Brittish Actors
Patrick Malahide was born in Berkshire, England the son of Irish parents in 1945. He made his television debut in 1976 in “The Flight of the Heron”. His many television appearances including “Middlemarch”, “The Singing Detective”and the title role of “Inspector Alleyn” in the 1993 series. His films include “Comfort and Joy” “and the James Bond thriller “The World Is Not Enough”. His website can be accessed here.
Eric Portman was born in 1901. He started work in 1922 as a salesman in the menswear department at the Marshall & Snelgrove department store in Leeds and acted in the amateur Halifax Light Opera Society.
He made his professional stage debut in 1924 with Henry Baynton‘s company. In 1924, Robert Courtneidge’s Shakespearian company arrived in Halifax. Portman joined the company as a ‘passenger’ and appeared in their production of Richard II at the Victoria Hall, Sunderland which led to Courtneidge giving him a contract. Portman made his West End debut at the Savoy Theatre in London, in September 1924, as Antipholous of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors. He was engaged by Lilian Baylis for the Old VicCompany. In 1928, Portman played Romeo at the rebuilt Old Vic. He became a successful theatre actor. In 1933, Portman was in Diplomacy at the Prince’s Theatre with Gerald du Maurier and Basil Rathbone.
In the 1930s, he began appearing in films, starting with an uncredited bit in The Girl from Maxim’s (1933) directed by Alexander Korda. In 1935, he appeared in four films, including Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn with Tod Slaughter. He also made Hyde Park Corner with Gordon Harker and directed by Sinclair Hill; Old Roses and Abdul the Damned.
In 1936 Portman had a stage hit playing Lord Byron in Bitter Harvest. After Hearts of Humanity (1936), he played Giuliano de’ Medici in Hill’s The Cardinal (1936). Portman made another film with Tod Slaughter, The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936), and was in Moonlight Sonata (1937).
He went to the US and played in Madame Bovary on Broadway for the Theatre Guild of America. He also had a small role in The Prince and the Pauper (1937), but disliked Hollywood and did not stay long.
He was back on Broadway in I Have Been Here Before by J. B. Priestley. Portman’s last London stage show was Jeannie.
In 1941 he had his first important film role playing a Nazi on the run Hirth in Powell and Pressburger‘s 49th Parallel, which was a big hit in the US and Britain. Portman was established as a star and signed a long term contract with Gainsborough Pictures.
Portman was in Powell and Pressburger’s follow up, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), which reworked the story of The 49th Parallelto be about Allied pilots in occupied Holland. He played a Belgian resistance leader in Uncensored (1942) from director Anthony Asquith, and a German pilot in Squadron Leader X (1943) with director Lance Comfort. Portman was a sailor in Asquith’s We Dive at Dawn (1943) and a factory supervisor in Millions Like Us (1943) from Launder and Gilliat.He was in another war story in Comfort’s Escape to Danger(1943), then was back with Powell and Pressburger for A Canterbury Tale (1944). Portman had the lead in Great Day (1945) with Flora Robson and in the expensive colonial epic Men of Two Worlds (1946).
In 1945, exhibitors voted him the 10th most popular star at the British box office. He maintained that ranking the following year.
He played the bogus Major in Terence Rattigan‘s play Separate Tables in 1956–57 on Broadway. For this performance, he was nominated for a Tony Award (Best Actor (Dramatic)). In 1958 he appeared on Broadway in a short-lived production of Jane Eyre as Rochester. Portman had better luck the following year in a production of Eugene O’Neill‘s A Touch of the Poet, which had a long run. In contract, Flowering Cherry by Robert Bolt, with Portman in the title role only lasted five performances on Broadway.
Later film roles included in The Naked Edge (1961), Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), West 11 (1963), The Man Who Finally Died (1963), The Bedford Incident (1965), and The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966).
In 1962 Portman was in a stage adaptation of A Passage to India that ran for 109 performances on Broadway.
Near the end of his life he played character roles including Number Two in the TV series The Prisoner, appearing in the episode “Free For All” (1967), as well as films including The Whisperers (1967) and Deadfall (1968), both for director Bryan Forbes. His final film was Assignment to Kill (1968).
Portman was homosexual, although newspapers never reported this during the mid-1950s when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Newspapers refrained from identifying his sexuality throughout the 1960s when it could still have damaged his career. His partner was actor Knox Laing.
Portman died at age 68 at his home in St Veep, Cornwall on 7 December 1969 from a heart disease. He was buried in St. Veep parish church, Cornwall, UK.
A blue plaque was erected by the Halifax Civic Trust.
Venetia Stevenson was born in 1938 in London. SShe is the daughter of actress Anna Lee and film director Robert Stevenson. When a child she moved to Hollywood with her parents who worked in U.S. movies. She made her stage debut with her mother in 1955 in “Liliom”. In the late 1850’s she began acting on film. Her films include “The Day of the Outlaw” and “Dasrby’s Rangers”. She retired from acting in movies after her marriage to Don Everly, one of The Everly Brothers. Their son is the country singer Edan Everly.
Sultry, glamorous blonde Venetia Stevenson was a British-born starlet of late 1950s Hollywood whose face was her initial fortune. A shapely, lush-lipped knockout, the camera simply adored her and, in her early years, she dotted the covers of several magazines. Her acting talent, however, never measured up and, within a few years, she willingly retired.
Born in London on March 10, 1938, Venetia came from strong entertainment stock. Her mother, actress Anna Lee, was a well-known co-star of the British cinema, and her father, director Robert Stevenson, was well-respected for his directing of such classy Grade “A” motion pictures as Nine Days a Queen (1936), King Solomon’s Mines (1937),Back Street (1941) and Jane Eyre (1943). Just prior to the beginning of WWII in Europe, the family moved to Hollywood. By 1944, her parents had divorced and Venetia, eventually, decided to live with her father and new stepmother.
Venetia’s photogenic beauty was apparent from the start. As part of the youthful Hollywood scene, she was quickly discovered and moved with ease into junior modeling work. This, plus her parents’ obvious connections, led to a natural progression into acting. Self-admittedly, she was never a confidant actress. Making her TV debut playing a corpse on Matinee Theatre (1955), she also appeared with her mother and the husband/wife team of Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl in a 1955 Arizona stage production of “Liliom”, in order to gain experience. Signed with RKO, Venetia took acting lessons and posed for publicity stills but she made little progress there. Warner Bros. eventually took her on and she made several guest appearances on TV, including that ofRicky Nelson‘s girlfriend on the popular series, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (1952). Other WB series work included roles on Cheyenne (1955) and 77 Sunset Strip (1958).
Venetia made her film entrance with a decorous, second-lead femme role in the WB war picture Darby’s Rangers (1958), starring James Garner, Peter Brown and Edd Byrnes. As part of the Hollywood dating swirl, there were obvious set-ups with such big stars as Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins and, even, Elvis Presley. Such a set-up led to a 1956 marriage to up-and-coming actor/dancer Russ Tamblyn, but the bloom quickly fell off the rose and the couple divorced a year later.
For the most part. Venetia was cast as a beautiful distraction in action-adventure and crime movies. Her handful of hunky movie co-stars included Jeff Richards and Guy Madison. Such routine roles in Day of the Outlaw (1959), Island of Lost Women (1959),Studs Lonigan (1960), Seven Ways from Sundown (1960), The City of the Dead (1960), which was made in her native England and released here as “Horror Hotel”, and The Sergeant Was a Lady (1961), her last, did little to boost her feelings of adequacy or her Hollywood ranking. Mother Anna Lee, who found renewed recognition as a daytime soap doyenne (“Lila Quartermaine” on General Hospital (1963)), appeared in support of her daughter in two films: Jet Over the Atlantic (1959) and The Big Night (1960). Divorced from Tamblyn, Venetia married one of The Everly Brothers, Don Everly, of “Wake Up, Little Susie” fame, in 1962. At this point, she had no qualms about retiring from the ever-competitive acting world and did so. The couple went on to have two daughters and a son. Stacy Everly and Erin Everly both dabbled in acting, and son Edan Everly delved into music as both a singer and guitarist. He also teaches music and produces/writes for other artists.
In later years, Venetia became a script reader for Burt Reynolds‘s production company and, subsequently, became vice-president of Cinema Group, a production company that made several films in the 1980s. Since her 1970 divorce from Everly, the still-beautiful lady, who enjoys horseback riding, has not remarried.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Published November 23, 2022 8:00am EST
By Stephanie Nolasco | Fox News
Author Billy Stanley spoke to Fox News Digital about how Elvis Presley, a ‘proud patriot,’ never lost his faith in God.
Whenever Venetia Stevenson walked into a room, every man would turn his head and gawk, including Elvis Presley.
The actress and model, who was once labeled “the most photogenic girl in the world,” died in September at age 84. Tab Hunter’s longtime partner Allan Glaser confirmed to Fox News Digital that he’s producing a film about Hunter’s life in which Stevenson is prominently featured.
Her sister Caroline Stevenson spoke to Fox News Digital about how her “idol” captivated some of Hollywood’s sought-after leading men, including the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Venetia Stevenson poses with Elvis Presley at his home in Memphis. (Getty Images)
“Elvis Presley was one of the most polite, wonderful, genuine kind men she’s ever met,” said Caroline. “Of course, me being a teenager, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, is Venetia going to marry Elvis?’”
Stevenson, the daughter of “General Hospital” star Anna Lee and “Mary Poppins” director Robert Stevenson, became romantically linked to the singer in the late ‘50s. She visited him in Memphis, Tennessee, and the pair were photographed attending a screening of Presley’s 1957 film “Loving You.”
“He couldn’t have been nicer,” said Caroline. “She did go and stay with him. I know they stayed in separate bedrooms because she made it very clear that’s how she wanted it. He respected that. And she thought he was just wonderful. But nothing ever evolved beyond that. Can’t imagine why. I mean, we were all doing flip-flops whenever he walked into a room.”
“I remember he was so down-to-earth,” she continued. “He came to this little restaurant and ordered a hamburger. The waitress was just swooning. And here he is saying, ‘This food is delicious. But you’ve got to make this lettuce smaller. You’ve gotta chop it up. Chop this lettuce up, or it just falls off the hamburger.’ Meanwhile, the waitress is just fainting almost on the floor.”
Joanna Venetia Invicta Stevenson was born in 1938. It was around this time her father signed a contract with producer David O. Selznick, and the family traveled from London to Hollywood. At 14, Stevenson was scouted by photographer Peter Gowland on a beach in Malibu, California. Her photos soon appeared in numerous magazines, including Esquire.
In 1956, Stevenson was signed by RKO Radio Pictures. She and Bond girl Ursula Andresseven took tap-dancing lessons together. She then signed a contract with Warner Bros. Then, Popular Photography magazine named her “the most photogenic girl in the world” out of 4,000 contestants in its 1957 issue. She accepted the award on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Venetia Stevenson alongside a young Burt Reynolds, circa 1960. (CBS via Getty Images)
“I remember I was in Grand Central Station [in New York City] and I looked at the magazine stand,” Caroline recalled. “One time, I counted 46 magazine covers with my sister. She’s a chameleon. She could be Marilyn Monroe. She could be Ingrid Bergman. She could be whoever the photographer wanted her to be.
“She just had this incredible ability to make herself look completely different in each photo. Some people thought she was a little distant or reclusive. The truth is, I felt Venetia was always a little shy. And I guess some people mistook that for coldness. She had a great sense of humor. I never knew her to speak unkindly about anyone.”
As a movie star, Stevenson dated “all kinds of people,” Caroline shared. She acted as a confidant for Hunter, a Hollywood heartthrob who was closeted at the time, and “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins. Hunter was allegedly one of Perkins’ first lovers, Entertainment Weekly reported. In the 2015 documentary “Tab Hunter Confidential,” Stevenson said she served as “a beard” when she was photographed around town with the two actors.
“I remember I got to stay at her apartment one time,” Caroline recalled. “She would get a lot of phone calls, and I was able to mimic her voice. I would have about seven- to 10-minute conversations with all sorts of people who wanted to be with her. I remember there was this man who was in charge of Warner Bros. at the time, and he really wanted to date Venetia. I just had this wonderful conversation with him, mostly yes and no, but quite a lot of nos.”
Russ Tamblyn and Venetia Stevenson were married from 1956-57. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Stevenson said “I do” to “West Side Story” actor Russ Tamblyn on Valentine’s Day 1956. However, the relationship was short-lived, and the pair called it quits in 1957. It was at “The Ed Sullivan Show” where she met Don Everly of The Everly Brothers. They were married from 1962-70.
Stevenson and Everly had three children, including actress Erin Everly. Erin married Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose in 1990. According to reports, it was Erin who inspired the band’s hit song, “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Their marriage was annulled in 1991.
Despite having a life of glitz and glamour, Stevenson quit acting after marrying Everly.
Phil Everly, left, congratulates brother Don Everly, who married screen star Venetia Stevenson. Everly and Stevenson were married from 1962-70. (Getty Images)
“She would not mind me saying this, but my sister Venetia was not a good actress,” Caroline chuckled. “She would be the first to tell you that. She didn’t like acting. But she was under contract and when you are, it doesn’t matter whether you like acting or not. That’s just what you do. She got out as soon as her contract was done. And she was happy to get out at the time. The [studio] had its stable of celebrities. And there was so much more she wanted to do.”
Stevenson went on to serve as a script reader for Burt Reynolds’ production company. She also became a vice president at the production company Cinema Group and a manager who represented director Renny Harlan.
“I’ve never really known anything but Hollywood,” Stevenson once said. “I don’t think I could relate to a physician or an accountant. What would we talk about? I guess, when I really stop and think about it, I have lived a very narrow existence because movies are all I know.”
Tab Hunter’s longtime partner Allan Glaser confirmed to Fox News Digital he’s producing a film about the actor’s life in which Stevenson is prominently featured. Hunter died in 2018 at age 86. (Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Fighting back tears, Caroline said it was difficult watching her sister battle Parkinson’s disease shortly before her death.
“I pray for her all the time that she’s really found happiness because she had Parkinson’s in the end,” said Caroline. “And I know how hard it was for her having been so beautiful. Parkinson’s is so cruel to your body, your everything. I wish I could have given her more comfort. I still feel her loss very much.”
Stevenson’s brother, actor Jeffrey Byron, confirmed to Fox News Digital that the star died at a health care center in Atlanta.
Venetia Stevenson quit acting after marrying Don Everly, but she found herself busy pursuing new, surprising roles behind the camera. (Universal Pictures/Film Favorites/Getty Images)
“My sister was resilient in this industry,” he said. “She took life as it came to her. And when things maybe didn’t go quite her way, she was able to turn it around and find new adventures and succeed in those adventures.”
“She had an amazing life,” added Caroline. “I really idolized her. With everything that she accomplished, I’m just so happy that she was my sister.”
Stevenson is survived by Byron, Caroline and her daughter Erin, as well as another daughter, Stacy; a son, Edan; a brother, Steve; and four grandchildren
Catherine Woodville was born in London in 1938. She featured in many television series in Britain in the 1960’s. In the late 60’s she went to Hollywood and made the terrific Western “Posse” with Kirk Douglas. She has guest starred in several of the U.S. television series. She was at one time married to the actor Patrick Magee of “Avengers” fame and was married for several years to the late actor Edward Albert. She died in 2013.
Her “Times” obituary:
The actress Catherine Woodville was an attractive presence on television and in the cinema. She was in the first episode of The Avengers in 1961 and made a glamorous one-off appearance as the priestess Natira in Star Trek.
She was born in London in 1938 and started acting at the age of 16 in a touring production of T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. Her first important television role was Helena Landless in the 1960 adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and she appeared with Ian McShane, John Hurt and Samantha Eggar as university students in the 1962 film, The Wild and the Willing.
In 1961 she was in the first episode of the secret agent spoof, The Avengers, opposite the bowler-hatted Patrick Macnee, and her character’s death helped to launch the series. She had a small part in a later episode and in 1965 she became Macnee’s second wife, though the marriage lasted barely a year and ended in divorce after four.
She was busy in television through the 1960s. She played Estelle opposite Harold Pinter (one of his occasional acting roles) in a BBC adaptation of Sartre’s In Camera and had guest spots in popular series including Z-Cars, Danger Man, The Saint and No Hiding Place. Her other films included the thriller, The Informers, the political drama The Crooked Road, with Robert Ryan and Stewart Granger, and the frontier adventure, The Brigand of Kandahar.
During her British career she was credited as Catherine Woodville and on moving the US in 1967 she changed her professional name to Kate Woodville. She made an early mark on American television playing Natira, the priestess who rules the people of the asteroid Yonada and falls in love with Dr McCoy, in the 1968 Star Trek episode, For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.
Other American television credits included Mission: Impossible, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Little House on the Prairie and Wonder Woman. She played Betty Gow, nurse to the family, in the TV movie, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, with Cliff de Young as the aviator and Anthony Hopkins as Bruno Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. In 1975 she returned to the cinema in the western Posse, starring and directed by Kirk Douglas. She became a life member of the Actors Studio.
In 1979 she married the actor and environmentalist, Edward Albert, son of the actor Eddie Albert. She gave up acting and started a business breeding and training horses.
Edward Albert died in 2006, aged 55, and she is survived by their daughter, Thaïs, a poet and songwriter.
Katherine Woodville, actress, was born on December 4, 1938. She died of cancer on June 5, 2013, aged 74
THE SCOTTISH actor Ian Bannen, who just three years ago received a lifetime achievement award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, was a versatile performer who did notable work in plays by Shakespeare and O’Neill, made over 50 films, winning an Oscar nomination for one of them, and also worked often on television where he successfully played Dr Cameron, the seasoned Highland medical practitioner, in a revival of the popular series Dr Finlay’s Casebook. His career was currently enjoying a resurgence after his acclaimed performance last year of an Irish con-man in the hit comedy Waking Ned.Ads by Googl
Born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, in 1928, the only son of a lawyer, he was educated at Ratcliffe College, Leicestershire. A lover of films as a boy – he later confessed he would sneak out of school to watch Jean Gabin movies – he served as a corporal in the Army before making his stage debut at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1947 as the Emperor’s son in the play Armlet of Jade.
In 1951 he joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford-upon-Avon and remained with them for four seasons which included in 1953 a year’s tour of Australia and New Zealand. His London stage debut came in 1955 when he played in Prisoners of War at the small Irving Theatre, but he first attracted important notice the following year with his portrayal of the virile Marco, the older of two immigrant brothers in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, presented at the Comedy Theatre which had been turned into a club in order to mount three plays banned at that time by the Lord Chamberlain (the other two were Tea and Sympathy and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). – The Guardian obituary.
In 1958 he made the first of several appearances in the works of Eugene O’Neill with a highly praised portrayal of Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. Kenneth Tynan called Bannen “perfect” as “the manic salesman, driving his friends to destruction with the enthusiasm of a revivalist” in this fondly recalled production directed by Peter Wood. Later the same year Bannen was in O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night, playing Jamie, based on the older brother of Eugene (called Edmund in the play) at the Edinburgh Festival and subsequently at the Globe in London. Tynan wrote, “Ian Bannen gets easily to the heart of the elder brother, especially in the last-act debauch when he confesses to Edmund how much he hates and envies him.” (Twenty-five years later Bannen was to play the same character at a later stage of his life in O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten.)
Bannen made his screen debut in 1956 in the Boulting Brothers’ hit comedy Private’s Progress and served as a reliable supporting player in many subsequent films, including Yangtse Incident (1957), A Tale of Two Cities (1958), and Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959). In a 1960 version of Macbeth made for American television but subsequently released to cinemas, he played Macduff, and the following year he went back to Stratford to play several pivotal roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company including a flinty Iago in Othello, Orlando in As You Like It (with Vanessa Redgrave), Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and the title role in Hamlet.
It was after a performance of Hamlet that he met Marilyn Salisbury, a Ministry of Agriculture assistant, who had inadvertently parked in his reserved space. Unable to start her van, she was trying to fix it when Bannen appeared. “I had on the only French dress I ever possessed, cream silk,” she later related, “and I was grease from head to foot.” The couple became close friends, but it was 17 years before they married.
At the Dublin and Venice Festivals in 1962 Bannen returned to O’Neill with an acclaimed portrayal of Cornelius Melody in A Touch of the Poet. He was given his first leading screen role in Seth Holt’s Station Six- Sahara, as one of five men fighting over a glamorous blonde (Carroll Baker) who crash-lands at their desert oasis.
Bannen himself played the survivor of a crashed aeroplane in Robert Aldrich’s Flight of the Phoenix (1965). The film had a strong line-up of stars headed by James Stewart, but Bannen’s performance was distinctive enough to win him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. The actor afterwards stated that he, Peter Finch and other actors would go to a different bar every night during the film’s location shooting. Bannen was later to be a regular drinking companion of Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, but after a spell of hepatitis was forced to give up alcohol.
He played Natalie Wood’s husband in Arthur Hiller’s comedy Penelope (1966), co-starred with Jeanne Moreau in Sailor from Gibraltar (1967) and worked with Robert Aldrich again in the grim war film Too Late The Hero (1969). Sidney Lumet’s intense thriller The Offence (1973), in which a frustrated detective (Sean Connery) beats a suspect to death, was also grim but Bannen won praise for his uncompromising portrayal of the ill-fated suspect who, in a taut cat-and-mouse game, causes the detective to acknowledge the darker side of his own character.
In 1983 Bannen returned to the role of Jamie Tyrone, this time in O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten, with Frances de la Tour as his co-star. The play was a success, and the following year transferred to Broadway, though the experience was not a happy one for Bannen. He did not get along with his new co-star Kate Nelligan, and her intense performance, though greatly praised by the New York press, created what the critic Benedict Nightingale described as an “emotional unbalance” compared to that of de la Tour. “There must have been times,” he wrote, “when Bannen felt like a flashlight battery expected to match the voltage of forked lightning.”
The actor’s many television credits include the betrayed agent who kills the mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), the secret service agent “R” in Ashenden (1991) and Dr Cameron in the revival of the popular series Dr Finlay’s Casebook (1993). Among his later films was John Boorman’s affectionate portrait of life in wartime Britain, Hope and Glory (1987), in which Bannen made an indelible impression as the flamboyant grandfather, and Braveheart (1995), Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning film in which Bannen played the leper Lord Allendale.
In Waking Ned (1998), he was the lovable pensioner Jackie O’Shea who persuades his village to claim a big lottery win after the ticket’s owner dies of shock. The film was a hit in both Britain and the United States and won Bannen international approval.
Tom Vallance
Ian Bannen, actor: born Airdrie, Lanarkshire 29 June 1928; married 1976 Marilyn Sainsbury; died Knockies Straight, Inverness-shire 3 November 1999.
To also view “The Independent” Obituary of Ian Bannen, please click here.
Ann Bell was born in 1938) and is a British actress, best known for playing war internee Marion Jefferson in the BBC Second World War drama series Tenko (1981–84).
She was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, the daughter of John Forrest Bell and Marjorie (née Byrom) Bell, and educated at Birkenhead High School.
She played the title role in a BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre (1963) in addition to many guest roles on television, including Edgar Wallace Mysteries, Gideon’s Way, The Avengers, The Sentimental Agent, The Saint, Armchair Theatre, For Whom the Bell Tolls(1965), Danger Man, The Baron, Mystery and Imagination, The Troubleshooters, Callan, Journey to the Unknown, Sherlock Holmes (the 1968 episode “The Sign of Four” with Peter Cushing), Department S, The Lost Boys, Enemy at the Door, Shoestring, Tumbledown, Blackeyes, Inspector Morse, Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Midsomer Murders, Casualty, Holby City, The Forsyte Saga (2002 miniseries), The Bill and Waking the Dead. In 1968 she appeared in the Dennis Potter play Shaggy Dog, part of The Company of Five, a London Weekend Television anthology series of six plays featuring the same five actors.
She was married to character actor Robert Lang from 1971 until his death in 2004. The couple had two children. Bell appeared on screen with Lang in Tenko Reunion, in which he played Teddy Forster-Brown. They also appeared together in an episode of Heartbeat (“Bread and Circuses”, 2002).
In 2010, Bell featured in the Doctor Who audio drama A Thousand Tiny Wings as well as the 2012 audio play Night of the Stormcrowwhich also featured her Tenko castmate Louise Jameson.
Binnie Barnes was born in Islington, North London in 1903. She began her career as a ballroom dance and then went into revue. Her first major film role was as Catherine Parr in 1933 in “THe Private Life of Henry 8th”. By 1936 she was in Hollywood where she met and married the film producer Mike Francovitch. Her last film was as Liv Ullmann’s mother in “40 Carats”. She died in 1998.
“New York Times” obituary:
Binnie Barnes, an English actress who was lured to Hollywood after her role as Catherine Howard in ”The Private Life of Henry VIII,” the 1933 film starring Charles Laughton, died on Monday at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 95. After a stint as a milkmaid at 15, the auburn-haired beauty, who was born in London, flitted through a series of jobs — nurse, chorus girl, dance hostess — before becoming a partner of Tex McLeod, a rope-spinning vaudeville entertainer of the Will Rogers school, eventually assuming the name ”Texas Binnie Barnes,” though she had never met an American cowboy.
In 1929, she made her stage debut in ”Silver Tassie,” which featured Laughton. After a year of dramatic training, she made her film debut in the 1931 English movie ”Night in Montmartre,” starring Heather Angel. Later, in a series of 26 Stanley Lupino comedy shorts, she played vampish character roles. The producer Alexander Korda then signed her to a contract to appear in his films, including ”The Private Life of Henry VIII” and ”The Private Life of Don Juan,” opposite Douglas Fairbanks. After seeing her in ”Henry VIII,” Carl Laemmle Jr., son of the founder of Universal Studios, brought Miss Barnes to Hollywood in 1934 to star opposite Frank Morgan in ”There’s Always Tomorrow.” More than 75 movies followed, including ”Diamond Jim” with Edward Arnold, ”The Adventures of Marco Polo” with Gary Cooper and ”The Three Musketeers” with Don Ameche, in which she typically played a tart-tongued ”man’s woman” — an image she often maintained in public in her earlier years.
”I’m no Sarah Bernhardt,” she once said. ”One picture is just like another to me,” as long as ”I don’t have to be a sweet woman.” In 1940, she married Mike Frankovich, a Columbia studio executive and former football star at the University of California at Los Angeles. He died in 1992. At the end of World War II they moved to Italy, where she made several films, including ”Fugitive Lady” with Janis Paige and Eduardo Cianelli.
She resurrected her career in the 1960’s for a role on ”The Donna Reed Show.” She appeared in ”The Trouble With Angels,” starring Rosalind Russell, in 1966 and in the sequel two years later. In 1973 Miss Barnes appeared in her last film, ”40 Carats,” with Liv Ullmann and Gene Kelly.
She is survived by two sons, a daughter and seven grandchildren.
Binnie Barne’s minibiography on the IMDB website can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
The delicately beautiful Binnie Barnes displayed a versatility and talent that was equally at home in comedies or dramas. While her heyday was primarily from the 1930s to the mid-50s, younger audiences may recall her as Sister Celestine in the genial romp “The Trouble With Angels” (1966) and its 1968 sequel “Where Angels Go… Trouble Follows” (The former was directed by Ida Lupino, whose father Stanley co-starred in several shorts with Barnes in the late 1920s.)
Although Billy Idol is known primarily as a rock singer, he has made anumber of acting appearances on film and television. He was born in 1955 in Stanmore, Middlesex. His films include “Mad Dog Time” and “The Doors”. Billy Idol’s website here.
Geraldine McEwan was born in 1932 in Windsor. She began her threatical career at the age of fourteen. She has worked for many years on the stage and played opposite Laurence Oliver in “The Dance of Death”. In 1965 she appeared with Kenneth Williams in “Loot”. She has had three very succesful television series, “The Prime of Jean Brodie”, “Mapp and Lucia” and “Marple”. Her film career is not extensive but it does include “There Was a Young Lady” in 1953 and “The Magdalene Sisters” as Sister Brigid.
She died in 2014.
“Guardian” obituary
Geraldine McEwan, who has died aged 82, could purr like a kitten, snap like a viper and, like Shakespeare’s Bottom, roar you as gently as any sucking dove. She was a brilliant, distinctive and decisive performer whose career incorporated high comedy on the West End stage, Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, and a cult television following in EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1985-86).
She was also notable on television as a controversial Miss Marple in a series of edgy, incongruously outspoken Agatha Christie adaptations (2004-09). Inheriting a role that had already been inhabited at least three times “definitively” – by Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury and Joan Hickson – she made of the deceptively cosy detective a character both steely and skittish, with a hint of lust about her, too.
This new Miss Marple was an open-minded woman of the world, with a back story that touched on a thwarted love affair with a married man who had been killed in the first world war. Familiar thrillers were given new plot twists, and there was even the odd sapphic embrace. For all her ingenuity and faun-like fluttering, McEwan was really no more successful in the part than was Julia McKenzie, her very different successor.
Although she was not easily confused with Maggie Smith, she often tracked her stylish contemporary, succeeding her in Peter Shaffer roles (in The Private Ear and The Public Eye in 1963, and in Lettice and Lovage in 1988) and rivalling Smith as both Millamant and Lady Wishfort in Congreve’s masterpiece The Way of the World in 1969 and 1995.
And a decade after Smith won her Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, McEwan scored a great success in the same role on television in 1978; Muriel Spark said that McEwan was her favourite Miss Brodie in a cluster that also included Vanessa Redgrave and Anna Massey.
McEwan was born in Old Windsor, where her father, Donald McKeown, was a printers’ compositor who ran the local branch of the Labour party in a Tory stronghold; her mother, Nora (nee Burns), came from a working-class Irish family. Geraldine was always a shy and private girl who found her voice, she said, when she stood up in school and read a poem.
She had won a scholarship to Windsor county girls’ school, but she felt out of place until she found refuge in the Windsor Rep at the Theatre Royal, where she played an attendant fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1946. After leaving school, she joined the Windsor company for two years in 1949, meeting there her life-long companion, Hugh Cruttwell, a former teacher turned stage manager, 14 years her senior, whom she married in 1953, and who became a much-loved and influential principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1965.
Without any formal training, McEwan went straight from Windsor to the West End, making her debut in Who Goes There? by John Deighton (Vaudeville, 1951), followed by an 18-month run in For Better, For Worse… (Comedy, 1952) and withDirk Bogarde in Summertime, a light comedy by Ugo Betti (Apollo, 1955).
Summertime was directed by Peter Hall and had a chaotic pre-West End tour, Bogarde’s fans mobbing the stage door every night and in effect driving him away from the theatre for good; McEwan told Bogarde’s biographer, John Coldstream, how he was both deeply encouraging to her and deeply conflicted over his heartthrob star status.
Within a year she made her Stratford debut as the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost and played opposite Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, replacing Joan Plowright as Jean Rice when the play moved from the Royal Court to the Palace. Like Ian Holm and Diana Rigg, she was a key agent of change in the transition from the summer Stratford festival – playing Olivia, Marina and Hero in the 1958 season – to Peter Hall’s new Royal Shakespeare Company; at Stratford in 1961, she played Beatrice to Christopher Plummer’s Benedick and Ophelia to Ian Bannen’s Hamlet.
Kittenish and playful, with a wonderful gift for suggesting hurt innocence with an air of enchanted distraction, she was a superb Lady Teazle in a 1962 Haymarket production of The School for Scandal, also starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, that went to Broadway in early 1963, her New York debut. She returned to tour in the first, disastrous, production of Joe Orton’s Loot, with Kenneth Williams, in 1965, and then joined Olivier’s National at the Old Vic, where parts over the next five years included Raymonde Chandebise in Jacques Charon’s landmark production of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, Alice in Strindberg’s Dance of Death (with Olivier and Robert Stephens), Queen Anne in Brecht’s Edward II, Victoria (“a needle-sharp gold digger” said one reviewer) in Somerset Maugham’s Home and Beauty, Millamant, and Vittoria Corombona in The White Devil.
Back in the West End, she formed a classy quartet, alongside Pat Heywood, Albert Finney and Denholm Elliott, in Peter Nichols’s Chez Nous at the Globe (1974), and gave a delightful impression of a well-trained, coquettish poodle as the leisured whore in Noël Coward’s broken-backed adaptation of Feydeau, Look After Lulu, at Chichester and the Haymarket.
In the 1980s, she made sporadic appearances at the National, now on the South Bank, winning two Evening Standard awards for her fresh and youthful Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (“Men are all Bavarians,” she exclaimed on exiting, creating a brand new malapropism for “barbarians”) and her hilariously acidulous Lady Wishfort; and was a founder member of Ray Cooney’s Theatre of Comedy at the Shaftesbury theatre.
In the latter part of her stage career, she seemed to cut loose in ever more adventurous directions, perhaps through her friendship with Kenneth Branagh, who had become very close to Cruttwell while studying at Rada. She was a surprise casting as the mother of a psychotic son who starts behaving like a wolf, played by Will Patton, in Sam Shepard’s merciless domestic drama, A Lie of the Mind, at the Royal Court in 1987. And in 1988 she directed As You Like It for Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, Branagh playing Touchstone as an Edwardian music-hall comedian.
The following year she directed Christopher Hampton’s under-rated Treats at the Hampstead theatre and, in 1998, formed a fantastical nonagenarian double act with Richard Briers in a Royal Court revival, directed by Simon McBurney, of Ionesco’s tragic farce The Chairs, her grey hair bunched on one side like superannuated candy floss.
She was a brilliant but controversial Judith Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever (1999), directed as a piece of Gothic absurdism at the Savoy by Declan Donnellan; McEwan tiptoed through the thunderclaps and lightning like a glinting harridan, a tipsy bacchanalian with a waspish lust and highly cultivated lack of concern (“My husband’s not dead; he’s upstairs.”)
Other television successes included Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990), playing Jeanette Winterson’s mother, and an adaptation of Nina Bawden’s tale of evacuees in Wales, Carrie’s War (2004). Her occasional movie appearances included Cliff Owen’s The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1975), two of Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptations – Henry V (1989) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) – as well as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); Peter Mullan’s devastating critique of an Irish Catholic education, The Magdalene Sisters (2002), in which she played cruel, cold-hearted Sister Bridget; and Vanity Fair (2004).
McEwan was rumoured to have turned down both being appointed OBE and a damehood, but never confirmed this.
Hugh died in 2002. She is survived by their two children, Greg and Claudia, and seven grandchildren.
The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
