British Actors Archives

Brian Bedford

Brian Bedford obituary in “New York Times”.

Brian Bedford was born in Morley, West Yorkshire in 1935. His first film role was “Miracle in Soho” in 1957. He had a good supporting role as a thug menancing Richard Attenborough in “The Angry Silence”. He has though spent the majority of his career on the U.S. stage with just the occasional film role. Article on Brian Bedford in “The New York Times” website here. He died in January 2016.

“New York Times” obituary:

Brian Bedford, the British-born actor, reared in working-class misery, who became a stellar portrayer of the princes, kings, fops and faded aristocrats of Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov, died on Wednesday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 80.

The cause was cancer, said one of his agents, Richard Schmenner.

A dapper, handsome man with a comfortingly resonant speaking voice, Mr. Bedford was an understated and perhaps undersung star. He was a protégé of John Gielgud and a theater-school classmate of Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole, sharing their elaborate gifts but not their celebrity, probably because he performed only occasionally in movies and on television.

Sylvan Barnet, Scholar, Is Dead at 89; Edited Signet Shakespeare PaperbacksJAN. 13, 2016
His stage career, however — in England, in the United States (Off Broadway as well as on) and in Canada, where he was a mainstay at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival for nearly four decades — had few equals. Playing comedy or tragedy, pathos or hilarity, Mr. Bedford was known for controlled and layered performances, and for finding the depth and subtlety in monumental characters, from King Lear to Tartuffe.

Mr. Bedford, left, as Lady Bracknell and Charlotte Parry as Cecily Cardew in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” a 2010 production at the American Airlines Theater. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
He won only one Tony Award, in 1971, for playing Arnolphe, the desperately jealous and insecure spouse-seeker in Molière’s “School for Wives,” but he did it against especially formidable competition; Gielgud and Ralph Richardson were among the other nominees.

In 2011, Mr. Bedford, who appeared in 18 Broadway productions, earned his seventh Tony nomination for his drag performance as Lady Bracknell, Oscar Wilde’s often-wrong, ever-certain social arbiter, in “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

“With his long jaw and listening eyes, Bedford, now 75, uses his physiognomy to tell the stories that no playwright or director can prefigure; that is, he allows himself to be transformed by the theatrical moment,” Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker in a brief, admiring article about the show.

He added: “As a kind of magistrate in a tall wig and a false front, Bracknell lives for her younger charges’ attempts to contradict her. But how can they scale the wall of imperiousness that Bedford builds with his silences and his disapproving glances? Life doesn’t stand a chance in the face of such brutally honest artifice.”

Mr. Bedford was also the director of “Earnest,” a production that originated at Stratford (now simply called the Stratford Festival) and was itself nominated for a Tony as best revival. And though his career as a director was consequential — Mr. Bedford staged more than 20 shows at Stratford — he craved performing most of all.

“I’m most alive when I’m acting,” he said. “I can’t deny it, it’s where I belong.”

His résumé was vast. His Shakespearean roles included Hamlet, Brutus, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Shylock, King Leontes, Timon of Athens, Benedick, Ariel and Dogberry. His Chekhov included Astrov in “Uncle Vanya,” Tusenbach in “The Three Sisters” and Trigorin in “The Seagull.”

In more modern roles he was Elyot in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” Vladimir in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” Henry in “The Real Thing” by Tom Stoppard, Martin Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” Salieri in Mr. Shaffer’s “Amadeus” and the title character in Simon Gray’s “Butley.”

A student of theater history, Mr. Bedford played not just the roles that the great writers wrote, but also the writers themselves in one-man shows about them.

“He is perhaps the finest English-language interpreter of classical comedy of his generation, and he seems to pick up a Tony nomination every time he steps on a Broadway stage,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times in 2011. “Yet he is as likely to be found on a cruise ship performing a one-man show about Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde, or in Prague, in high summer, appearing in a supporting role in a traveling musical production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ starring Kelsey Grammer.”
For an actor who became known for interpreting classic works, his background might be considered surprising.

Mr. Bedford was born on Feb. 16, 1935, in the mill town of Morley, near Leeds and Bradford, in Yorkshire — “a pretty awful place,” he told The New York Post in 1971, comparing it to Lawrence, Mass., another city that played a grim role in his family history. “Only much dirtier. Chimneys belching smoke night and day.”

His father, Arthur, was a postal worker; his mother, the former Eleanor O’Donnell, was a factory weaver. Two of his three older brothers died of tuberculosis. Sometime after Brian left home and began his acting career, his father took his own life.

“Suicide runs in the family,” Mr. Bedford said in a Times interview in 1971. “My father’s brother also committed suicide. He got a girl into trouble when he was 22, and in order to save face for both families, he emigrated to America, took a boat to Boston, went to a tiny place — Lawrence, Mass. — booked into a hotel and shot himself in the mouth.”

The austerity of his upbringing fostered a lively fantasy life. “I used to spend all my time pretending to be a radio,” Mr. Bedford said. He attended a Roman Catholic school in Bradford but left at 15, working in a warehouse by day and performing in amateur theater at night. At 18, he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

“I did a bit of Romeo and a bit of ‘Boy With a Cart’” — a verse drama about a saint by the 20th-century playwright Christopher Fry — “and I got a scholarship,” he recalled. “That was the beginning of my life. I moved to London.”

At RADA, as the academy is familiarly known, Mr. Bedford joined a generation of actors who came of age at a turning point on the British stage, when class conflict and the lives of young people in hardscrabble circumstances became central subjects, realism displaced escapism, and gentility was no longer a watchword for writers or performers.

The shift was given impetus with the first performance, in 1956, of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” about life in a cramped city flat. It propelled a movement of playwrights and novelists, joined by Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, Kingsley Amis and David Storey, who became known as the angry young men.

Alan Bates, who was Mr. Bedford’s roommate in their own cramped flat, appeared in Osborne’s play; to do so he had to give up a role in another play, based on stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, called “The Young and the Beautiful,” and Mr. Bedford took over for him.

From there, Peter Brook cast him as Rodolpho, the young swain, in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” and as Ariel in “The Tempest,” which starred Gielgud, whom Mr. Bedford had met while at school and who had counseled him when, at 21, he played Hamlet at the Liverpool Repertory Theater.

Gielgud later directed him in “Five Finger Exercise,” Peter Shaffer’s play about an imploding family, which brought him to New York for the first time in 1959; the play ran for 10 months on Broadway.

Mr. Bedford appeared again on Broadway in the early 1960s — in “Lord Pengo,” a comedy by S. N. Behrman, and in an evening of one-acts by Mr. Shaffer, “The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye.” He also appeared Off Broadway in “The Knack,” a frisky bachelor-pad comedy directed by Mike Nichols (fresh from his triumph with Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park”), after which he decided to move to New York.

“I found England dreary,” Mr. Bedford later explained. “I suppose it’s understandable if your childhood was as mean as mine.”

In the movies, Mr. Bedford appeared in “Grand Prix” (1966) with James Garner, and as Clyde Tolson, associate director of the F.B.I., in “Nixon” (1995), whose title role was played by his fellow Briton Anthony Hopkins.

His best-known film role may be the voice of the title character in the Disney animated feature “Robin Hood” (1973), who was portrayed as a fox. On television he made occasional guest appearances on prime-time series, including “Ben Casey,” “Judd for the Defense,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Cheers,” “Frasier” and “The Equalizer.”

In 1975, after his debut performance at Stratford as Malvolio in “Twelfth Night,” the festival became his artistic home. He performed in more than 50 productions there, taking on many of his grandest and most celebrated classic roles.

He also displayed a wide range as a director at Stratford, staging not just Shakespearean tragedies like “Titus Andronicus,” “Othello” and “King Lear” but also 20th-century classics, including “Waiting for Godot” and “Blithe Spirit,” and Michael Frayn’s contemporary farce “Noises Off,” not to mention “Earnest.”

He toured internationally in one-man shows of his own creation; in a tour of Shakespeare’s life and works called “The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet”; and in “Ever Yours, Oscar,” drawn from the letters of Oscar Wilde.

Mr. Bedford is survived by his partner of 30 years, the actor Tim MacDonald. They married in 2013.

In 2013, illness forced Mr. Bedford to withdraw from a Stratford production of “The Merchant of Venice,” in which he was cast as Shylock.

“We were hoping he would bounce back,” Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director, said in an interview on Wednesday. “He was a great actor, a brilliant comedian, a tragedian and comedian of equal measure. For many of us here, he was the reason we went into the theater, an inspiration and a mentor.”

“Onstage he was luminous,” Mr. Cimolino added. “You could feel he was a theater animal — he had such a sense of ease. He was like a fish in water on that stage.”

The above “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Brian Murray. (Wikipedia)

Brian Murray was born in South Africa in 1937. He began his acting career in Britain and had a prominent supporting role in “The Angry Silence” as one of the thugs menancing Richard Attenborough. His career though has been primarily on the stage in the U.S.A.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

This wonderfully witty, enormously talented, classically-trained theatre actor has yet to find THE film project to transition into twilight screen stardom; yet, at age 70 plus, there is still a glimmer of hope for Brian Murray if one fondly recalls the late-blooming adulation bestowed upon such illustrious and mature stage stars Judi Dench, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.

Born Brian Bell in September of 1937 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Shakespearean titan attended King Edward VII School, while there. It must have been a sign. He made his stage bow in 1950 as “Taplow” in “The Browning Version” and continued on the South African stage until 1957. Though he made his film debut fairly early in his career with The League of Gentlemen (1960) and showed strong promise and presence in The Angry Silence (1960), his first passion was, and is, the theatre and instead chose to join the Royal Shakespeare Company where his impressively youthful gallery of credits included those of “Romeo”, “Horatio” in “Hamlet”, “Cassio” in “Othello”, “Edgar” in “Lear” and “Lysander” in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.

Eventually Broadway (off- and on-) took notice of this mighty thespian and utilized his gifts quite well over the years. A three-time Tony nominee (for “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, “The Little Foxes” and “The Crucible”), not to mention a recipient of multiple Obie (“Ashes” and “The Play About the Baby”) and Drama Desk (“Noises Off”, “Travels with My Aunt” and “The Little Foxes”) awards, this lofty veteran continues to mesmerize live audiences with a wide range of parts, both classical and contemporary. Two of his later roles, that of “Sir Toby Belch” in “Twelfth Night” and “Claudius” in “Hamlet”, were taken to TV and film. A more recent movie project was a nice change of pace — voicing the flamboyant role of “John Silver” in the animated feature, Treasure Planet (2002).

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Susan Hampshire. TCM Overview.

Susan Hampshire has had a long and steady career in British films and television. She was born in London in 1937. She appeared as a child actress in the film “The Woman in the Hall”. As a young adult she had small parts in “Expresso Bongo” and “Upstairs and Downstairs”. In 1961 she went to Hollywood to guest star in the popular TV series “Adventure in Paradise”. It did not lead to further offers in the U.S. and she returned to resume her career in Britain. She was Cliff Richard’s leading lady in “Wonderful Life”. She has had tremendous successful run in TV series in the UK. “The Forsyth saga”, “The First Churchills”, “The Pallisers”, “Yhe Grand”, “Monarch of the Glen” and “The Royal” have all starred Susan Hampshire and they span from 1967 to 2009. This is a very impressive feat. Her films include “The Fighting Prince of Donegal” and “Violent Enemy”. Susan Hampshire recalls her “This Is Your Life” here.

TCM Overview:

Best known to American audiences for her portrayal of sturdy upper crust Brits on public TV imports, Susan Hampshire was a celebrated British actress of stage, screen and TV, mostly in her native land. American audiences came to know her through such serials as “The Forsyte Saga” (PBS, 1969-70), in which she was Fleur, the stalwart member of a merchant family, “The First Churchills” (PBS, 1971), in which she was Sarah, the focused member of the Duke of Marlborough’s clan, and as Becky Sharpe in the TV rendition of “Vanity Fair” (PBS, 1972).

She won Emmy Awards for all three portrayals, and is also remembered as Agnes Wickfield in the “David Copperfield” adaptation shown on NBC in 1970. Additionally, Hampshire was the outspoken Glencora in “The Pallisers” (PBS, 1977), a series about a Victorian family with political leanings.

Hampshire’s work in feature films is less well-known to American audiences. After an appearance as a child in the British-made “The Woman in the Hall” (1947), she appeared in ingenue roles beginning with “Upstairs and Downstairs” (1959). She was the mother in “The Three Lives of Thomasina,” a 1963 Disney film about a girl in a Scottish village who heals animals through love. Her career transformed when she starred in Pierre Granier-Deferre’s “Paris in the Month of August/Paris au mois d’Aout” (1966), in which she appeared in a nude scene. Hampshire later married Granier-Deferre (they divorced in 1974). Her portrayal of African-based naturalist Joy Adamson in “Living Free” (1972), the sequel to “Born Free” in which Elsa the lion has died, received some notice in the States. Some of her other appearances in film, including her work in several French films are almost unknown to US audiences.

Hampshire’s work on stage in England began in the late 50s, and has included Shakespearean interpretations, from Rosalind in “As You Like It” to Katherina in “The Taming of the Shrew” (both at the Shaw Theatre). She played Peter Pan in a 1974 production of the classic musical as well. For most of the 80s, her performing career was virtually inactive. Hampshire devoted herself primarily to writing gardening and children’s’ books, including the “Lucy Jane” series. She authored “Susan’s Story” (1982), which recounted her struggle with dyslexia, and “The Maternal Instinct” (1985), about coping with her daughter’s fatal illness. Hampshire returned to the theatre in a 1990 production of “A Little Night Music” and was on stage at the Savoy Theatre in London in “Relative Values” (1993).

Roy Kinnear. TCM Overview.

Roy Kinnear was one of Britains best and busiest character actors. He was born in Wigan, Lancashire in 1934. In 1951 he began studying at RADA. One of his first feature films was “Sparrows Can’t Sing” with Barbara Windsor. He also starred in the television satirical revue “That Was the Week That Was”. His many films include “The Bed Sitting Room” and “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” with Gene Wilder. In 1988 while filming “The Return of the Musketeers” in Spain, he fell off his horse and was killed.He was 54 years of age when he died. His son Rory Kinnear is a popular actor. His obituary in “The New York Times” can be accessed here.

TCM Overview:

Original Cinema 1-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters

Portly, sometimes mustached, stage-trained British character actor of film and TV of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Kinnear first gained notoriety on British TV as a regular on the groundbreaking weekly topical satire series, “That Was the Week That Was” in the early 60s. With his large, round face and often bulging eyes, Kinnear sweated and flustered his way through many a frantic comedy, as well as dramas and period fare, playing characters both sympathetic and not. Children of a certain age may best recall him in “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) as Mr. Salt, the pompous, indulgent father of the bratty Veruca Salt. His non-comedy credits include “The Hill” (1965), director Sidney Lumet’s hard-hitting military prison drama starring Sean Connery, and the Hammer horror entry, “Taste the Blood of Dracula” (1969).

Kinnear had a rather broad performing style which some reviewers quickly found tiresome. In contrast he seemed to positively enchant American expatriate director Richard Lester who cast him in eight features including the Beatles vehicle “Help!” (1965) as the bumbling assistant to mad scientist Victor Spinetti, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966), “How I Won the War” (1967) and “The Four Musketeers” (1975) and “Return of the Musketeers” (1989). Kinnear died during the shooting of the latter when he fell off a horse.

The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

Derren Nesbitt. TCM Overview.

Derren Nesbitt is best known for his performance as SS Major Van Hapen in “Where Eagles Dare”. He was born in 1935 in London. His first film was “The Silent Enemy” in 1958.

The following year, he was the thug who beat up Laurence Harvey’s Joe Lampton in “Room at the Top”. Among his other credits are “In the Nick”, “Victim” and “Term of Trial. Interview on “Youtube” can be viewed here.

TCM Overview:

Derren Nesbitt’s acting talents were showcased on the big screen many times throughout the course of his Hollywood career.

Nesbitt kickstarted his acting career in various films such as the adventure “Sword of Sherwood Forest” (1960) with Peter Cushing, the Dirk Bogarde drama “Victim” (1961) and “The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders” (1965).

He also appeared in “The Blue Max” (1966) with George Peppard, “The Naked Runner” (1967) with Frank Sinatra and the dramatic adaptation “Where Eagles Dare” (1968) with Richard Burton.

He continued to act in productions like the Tony Curtis action flick “Monte Carlo or Bust!” (1969), the action movie “Innocent Bystanders” (1972) with Stanley Baker and “The Playbirds” (1978).

He also starred in the TV movies “Berlin Affair” (NBC, 1970-71) and “The House on Garibaldi Street” (ABC, 1978-79).

Film continued to be his passion as he played roles in “Give Us Tomorrow” (1979), the adventure “Funny Money” (1982) with Gregg Henry and “The Strike” (1987) with Peter Richardson.

He also appeared in “Eat the Rich” (1988) and the “Bullseye!” (1990) film with Michael Caine.

Most recently, Nesbitt acted in the Michael Caine crime drama “Flawless” (2008).

The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

Barbara Ferris. TCM Overview.

There was a time in ther sixties when it looked that Barbara Ferris was going to have a major film career. It di not happen to the level it should have but she did have the lead in three good movies. John Boorman cast her in “Catch Us If You Can” with the Dave Clark Five, “Interlude” with Oskar Werner and “A NIce Girl Like Me” in 1969. Since then she has worked regularly on the stage and television in the UK. Her “Wikipedia” page can be read here.

TCM Overview:

t the tender age of 16, Barbara Ferris began her entertainment career as an actress. Ferris kickstarted her acting career in various films such as the drama “Children of the D*mned” (1963) with Ian Hendry and the Laurence Olivier dramatic adaptation “Term of Trial” (1963). She was nominated for a BAFTA Award for “Having A Wild Weekend” in 1965. Ferris also brought characters to life with her vocal talents in the adaptation “Tom Thumb” (1958) with Russ Tamblyn.

She continued to work steadily in film throughout the sixties and the eighties, appearing in “Interlude” (1968) and “A Nice Girl Like Me” (1969). She also worked in television around this time, including a part on “The Strauss Family” (ABC, 1972-73). Film continued to be her passion as she played roles in “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and “A Chorus of Disapproval” (1989). Ferris more recently acted in “The Krays” (1990) with Billie Whitelaw.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

David Royle was born in 1961 in Salford, Manchester. He spent three years in the British army (Royal Artillery)before studying acting at the Drama Centre in London. He is best remembered for featuring in 29 episodes of “Dalziel & Pascoe”. The series was not the same since he left the show. Sadly David Royle died of MS in 2017. His IMDB page can be accessed here.

Googie Withers obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.

Googie Withers was one of the great stars of the Golden Age of British Cinema. She was born in 1917 in Karachi in now Pakistan. Her father was British and her mother Dutch. She acted on the London stage and made her film debut in 1935 in “The Girl in the Crowd”. She was one of Margaret Lockwood’s chums in “The Lady Vanishes”. Some of her best remembered films include “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing”,””Pink String and Ceiling Wax”, “It Always Rains On Sundays” and “Miranda”. She married the Australian actor John McCallum and went to live there with him. However they acted on the stage in Britain and were acting on Broadway when they were in their eighties. John McCallum died in 2010. Googie Withers died at the age of 94 in her home in Sydney, Australia in July 2011.

“Guardian” obituary:

Dead Of Night, poster, bottom left from left: Ralph Michael, Googie Withers, right top to bottom: Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, 1945. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers’s striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. A bored wife, she gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, played by John McCallum, soon to be her real-life husband. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards.

What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped, she acquired great skill at playing wives in various states of dissatisfaction because of the implied sexual shortcomings of their husbands.

She was especially effective as the not entirely unsympathetic wife of a judge in the stage version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952). “Respectable” but emotionally unsatisfied, she throws herself at a weak and irresponsible ex-RAF wonderboy.

Another Rattigan creation that might have gone to Withers was the part of the wife of the dried-up and professionally despised schoolmaster in the film of The Browning Version (1951). In the event, Jean Kent provided one of the most harrowing moments to that date in British cinema when she tried to destroy her husband’s remaining hopes with such vicious hatred that the scene was often booed and hissed in 1950s cinemas. Withers, while making the cause of the wife’s frustration just as plainly sexual, might well have conveyed a certain residual warmth and humanity that would have transformed melodrama into drama.

Withers was a loss to the British stage and screen when she followed her husband to his native Australia in the late 1950s. They had married in 1948, and had two daughters, Joanna and Amanda, and a son, Nicholas. From 1955 onwards, she alternated between productions in the southern and northern hemispheres, including Broadway. But while her touring work focused more on Australia and New Zealand, she still made the first three seasons of a British TV series, Within These Walls (1974-75), as the governor of a women’s prison, which provided her biggest national and international audience.

Georgette Lizette Withers was born in Karachi, in pre-partition India, to a British naval captain who hated the thought of his daughter going on the stage and a Dutch mother who quietly encouraged her. The captain, who tried to run a Birmingham foundry after leaving the Royal Navy through poor health, was a high-handed man who clashed with fellow directors whom he openly despised, and lost his job. His daughter inherited his imperious inability to keep his opinions to himself, but in her case it was softened by her feminine humour.

At 12, while a boarder at Fredville Park private school near Dover, she took dancing lessons, initially to straighten bandy legs. At the same age she made her first professional appearance, in the chorus of a children’s show at the Victoria Palace, London. She persuaded her parents to send her to the Italia Conti school after she had worked her normal school day at the Convent of the Holy Family in Kensington.

A fall during dancing class permanently weakened an arm and indicated a less arduous form of dancing. She did cabaret in Midnight Follies at the Mayfair hotel and the Kit Kat Club. At 16 she was the youngest member of the chorus of Nice Goings On and was soon appearing in other popular musicals.

From 1935 onwards, she appeared in more than 60 films and television productions, including some of the finest movies of their time: One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), They Came to a City (1944, from the JB Priestley novel); Miranda (1948), in which Glynis Johns played the mermaid and Withers the all-too-normal woman; and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), with Richard Widmark.

On the stage she was a beguiling Beatrice in Stratford-upon-Avon’s production of Much Ado About Nothing (1958), and though her move to Australia often brought her under the umbrella of her husband’s theatre management, she continued to play in adventurous work in Britain, including Ionesco’s Exit the King for the Edinburgh Festival and the Royal Court theatre. A production of Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the Chichester Festival theatre in 1976 was so successful that it went to the West End, Canada and on tour in Britain. Withers’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1979) at Chichester managed to step out of the shadow of Edith Evans’s high-camp shadow without losing impact.

In the 1970s, when traditional leading ladies were less in demand, Withers’s career became more variable. In 1971 she starred in a film produced and directed by her husband, and featuring her daughter Joanna, called Nickel Queen, otherwise known as Ghost Town Millionairess, an examination of socialites and riff-raff in an Australian town dominated by nickel production. It was not well received, one comment being that it was an appalling bit of Australiana that made Barry Humphries’s film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) look like a refreshing can of Foster’s.

The role of Faye Boswell in Within These Walls three years later proved to be a sounder vehicle. Giving her formidability a greyer hue, Withers played a prison governor striving to be, as well as a disciplinarian, as sensitive as possible to the problems of the prisoners. The series led to further successes in the 1980s, when on television she appeared in distinguished productions including adaptations of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up.

She continued to be active in the 1990s, appearing in two highly praised films. Country Life (1994), directed by Michael Blakemore, was a version of Uncle Vanya set in Australia in 1919, showing what was on the collective mind of one part of the British Empire as Chekhov had shown what was on the minds of a fading Russian social class.

Shine (1996) was based on the career of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, beset by struggles against family pressures and mental instability. His real-life interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto was used in the film and became a controversial attraction in the concert hall. Withers played the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, who helped Helfgott in his ambition to get away from his possessive father and to London for his higher musical training, but died before she could enjoy his success.

Withers was a great trouper of the old school who, coming back to England in 1967 to play the forceful mayoress in Shaw’s Getting Married, found the country “changed and lacking in energy”. The woman who was once called “the best bad girl in British films” was always prepared to help make up any deficiency in that respect. At 85 she was still commanding attention on the West End stage, in Lady Windermere’s Fan.

In 1980 she was appointed AO, and in 2001 CBE. Her husband died last year, and she is survived by her children.

• Googie (Georgette Lizette) Withers, actor, born 12 March 1917; died 15 July 2011

The “Guardian” obituary on Ms Withers can also be accessed here.

Anita Harris had a neat reputation as a ballad singer when she also began an acting career on film. She was born in Somerset in 1942. She was part of the Cliff Adam Singers and made several television appearances on British television with the group. She then began a solo singing career and in 1967 has a massive hit with “Just Loving You”. In thelate sixties she became part of the “Carry On” group and starred in “Follow that Camel” and “Carry On Again Doctor”. She still continues to appear on stage and concert halls in Britain. Interview with “Express Newspapers” can be read here.

Anita Harris. Wikipedia.

Anita Harris was born in 1942 and is an English actress, singer and entertainer.

Harris sang with the Cliff Adams Singers and had a number of chart hits in the 1960s. She appeared in the Carry On films Follow That Camel (1967) and Carry On Doctor(1968).

Harris was born in Somerset; her family moved from Midsomer Norton to Bournemouthwhen she was seven. She won a talent contest at the age of three. However, it was her penchant for figure skating which led to her performing career, she began skating at the neighbourhood rink, eventually becoming a regular at the Queens Ice Rink in London. Seen by a talent scout shortly before her sixteenth birthday, she was offered a chance to skate in Paris or to travel to Las Vegas where she would be a dancer in a chorus line. She accepted the latter, danced at the El Rancho Hotel in Las Vegas. We did three shows a night and on the 12th night, we had the night off”, she said years later.

On returning to the UK, she performed in a vocal group known as the Grenadiers and then spent three years with the Cliff Adams Singers.She was still in her teens when John Barry’s manager, Tony Lewis, offered her a recording contract by EMI and made her first recordings with the John Barry Seven — a group which was a successful chart act. This first single, a double A-side of “I Haven’t Got You”, written by Lionel Bart and “Mr One and Only”, did not reach the charts.

Subsequent to their meeting, when they both auditioned for a musical revue, Mike Margolis and Harris formed a personal and professional relationship marrying in 1973. He became her manager and wrote the songs which served as her second and third singles: “Lies”/”Don’t Think About Love”(Vocalion, September 1964) and “Willingly”/”At Last Love” (Decca, February 1965).

In January 1965 she performed at the San Remo Music Festival. Her duet with Beppe Cardile, “L’amore è partito”, failed to reach the finals but even to participate in such a star-studded event augured well for her stardom. She made her label debut for Pye Records with the May 1965 release “Trains and Boats and Planes“, although rival versions by both the song’s composer Burt Bacharach (with vocals by the Breakaways) and Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas eclipsed her recording. She had four subsequent releases on Pye, including the only evident recording of the Burt Bacharach/ Hal David composition “London Life”.

In 1966, she moved to CBS Records where her debut release was also her debut album: Somebody’s in My Orchard. Her chart breakthrough came in the summer of 1967 with the single “Just Loving You“, a Tom Springfield composition which singer Dusty Springfield had suggested that Tom (her brother) give to Harris after Dusty and Harris had performed on the same episode of Top of the Pops.

Recorded at Olympic Studios in a session produced by Margolis and featuring harmonica virtuoso Harry Pitch, Just Loving You” had been released in January 1967 but did not reach the UK Top 50 until 29 June 1967.^[10] Even after peaking at No. 6 on 26 August 1967 “Just Loving You” remained in the UK Top 40 until the end of the year, and was reported to have accumulated UK sales of 625,000 in six months. Besides charting at No. 18 in Ireland, “Just Loving You” was a Top Ten hit in South Africa where sales reached 200,000 copies. The disc was released in September 1967 in the United States where it rose to No. 20 on the “Easy Listening” chart in Billboard and approached the mainstream Pop “Hot 100” chart. It rose no higher than No. 120 on the “Bubbling Under” chart. In January 1968 Harris made her only appearance on the UK album chart when her Just Loving You album reached No. 29.

The sustained interest in “Just Loving You” predicated a mild chart impact for her follow-up single “The Playground”, released in September 1967. This reached its chart peak of No. 46 by 28 October 1967, the same week “Just Loving You” (which had dropped out of the Top 20 at No. 21) returned to the Top 20 for three more weeks. However she did score a substantial hit with her 5 January 1968 release, a remake of the standard “Anniversary Waltz“, which spent eight weeks in the UK Top 40, peaking at No. 21.

After just missing the UK Top 50 with the single “We’re Going on a Tuppenny Bus Ride” (released 17 May 1968), she made her final chart appearance with her rendition of “Dream a Little Dream of Me“. Released on 26 July 1968, her single version peaked in the UK Top 50 at No. 33,^[10] whilst the Mama Cass Elliot version peaked at No. 11.

A third album, Cuddly Toy, was released in 1969.

Since 1961 she has made numerous television appearances, mostly as a performer, occasionally as an actress, and her few film roles included a cameo as a casino singer in Death Is a Woman (1966) and co-starring roles in the comedy films Follow That Camel (1967) and Carry On Doctor (1968). Harris gained her role in the latter film while working in a revue Way Out in Piccadilly with Frankie Howerd. Backstage, he introduced her to the producer and director of the series resulting in the decision to cast Harris as well as Howerd.^[2]^[4] In December 1970, Thames Television debuted the children’s TV series Jumbleland which she co-produced and in which she starred as Witch Witt Witty.

Harris worked with magician David Nixon for eight years in the 1970s.^[4] She appeared on the Morecambe and Wise Show in 1971 and 1973.^[5] In 1981 she was in the line-up for the Royal Variety Performance, singing “Burlington Bertie” This performance she reprised at the Queen Mother’s 90th Birthday celebration at the London Palladium, in 1990, in the presence of the Queen, Princess Margaret and the Duke of Edinburgh in a large company of artistes presenting music hall, featuring many well known TV and stage personalities. That same tribute to the star she had presented several times on the BBC’s variety show, The Good Old Days. She was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1982 when surprised by Eamonn Andrews at London’s Talk of the Town. She was still appearing on television up to 2001, in particular Boom Boom: The Best of the Original Basil Brush Show, French & Saunders and Bob Monkhouse: A BAFTA Tribute.^[5]

From the early 1970s, Harris toured in several editions of her one-woman stage show which, as Anita Harris in the Act!, was broadcast in 1981. It was essentially a recording of her performance at the Talk of the Town. In 1982 she was named Concert Cabaret Performer of the Year by the Variety Club of Great Britain. Whilst a frequent star of pantomime over the years, she made a debut in legitimate theatre in 1986 when she assumed the role of Grizabella in the West End production of Cats for a two-year tenure,^[11] with subsequent credits including Bell, Book and Candle, Deathtrap, Seven Deadly Sins Four Deadly Sinners, Verdict and the stage dramatisations of House of Stairs and My Cousin Rachel. Additionally she co-starred with Alex Ferns, Will Thorp, Colin Baker and Leah Bracknell in the UK tour of the stage adaptation of Strangers on a Train in 2006. She portrayed Gertrude Lawrence in G and I at the New End Theatre in the spring of 2009. In 2010 she starred with Brian Capron in the UK national tour of Stepping Out; having previously played the leading role of Mavis, she now took on the role of Vera. She toured with a new one-woman stage show: An Intimate Evening With Anita Harris in 2013 and appeared in a production of the Emlyn Williams play A Murder Has Been Arranged at the Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton in July 2013 and at Malvern Festival Theatre in August of that year.

In 2014, Harris appeared in a lead guest role in the prime-time BBC drama, Casualty . She continues to perform with her band around the country, including at the Royal Albert Hall, London. She performed in pantomime over Christmas 2014-15 by appearing as the wicked Baroness in a production of Cinderella at the Grand Opera House in York. “I’ve played Aladdin, Jack and Dick Whittington and Robinson Crusoe. I’ve loved playing principal boy and I’m sorry that boys are now playing that role”, she told a York press meeting at the time.

On 12 January 2015, The Mail on Sunday reported that Anita Harris and her husband and manager Mike Margolis were, or were about to be, declared bankrupt by HM Revenue and Customs over historic tax arrears of £14,000 and £25,000 respectively.^[13] The bankruptcy order of 11 August 2014 was annulled when an IVA was approved on 27 May 2015.

During 2016, Harris toured with her show across the UK, An Evening with Anita Harris. With musical accompaniment, she revealed anecdotes from her life in showbusiness, the people she has met and the places she has been. She appeared in ITV‘s Last Laugh in Vegas, and was a contestant in the BBC‘s Celebrity MasterChef 2018.

In 2019, Harris guest starred in the first episode of Series 20 of Midsomer Murders’ entitled “The Ghost of Causton Abbey” as Irene Taylor, an accomplice to the killer.

She will guest star as a medium in an episode of EastEnders which is due to be aired in August 2019.

Anita will be starring in the UK Tour of Cabaret, alongside John Partridge from August 2019 to early 2020.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Brian Bedford

Brian Bedford obituary in “New York Times”.

Brian Murray

Brian Murray. (Wikipedia)

Susan Hampshire

Susan Hampshire. TCM Overview.

Roy Kinnear

Roy Kinnear. TCM Overview.

Derren Nesbitt

Derren Nesbitt. TCM Overview.

Barbara Ferris

Barbara Ferris. TCM Overview.

David Royle

Googie Withers

Googie Withers obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.

Anita Harris

Anita Harris. Wikipedia.

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