Daragh O’Malley hails from Limerick city. He was born in 1954. His father was Donagh O’Malley a Minister of Education in the Irish Government who died suddenly in 1968. His mother Dr Hilda Moriarty was from Kerry and while in university had met the port Patrick Kavanah who wrote the famous “Raglan Road” about her. Daragh O’Malley’s most famous role is as Patrick Harper the loyal and tough ally of Sean Bean in the hughly popular TV series “Sharpe”. His first film role was in the terrific thriller “The Long Good Friday” in 1980. His other films include “Cal”, “Whitnail and I” and “Shaughnessy”. He has guest starred in most of the popular UK crime TV series such as “Wire in the Blood”, “Silent Witness” and “Waking the Dead”. His website here.
Martin Benson was born in London in 1918. His appearacnes on film stretched over fifty years from “The Blind Goddess” in 1948 to “Angela’s Ashes” in 1999. Best remembered roles were as Karalholme in the Hollywood production of “The King and I” in 1956 and as the gangster Solo in “Goldfinger” in 1964. Martin Benson died in 2010 at the age of 92.
Martin Benson’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
The actor Martin Benson, who has died aged 91, occupied a screen category filled in its time by Herbert Lom, with whom he acted on several occasions, and previously Conrad Veidt – that of the worldly, sophisticated, foreign villain. With jet-black hair, dark colouring and pronounced eyebrows on a thin face, he never seemed properly dressed without a tuxedo. As well as remaining furiously busy during six decades as an actor, he pursued several artistic disciplines.
Born into a Jewish family in London, he seemed briefly destined to become a pharmacist. As a gunner in the army during the seond world war, he organised entertainment for the troops, and produced a tour of Gaslight in aid of a fund to replace HMS Dorsetshire. By 1944, he had been promoted to captain and was posted to Alexandria, Egypt, where he built a theatre from scratch, assisted by his sergeant-major, another aspiring actor – Arthur Lowe.
Among Benson’s earliest screen roles was an unbilled part for Alfred Hitchcock in Under Capricorn (1949). The King and I had its British stage premiere at Drury Lane in October 1953, with Lom as the King, and Benson as his court chancellor, Kralahome. Benson played the part again opposite Yul Brynner in the Hollywood film version in 1956. He also played the King himself in February 1955, when Lom was ill. Benson later asserted that “despite the reputation which Yul Brynner continues to enjoy, the more intelligent as well as intelligible performance came from Herbert Lom, notwithstanding a good deal less swagger”.
Back in Britain and in modestly budgeted monochrome thrillers, he was on characteristic form in Soho Incident (1956) as a “big boss” running crooked boxing and horse-racing schemes. Venturing into television, Benson was among a repertory company of actors in the half-hour anthology Douglas Fairbanks Presents (1953-57), aimed at US television, shown in Britain as cinema shorts and as schedule-fillers in ITV’s early days. Benson also worked on the scripts, where as many foreign settings were included as possible. Another rep company member was Christopher Lee, who called it a valuable training ground. He and Benson made up a comic double act for one segment, The Death of Michael Turbin (1953), as slow-witted east Europeans.
He was a regular, as the villainous Duke de Medici, in Sword of Freedom (1957-58). In 1958 and 1959, he played a barrister in the unscripted courtroom series The Verdict Is Yours and, in On Trial (1960), which recreated celebrated cases, Micheal MacLiammoir played Oscar Wilde, with Benson as his prosecutor, Edward Carson.
After a role in Cleopatra (1963), he was an American gangster coerced into taking a doomed car ride with the henchman Oddjob, in Goldfinger(1964). He was among a houseful of suspects in Peter Sellers’s second outing as Clouseau, A Shot in the Dark (1964).
From 1960 to 1985, Martin Benson Films, based in Radlett in Hertfordshire, made more then 100 educational and training films, which Benson directed, wrote and occasionally narrated. Some were for Save the Children.
For Lew Grade’s ITC series, the logical successors to the Fairbanks shows, he variously played corrupt South American ministers, Algerian majors, ruthless Turkish policemen and cigar-smoking gamblers. Submerged under green makeup, Benson played the Vogon Captain, an excruciatingly bad poet, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981).
Benson began painting in his stage dressing room, and in 1993 he staged an exhibition of his Shakespearean paintings at the Shakespeare Globe Centre, the subjects including Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Alec Guinness.
His later credits included Alan Parker’s adaptation of Angela’s Ashes (1999) and a 2005 episode of Casualty.
His wife Joy, son and three daughters, two stepdaughters and one stepson survive him.
• Martin Benson, actor, born 10 August 1918; died 28 February 2010
This “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Julian Sands was born in West Otley, West Yorkshire in 1958. He began appearing in supporting roles on film in 1984 with “Oxford Blues” and “The Killing Fields”. The following year he was in “A Room With A View” with a steller cast including Denholm Elliott as his father, Daniel Day-Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith an Judi Dench. He went Stateside and his other films include “Arachnophobia”.
TCM Overview:
Tall, blond and striking, with angular features and an unmistakable European air, British actor Julian Sands looked right at home in the tasteful historical dramas, gothic horror films, and international espionage roles he became known for. This veteran actor started out charming audiences in the 1985 film “A Room With A View,” but darker roles in “Warlock” (1989), “Boxing Helena” (1993), and a string of films with director Mike Figgis always suggested a powerful talent with the potential to become a household name if the right role came along.
Julian Sands, a versatile British actor whose film roles included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louis XIV, a warlock, Superman’s father and a Latvian pimp, was pronounced dead on Tuesday, more than five months after disappearing while hiking alone on a trail on Mount Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California. He was 65.
On Sunday, authorities recovered human remains near the mountain where search crews had been looking for Mr. Sands. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said it had been contacted by hikers who had found human remains in the Mount Baldy wilderness. Dangerous conditions, including a series of severe storms, had complicated search efforts.
The coroner’s office identified the remains as Mr. Sands on Tuesday. It added that the cause of his death remained under investigation.
With his shock of blond hair and his occasionally icy demeanor, Mr. Sands was instantly recognizable. He could slip easily from a costume drama like James Ivory’s “A Room With a View” (1985), in which he played an idealistic romantic around the turn of the 20th century, to an occult movie like “Warlock” (1989), in which, as the title character, he flees a 17th-century witch hunter to 20th-century Los Angeles.
“He was always good, always gallant and dignified,” Janet Maslin, a former New York Times film critic, said in a phone interview. “I don’t remember a false move from him.”
Mr. Sands played Shelley in Ken Russell’s horror film “Gothic” (1987), which recreates a true story: a gathering on a stormy night in 1816 in a Swiss villa where Shelley; his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would soon write “Frankenstein”; her stepsister, Claire Clairmont; Lord Byron; and Byron’s doctor, John William Polidori, wrote ghost stories.
Mr. Sands’s Shelley suffered from drug-fueled hallucinations and was tormented by fears and devils. Gabriel Byrne’s Byron was nearly demonic.
“I think these portraits are rooted in reality,” Mr. Sands told The Times in 1987. “If people think otherwise, it’s because of the later Victorian whitewash of them. These were not simply beautiful Romantic poets. They were subversive, anarchic hedonists pursuing a particular line of amorality.”
Within two years, Mr. Sands had worked with Mr. Ivory and Mr. Russell, two directors with wildly different styles.
“James Ivory is like an Indian miniaturist, and Ken Russell is a graffiti artist,” Mr. Sands told The Times. “James Ivory is like an ornithologist watching his subjects from afar, whereas Ken Russell is a big-game hunter filming in the middle of a rhino charge.”
Mr. Sands also worked on several films with the British director Mike Figgis, among them “Leaving Las Vegas” (1996), in which he played a pimp, and “The Loss of Sexual Innocence” (1999), in which Mr. Figgis fused the story of Adam and Eve with that of a filmmaker (Mr. Sands) drifting in and out of his sexual memories.
“Since this is a film of images rather than words, it requires a great deal of presence and expressiveness on the part of the actors,” Kevin Thomas wrote in his review of “The Loss of Sexual Innocence” in The Los Angeles Times. “Happily, Figgis has chosen well, with Sands effortlessly carrying by far the most demanding role of a man of isolating self-absorption.”
Julian Richard Morley Sands was born on Jan. 4, 1958, in Otley, England, to Richard and Brenda Sands and grew up in nearby Gargrave. He began acting as a child, inspired in part by his mother’s work in amateur theater. When he was 6, he told The Yorkshire Post in 2013, he appeared in a play; his first line was “My master, the great Aladdin.”
He studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London but left in 1979 to form a youth theater that performed at schools and clubs. His screen career began in the early 1980s, with small roles in movies like “Oxford Blues” and “The Killing Fields,” and in “The Sun Also Rises,” a mini-series based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel.
Mr. Sands’s other roles included a photographer in “The Killing Fields” (1985), an entomologist in “Arachnophobia” (1990), Louis XIV in “Vatel” (2000), Jor-El, Superman’s father, in two episodes of the television series “Smallville” (in 2009 and 2010), and a sadistic farmer in the Czech film “The Painted Bird” (2019), an adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel about a homeless and abused boy during World War II.
“I was drawn to ‘The Painted Bird’ because of its unflinching, stark but ultimately redemptive consideration of human endurance,” Mr. Sands told the website Moviemaker in 2020. “The bleak hinterland of war-torn Eastern Europe is as beautiful and moving as it is disturbing and grotesque.”
Mr. Sands appeared onstage occasionally and earned a Drama Desk nomination in 2013 for his one-man show, “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” Mr. Sands performed the show, which was directed by John Malkovich, at the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan in 2012 (and again in 2016) and took it to Houston; Sarasota, Fla.; East Lansing, Mich.; and other cities over the course of several years.
The focus was not on Pinter’s plays but his poetry. Mr. Sands, who had known Pinter since 1987, stepped in for the ailing playwright at a reading of his verse in England in 2005; they remained close until Pinter’s death three years later.
“I’ve called it in the past a ‘Homeric evening of theater,’” Mr. Sands told The Washington Post in 2015, “because it’s me, in a pool of firelight, with the audience gathered around the fire, at a shamanic level.”
Mr. Sands’s survivors include his wife, Evgenia Citkowitz; his daughters, Natalya and Imogen; and his son, Henry. His marriage to Sarah Harvey ended in divorce.
Mr. Sands loved hiking in the Los Angeles area, especially on Mount Baldy.
“I must have been up Mount Baldy about 200 times, so I think this is a real favorite,” he was quoted as saying in “My City, My Los Angeles: Famous People Share Their Favorite Places” (2013), by Jeryl Brunner. “And I like it in winter. Winter conditions make it a bit more interesting
Leo McKern is firmly associated with “Rumpole of the Bailey” but he was a terrific character actor on film and on reflection it is a pity that Rumpole took up so much of his time, that it deprived us of him from the cinema. He was born in Sydney, Australia in 1920. He lost an eye at the age of 15 in an accident. During World War Two he made his stage debut in this home city. He came to England in 1976 and soon became a regular with the Old Vic company. His film debut was in 1952 with “Murder in the Cathedral”. His many appearance thereafter included “Help”, “A Man For All Seasons”, “Ryan’s Daughter”, “The Omen” and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. His first episode as Rumpole began in 1975 and in all he starred in 44 episodes. He died in 2002 at the age of 82.
“The Guardian” obituary:
Leo McKern, who has died aged 82, was best known and admired for his most famous character, the crumpled, combative defence barrister Horace Rumpole in John Mortimer’s television series, Rumpole Of The Bailey. But he was also one of the finest and most resourceful actors in Britain, with a long and distinguished career in the theatre and films.
Short and stocky, he was not built for romantic leads, but he was capable of playing – and playing well – a wide range of parts, from Peer Gynt to Toad of Toad Hall, Lear’s Fool to the Common Man, and, later, Thomas Cromwell, both on stage and in the film A Man For All Seasons (1966).
He took on Rumpole for the first time in 1975, in a television play based on the Mortimer novels. His portrayal was a hit with viewers, and his references to his wife Hilda as “she who must be obeyed” became part of the nation’s vocabulary. The ITV series which followed ran for 15 years.
McKern was happy to continue portraying the same character for so long – “With Rumpole,” he once said, “one comes to be reconciled to the fact that it isn’t half a bad thing to be stuck with.” However, in an interview with Vanity Fair in 1995, he also made the point that “I consider my best performance ever was as Peer Gynt, though if I get an obituary, they will say, of course, ‘known to millions as Rumpole’.”
Born into a family of engineers in Sydney, McKern left school – where his English master had instilled a hatred of Shakespeare – at 15, and joined his father and brothers working in a refrigerator factory. While there, a piece of metal flew into his left eye; though the injury was not, at first, considered serious, the sight deteriorated and eventually the eye had to be removed. With his portion of the compensation – his parents sued the surgeon who had first attended him – McKern bought an old boat, the first of several he owned, and wrecked it in Sydney harbour.
After training and working as a commercial artist, he decided to try acting, and duly appeared in theatre in Sydney. In 1944, he sailed away in pursuit of Jane Holland, who was well known on the Australian stage and wanted to try her luck in England. They married, and lived for a time in a Hampstead bedsitter, taking various jobs. McKern was a meat porter, and drew slides for the cinema, though he was also sacked for selling under-the-counter goods to pensioners. As assistant stage manager, he went on a combined services entertainments tour of Germany; back in London, he became a jeweller’s stone-setter, while Jane was a cinema usherette.
In repertory at Bangor, McKern worked long hours painting scenery, stage managing and acting, before going on an Arts Council tour of Welsh mining villages in The Miser, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, a contact which eventually resulted in his joining the Old Vic Company in 1949. In the first of three seasons there, he played small parts, and, as an understudy, went on as Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops To Conquer. His best part the following season was Feste in Twelfth Night.
In Guthrie’s production of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine The Great – the first for 300 years – McKern played Bazajeth, Emperor of the Turks and Tamburlaine’s chief adversary. This was a part in which he could show his physical skill and energy, but also an unnerving experience as Donald Wolfit (Tamburlaine) was given to distracting the audience’s attention from everyone except himself. Before the end of the season, in which he was due to play Lear, Wolfit left – and McKern shone as the Fool.
Many years later, he appeared in the play again, this time on television, as Gloucester, with Laurence Olivier as Lear, and, having progressed to leading parts, he went back to Australia with the Stratford company, as Iago to Anthony Quayle’s Othello.
Back in England at Christmas 1954, McKern enjoyed playing Toad to large audiences of children at the Prince’s theatre (now the Shaftesbury). His first strong West End part was as Big Daddy in Peter Hall’s production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958); two years later, he took the title part in Marcel Achard’s Rollo. His next outstanding performance was as the Common Man, in A Man For All Seasons, which created a mild sensation as a Brechtian experiment. Grabbing costumes from a basket on stage, McKern was both commentator and storyteller, though in New York, and in the film, he played Thomas Cromwell.
For Peer Gynt, one of his most taxing – but also most satisfying – roles, McKern returned to the Old Vic in 1962. Although he knew he was too old for the part, he comforted himself in the knowledge that Ibsen never intended the play to be staged. Some years later, he discovered that Guthrie had described it as “brilliant”.
In Guthrie’s modern dress production of The Alchemist (Old Vic, 1962), he had to make an entrance three feet above the ground. The following year, he was back with Iago, as well as playing the garrulous elder statesman Menenius, in Coriolanus, at the opening of the Nottingham Playhouse. At the Oxford Playhouse and later in London, he was an explosive Volpone – his second Jonson character in the 1960s. He was also part of the swinging 60s to the extent of appearing with the Beatles in Help (1965), and in the cult TV series The Prisoner.
In 1970, McKern returned to Australia to play Bligh in The Man Who Shot The Albatross and Rollo. Back at the Oxford Playhouse, he was Shylock, and Kelemen in Molnar’s The Wolf, opposite Judi Dench. There were also film ventures, including Ryan’s Daughter (1970), which involved almost a year’s stay on the west coast of Ireland – he took along his wife and daughters, and his 32ft sloop.
McKern returned to the theatre in 1995, as Old Hobson in Hobson’s Choice at Chichester, giving a performance that was a nice blend of pathos and northern humour (his last West End performance was in the same play two years ago). Also at Chichester, in 1996, he played the press photographer Henry Ormonroyd, in a revival of Priestley’s When We Are Married, with, wrote the Guardian critic Michael Billington, “the stately dignity of a tipsy porpoise”. His last film role was as a bishop in a period drama, The Story Of Father Damien (1999).
In later life, McKern suffered health problems. He had diabetes and became deaf in one ear. As well as boats, he was fond of fast cars, of which he had many. He is survived by Jane, and their daughters Harriet and the actor Abigail McKern.
· Leo (Reginald) McKern, actor, born March 16 1920; died July 23 2002
“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
In the 1960’s when Swingin London was taken the world by storm, blonde British actresses were in vogue. Julie Christie led the pack, but she was quickly followed by Susannah York and then Carol White, Judy Geeson and Suzy Kendall. She was born in 1966 in Derbyshire in England. She was a photographic model before she became an actress. Her first film was “Up Jimped A Swagman” with the Australian pop singer Frank Ifield in 1965. Her breakthrough role was in the London made international hit “To Sir With Love” which also starred Sidney Poitier, Judy Geeson, Christian Roberts, Lulu and a scarcely recongnisable Patricia Routledge. Suzy Kendall was given then lead in “Up the Junction” with a young Denis Waterman. Seen to-day it seems very dated, somewhat patronising to working class people but at the same time capturing the look of London in the 1960’s. Suzy Kendall went to Hollywood to make “Darker thean Amber” with Rod Taylor. She went on to Italy to make a series of grizzly slasher films before retiring from film in the late seventies. She was at one time married to the gifted Dudley Moore.
Her minibiography on the IMDB website:
doe-eyed, honey-blond actress of extraordinary beauty, Suzy Kendall was one of the most popular British actresses of the 1960s. Yet, she never really sought the spotlight and accepted fame only reluctantly. Born as Freida Harrison, her goal was actually to be a clothing designer and, in fact, she majored in fabric and fashion design at Derby College. In pursuing her studies, she inevitably ran into fashion photographers and agents. With few exceptions, they were very taken by her looks and urged her to go into modeling. While not particularly interested in that line of work, she was flattered by the compliments and saw a chance to make some extra income. In addition, she saw it as a way to draw attention to her fashion ideas. So, she signed up with a recommended agency, who gave her the name Suzy Kendall. To her surprise, she immediately was in constant demand. This was at a time when there was increased crossover in the British entertainment industry, with singers appearing in motion pictures. Before long, she began to receive film offers and, while not trained as an actress, was persuaded by her agents to accept film and television roles. The first roles were minor in nature, but included a part in the spy caper The Liquidator (1965), which was a major success. She became internationally known with her prominent role in To Sir, with Love (1967), a sort of British version of Blackboard Jungle (1955). That same year, she starred in the crime thriller The Penthouse (1967), playing a woman taken hostage by violent criminal predators. She disliked the film, but it was a major hit. It was around this time that she met the highly talented and famous but insecure Dudley Moore, with whom she co-starred in 30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia (1968). They immediately hit it off and gradually became a couple, marrying in 1968. At Moore’s urging, she accepted the title role in Fraulein Doktor (1969), in which she plays a World War I femme fatale, based onMata Hari.
In spite of some good reviews, it was not a success. However, her career was boosted again in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), in which she plays the girlfriend of a murder suspect who becomes the target of the real killer. The film was an international success and made director Dario Argento a household name among horror fans. By this time, she wanted to become a mother and cut back on her career. But Moore’s career had found worldwide success and he didn’t think the time was right for raising children. This and their increasing time spent apart took a toll, and they subsequently divorced. However, their marriage ended amicably and they remained good friends for the remainder of his life. She continued to work through the 1970’s, mostly as threatened heroines in violent horror films of uneven quality. She soon found herself in a professional rut in an industry that wasn’t all that important to her. She remarried and settled into a private life, concentrating on her marriage and raising their child. She did briefly return to the public eye in 2002, when she hosted a memorial service for her late former husband, Moore, who was friends not only with her but her current husband, as well, even giving their daughter piano lessons.
Her daughter, Elodie Harper, is a journalist with the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Gayle Hunnicutt was born in Forth Worth, Texas and was a fashion model before she became an actress. She had her first major role opposite George Peppard in “P.J.” and then 1970 she settled in England after her marriage to actor David Hemmings. She made a number of films with him including “Running Scared”. She starred opposite Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Paul Scofield in “Scorpio” in 1973. Between 1989 and 1991 she returned to the U.S. to play a love interest of Larry Hagman in “Dallas”. Article on Gayle Hunnicut in “MailOnline” here.
Article in “Daily Telegraph”:
By Richard Eden
Gayle Hunnicutt, who told Mandrake in 2008 that she had initiated divorce proceedings against Sir Simon Jenkins, the chairman of the National Trust, after a 30-year marriage, has a reason to smile again. The glamorous actress is enjoying an emotional reunion with the BBC tennis commentator Richard Evans, who was her boyfriend until the year before she married Sir Simon.
Shadowman, poster, (aka NUITS ROUGES), US poster, Gert Frobe (left), Gayle Hunnicutt (right), 1974. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
“I am spending quite a lot of time with this lovely man in Florida,” she told me at the launch of the paperback edition of Miranda Seymour’s bookChaplin’s Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill, at The House of Hardy Amies in Savile Row, London. “It is lovely being with someone who knows you so well and understands you.
“We first met in 1975 and were together for two and a half years. As he is in the tennis world, he travels constantly. I had a career and a child to raise, so I couldn’t always be travelling around the world and we never married.” Hunnicutt, 67, was previously married to David Hemmings, the late star of the cult Sixties film Blow-Up. She added of Evans: “The person who introduced us in 1975 reintroduced us last summer. We both became separated and neither of us knew. It is one of those extraordinary things.”
Gayle Hunnicutt died in 2023
The Telegraph obituary in 2023:
Gayle Hunnicutt, who has died aged 80, was a strikingly glamorous American actress better known for her appearances in gossip columns than for most of her films, having divorced the wayward young British star David Hemmings in 1974 and married the writer and journalist Simon Jenkins.
Cast as elegant sexpots in thrillers like Marlowe (1969) with James Garner, Fragment of Fear (1970), her first British film, in which she co-starred with Hemmings, and Michael Winner’s spy caper Scorpio (1973), Gayle Hunnicutt dazzled with her inordinate good looks.
Gayle Hunnicutt in London, circa 1980 CREDIT: Terry Fincher/Popperfoto via Getty Images
The Telegraph’s critic Richard Last was agog as he ascribed to her “the most luminously beautiful face on television”, while an equally appreciative Clive James, gazing on her ravishing Titian hair and porcelain complexion, was smitten by her “sweet violence to the eye”.
There were others for whom the mere mention of her exotic name suggested a character who had stepped from the pages of an Ian Fleming novel; indeed, in 1972 she was canvassed as a Bond girl opposite Roger Moore in Live and Let Die, but it was not to be.
In the late 1980s millions saw her make a splash on British television as JR Ewing’s old flame, an English countess called Vanessa Beaumont, in the glitzy American soap Dallas.
Gayle Hunnicut with husband David Hemmings arrive at a party in Los Angeles, circa 1968 CREDIT: Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Had she remained in Hollywood rather than marrying David Hemmings and moving to London in 1968, she would probably have had a more illustrious film career, but she considered herself lucky to escape.
In Britain she sought to establish herself as a serious actress, and in the 1970s featured on television in costume dramas including an adaptation of Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Colette’s The Ripening Seed (both 1973) and as Tsarina Alexandra in the classic serial Fall of Eagles (1974).
Offers of film parts continued to flow and she was busy on the stage, too, appearing in productions of Shakespeare and Shaw and in lighter fare such as revivals of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (Oxford Playhouse, 1981) and Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife (Albery, 1987), in which she co-starred with Martin Shaw.
In 1993, with her second husband, the cerebral Simon Jenkins, once described as “the acceptable face of fogeyism”, she hosted a joint 50th birthday celebration at St James’s Palace, previous venues for their annual extravaganzas having included Battersea Power Station and the Science Museum.
Gayle Hunnicutt with her husband Simon Jenkins, then editor of The Evening Standard CREDIT: Monitor Press Features Limited
Sir Christopher Bland, chairman of London Weekend Television and a future chairman of the BBC, used the occasion to make mischief, spreading a story that Gayle Hunnicutt and Jenkins had spent their wedding night at Henry James’s old home, Lamb House at Rye, reading Middlemarch.
The disintegration of her first marriage put paid to her appearance as Thérèse Raquin in Michael Voysey’s stage adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel of that name at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in August 1974.
She pulled out a couple of days before the play opened, explaining that she was suffering from laryngitis, but her “indisposition” coincided with her final split from the serially unfaithful Hemmings, who was reportedly being “consoled” by his secretary, Prudence de Casembroot, 26.
The only child of a US Army colonel, Virginia Gayle Hunnicutt was born on February 6 1943 in Fort Worth, Texas. When the family moved to Beverly Hills in the mid-1950s, she won a scholarship to the University of California in Los Angeles, as near to Hollywood as a student of English and drama could get, and dabbled in acting during the summer holidays.
With Hermings in Fragment of Fear CREDIT: Film Stills
Her break came when a Warner Brothers talent scout spotted her in a student production, and after graduating with a BA in English Literature she made her first film, The Wild Angels, with Peter Fonda in 1966, followed by New Face in Hell starring George Peppard. In the same year she was cast on American television in two episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies.
In 1967, at a beach party for Steve McQueen thrown by the Rat Pack member Peter Lawford in Santa Monica, she met David Hemmings, the British actor who had rocketed to international stardom in Michelangelo Antonioni’s quintessential Swinging London film Blow-Up, and followed him to Turkey, where he was shooting The Charge of the Light Brigade. They married in Beverly Hills the following year.
When her marriage to Hemmings broke up in the mid-1970s, she decided to remain in Britain and “its wonderful, wonderful theatres”. She was cast in Twelfth Night at Greenwich, The Tempest at Oxford, A Woman of No Importance at Chichester and JM Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, also at Greenwich. In 1979 she became the first American actress to play Peter Pan in the West End.
With James Garner in Marlowe, 1968 CREDIT: Alamy
Her tight schedule continued throughout the 1980s, with stand-out projects including the role of the retired opera singer and femme fatale Irene Adler, opposite Jeremy Brett, in the first episode (“A Scandal in Bohemia”) of the ITV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1984 and the following year taking the female lead in Arthur Penn’s action adventure film Target (1985) opposite Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon.
In one of her last West End roles, aged 52, she donned a stunning backless evening dress in a revival of JB Priestley’s psychological thriller Dangerous Corner (Whitehall, 1995). She once said she did not wish to be remembered as “a lady Texan starlet with a good face”, and as an actress she was always memorable, even if unstretched; the suspicion lingered that her potential was never thoroughly explored.
At their Victorian home in Primrose Hill, north London, she became a notable social asset to her second husband, especially following his appointment as editor of The Times in 1990. “Simon is part of the Establishment,” she declared, “and as his wife, I am too.”
She was the author of the books Health and Beauty in Motherhood (1984), and Dearest Virginia (2004), a collection of her father’s wartime letters written between 1942 and 1944.
With David Hemmings, Gayle Hunnicutt had a son, the actor Nolan Hemmings, named after the character Hemmings played in The Charge of the Light Brigade. After her divorce she married Simon Jenkins in 1978 and had a second son, Edward, who became a journalist. That marriage ended in 2009.
Jill Balcon was born in London in 1925. She was the daughter of the famed film producer Michael Balcon. She made her film debut in 1947 in “Nicholas Nickleby”and had a substantial role in “Good Time Girl” with Jean Kent. Her other films include “The Lost People” and “Highly Dangerous” with Margaret Lockwood. In 1951 Jill Balcon married the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. The actor Danel ay-Lewis is their son. Jill Balcon died in 2009.
Her obituary in “The Guardian”:
Jill Balcon, who has died aged 84, was celebrating her 23rd birthday and just beginning to make a name for herself as a film and stage actor when, on 3 January 1948, she appeared on the BBC radio programme Time for Verse, broadcast live on Sunday evenings. Her voice – a rich, expressive, finely modulated instrument – was already a favourite with listeners and was to remain so throughout her long life. In the studio she met a fellow contributor, the poet C Day-Lewis, whom she had worshipped from afar ever since he visited her boarding school, Roedean, in 1937 to judge a verse-speaking competition. That meeting in Broadcasting House was to change her life.
Balcon – pronounced, she would point out with typical precision, like Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, not an abbreviation of balcony — thought Day-Lewis had hardly noticed her, but soon afterwards he telephoned her at her Pimlico flat just as she was packing for a season with the Bristol Old Vic. He wanted her to join him in a poetry recital in Salisbury. She could not, but spent her whole time at Bristol wishing she had been able to say yes. “He had charm,” she later recalled, “in the original sense of the word – a kind of magical magnetism.”They met again later that year – at the English Festival of Spoken Poetry in London – and romance blossomed. Balcon was, said her great friend Natasha Spender, wife of the poet Stephen Spender, “strikingly beautiful, like the sort of beautiful woman you only see on a Greek vase”. Jacob Epstein was so taken by her looks that he asked her out of the blue if he could make a bronze sculpture of her head.
Their joy at finding one another was not shared by those around them. Day-Lewis was 21 years her senior and married. He had also been involved throughout the 1940s in a very public love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, one of the most celebrated women of her age. He was dividing his time between her home in Oxfordshire and his wife and two teenage sons in Dorset.
Balcon had few expectations of Day-Lewis, but, after a late night walk along the banks of the Thames, where they carved their initials on a tree outside George Eliot’s home on Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk, he told her wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Day- Lewis broke with both his wife and Lehmann in favour of Balcon. It caused both discarded women great pain. Mary Day-Lewis bore it stoically, but Lehmann blamed Balcon and made it plain that she would never recover from the blow.
Balcon’s father, Sir Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios, was not at his daughter’s wedding breakfast in 1951. He had been horrified when her name appeared on the front pages of the newspapers as the co-respondent in Day-Lewis’s divorce. Lady Balcon was afterwards able to see her daughter only at clandestine meetings in Hyde Park.None of this disapproval could detract from the bond of love and common interest that the newlyweds shared. They were soul mates. She had been passionate about poetry since childhood. He had first made his name in the 1930s as one of a group of leftist poets, collectively known as the Auden generation or MacSpaunday. But by the 1940s he had moved away from their political concerns to embrace wider themes and to earn a place in the English lyric tradition alongside his hero, Thomas Hardy.There followed many joint public performances of poetry – Day-Lewis’s and that of others they both admired such as Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. From 1968 until his early death in 1972 Day- Lewis was poet laureate, and the couple were familiar public faces in the world of the arts, supporting progressive causes.
In the early years of their romance, Balcon’s own career continued to thrive. At the Old Vic, she played Zenocrate to Donald Wolfit’s Tamburlaine in a rare revival of Christopher Marlowe’s play. It was part of a season directed by Tyrone Guthrie, which also saw her play Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, with two children – Tamasin, born in 1953, and a noted documentary maker and cookery writer, and, in 1957, Daniel, the Oscar-winning actor – she put family before work. The demands of home and husband meant she concentrated mainly on television roles and radio work because they placed more manageable demands on her time.
Day-Lewis’s infidelities caused her much pain, but their marriage endured. After his death from cancer, she took on the mantle of his editor, producing a collection of his posthumous poems in 1979, the complete set in 1992, and a selection to mark the centenary of his birth in 2004. She became the keeper of the flame and noted with wry amusement that he had once written a poem The Widow Interviewed. “Sometimes I think, God, I have become that relic.” She continued giving performances of his verse at festivals and events as well as dealing with a constant stream of visitors and letters about Day-Lewis and the poets of his generation. She remained frustrated by the refusal of the authorities at Westminster Abbey to grant him a place in Poets’ Corner, a usual but not guaranteed honour for poets laureate. Despite a letter of protest organised by the Royal Society of Literature in 2000, the dean refused even to give Balcon a reason for his refusal
Balcon was born in Westminster, the daughter of Michael Balcon and his wife Aileen. Her father advised her against the stage, but after Roedean school, in Brighton, she trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she came top in her year, much to his delight. She first caught the eye of critics as Madeline Bray in Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1947 screen version of Nicholas Nickleby. Major screen roles followed in film, including opposite Stewart Granger in Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), Good Time Girl (1948) with Jean Kent, and The Lost People (1950), but the stage was her passion. In her later television work, she had decent roles in The First Churchills (1969) and Elizabeth R (1971) to complement more bread-and-butter appearances in series such as The Sweeney and The Protectors. Her final professional engagement with her husband was as a reader (with Marius Goring and John Gielgud) in his television series on poetry, A Lasting Joy, recorded in their home weeks before his death and broadcast posthumously to great acclaim.
Late in her career, she enjoyed something of a renaissance, with substantial parts in Derek Jarman’s films Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1993), and as Lady Bracknell performing in the Wilde play within the film An Ideal Husband (1999). But the medium where she worked most happily until the end was radio, where her 60 years as a well-loved actress and broadcaster were celebrated by the BBC in 2003 with a specially commissioned play, Deadheading Roses, which also featured her son, Daniel.
With her children grown up, she retreated to the Hampshire countryside, where she shared a picture-postcard thatched cottage with a new partner, the military historian Antony Brett-James. After his death in 1984, she tended their exquisite garden, entertained with good humour and great generosity neighbours such as Alec and Merula Guinness, kept a watchful eye on her beloved grandchildren at nearby Bedales, and made a new generation of friends among writers — including those, such as Claire Tomalin, who were anxious that her golden voice should be the one featured on audio versions of their books. Her passion for poetry never diminished, as she demonstrated in a 2007 appearance as the castaway on Desert Island Discs. She continued to give recitals and remained in close contact with almost all of the distinguished British poets of the generations that followed Day-Lewis. “I have spent my entire life,” she reflected just short of her 80th birthday, “trying to interest people in poetry.” She is survived by her son and daughter.
The grand dame of English theater and a prolific screen actress, Gladys Cooper was one of the most revered performers of her generation. She began appearing as a photographic model as a child, and after her stage career began she became a popular pin-up postcard model for British troops during World War I. Her first film appearance was in the silent feature “The Eleventh Commandment” in 1913, but she continued acting on stage, earning notice for work in plays such as Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in 1938 at the Open Air Theatre. Her first important film role was in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” and she had a supporting role in Alexander Korda’s classic romance “That Hamilton Woman.” One of her most famous roles came in 1942 when she played the mother of Bette Davis’s character in the psychological drama “Now, Voyager”; both she and Davis earned Oscar nominations for their roles. Cooper remained a busy actress throughout the rest of the ’40s and ’50s and earned another Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work in the historical drama “The Song of Bernadette.” When the golden age of TV began, Cooper found steady work in classic dramatic shows like “Playhouse 90” and “Twilight Zone,” appearing in three episodes of Rod Serling’s sci-fi classic. Nearing the end of her career she had a starring role in the con-men sitcom “The Rogues” with co-star Charles Boyer, and played Mrs. Higgins in the film musical “My Fair Lady” earning plaudits–and awards–for both roles.
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.
