year of the Fat Knight, his book about Falstaff. “You hold it in your mouth, you taste it. If it’s good dialogue the taste will be distinctive. If it’s Shakespeare dialogue, the taste will be Michelin-starred. Falstaff’s dialogue is immediately delicious: you’re munching on a very rich pudding indeed, savoury rather than sweet, probably not good for your health, but irresistible
Hannah Gordon is a wonderful Scottish actress with a warm rich distinctive voice. She was born in 1941 in Edinburgh. She began making television appearances from the mid 1960’s. In 1967 she starred in the play “Spring and Port Wine” and played the same part on film in 1970 with James Mason replacing Alfred Marks. Her television series include “My Wife Next Door” and “Upstairs, Downstairs”.
Interview in “Mail Online”:
Lynda Lee-Potter
Last updated at 00:00 12 April 2003
HANNAH GORDON has just taken over the role of Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. She’s tiny, but in flowing costumes and sensational hats brings panache and wit to the role of the formidable mama of the irascible Professor Higgins. We meet at the historic theatre and walk across the vast stage where so many stars have performed. It’s a magical show full of glorious songs and Hannah is loving every minute of it.
She began her career at Dundee Repertory Theatre and has starred in many television series, including the legendary Upstairs Downstairs.
Unbelievably she’s been an actress for nearly 40 years, though she looks incredibly young, with the unlined skin of a teetotaller.
She’s known much tragedy in her life but she has a superficial calm which I suspect comes more from an iron self-control than a fundamental tranquillity. She learned from a very early age to keep any hurt to herself.
She retains her Scottish burr, and if she weren’t so immediately recognisable one would never suspect she was an actress.
She was born in the district of Newhaven on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and says she was a terribly plain child.
‘I had glasses at the age of five and then developed asthma, so had these thin high shoulders. I once showed an old photograph of me to a very camp friend. He looked at it for a long time and then said: “That is the picture of a child for whom there was no hope whatsoever.”
In fact, Hannah’s early life was chillingly bleak.
‘I didn’t know my father at all, because he had Parkinson’s disease and doctors didn’t understand much about the illness in those days. He was put in an asylum where soldiers suffering from shell shock after World War I were sent.
‘I only remember going there once and it was grim and depressing with grey walls. In those days people didn’t take children to hospitals very often.
‘I saw my father just three times as a child, and I think he came to the house only once. He was a complete stranger really, so my mother had a tough time.’ Her world seemed harsh enough but then, when Hannah was nine, her mother died. ‘Today’s nine-year-olds are nine going on 15,’ she says, ‘but children in those days stayed younger for much longer.
WE LIVED in my grandparents’ big Victorian house in Edinburgh. My grandfather was a great collector and I remember lovely old furniture. My uncle and his wife also lived there for a while and my mother had to look after my grandmother.7
‘Then, when she was 45, she was alone in the house one day and she had a heart attack and died.
‘I walked home from school, as one did in those days, and I couldn’t get in. I kept ringing the doorbell but my mother didn’t come, so I just thought: “Oh, she must have gone out.”
‘I went to play with a schoolfriend called Betty Darling, who lived next door. Then later, the rest of my family arrived home, discovered my mother and came and got me.
‘Nine is a rotten age to lose your mother when you haven’t got a dad.’ The grownups were so busy dealing with the tragedy that nobody seems to have spared much thought or compassion for Hannah. She felt frightened, devastated and isolated, but she was left to cope alone.
‘My mother was laid out in a coffin in the drawing room on the first floor and I was taken to look at her. The undertakers had put lace edging all round the edge of the coffin and I thought: “That’s not my mother.” ‘ Nobody cuddled Hannah or reassured her. She wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, or helped to grieve, and a year later, when she was ten, she was sent away to boarding school.
‘It was baptism by fire really,’ she says. ‘It was pretty rough.’ It’s a tragic story and two years later her father died. Then, when she was just 14, Hannah was told she was going to live on her own.
‘My second uncle was my guardian. He was a widower with a child of his own, so it was hard enough for him.
‘I boarded at school, but in the holidays I looked after myself. A flat had been left in trust for me, so I went to live in that and was self-sufficient from the age of 14. I bought my own clothes, my own food and cooked for myself.
‘The girls at school thought it was a marvellous way to live. They said: “Oh, aren’t you lucky. You can watch television till midnight if you want to.”
‘I used to think: “I’d rather have a mummy and a daddy.” ‘ She has a brother who is ten years older but he was away working at the time, though they have always remained close.
At school, Hannah poured all her emotions into acting, and when she left she went straight to the Glasgow College of Dramatic Art. There, she fell in love for the first time and told her boyfriend of her lonely upbringing.
‘I must have been whining a bit, because one day he suddenly said: “Oh, for goodness sake, stop complaining. What makes you think the world owes you a living?”
‘I began to realise that it’s not what happens to you but what you make of it that’s important.’ In her 20s she began to make her name in London as a powerful and beautiful actress. She then got a part in the film Spring And Port Wine with James Mason.
It was to be a life-changing role because on set she met lighting cameraman Norman Warwick. He’d been married before and was 20 years older but was understandably captivated and kept asking her out.
‘I always said no but we’d have little chats and smile at each other.
Then, on the last evening of filming, I agreed to have dinner and that was it.
‘He was strong but gentle and protective. When you haven’t had a family of your own, it’s wonderful to meet somebody who wants to look after you, which he always did.’ Six months later they married and had a son, Ben, who is now an actor. They were a close-knit threesome but nine years ago, just before their silver wedding anniversary, Norman was told that he had cancer. It was then discovered after a bone marrow test that he also had a form of leukaemia.
‘He was much more ill than we’d thought,’ says Hannah bleakly ‘and six weeks later he died. It was mercifully quick. He wasn’t going to recover, so it was best that it didn’t last long. That’s how I look at it and how I would feel if it were me.
‘Some people have rotten marriages with little happiness but we’d had so much. When he died I said to Ben: “We can’t give in. We’ve got to keep our lives together. Your father invested too much in both of us for us to let him down now.”
‘I took a year off work when Ben was born and I took a year off when Norman died. A lot of actresses find that throwing themselves into a play or film is the best cure for loss, but I couldn’t. I found it impossible to cope with anything stressful, however small.’ Despite her vow to her son that neither of them must be defeated, it was a terrible year and she thought she would never feel whole again.
‘It was utterly devastating but you can’t let yourself go completely to pieces. I believe that the spirits of those you love are still around.
‘I did have a strong sense of Norman being with me. He was such a gentle person and I felt if we grieved too much it would be upsetting and awful for him.
‘I didn’t want to work in the theatre but you need to do things and look after somebody else. When young women lose their husbands, having children to look after must be a lifesaver.
‘I’m not good at being on my own. I wish I were more self-sufficient but a lonely childhood makes you need people.
‘My brother and my friends were wonderful. Three of them in particular were extraordinary. I think they must have got together and said: “Right, I can do the mornings if you can do the afternoons.” They became my human water wings.’ Hannah determined not to lean on her son, though she now thinks that it might have comforted him if she had. ‘I just didn’t want to be a burden.
He was at Glasgow University doing a four-year English honours degree. He was due to go to the States for a year but he didn’t. He stayed in Glasgow, and I’m glad. ‘He’s so like Norman. People used to laugh because they were like peas in a pod, two halves of the same person.’ Having had one fulfilling marriage, it never occurred to Hannah that in her late 50s she would meet another soulmate. However, fate had another plan in mind.
She has the glow of a woman in love who knows she’s deeply loved in return. The lucky chap is Rob Leighton, who is a viola player with the Philharmonic Orchestra and is a few years younger than Hannah.
They were introduced by a mutual friend after a concert at the Festival Hall, and she can’t help smiling when she talks about him.
‘He has a lovely speaking voice and he was very interested in recording books for the blind. We were talking about this one evening and I said: “I’m a trained speech and drama teacher so if you ever want me to listen to your tapes I might be able to make a few suggestions.”
‘So he came to the house for lunch one day when I was making my Delia Smith Christmas cake. He knew that Norman had died and the last thing he was looking for was any involvement. In the beginning, we just had a wonderful friendship. I think people outside the theatre don’t understand that you can have blokes who are just friends.
‘Rob plays the piano like a dream and I used to go and have lunch or supper with him. Often he’d sit down and play and it was wonderfully therapeutic.
‘All my friends knew Norman and me as a couple. So meeting somebody new on different territory which wasn’t crowded with memories was very calming.’ The friendship grew and they were both falling in love but not admitting it – even to themselves. ‘Then Ben came with me to a concert at the Albert Hall and we all had a picnic with the friends who’d introduced Rob and me.
‘Afterwards Ben said: “Rob is very good for my mum.” If Ben hadn’t been happy that would have been it.
‘Rob is very interested in history and one day he took me to see some prehistoric stones.’ Away from London in the countryside, they both admitted how they felt.
‘Rob wasn’t married or involved, so nobody had to be got rid of, let down or upset, which was uncannily lucky. But my feelings were extraordinarily powerful to deal with.
‘It wasn’t like a love affair when you’re young. In some ways it was tinged with sadness because of the past. I found that you can experience piercing joy and grief at the same time.
BUT when you have been happy in one marriage I think you are more prepared to take a chance. If you’ve been hurt and wounded and had an awful time you’re probably much more wary and self-protective.’ Hannah also had to tell her adored mother-in-law that she had fallen in love again.
‘She died in her 90s but she was formidable, part Italian and part German, and very wise. She’d known me as the wife of her son for all those years, but she met Robert and it was fine.
‘She’d lost her son and to have your child die before you is a terrible thing, but she was intelligent and remarkably unsentimental. She actually said to me: “Things turn out for the best.”‘ Finally, Rob moved into the house where Hannah had lived with her husband for more than 20 years.
‘I said to Ben: “Whatever happens, this is your home.” He was 21 when Norman died and Rob was the same age when he lost his mother and his father remarried, so he was sensitive about how Ben might feel.
‘The house has become everybody’s home in three equal parts, and it’s never been a problem.’ One day soon, I suspect, Hannah and Rob will go quietly away for the weekend and come back married.
Wendy Craig was born in 1934 in Durham. Her feature films include “The Servant” with Dirk Bogarde and Sarah Miles and “The Nanny” with Bette Davis. She is known primarily for her many television series including “Butterflies”, “And Mother Makes Three” and “The Royal”. BFI page on Wendy Craig here.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Anne Gwendolyn Craig was born in Sacriston, County Durham the daughter of farmer George Craig and his wife Anne (née Lindsay).[2] She attended Durham High School for Girls, initially as a day pupil and later as a boarder,[ which she revisited on 13 October 2007 to open a new building that had been named after her. She passed theEleven Plus examination and went to Darlington High School.[3] When she was twelve years old the family moved to Picton and she attended nearby Yarm Grammar School.[2]She trained as an actress at the Central School of Dramatic Art.
From the mid-1950s Craig appeared in British films such as The Servant (1963) and The Nanny (1965) with Bette Davis, but it was her appearances in British sitcoms of the late 1960s/1970s which led to her becoming a household name, usually playing a scatty middle class housewife. She went from the BBC‘s Not in Front of the Children (1967) to ITV‘s…And Mother Makes Three (1971) (in which she played a single parent), which later evolved into …And Mother Makes Five. Then came Butterflies (1978), a comedy on BBC2.
Craig returned to drama with the series Nanny (1981–83), a series she created, and wrote some episodes herself as Jonathan Marr,] a pseudonym she had used before when writing episodes of …And Mother Makes Five. Twenty years later, she played a hospital matron in ITV’s The Royal (2003–11). However, she has continued to be associated with comedy, having taken one of the leading roles as Annie in Brighton Belles (1993–94), the UK’s short-lived version of The Golden Girls. She appeared as Reggie’s mother in the BBC1 comedy Reggie Perrin (2009, Series 1 and 2010, Series 2), an update of the 1970s’ series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.
In 2012 Craig appeared as a guest in Episode 12 of the Series Masterchef, along with many other 1970s sitcom stars. In January 2014 she appeared in an episode of the BBCpopular drama Waterloo Road.
In 2016 she appeared as Mary Goodman in the BBC TV series Death in Paradise episode
Anne Crawford was born in Haifa, Palestine (now Israel) in 1920.She starred in some terrific British films e.g. “Millions Like Us”, “Daughter of Darkness”, “Bedelia” and “Two Thousand Women”. She made one film in Hollywood “Thunder On the Hill” with Claudette Colbert and Ann Blyth. She died in 1956 aged only 35.
Wikipedia entry:
Anne Crawford was born on November 22, 1920 in Haifa, Palestine as Imelda Crawford. She was an actress, known for Knights of the Round Table (1953), Daughter of Darkness(1948) and The Peterville Diamond (1943). She was married to James Hartley and Wallace Douglas. She died on October 17, 1956 in London, England. Beautiful, sadly short-lived British leading lady with a gentle, good-humoured personality. She was born in Palestine to Scottish parents and raised in Edinburgh.
“Youtube” tribute to Anne Crawford here.
Angus Lennie has one terrific performance on film to his credit. It is surprising that he did mot mantain the momentum on film. His glory moment was as Steve McQueen’s buddy in “The Great Escape”. Angus Lennie was born in 1930 in Glasgow. He featured as a repertory player in theatres in England and Scotland. His many television appearances include “Crossroads”, “Z Cars”, “Rumpole of the Bailey” and “Monarch of the Glen”. He made quite a few war movies including “633 Squadron” and “Tunes of Glory”. He died in 2014
“Guardian” obituary by Anthony Hayward:
The actor Angus Lennie, who has died aged 84, found a new audience when he played the irascible, amorous motel chef Shughie McFee in the teatime soap opera Crossroads (1974-81). The role came after years of taking character parts on screen, most memorably in the 1963 prisoner-of-war film The Great Escape as Flying Officer Archibald Ives – known as the Mole – who is shot dead while scaling a German barbed-wire fence after the plot he has hatched with Steve McQueen’s US Army Air Force captain is uncovered.
Lennie’s appearance as a PR consultant in two 1972 episodes of Crossroads led Jack Barton, on being promoted from director to producer two years later, to create the role of Shughie for him. The actor joined when the ITV serial was at its height, watched by up to 18 million viewers, but panned by the critics for its wooden acting and wobbly sets.
Lennie simply decided to enjoy his time as Shughie. “I had great fun playing him as a Scottish comedian, very over-the-top, because many chefs are OTT,” he once said. The character, renowned for his tall stories, blagged his way into the job with a tale of having worked on a luxury cruise ship when, in fact, it was a workers’ ferry on the Clyde.
Although he did not leave until 1981, Lennie had plenty of time out of Crossroads, which allowed him to play other roles. This led to the soap again being criticised, this time for poor continuity, as on one occasion Shughie disappeared behind a fridge to get some ingredients and was not seen again for weeks. And he was not the only one: Paul Henry, as Benny, went to find a spanner and failed to reappear for six months.
Lennie was born and brought up in Shettleston, in Glasgow’s East End, where he attended Eastbank Academy. At the age of 14, while training as a stockbroker’s clerk, he joined the entertainer Jimmy Logan‘s parents, the music-hall act Short and Dalziel, as a dancer at the city’s Metropole theatre. He subsequently toured Scotland before the impresario Vivian Van Damm put him in his Revudeville variety performances in between the strippers at London’s Windmill theatre for two years.
At the age of 23, Lennie branched out into acting and gained repertory experience in Oxford and Birmingham. He also worked at theatres across Scotland during his long career. In 1957, he made his television debut in the Armchair Theatre play The Mortimer Touch. Two years later, he was cast as the cabin boy Sunny Jim in the BBC Scotland comedy series Para Handy – Master Mariner (1959-60)
Alongside many character roles in popular TV shows – and that of Able Seaman Murdoch throughout the sitcom HMS Paradise (1964-65) – Lennie played military types in the cinema, starting with Tunes of Glory (1960), before The Great Escape in 1963. That film’s story line of courageous servicemen was followed by real-life danger when Lennie played a flying officer in 633 Squadron (1964). “Cliff Robertson and I had to escape from a burning plane,” he said. “They used gas jets to simulate the fire, but they didn’t take into account that the Mosquito was made of wood and it went up in flames. Close-ups of us scrambling to get out of the plane were for real.” Lennie also had a small role in the screen musical satire Oh! What a Lovely War (1969).
On stage, he appeared in six pantomimes over 10 years with the comedian Stanley Baxter at the King’s Theatres in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and toured the Far East with Derek Nimmo‘s company.
After Crossroads, his television roles included the bakery worker Tom in the sitcom All Night Long (1994) and Badger, loyal valet to Earl Kilwillie (Julian Fellowes), on and off between 2001 and 2003 in the feelgood drama Monarch of the Glen. In 1994, he reprised the role of Shughie McFee alongside his fellow Crossroads stars Jane Rossington and Tom Adams for a send-up of the soap during BBC Two’s ATV Night.
The actor enjoyed travelling in Europe but reflected that he could never leave chef Mcfee behind. “It can be a little disconcerting to turn up at Barclays Bank in Paris and have the doorman greet you with, ‘Ah, bonjour, Monsieur Shughie,'” he said.
• Angus Wilson Lennie, actor, born 18 April 1930; died 14 September 2014
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Interview with Angus Lennie at University of Glasgow in 2001 here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
