British Actors Archives

Brian Roper

Brian Roper. (Wikipedia)

Brian Roper was born in 1929 in Doncaster, Yorkshire. He made his film debut in 1947 in the British movie “Just William’s Luck”. He screen tested for the role of Dickon in 1949’s “The Secret Garden” with Margaret O’Brien and Dean Stockwell. He won the part and travelled to to Hollywood to make the movie. Although he was nearly twenty at the time, he made a convincing 13 year old. Although the film was a popular success and is now regarded as a classic, he returend to Britain and made films there throughout the 1950’s. He returned to Hollywood to work as a film agent and then went into sales training. He died in Livermore, California in 1994.

Wikipedia entry:

Roper played youthful parts during his career due to his young physique, which included his appearance as the animal-loving young boy “Dickon” with a pet fox in The Secret Garden (1949), starring Margaret O’Brien. The Secret Garden was prepared for MGM’s 25th anniversary as a film studio and was heavily promoted in 1949–50. Newspapers would claim his age as 14 at the time. He appeared this age but was actually five years older. Roper was noted for his reddish hair and some freckles.

Born in Doncaster, Roper left England at age 19 on American Overseas Airlines from London on 5 October 1948 via a Constellation plane (number N90922, Flagship Denmark) after his selection for The Secret Garden from more than 100 boys who were tested during a six-month search.

He arrived in Washington, D.C. in the United States on 6 October 1948,^[noteen route to MGM-British Studios in Culver City, California (now Sony Pictures Studios) who had paid for his trip. Work on the film began 4 October 1948 and lasted to late November, during a period of excitement regarding the appearance of a predawn bright long-tailed comet (1948 L, aka the Eclipse Comet of 1948) becoming visible. He lived in both Britain and California, depending on shooting locales, and acted for 24 years.

Following his acting career he went briefly into the film industry agency business. Roper married Barbara L. Eaton (aka Barbara L. Stafsudd), in Los Angeles when he was 38 years old, on 30 December 1967. Shortly after this marriage, Roper established the Roper School of Real Estate in 1968 in Hayward, California and served as its lecturer and instructor. He would go on to train new salespeople while serving as director of sales training for Red Carpet Realtors in Northern California.

Zena Marshall obituary in “The Guardian” in 2002.

Zena Marshall can claim the distinction to be the first of all the Bond beauties to have a romantic interlude with James Bond in 1962’s “Dr No”. She played Miss Taro the Chinese double agent. She had been appearing in British films since 1946’s “Caesar and Cleopatra”. Zena Marshall was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1926. Her other early films include “Sleeping Car to Trieste” and “So Long at the Fair”. After “Dr No” she featured in “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines” as the wife of Alberto Sordi. In more recent years she attended film functions celebrating the James Bond films. She died in 2009 at the age of 83.

“Guardian” obituary by Gavin Gaughan:

Zena Marshall, who has died aged 83, played a small but pivotal part in establishing the formula of the James Bond series. As the Eurasian secretary, Miss Taro, revealed to be working for the title character in the first Bond film, Dr No (1962), while dallying with 007 (Sean Connery), she was the first of those unscrupulous, exotic beauties who, in the service of the villain, would try but fail to entrap Bond.

For more than a decade beforehand, she had lent a hint of the exotic to monochrome, domestic British cinema. With her dark hair and colouring, the Rank Organisation may have signed her due to a similarity to Ava Gardner.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, she was raised in Leicestershire, and described her ancestry as “part French” (her mother), “part English and part Irish”. She attended St Mary’s school, Ascot, but had already undertaken theatre tours for the Entertainments National Service Association by the time she was in her late teens. Her first film was the misguided epic Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) as a lady in waiting; her fellow super- numeraries included her friend Kay Kendall, and another Bond, Roger Moore.

By 1946, she was part of Rank’s Company of Youth, often dubbed the Charm School, where fellow conscripts includ- ed Sir Christopher Lee, Diana Dors and the broadcaster Pete Murray. The studio, and affiliates such as Gainsborough, cast her in The End of the River (1947), produced by Powell and Pressburger, and as a passenger in the compact thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948).

Good-Time Girl (1948), Snowbound (1948) and The Lost People (1949) all teamed her with Dennis Price, then a suave leading man. Unfortunately, both were also in the much-derided The Bad Lord Byron (1949); fortunately for her, Dr No’s director, Terence Young, was among the screenwriters.

At London’s New Torch Theatre, she was in the poorly received Snow (1953), by the novelist Diana Marr-Johnson, niece of Somerset Maugham. With John Ringham in late 1959, she toured Germany and Holland in The Late Edwina Black. She played a determined doctor in Men Against the Sun (1952), a Kenyan-British co-production starring the august John Bentley, in much the same mode as his later television series African Patrol (1958), in which she also appeared. August 1952 saw her small-screen debut in The Portugal Lady, a live BBC costume drama that was part of its Sunday Night Theatre series, as Charles II’s bride Catherine of Braganza.

During ITV’s opening weeks Marshall appeared in a shampoo commercial, assuring female viewers it was fine to use the product before going to a party. For the new channel, she did The Bob Hope Show (1956), pre-sold by Lew Grade to NBC, then played a scientist “from behind that Curtain” in The Invisible Man (1958), enduring a very silly ending in which she hugs and kisses the unseen hero goodbye.

Marshall appeared three times, between 1960 and 1964, in the series Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan, who had declined the Bond role: twice Marshall played fellow agents who needed to be rescued. She also guested in the now-forgotten shows Man of the World (1962), The Sentimental Agent (1963) and The Human Jungle (1963).

After several of the Edgar Wallace thrillers, she was glimpsed waving off Alberto Sordi in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965). Her last film was The Terrornauts (1967), with the unlikely presence of Charles Hawtrey.

Her marriage to the bandleader Paul Adam ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage. In 1991, she married the producer Ivan Foxwell, whose credits included The Colditz Story. He predeceased her in 2002.

Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.

The great comedian and write Spike Milligan was born in India in 1918. The majority of his career was spent in British radio, television and film. He was part of the famous radio quartet “The Goons” which included Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. His films include “The Bed-sitting Room”, “Adolf Hitler, My Part in His Downfall” and “Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World”. Spike Milligan was an Irish citizen. He died in 2002.

“Guardian” obituary by Stephen Dixon:

Spike Milligan, who has died aged 83 of kidney failure, was once talking about Eccles, his favourite Goon Show character. “Eccles represents the permanency of man, his ability to go through anything and survive. They are trying to get off a ship on the Amazon and lower a boat. When they get to the shore Eccles is already there.”‘How did you get ashore?'”‘Ho hum, I came across on that log.’

“‘Log… that’s an alligator!’

“‘Ooh. I wondered why I kept getting shorter.'”

That brief exchange, recognisable instantly as something only Milligan could have written, does tell us something about this troubled, gifted man, with his unique mind and puzzled pity for humanity.

Jimmy Grafton, who co-wrote many of the early shows, maintained that Eccles was the nearest thing to Milligan’s own id – a very simple, uncomplicated creature who doesn’t want to be burdened with any responsibility and just wants to be happy and enjoy himself. Grafton added: “Spike achieved a reputation for eccentricity and has become, by his own choice, a sort of court jester. You begin to wonder to what extent in some circumstances the eccentricity is involuntary and to what extent it is deliberate. He can always get out of trouble by going a little mad.”

Milligan never achieved Eccles’s simple dream of happiness, and comedy is richer for his failure. He lived his life at the end of his mind’s tether and was always a man of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions: an anarchist with a passion for conservation, a vulnerable and acutely sensitive exhibitionist, a sophisticated person who preferred to retain a vision of childlike purity.

He was often distinctly unsettling, both offstage and as a writer/performer. The writer and jazz singer George Melly, while admitting that Milligan was not the sunniest person all the time, added that his was “the greatest mind in what is loosely called comedy”.

George Orwell’s assertion that “whatever is funny is subversive” was never truer than in the case of Milligan. He didn’t invent surrealistic radio comedy – nor did he ever claim to – but he opened up the medium with his uncluttered anarchic vision, and his influence since the early 1950s has been vast. It took its toll: “I was trying to shake the BBC out of its apathy. I had to fight like mad and people didn’t like me for it. I had to bang and rage and crash. I got it right in the end, and it paid off, but it drove me mad in the process… I’m unbalanced. I’m not a normal person, and that’s a very hard thing to have placed upon you in life.”

Milligan was born in Poona, India. He was the son of an Irish captain in the Royal Artillery, and Irishness, represented by his contempt for authority and his free-wheeling humour – one thinks of the novelist Flann O’Brien – always ran through his work. His father was a frustrated entertainer who did impressions of GH Elliott, the “Chocolate-Coloured Coon” at camp concerts, but never had the confidence to turn professional, and Milligan appeared at such concerts from an early age.

“I wasn’t consciously aware of it,” he said, “but I had had enough of the British empire. The Goons gave me a chance to knock people my father and I had to call ‘Sir’. Colonels. Chaps like Gritpipe-Thynne with educated voices who were really bloody scoundrels.”

Milligan was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and, after his father was posted to Rangoon in 1929, at the Brothers de La Salle; the family stayed in Burma until 1933, when they returned to England to what Milligan described as a fairly impoverished life and where his education continued at the South East London Polytechnic in Lewisham. He worked in a nuts and bolts factory, but had already decided to become an entertainer, and learned to play the ukulele, guitar and trumpet. At one point he won a Bing Crosby crooning competition at the Lewisham Hippodrome.

When the war broke out he joined his father’s old regiment and served in north Africa, where he first met Harry Secombe. He began to organise music and comedy shows for the armed forces entertainment organisation Ensa with Secombe and others, and was wounded in Italy. His war experiences later formed the basis for a number of bestsellers, including Adolf Hitler, My Part In His Downfall (1971), Monty, My Part In His Victory (1976) and Mussolini, His Part In My Downfall (1978).

Back in civvies in 1946, he formed a trio and started the weary round of agents and audition rooms. The act failed to generate any enthusiasm, and when it broke up Milligan “sort of wandered around”. It was during these wanderings that he renewed his friendship with Secombe, who had been struggling along as a comic at the Windmill Theatre in London’s West End which, in a pre-strip club era, provided static nude tableaux. He also made the acquaintance of another young hopeful, Peter Sellers, and the wild-haired and equally anarchic Michael Bentine.

All gravitated to Jimmy Grafton’s pub in Westminster, where they would do turns in the back room to entertain each other. And it was there that the seeds of the Goon Show were sown.

Grafton was writing jokes for the radio comedian Derek Roy and, impressed by Milligan’s unique view of the world, asked him to co-write some material. In this way Milligan wrote for several top comics of the day – Bill Kerr, Alfred Marks and even Frankie Howerd. He also wrote for Secombe and Sellers, who had started to become established, in a modest way, as radio performers. Sellers had the best contacts and first put the idea for the Goon Show to the BBC (“Goon” came from a strange being in the Popeye cartoons which Milligan loved).

The corporation was lukewarm, but agreed to give the show – starring Sellers, Milligan, Bentine and Secombe – a trial run under the title Crazy People. Thus it began in May 1951, swiftly changing its title and losing Bentine, whose surreal style clashed with Milligan’s. It ran, with 26 shows a year, for nine years. It toured the variety theatres as a stage show in the early 1950s, and it was on this tour that Milligan’s emotional imbalance began to assert itself. In Coventry his solo spot went badly and he strode to the footlights and raged at the audience: “You hate me, don’t you?”

Receiving an affirmative, he threw his trumpet to the stage and stamped on it, and when this was greeted with appreciative applause, left the stage and locked himself in his dressing room. Knowing about their friend’s mental instability, Secombe and Sellers broke down the door, fearing that he had tried to kill himself. He hadn’t, but it was an omen of unhappy times to come.

Milligan, with or without Grafton or Larry Stephens, wrote all the shows, with Eric Sykes drafted in to help on occasion. Although the show could hardly have existed without Milligan’s participation, his difficult behaviour kept him at constant loggerheads with the BBC. However, it was when the programmes ended – at Milligan’s instigation – in 1960 that his personal demons started to dominate his private and professional life. “When the Goons broke up I was out of work,” he said. “My marriage ended because I’d had a terrible nervous breakdown – two, three, four, five nervous breakdowns, one after other. The Goon Show did it. That’s why they were so good.”

Because of the “difficult” label, he almost had to beg for work, and the first to respond was the actor/manager Bernard Miles, who asked him to play Ben Gunn in Treasure Island at the Mermaid Theatre on the edge of the City of London. It was during its successful run that Milligan and John Antrobus wrote the bleak comedy The Bed-Sitting Room, which was set in the aftermath of the third world war. It, too, opened at the Mermaid, in 1963, with Milligan appearing as a sort of disruptive “chorus”, and then went to the Duke of York’s Theatre and the Comedy Theatre. In 1970 the play was made into a film.

His next piece, Oblomov, was just as successful, opening at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in 1964. It was based on the Russian classic by Ivan Goncharov, and gave Milligan the opportunity to play most of the title role in bed. Unsure of his material, on the opening night he improvised a great deal, treating the audience as part of the plot almost, and he continued in this diverting manner for the rest of the run, and on tour as Son Of Oblomo

In the late 1960s he did a number of television series, notably the World Of Beachcomber and Q5. He also became a favourite on TV chat shows, although it was with some trepidation that the host – be he Michael Parkinson, Eamonn Andrews or Terry Wogan – would introduce him. Milligan rarely had much of an inkling of what he was going to do, even at far more formal, scripted occasions. “I turn up on the day,” he said. “They point me at the audience and I do it.”

He also turned his attention to the cinema. His films included The Magic Christian (1971), The Devils (1971), The Three Musketeers (1973), The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977) and Monty Python’s Life Of Brian (1978). On the the big screen there was not marked success, for it was impossible to get near the essence of Milligan in short, carefully rehearsed takes.

He worked harder than almost any entertainer one can think of, but seemed to have an imperfect grasp of what was good and what was dashed-off self-indulgence in his prolific output – a Private Eye cartoon in 1984 had a bookshop with a sign in the window: “Spike Milligan will be here to write his latest book at three o’ clock.” Novels, memoirs, verse – words gushed from him in a torrent.

He seemed to mellow in later years, but there was always a hint of the dangerous spark that had brought him to the brink of despair so many times and lit beacons of laughter to cleanse us all. In 2000, to a clutch of awards was added an honorary knighthood. It was honorary because – and earlier the cause of considerable furore – his father’s Irish background meant that he was denied automatic British citizenship and thus the official title.

His first marriage, to June Marlowe, ended in divorce. His second wife, Patricia Ridgeway, died in 1978. He is survived by his third wife, Shelagh Sinclair; they were married in 1983. He leaves two daughters and a son from his first marriage, and a daughter from his second.

· Terence Alan (Spike) Milligan, writer and performer, born April 16 1918; died February 27 2002.ccessed

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Melvyn Hayes was born in London in 1935. He is best remembered for role in the long-running British comedy TV series “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”. He has also featured in many movies including 1957’s “The Curse of Frankenstein” and supporting Cliff Richard in “The Young Ones” and “Summer Holiday”. “Daily Telegraph” with Hayes on the making of “Summer Holiday” can be accessed here.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Hayes attended Sir Walter St John’s Grammar School for Boys, Battersea. He was also in a theatrical troupe called Terry’s Juveniles and his acting career stretches back to 1950 when he was “disappearing twice daily for £4 per week” performing theIndian Rope Trick in Maskelyne’s Mysteries at the Comedy Theatre in London. He also appeared in Repertory Theatres in Surrey,Derbyshire and the Midlands. One of his earliest roles was in the BBC television adaptation of Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School. He played Edek in The Silver Sword (author Ian Serraillier) in 1957, a children’s television production about Polish refugee children trying to find their parents after the Second World War. His film roles include the young Victor Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Cecil Biggs in Bottoms Up (1960), Jimmy in The Young Ones with Cliff Richard (1961), Cyril in Summer Holiday, again with Cliff Richard (1963) and ‘Brother’ Willy in Crooks in Cloisters (1964). He also performed voices on children’s cartoons such as SuperTed, The Dreamstone, Little Dracula, Alfred J. Kwak, Pongwiffy and Budgie the Little Helicopter.

Hayes played dames in British Christmas Pantomimes – his most recent roles being Nanny Nellie in Sleeping Beauty in Worthing, (2006) and Widow Twankey in Aladdin inChatham (2005). Other roles include parts in EastEnders as Michael Rawlins. Carry On England, Love Thy Neighbour, The Thin Blue Line, Here Come the Double Deckers, Potter’s Picture Palaceand the final series of Drop the Dead Donkey. He also provided the voice to characters in the English translation of the cartoon Alfred J. Kwak. In March 2011, Hayes appeared as Mr Pink in the ITV1 comedy TV series Benidorm. His latest theatre appearance was in You’re Only Young Twice (2012) He was also in the audio The Scorchies (2013).

Hayes first married actress Rosalind Allen, with whom he has two daughters and one son. He has two daughters with his second wife, actress and agent Wendy Padbury;^[their daughter, Charlie Hayes, also became an actress. He is now married to Jayne Male and lives in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. Hayes has one child with Male.

He has been a pub landlord, at the Stag Inn in the village of Offchurch in Warwickshire and in Hertfordshire, as landlord of the White Hart Tap in St Albans. He presented awards at the annual Isle of Wight County Press amateur theatre ceremony on 9 November 2010, at Shanklin Conservative Club. Hayes is a member of the Grand Order of Water Rats and in 2004, was made King Rat.

The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.

Nicky Henson. (Wikipedia)

Nicky Henson was born in 1945 is an English actor who has portrayed many roles since 1963. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977.

Henson was born in London, the son of Harriet Martha (Collins) and comedian Leslie Henson. Henson attended St. Bede’s Prep School, Eastbourne and Charterhouse in Godalming. He trained as a stage manager at RADA, and first appeared on stage himself as a guitarist. As a member of the Young Vic Company he played Pozzo in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Henson has appeared in various television roles, including guest roles in Fawlty Towers, Minder, Boon, A Touch of Frost, Heartbeat, After You’ve Gone and Doctors. He also played the eponymous hero in Shine On Harvey Moon when the series was revived in 1995. In 2005 he played Hugo, an antique dealer in Bad Girls. In February 2006, Henson joined the cast of the BBC1 soap opera EastEnders, playing Jack Edwards. Henson left the production towards the end of the year due to health problems.

Henson has played three different characters the police drama series The Bill, the first in 1991, the second in 1998, and the third in 2007. In 2010, he appeared in an episode of the ITV period drama Downton Abbey and appeared in two further episodes in 2013.^[3] He also played Randolph Mepstead, the older brother of David Jason’s character in the pilot episode of the 1976 series Lucky Feller.

Nicky Henson’s film appearances include Witchfinder General (1968), There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970), Mosquito Squadron (1970) and Psychomania (1971). He graduated to lead roles in The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1976) and No. 1 of the Secret Service (1977), before returning to supporting roles in Vera Drake (2004) and George Clooney‘s Syriana (2005).

On stage, Henson has played many Shakespearian characters and has had leading roles in Look Back in Anger, Man and Superman, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, She Stoops to Conquer, Noises Off and many other plays. He appeared as Mordred in the original 1964 London version of Camelot opposite Laurence Harvey as King Arthur. Henson made his Broadway debut in a production of Oscar Wilde‘s An Ideal Husband, opposite Stephanie Beacham. He was nominated for a 1998 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Supporting Performance in a Musical of 1997 for his role in Enter the Guardsman.

He started directing with a Restoration workshop at LAMDA with a production of The Provok’d Wife. In 2009 he directed the Jack Shepherd play Only When I Laugh at the Arcola Theatre in London and Alan Ayckbourn‘s Intimate Exchanges at Sheringham Little Theatre.

He played Lemuel ‘Chipper’ Barnet in Space Force series 1 and 2 (1984–85).

Henson married actress Una Stubbs (who incidentally played his sister-in-law Caroline Bishop in EastEnders). The couple had two sons, Joe and Christian, both of whom are composers.

After their divorce He then married ballerina Marguerite Porter, by whom he has a third son, Keaton, a musician and illustrator.

Adam Henson, a farmer and regular presenter on BBC TV‘s Countryfile, is a nephew.

Henson was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. Surgeons removed tumours from around his spleen, but a routine check-up in 2006 showed that other tumours had grown and it would be dangerous to remove them. Henson was put on a regimen of chemotherapy, and worked regularly to raise funds for cancer charities, especially Marie Curie Cancer Care. Nicky Henson died in December 2019 at the age of 74.

Nicky Henson obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

Tough and tender marked the acting style of Nicky Henson, who has died after a long illness aged 74. Energetic and ebullient were other critical adjectives flying around a career of more than five decades in revue, musicals, with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and on television (Fawlty Towers and EastEnders) and in films by Roy Boulting (There’s A Girl in My Soup, 1970), Mike Leigh (Vera Drake, 2004) and George Clooney (Syriana, 2005).

The range and variety of his work was astonishing, and seems even more so after taking into account the cancer and serial medical procedures he endured over the last 20 years of his life. But he was like Bobby Vee’s rubber ball that came bouncing back all the time.

It was the director Frank Dunlop who really unleashed his talent when he founded the Young Vic in 1970 and picked Henson as a cornerstone actor – alongside Jim Dale, Denise Coffey and Gary Bond – in a project revitalising classics for a new audience.

Between 1970 and 1973, Henson played in Molière, Goldsmith, Shakespeare and Stoppard, scoring particularly as Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger. He was also the sado-masochistic housemaid Solange in Jean Genet’s The Maids.

Now ready for take-off, in 1973-74 alone he played in Peter Handke’s enigmatic A Ride Across Lake Constance at the Hampstead theatre and the Mayfair with Alan Howard, Nicola Pagett and Gayle Hunnicutt; Laertes, Bottom (never was bully Bottom bullier) and Petruchio at the Open Air theatre, Regent’s Park; and Buttons to Twiggy’s Cinderella at the London Casino (now the Prince Edward). And on television he starred as a rumbustious Balzac in a three-part study of the novelist’s love life – Prometheus: The Life of Balzac (1975) – with a top cast including Helen Ryan, Rosemary McHale and Elizabeth Spriggs.

Born in London, Nicky was the son of the music hall star and producer Leslie Henson and his third wife, Billie Collins. He was educated at St Bede’s prep school, Eastbourne, and Charterhouse, Godalming, Surrey, before training as a stage manager at Rada. Also a musician, he formed, and played guitar in, a pop group called the Wombats and wrote songs for Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

He made his West End debut in a revue, All Square (1963), at the Vaudeville, with Beryl Reid, Naunton Wayne and Julian Holloway, after Beyond the Fringe had changed the face of the genre.

Before joining the Young Vic he was modestly established in West End musical theatre. He played Mordred in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot at Drury Lane (1964), with Laurence Harvey and Elizabeth Larner; joined other young hopefuls Francesca Annis and Bill Kenwright in Wolf Mankowitz and John Barry’s Passion Flower Hotel at the Prince of Wales (1965); supported Harry Secombe, Thora Hird and Russ Conway in London Laughs at the Palladium (1966); and spent 18 months in the Martin Starkie/Nevill Coghill musical version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1968) at the Phoenix with Jessie Evans and Wilfrid Brambell. Henson’s big number was I Have a Noble Cock (“he crows at break of day”).

His early films included the low-budget cult movie Witchfinder General (1968), a graphic tale of torture and persecution in the civil war, starring Vincent Price and Ian Ogilvy, the latter becoming a lifelong friend; There’s A Girl in My Soup, starring Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn (Henson was Goldie’s rock musician boyfriend); and The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1976), Henson succeeding Albert Finney as the athletic lothario in the superior 1963 Tony Richardson version, though Henson’s fellow actors included Joan Collins, Terry-Thomas, and Trevor Howard.Advertisement

After the Young Vic and a 1977 tour – and season at the Savoy – with Shaw’s Man and Superman for the RSC, co-starring Richard Pasco and Susan Hampshire, Henson joined Peter Hall’s National on the South Bank from 1978 to 1980, playing in Chekhov, Edward Bond (The Woman), Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel and two Restoration classics directed by Peter Wood, The Double Dealer and The Provok’d Wife. Somehow he squeezed in a reunion with Dunlop for a West End season in the Ben Travers farce Rookery Nook, at Her Majesty’s (1979). This was a play first produced by his father with Tom Walls in the Aldwych farce series in 1926.

His second great farce triumph came in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982) as the ageing juvenile lead Roger Templemain, who can only articulate semi-sensibly while spouting the lines “in character” as the hapless Gary Lejeune. He returned to the RSC for the 1985-86 seasons and gave two fantastic performances as Touchstone in As You Like It, a role usually immune to comic invention but here transformed into a music hall chameleon; and as the frenetic Frank Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, searching a palpably uninhabited laundry basket for his cuckolder and adopting a ludicrous disguise as a moustachioed little Hitler in a yellow bicycle plastic mac.

In the second series of Fawlty Towers (1979), Henson had played a fruity medallion man Basil suspects of smuggling a woman into his room. He had. She was his mother.

In the subsequent decade, his TV work embraced several mini-series: The Happy Apple (1983), scripted by Keith Waterhouse from a Jack Pulman stage play set in a failing advertisement agency; Thin Air (1988), in which a radio reporter uncovers local corruption; and Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man (1990), Finney leading a cast including Henson, Linda Marlowe, Josie Lawrence and Michael Grandage.

In the 1990s, he appeared as Vershinin in Frank McGuinness’s version of Three Sisters with the Cusack sisters and their father Cyril at the Royal Court; in Ronald Harwood’s Reflected Glory with Finney at the Vaudeville; and on a bill of Frayn playlets and sketches, Alarms and Excursions, at the Gielgud. His final stage role came as the suave vice-chancellor and lead gymnast, Archie, in David Leveaux’s fine National Theatre revival of Stoppard’s Jumpers (with Simon Russell Beale and Essie Davis) on its transfer to the Piccadilly in 2003.

By then he was seriously ill in sustained bursts, but still he managed to make a Shakespeare TV film, A Waste of Shame (2005), with a script by William Boyd that weighed the mystery of the sonnets, and he made that EastEnders appearance as Jack Edwards in 2006, threatening the putative husband of his daughter (“I will hunt you down. With dogs. On horseback.”) He even popped up twice in Downton Abbey (2010 and 2013) as a washed-up music hall artiste, partner in a long-ago double act with Jim Carter’s Carson.

In 2005 the RSC had invited him back to play Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, but he had to quit the role – an ideal one for him – after just one public preview. He knew his life on stage was over, but in 2017 I found him bouncing around still in the interval of a play he had directed at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester. This was John Cleese’s Bang Bang, an adaptation of Feydeau, with Oliver Cotton playing the John Cleese role. He had done it really well.

His last film credits were in The Holly Kane Experiment (2017), a spooky thriller in which he played the sinister nemesis of an obsessive psychologist (Kirsty Averton); and in a low-budget crime thriller, Tango One (2018).

In 1968 Henson married Una Stubbs. After they divorced in 1975, he was in a relationship for five years with the actor Susan Hampshire.

In 1982 he met and married Marguerite Porter, a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. She sustained him through his illness and survives him, along with their son, Keaton, the two sons from his first marriage, Christian and Joe, and four grandchildren. All three sons are musicians and composers.

• Nicholas Victor Lesley Henson, actor, born 12 May 1945; died 16 December 2019

Tim Seely was born in 1935 in England. He has featured in numerous television productions. He had a major role in the Irish made feature film “Sally’s Irish Rogue” with Julie Harris.

“Wikipedia” entry:

In 1957, he gave his theatre debut in the play Tea and Sympathy at the London Comedy Theatre. Seely played the young Tom Lee, who fell in love with the senior Laura, played by Elizabeth Sellars.^[2] He played the same role in the adaption at New Shakespeare Theatre, Liverpool. There he also played Rodolfo in Arthur Miller‘s A View From the Bridge. In 1958, he acted alongside Maggie Smith at the London St Martin’s Theatre in an adaption of The Stepmother.

Seely was member of the BBC Radio Drama Company, with whom he acted the title role in Pericles, Prince of Tyre.^[1] He also had roles in various Shakespeare plays, including as Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew, Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, Polonius in Hamlet, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing and the King of France in All’s Well That Ends Well.^[1]In the late 1950s, he also took roles in film and television productions. One of his more prominent roles was Midshipmen Ned Young in the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, where Seely played alongside Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.

His “Wikipedia” entry can be read here.

“Margaret Lockwood was not by any means a great screen actress, but she was spirited and likeable. The British public queued to see her until blatant mishandling ruined her career. Possibly (age apart) she might not have retained her popularity. There was something about her South-London-bred personality that suited the 40’s and by the mid-50’s she and her fellows – Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc and Jean Kent were passe as far as the cinema was concerned. One can only speculate as to what they might have been like had they ever had good scripts or first-rate directors, though Milton Shulman in the ‘Evening Stand’ in 1946 had little doubt; in an open letter to Mr Rank he claimed that he could find five girls as pretty and talented as this bunch by watching the secretaries get off the escalators in Leicester Square Station. He could’nt, of course” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The Golden Years”. (1970).

Margaret Lockwood Guardian tribute

Margaret Lockwood was the most popular actress in British films in the 1940’s. She was bron in 1916 in Karachi, Pakistan. She began her film career in 1934 and the following year she had a major role in “Lorna Doone”. In 1938 she starred in the Alfred Hitchcock classic “The Lady Vanishes” and was soon on her way to Hollywood. She made two movies there “Susannah of the Mounties” with Randolph Scott and Shirley Temple and “Rulers of the Sea” with Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. However she was soon back in England and her career went from strength to strength. Her major movies include “The Stars Look Down” in 1939, “Night Train to Munich” “The Man in Gray” , “The Wicked Lady” in 1945, “Love Story”, “Madness of the Heart” and ” Cast a Dark Shadow”. In 1971 she won critical acclaim for her television performances in the series “Justice”. She died in 1990. Her daughter is the actress Julia Lockwood.

Philip French’s excellent article on Lockwood in the Guardian:

She was born in India, a daughter of the Raj, brought up in England by a cold, domineering mother, and was an experienced child actor before studying at Rada. Playing costume heroines, career girls and socialites, this brunette beauty became a sort of movie star in Carol Reed’s debut Midshipman Easy (1935), the first of seven collaborations with Reed, and a real star as the bored heiress in Hitchcock’s comedy-thriller The Lady Vanishes (1938). This brought her to Hollywood’s attention. But after two unsuccessful films there in 1939, she returned home for good to become the greatest British star of the 1940s, starting with Reed’s The Stars Look Down as the upper-middle-class wife of working-class Michael Redgrave.

This unsympathetic role was the first of numerous seductive femmes fatales, mostly with James Mason, Phyllis Calvert, Stewart Granger and Patricia Roc. The most famous was her Lady Barbara Skelton, the aristocrat moonlighting as an 18th-century highwayman in The Wicked Lady (1945). She caused problems for the Hollywood Production Code with her provocative cleavage. A 1948 editorial in the polemical magazine Sequence, co-edited by Lindsay Anderson, sarcastically noted: ‘Mr Harold Wilson was recently recorded … presenting Miss Margaret Lockwood with a heavy, silver-plated ornament, thus bestowing official sanction on to the British people’s judgment that Miss Lockwood is their finest actress. Indeed, as Mr Wilson smilingly remarked, this comes to the same thing as saying: “The finest actress in the world.”‘

Her film career went downhill following her appeal to J Arthur Rank that she was ‘sick of sinning’. She refused the title role in Forever Amber but sunnier parts proved unpopular, especially her jolly Nell Gwynne in Cardboard Cavalier. Joining the company run by Herbert Wilcox, husband of her rival, Anna Neagle, she fared no better, and gave up films to enjoy much success in the theatre (she was an excellent Eliza in Pygmalion) and on TV. She made an impressive comeback as a barmaid in Lewis Gilbert’s Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), and after an absence of 20 years played the evil stepmother in Bryan Forbes’s The Slipper and the Rose (1976). Her reclusive life was interrupted by a visit to Buckingham Palace on being made a CBE in 1980.

Philip French’s article in The Guardian can also be accessed on-line here.

“The Times” obituary:

Margaret Mary Lockwood, the daughter of an English administrator of an Indian railway company, by his Scottish third wife, was born in Karachi, where she lived for the first three and a half years of her life. In 1920, she and her brother, Lyn, came to England with their mother to settle in the south London suburb of Upper Norwood, and Margaret enrolled as a pupil at Sydenham High School. Her childhood was repressed and unhappy, largely due to the character of her mother, a dominant and possessive woman who was often cruelly discouraging to her shy, sensitive daughter. As a result, Margaret took refuge in a world of make-believe and dreamed of becoming a great star of musical comedy. After becoming a dance pupil at the Italia Conti school. she made her stage debut at 15 as a fairy in ” A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Holborn Empire. A year later, she played another fairy, for 30 shillings a week, in “Babes in the Wood” at the Scala Theatre. The excitement of “walking on” in Noel Coward’s mamouth spectacular, “Cavalcade”, at Drury Lane in 1931 came to an abrupt conclusion when her mother removed her from the production after learning that a chorus boy had uttered a forbidden four-letter expletive in front of her.

In 1933, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she was seen in Leontine Sagan’s production of “Hannele” by a leading London agent, Herbert de Leon, who at once signed her as a client and arranged a screen test which impressed the director, Basil Dean, into giving her the second lead in his film, “Lorna Doone” when Dorothy Hyson fell ill. Seven ingenue screen roles followed before she played opposite Maurice Chevalier in the 1936 remake of “The Beloved Vagabond”. A year later, she married a man of whom her mother disapproved strongly, so much so that for six months Margaret Lockwood did not live with her husband and was afraid to tell her mother that the marriage had taken place. In 1938, Lockwood’s role as a young London nurse in Carol Reed’s film, “Bank Holiday”, established her as a star, and the enormous success of her next film, “The Lady Vanishes“, opposite Michael Redgrave, gave her international status.

A visit to Hollywood to appear with Shirley Temple in “Susannah of the Mounties” and with Douglas Fairbanks Jr in “Rulers of the Sea” was not at all to her liking. She returned with relief to Britain to star in two of Carol Reed’s best films, “The Stars Look Down”, again with Redgrave, and “Night Train to Munich“, opposite Rex Harrison. In 1941, she gave birth to a daughter by Leon, Julia Lockwood, affectionately known to her mother as “Toots”, who was also to become a successful actress. The Leons separated soon after her birth and were divorced in 1950. Lockwood gained custody of her daughter, but not before Mrs Lockwood had sided with her son-in-law to allege that Margaret was “an unfit mother.” The turning point in her career came in 1943, when she was cast opposite James Mason in “The Man in Grey”, as an amoral schemer who steals the husband of her best friend, played by Phyllis Calvert, and then ruthlessly murders her. Spectral in black, with her dark, dramatic looks, cold but beautiful eyes, and vividly overpainted thin lips, Lockwood was queen among villainesses. The film inaugurated a series of hothouse melodramas that came to be known as Gainsborough Gothic and had film fans queueing outside cinemas all over Britain.

In 1944, in “A Place of One’s Own”, she added one further attribute to her armoury: a beauty spot painted high on her left cheek. It became her trade mark and the impudent ornament of her most outragous film “The Wicked Lady”, again opposite Mason, in which she played the ultimate in murderous husband-stealers, Lady Skelton, who amuses herself at night with highway robbery. The amount of cleavage exposed by Lockwood’s Restoration gowns caused consternation to the film censors, and apprehension was in the air before the premiere, attended by Queen Mary, who astounded everyone by thoroughly enjoying it. The film’s worldwide success put Lockwood at the top of Britain’s cinema polls for the next five years.

After poisoning several husbands in “Bedelia” (1946), Lockwood became less wicked in “Hungry Hill”, “Jassy”, and “The White Unicorn”, all opposite Dennis Price. She complained to the head of her studio, J. Arthur Rank, that she was “sick of sinning”, but paradoxically, as her roles grew nicer, her popularity declined. She refused to return to Hollywood to make “Forever Amber”, and unwisely turned down the film of Terence Rattigan’s “The Browning Version”. Her contract with Rank was dissolved in 1950 and a film deal with Herbert Wilcox, who was married to her principal cinema rival, Anna Neagle, resulted in three disappointing flops. In 1955, she gave one of her best performances, as a blowsy ex-barmaid in “Cast a Dark Shadow”, opposite Dirk Bogarde, but her box office appeal had waned and the British cinema suddenly lost interest in her.

An unpretentious woman, who disliked the trappings of stardom and dealt brusquely with adulation, she accepted this change in her fortunes with unconcern, and turned to the stage where she had a success in “Peter Pan”, “Pygmalion”, “Private Lives”, and Agatha Christie’s thriller “Spider’s Web”, which ran for over a year. In 1965, she co-starred with her daughter, Julia, in a popular television series, “The Flying Swan”, and surprised those who felt she had never been a very good actress by giving a superb comedy performance in the West End revival of Oscar Wilde‘s “An Ideal Husband”.

After what she regarded as her mother’s painful betrayal at the custody hearing, the two women never met again, and when a friend complimented Mrs Lockwood on her daughter’s performance in “The Wicked Lady”, she snapped: “That wasn’t acting. That was natural.” Lockwood never remarried, declaring: “I would never stick my head into that noose again,” but she lived for many years with the actor, John Stone, whom she met when they appeared together in the 1959 stage comedy, “And Suddenly It’s Spring”. Stone appeared with her in her award winning 1970s television series, “Justice”, in which she played a woman barrister, but after 17 years together, he left her to marry a theatre wardrobe mistress. This last blow, coupled with the sudden death of her trusted agent, Herbert de Leon, and the onset of a viral ear infection, caused her to turn her back gradually on a glittering career.

She had one last film role, as the stepmother with the sobriquet, “wicked”, omitted but implied, in Bryan Forbes‘s Cinderella musical, “The Slipper and the Rose” in 1976. Her final stage appearance, as Queen Alexandra in “Motherdear”, ran for only six weeks at the Ambassadors’ Theatre in 1980.

That year, she was created CBE, but her appearance at her investiture at Buckingham Palace accompanied by her three grandchildren was her last public appearance. For the remaining years of her life, she was a complete recluse at her home in Kingston upon Thames, rejecting all invitations and offers of work.

In spite of this, she was warmly remembered by the public. When the author Hilton Tims, was preparing his recent biography, “Once a Wicked Lady”, a stall holder from whom he was buying some flowers for her, snatched up a second bunch and said, “Give her these from me. I used to love her films.”

Gladys Henson was an Irish born actress whose career was on the British stage and in character parts in movies. She usually played careworn housewives. Her films include “The Captive Heart” and “The Blue Lamp”. She was especially good in Sidney Furie’s “The Leather Boys” in 1964. She died in 1982 at the age of 85. Her “Wikipedia” page can be viewed here

Heather Sears obituary in “The Independent” in 1994

Heather Sears was very pretty and talented actress who had a sudden burst in British films in the late 1950’s which was not sustained. She made her film debut in a minor role with June Thorburn and John Fraser in 1955 in “Touch and Go”. At the age of 21 she won the title role in “The Story of Esther Costello” with Joan Crawford and Rossano Brazzi. Her most famous role was as Susan Brown opposite Laurence Harvey’s Joe Lampton in “Room At the Top”. She also starred in “Sons and Lovers” from the novel by D.H. Lawerence. Her film career had waned by the early 60’s and she concentrated on the stage with occasional roles on television. Heather Sears died in 1994 at the early age of 58.

Her “Independent” obituary:

HEATHER SEARS was a beautiful, intelligent and gifted actress with taste. The four virtues rarely come together. And she might have been a star, filling theatres and cinemas with her beguiling presence, never mind the brains, the talent or the taste, if she had not also been such a human being. It made no sense to her to try to raise a family and pursue an acting career at the same time. So the acting became increasingly spasmodic as the family grew; and that was no doubt wise of her maternally. But artistically?

Would she have risen to the top of her profession had she given up everything for art’s sake? That is the only question that can interest any serious student of acting; and the answer is probably not because her talent seemed to place her at the top from the word go.

Some players are born great; others achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon them. Sears struck most of us all of a heap from the start. She never seemed to have to strive. She had the looks, the charm, the personality, the warmth and, as we saw in the film Room at the Top (1958), the sense of irony to make a dullish, drippy, well-bred symbol of virginity as real and interesting as the much more sensually arresting role in the same film, played by the much more experienced Simone Signoret, as the rival object of Laurence Harvey’s social ambition and sexual fancy.

Would her acting have got much better had she practised it more assiduously? It wasn’t just in films that she first enchanted us. At the Royal Court in its heyday she was the third Alison in Look Back In Anger (to Richard Pasco’s wrathful Jimmy and Alan Bates’ Cliff). At the same theatre she made an admirable and typically warming Agnes in Giraudoux’s one-acter The Apollo de Bellac (again with Pasco and Bates), and in a Sunday night try-out, directed by John Dexter, of Michael Hastings’s Yes – And After, she also showed herself to be a player in whom a strong future could be foreseen.

She seemed to be well on the road towards it in Julien Green’s South (Lyric, Hammersmith), in which she nearly brought off the impossibly challenging part of a devoted girl who finally understood what had been happening to her beloved when he faced up to his homosexuality; and by then the world had seen her as Joan Crawford’s adopted deaf-mute daughter in The Story of Esther Costello (1957), and as Miriam Lievers in the film Sons and Lovers (1960).

So there was no doubt of it. Sears was a serious and compelling actress, but motherhood and family life intervened and in the next decade, though she worked in the film studios from time to time, she acted on the stage notably only twice. At Chichester she was the kitchenmaid in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, bringing up a child she had rescued from cruelty until its mother came to claim it; and in the West End she was the scattier of the two wives in Ayckbourn’s How The Other Half Loves (1970).

Not much of a record for an actress in her mid-thirties; but in the 1970s she more than made up for it when she felt free to return to the stage, even if the artistic atonement took place in that relatively unfashionable sector of the theatre – provincial rep.

10th December 1956: British stage and screen actress Heather Sears (1935 – 1994) on the film set of David Miller’s ‘The Story of Esther Costello’ for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 73 No 10 – pub. 1956. (Photo by Kurt Hutton/IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Getty Images)

You had to go to the Leicester Haymarket, one of the better-funded houses, to see her in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Farquhar, Goldsmith, Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Ibsen, Rattigan and Pinter. Just the kind of names you might expect to find in any serious-minded National Theatre’s repertoire – though she would have looked in vain for most of them on the South Bank – and just the place to prove herself the dedicated player we had suspected her to be 20 years earlier. Leicester was only an hour and a bit non-stop from St Pancras and her acting was always worth the journey, never more so than in 1979 in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf.

As the possessive, passionate wife of a man overwhelmed by guilt over the drowning of their crippled son, the actress conveyed with stillness and understatement all the pain and fear for the future of a marriage drained of warmth but sealed by cold duty. It was acting of a quality only Ibsen could provoke with his feeling for feminine character, and which only this actress in her renewed dedication to her art could, as a mother herself, deliver with such stirring, unaffected, emotional candour.

It made you feel she had indeed been born great.

Her “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.

Article on Heather Sears from Tina Aumont’s website:

Petite and pretty with a mass of talent, the quiet and often beguiling Heather Sears had the power to shine on both stage and screen. And although she only appeared in 10 movies in her long (if sporadic) career, she managed to inject her characters with genuine warmth and emotion, leaving a haunting impression on many who saw her.

Sears was born on September 28th 1935, and, after attending drama school in London, won a contract with Romulus Films where she was mentored by director Jack Clayton. After minor bit parts in the 1955 Jack Hawkins comedy ‘Touch and Go’ and the Ronald Shiner cockney farce ‘Dry Rot’ (’56), Heather would land an early juicy role that would bring her to the attention of both the public and critics.

In 1957 Heather was hand-picked to play the title role in Jack Clayton’s production of ‘The Story of Esther Costello’, as a 15 year old girl rendered deaf, dumb and blind after a childhood accident (in a compelling opening scene). Joan Crawford was the caring socialite who takes Esther into her care and, although Sear’s performance was later overshadowed by Patti Duke’s faultless performance in ‘The Miracle Worker’, Heather was still excellent in a difficult role, and convincingly conveyed her character’s initial struggle to communicate. Though at times overly melodramatic, it was a very good movie and earned Sears a BAFTA for Best Actress, and much international praise. After filming, Heather married the movie’s art director Tony Masters, and they would remain together until his death in 1990.

It would be Sears’ next film role though, that she is probably best remembered for, as the loving and naïve Susan Brown, the spoilt daughter of Donald Wolfit’s imposing industrialist, in Jack Clayton’s blistering drama ‘Room at the Top’. Laurence Harvey starred as Joe Lampton, an ambitious young man with big dreams, whose affair with a married woman (played wonderfully by an Oscar-winning Simone Signoret) resulted in tragic consequences. A deserved classic of British cinema, it’s still a powerful and devastating movie, and one that ushered in a new wave of realism. Travelling to Australia, Heather made the very good crime picture ‘The Siege of Pinchgut’ (’59) playing a caretaker’s daughter who’s taken hostage by Aldo Ray’s escaped convict. Largely forgotten in the UK, it remains something of a classic in Australia. Another good role came the following year in Jack Cardiff’s sensitive drama ‘Sons and Lovers’ (’60), as the academic friend of Dean Stockwell’s artistic yet browbeaten teenager. She was abducted again, this time in Hammer’s 1962 remake of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, as the rising opera star Christine Charles, who’s fixated upon by Herbert Lom’s Phantom.

Heather’s last film role of note came in the 1964 gothic horror ‘The Black Torment’, starring as Lady Elizabeth Fordyke, the new bride of John Turner’s Sir Richard Fordyke, a Lord who has been accused of murder by local villagers. Busy raising a family, only periodic TV appearances followed, including the series ‘The Informer’ (’66-7) as disgraced barrister Ian Hendry’s wife. In the 1970’s Sears returned to the theatre, starring in both the Classics as well as plays by Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter. On television, she appeared in a 1974 remake of ‘Great Expectations’, playing the orphan Biddy who befriends young Pip. After a couple of more television guest spots, Heather’s final screen role was in the obscure 1989 movie ‘The Last Day of School’.

Married to Tony Masters for over 30 years, and with 3 sons, Heather Sears sadly died of multiple organ failure, on January 3rd 1994. She was only 58. A genuine talent, Heather managed to leave her mark in some impressive Black & White pictures, and gave outstanding performances in a couple of unforgettable ones.

Favourite Movie: Room at the Top
Favourite Performance: The Story of Esther Costello

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Brian Roper

Brian Roper. (Wikipedia)

Zena Marshall

Zena Marshall obituary in “The Guardian” in 2002.

Spike Milligan

Melvin Hayes

Nicky Henson

Nicky Henson. (Wikipedia)

Nicky Henson obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

Tim Seely

Margaret Lockwood

Margaret Lockwood Guardian tribute

Gladys Henson

Heather Sears

Heather Sears obituary in “The Independent” in 1994

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