Ben Daniels was born in 1964 in Nuneaton, England. On TV he has appeared in plays such as “The Lost Language of Cranes” and in the TV series “Cutting It” and “Law & Order UK”. On film he has been in “Beautiful Thing” and “I Want You”. Website on Ben Daniels can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
Ben Daniels first became enamored with acting when he took drama lessons in comprehensive school. After graduating, his love for the craft led him to carry on studying at the well-respected London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. When he finished there, he found success on various stages around the United Kingdom. His portrayal of a murderer in the production of “Never the Sinner” earned him a nomination for a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor, boosting his theater career even further. He first appeared on screen with a role as a policeman in the dramatic comedy film “Wish You Were Here.” From there, he began to make his mark on television with a string of appearances. He could be seen in such productions as the 1988 TV movie “Freedom Fighter,” the military drama “Soldier Soldier” in 1992, and playing Mercutio in the 1994 TV movie production of “Romeo & Juliet.” His first recurring role came in 1994 in the short-lived comedy series “Outside Edge.” It was his performance from 2002 to 2004, however, in the lauded drama “Cutting It,” playing Finn Bevan, the ex-husband and business rival of a hair salon owner, that exposed him to a wider audience. He went on to have recurring roles in many other productions, such as crime drama “Law & Order: UK,” the mini-series “The Passion,” and the war thriller “The Sate Within.” Some of his other films include 2002’s drama “Fogbound,” 2005’s action film “Doom,” and the fantasy drama “Luna.”
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Barbara Shelley is an English actress best known for her roles in many of the Hammer horror films of the 1960’s. She was born in London in 1933. Her film career began in Italian movies in the mid 1950’s. She then gained smal parts in international films like “The Little Hut” with Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger in 1957. Among her notable fims we must mention “Dracula, Prince of Darkness”, “The Gorgon”, “Rasputin the Mad Monk” and “The Camp at Blood Island”. She has now retired from acting. Interview with Barbara Shelley in “Express Newpapers” can be read here.
Barbara Shelley obituary: Actor who traumatised and tantalised
Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 00:26
Barbara Shelley and Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), which ‘traumatised and tantalised’ generations of viewers. Photograph: Everett/Rex
Barbara Shelley (Barbara Kowin)
Born: February 13th, 1932
Died: January 4th, 2021
During the heyday of Hammer, the Berkshire-based film production company that transformed the horror genre, there were few surer signs of a film’s integrity than Barbara Shelley’s name in the credits. The copper-haired Shelley, who has died aged 88 after contracting Covid-19, brought elegance and conviction to her work. She possessed a grounded, rational quality that instantly conferred gravitas on whatever lunatic occurrences were unfolding around her.
In Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), she gave a deft two-sided performance as the straitlaced Helen, who becomes a ravenous bloodsucker after being taken under the bat-wing of the Count, played by Christopher Lee. When next we meet her in his Karlsbad castle, she assures a stricken friend that “nothing’s wrong”, only for her lips to part to reveal tiny pointed fangs.
Generations of viewers were traumatised and tantalised by that scene, as well as a later one in which Helen taps on her friend’s window in the middle of the night. “Please let me in,” she pleads. “It’s cold out here. So cold. Everything’s all right now.” Shelley makes the appeal sound so reasonable that any one of us would surely have unfastened the latch.
She should be much bigger than she is, but I don’t think she really cares whether she is a star or not. She can act, God, she can act!
Helen’s eventual demise, held down on a table by monks as a stake is driven into her heart, was physically demanding on Shelley, who suffered from chronic back pain. Nevertheless, she was proud of that scene. “There’s absolute evil in there when she’s struggling,” she told Mark Gatiss in his 2010 documentary series A History of Horror, “and then suddenly she’s staked.
She also recounted how she and Lee, who prided themselves on being “un-corpseable”, would compete to make one another laugh during takes.
For Quatermass and the Pit (1967), her last of eight films for Hammer, Shelley was part of a team of scientists investigating an alien spacecraft found during an expansion of London’s underground transport system. She kept her cool while decomposing aliens were disinterred from the tunnels and ferried past her, dripping with green goo. When she fell under the electro-magnetic spell of the spacecraft, her body convulsing as images of alien life were fed into her brain, she made the ordeal look painfully believable.
Shelley named the picture’s director, Roy Ward Baker, as her favourite of all the film-makers she had worked with. He, in turn, told Bizarre magazine in 1974 that he was “mad” about her. “Mad in the sense of love,” he said. “We used to waltz about the set together, a great love affair. It puzzles me about her. She should be much bigger than she is, but I don’t think she really cares whether she is a star or not. She can act, God, she can act!”
Italy
She was born Barbara Kowin in London. She worked as a model but found that precluded casting directors from taking her seriously, despite her theatrical training. A fleeting role in the Hammer whodunit Mantrap (1953) came her way but she enjoyed better luck in Italy, where she worked as both model and actor after being discovered by the Italian comic Walter Chiari while on holiday in Rome.
Returning to the UK four years later, Shelley was put under contract by British Lion and cast in Cat Girl (1957), an unofficial remake of Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People. To prevent too much of her body being shown during nude scenes, she wrote “STOP” on her chest. She also refused to appear topless in Blood of the Vampire (1958), in which she was menaced by Sir Donald Wolfit, and threatened to sue the studio if it went ahead with a body double.https://8d2c73e993bd21e28fd0c48fbcdc9094.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
She had no issue, however, with a revealing seduction scene in Rasputin, The Mad Monk (1966). “That scene was in the script when I read it,” she told Fangoria magazine in 2010. “The scenes I refused to do were when they suddenly would say to me, ‘Oh, you take your clothes off here’. The answer to that was always no.”
In Village of the Damned (1960), adapted from John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, she was heartbreaking as a woman who gives birth to one of a breed of malevolent telepathic children. For one of her first woman-turned-monster roles, in The Gorgon (1964), she offered to have snakes draped over her. “I wouldn’t need any makeup,” she told the studio, “just a green face and the headdress of real snakes.”
Surprised enough when her proposal was rejected, and another actor (Prudence Hyman) cast as the monster into which her character transformed, she was positively crestfallen when she saw what the effects department produced instead. “They came up with these terrible sorts of rubber snakes dancing around, and it just looked awful. It wasn’t frightening at all.” She called it “probably the biggest regret I’ve had in any film I ever made” though she admired the look of the picture, noting that “every shot . . . resembles a Rembrandt painting”.
Her numerous television appearances included roles in The Man from UNCLE (1965), Crown Court (1972), Z Cars (1973), Doctor Who (1984) and EastEnders (1988). She was also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1975 and 1977.
Shelley claimed not to have grasped the reach of her horror movies until she began attending fan conventions. “I realised that my work had been appreciated and that I had – through those horror films – actually reached a far bigger audience than I would ever have done if I’d stuck to the theatre.”https://8d2c73e993bd21e28fd0c48fbcdc9094.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Any irritation she felt stemmed from the emphasis placed on the sexual component of her films. “I had one or two dissertations on horror sent to me by students, and all the discussion ever seems to be concerned with is exploitation and the licking of blood and a scene of people making love, and it’s not right. It annoys me intensely, because my career was not built on exploitation and sex. It was built on working very hard.”
She retired from acting in 1988. Though she never got around to writing her autobiography, she had a title in mind: What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Film Like This? – Guardian
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
The sexy lady subsequently dubbed “The First Leading Lady of British Horror” was born Barbara Kowin in 1933 in London, England. With her beautiful looks and stature, she worked as a model during her salad days. Her film career began in Italy in the mid-1950s in such tempting fare as New Moon (1955) [New Moon] and Nero’s Mistress (1956) [Nero’s Mistress], but when it seemed like she was going to remain in the minor ranks, she returned to England to try to better her career. After appearing in the minor sex farceThe Little Hut (1957) with Stewart Granger, David Niven and Ava Gardner
Barbara Shelley & Martin Stephens
, Barbara caught a bit of film notoriety in the title role of Cat Girl (1957), a low budget production in which she played a woman possessed by a family curse who develops psychic links with a leopard. This paid off and she quickly evolved into a popular Gothic glamour woman at Hammer Studios. Starting things off with The Camp on Blood Island (1958) and Blood of the Vampire (1958), the lovely actress proceeded to stake out her own lucrative territory in the horror genres. Throughout the 1960s she co-starred in the classic Village of the Damned (1960), along with The Shadow of the Cat (1961), The Gorgon (1964), The Secret of Blood Island (1964) (which was the sequel to her aforementioned Camp on Blood Island), Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966) andFive Million Years to Earth (1967). By the late 60s, however, Barbara’s film career had fallen aside and she turned to TV. Retired now, she has pursued interior decorating in recent years. Whether playing female monsters or their intended victims, Barbara played it straight and handled it all with requisite style and grace. For this, she is now occasionally seen by film fans at conventions as an integral figure of camp horror history.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
In both life and death, actor Laurence Harvey commanded a sort of unusual fascination from both the public and press. A strikingly handsome performer, he was also exceptionally cold, occasionally cruel and prone to making statements in the press about his own talents, which were largely underused in his three decades on film, save for a handful of projects like “Room at the Top” (1959) and “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962).
In both films, his chilly screen presence made for memorable performances, first as a ruthless social climber in “Room” and later as a brainwashed solder in “Candidate.” Before and after these assignments, he languished in low-budget dramas, save for a brief stint at the top of the Hollywood heap in “The Alamo” (1960) and “Butterfield 8” (1960).
His luck ran out in the late 1960s, and he languished in obscurity until his death from cancer in 1973. But in the decades that followed his passing, Harvey’s legacy and performances – at once riveting and repelling – commanded a small but dedicated cult who celebrated his eccentric star and its sporadic bursts of brilliance.
Born Laruschka Mischa Skikne in Joniskis, Lithuania on Oct. 1, 1928, Laurence Harvey was the youngest of three sons by Boris and Ella Skikne, who immigrated with their children to Johannesburg, South Africa in 1934.
He joined the South African Army while still in his teens, and as a member of its entertainment unit, performed across Egypt and Italy during World War II. Upon his discharge, he relocated to London after winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
There, he billed himself as Laurence Harvey, a name reportedly inspired by either the Harvey Nichols department store chain or the sherry Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Even as a tyro actor, Harvey was well known for living far beyond his means, and allegedly worked as a male prostitute to make ends meet while performing with the Library Theatre.
He made his feature debut as a callous heel who caused his brother’s own death in the low-budget thriller “House of Darkness” (1948), and would essentially repeat variations on that role throughout his career. Signed to contracts with Associated British Studios and later Romulus Pictures, Harvey labored through a string of undistinguished films and roles while working to establish himself as a stage star with the Memorial Theatre at Stratford. There, he received almost unanimously negative reviews, which were exacerbated by a series of self-aggrandizing interviews in which he staunchly defended his own talents
. He finally landed a movie hit with his Hollywood debut, “King Richard and the Crusaders” (1954) opposite Rex Harrison and George Sanders, but almost immediately deflated any positive response with an aloof turn as Romeo in Renato Castellani’s 1954 film version of “Romeo and Juliet,” which won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival, despite an abundance of critical brickbats. His debut on Broadway in “Island of Goats” (1955) closed after only a week, though it netted Harvey a Theatre World Award.
Upon his return to England, Harvey launched his film career with Romulus anew, though with decidedly unfortunate results. He was soundly panned for turns in Christopher Isherwood’s “I Am a Camera” (1955), which later served as the inspiration for “Cabaret” (1972), and slogged through several more flops before landing his defining role in “Room at the Top” (1959). Cast as Joe Lampton, an ambitious and amoral social climber who left a wake of emotional destruction in his drive to success, Harvey’s performance was cited as one of the defining elements of the New British Cinema, which eschewed the quaintness of the past in favor of gritty vérité stories of postwar London. He received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations for his performance, which re-ignited Hollywood’s interest in him.
After another acclaimed turn in “Expresso Bongo” (1959) as an oily talent scout who exploited his latest discovery, a hapless pop star (Cliff Richard), Harvey began a lengthy tenure in Hollywood. He arrived with a bang, landing starring roles in two major features: the John Wayne-directed epic “The Alamo” (1960) and “Butterfield 8” (1960), starring Elizabeth Taylor. Both arrived in theaters with a thud, with budgetary overruns and a tasteless Oscar campaign sinking “The Alamo,” and Taylor’s scandalous union with co-star Eddie Fisher undermining “Butterfield,” despite her Oscar win for Best Actress.
He soldiered on, but found few viewers for “Walk on the Wild Side” (1962) or “Summer and Smoke” (1962), his second turn in a Tennessee Williams adaptation after “Butterfield 8.” He was also developing a reputation as a difficult and unlikable performer on sets; his “Wild Side” co-star Capucine found him physically unappealing in their love scenes, while Jane Fonda spared no quarter to the press in describing Harvey as wooden and unprofessional.
There was a brief uptick in popularity as one of the Brothers Grimm in “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” (1962), and then a chance at renewed stardom with a controversial film being readied by director John Frankenheimer.
With “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), Harvey found another perfect role in Raymond Shaw, an Army sergeant captured by the Communists during the Korean War who is programmed through subliminal suggestion to assassinate a string of political targets.
The scion of a powerful conservative family, Shaw was handsome, charming, polite and a complete blank, having lost his identity to rigorous brainwashing. The soulless quality of the character seemed to echo Harvey’s own emotionless core, and it seemed to realign his career in a positive direction. However, his subsequent pictures, which included his producing and directorial debut with the violent and surreal crime picture “The Ceremony” (1963) and Martin Ritt’s “The Outrage” (1964) were pilloried in the press, with Harvey receiving the brunt of their ire.
He briefly rebounded with John Schlesinger’s “Darling” (1965) as a cynical ad executive who romanced bored socialite Julie Christie, and reprised his star-making turn in “Life at the Top” (1965), a less well-received sequel to “Room at the Top.” After that, his career went into a lengthy spiral, with careless performances in forgettable films like “The Spy with a Cold Nose” (1965). In 1968, he took over direction of the Cold War thriller “A Dandy in Aspic” when Anthony Mann died before its completion. The film also served as his introduction to model Paulene Stone, who became his third wife and the mother of his only child, Domino Harvey.
Harvey drifted through the early 1970s in a string of forgotten and failed projects. Some were well intentioned, like Stuart Rosenberg’s “WUSA” (1970), which echoed his best-known role in “Manchurian Candidate” with its story of conspiracies and assassinations. Others, like “The Deep” (1970) for Orson Welles, never saw the light of day. He gave one final, full-bodied turn in a 1972 episode of “Night Gallery” (NBC, 1970-72) as a scheming rotter whose attempt to murder a rival backfired in a horrific manner. Audiences, however, could not help but notice that the actor, who was only 45, looked at least a decade older. The cause was stomach cancer, which claimed his life shortly after he completed “Welcome to Arrow Beach” (1973), a grisly horror film about a Korean War veteran-turned-cannibal. In death, he continued to receive slings and arrows from an array of sources ranging from actor Robert Stephens and Frank Sinatra’s valet to wife Paulene Stone. His daughter, Domino, followed a similarly tragic career path that took her from model to bounty hunter before her death from a drug overdose in 2005. Her life story was highly fictionalized by director Tony Scott in “Domino” (2005) with Keira Knightley in the title role. The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Kitty McShane was part of the famous British double bill “Old Mother Riley and her daughter Kitty”. She was born in Dublin 1897. She was the fourth of seventeen children. In 1913 she married Arthur Lucan (Old Mother Riley). They became a popular music hall act. They began making films together in 1937 with”Old Mother Riley”. Together they made 13 Mother Riley films together. Their off-screen fights were legendary. Kitty McShane did not appear in the final Mother Riley film. Kitty McShane died in 1964. Radio recording of Arthur Lucan & Kitty McShane can be heard here. Very good article on Arthur Lucan & Kitty McShane can be accessed here on the Britmovie website.
“In a long career, Kathleen Harrison was rigidly type-cast, kept firmly below stairs. On the few occasions she was not a maid or the daily, she was a nosy neighbour or a Cockney mum – clearly the British character actress par excellence. She has been loyal, cheeky, vague ( ‘I dunno, dear’ is one of her stock remarks) and chin-up cheerful -‘common’ to use a word she (the screen Harrison) uses about others but never herself. There have been other actresses of this vernacular – Thora Hird, Dandy Nichols and the more eccentric and divinely funny Irene Handl – but Harrison is the only one who achieved real film stardom. In her own modest way she was as accomplished a screen artist as any.” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972)
Kathleen Harrison was long a stalwart of British cinema. Her place was always firmly below stairs – a cook perhaps, or a cleaning lady often answering the door with a puzzled expression always fearful that trouble was just around the corner. She was born in 1892 in Blackburn in Lancashire. She studied at RADA and then went to live in Agentina for some time. On her return to Britain, she made her stage debut in 1926 in “The Constant Flirt”. Her first major film role was in 1931 in “Hobson’s Choice”. Kathleen Harrison made one film in Hollywood in Emlyn Williams “Night Must Fall” in 1937 as a maid (naturally). She achieved national fame as Mrs Huggett in four films about the Huggett family. In the mid 1960’s she starred in a very popular television series Mrs Thursday about a cleaner who won the football pools. She died in 1995 at the age of 103.
Her “Independent” obituary by Anthony Hayward:One of the greatest British film character actresses of the Forties and Fifties, the homely Kathleen Harrison made a career out of playing cockney mothers, maids and charwomen. After fame as the cleaner Ma Huggett in the series of Huggetts film comedies and a long-running radio serial, she found a new audience on television in the Sixties with the hugely successful comedy- drama Mrs Thursday.
She was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1892. Her family moved to London when she was five and the aspiring actress trained at RADA (1914-15), where she won the Du Maurier Bronze Medal. While playing Eliza Doolittle there in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the writer attended rehearsals and gave her a piece of advice that was to become the inspiration for many of the roles she would later play. “Go out into the Old Kent Road and just listen to the women talking,” he told her.
However, on graduation, she married and went abroad to live in Argentina and Madeira for eight years. On her return to Britain, Harrison made her stage debut as Mrs Judd in The Constant Flirt, at the Pier Theatre, Eastbourne, in 1926, and appeared in the West End for the first time the following year as Winnie in The Cage, at the Savoy Theatre. Her many subsequent West End plays included A Damsel In Distress, The Merchant and Venus, Lovers’ Meeting, Line Engaged, The Corn is Green, Night Must Fall – later repeating her role as the housekeeper in the 1937 film version – and Sailor Beware!, in which she took over the lead role of fearsome mother Emma Hornett that had made a star of Peggy Mount.
Harrison had already made her film debut with a small role in Our Boys, back in 1915, when she returned to the screen in the 1931 picture Hobson’s Choice, based on Harold Brighouse’s play set in her native Lancashire. Cast firmly in the mould of cockney domestics and mothers, she appeared in another 85 films, including The Man from Toronto (1932, as Jessie Matthews’ maid), The Ghoul (1933, with Boris Karloff), Home from Home (1939, as Sandy Powell’s wife), In Which We Serve (1942), Oliver Twist (1948, as Mrs Sowerby), The Winslow Boy (1948, repeating her stage role as the excitable maid), Scrooge (1951, with Alastair Sim), The Pickwick Papers (1952, as Miss Wardle), Lilacs in the Spring (1954, as Anna Neagle’s dresser), The Big Money (1956, as Ian Carmichael’s mother), Alive and Kicking (1958, with Sybil Thorndike and Estelle Winwood as three lively old ladies escaping from a home), On the Fiddle (1961, as Stanley Holloway’s wife) and West 11 (1963, as Alfred Lynch’s mother).
Harrison first played the London East End charwoman Ma Huggett in Holiday Camp (1947), a film featuring the fictional Huggett family and capitalising on a post-war leisure innovation. The public loved it and the actress continued in the role, alongside Jack Warner as her screen husband and, at various times, Jimmy Hanley and Petula Clark playing two of their children, when Rank tried to capitalise on the original’s success by making the sequels Here Come the Huggetts (1948), Vote for Huggett (1949) and The Huggetts Abroad (1949). When the series received a critical mauling, Rank axed it, but such was the Huggetts’ popularity that they switched to radio in Meet the Huggetts, a serial that ran from 1953 to 1962.
As her cinema appearances became less frequent, Harrison also turned to television, finding a large following as the star of Mrs Thursday, a role created for her by Ted Willis in 1966. Again, the series was panned by the critics, but viewers loved it and immediately made Mrs Thursday the most popular programme on television, even toppling the mighty Coronation Street from its No 1 slot in the ratings. In the programme, also featuring Hugh Manning – later to play the Rev Donald Hinton in Emmerdale Farm – Harrison acted a charwoman who inherits pounds 10m and the controlling interest in a multinational company.
Five years later, she turned down the title role in Jeremy Sandford’s acclaimed BBC play Edna the Inebriate Woman, which won Patricia Hayes a Best Actress on TV award. Harrison’s other television appearances included Shades of Greene, Danger UXB and two BBC serialisations of Charles Dickens novels, Our Mutual Friend and Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens was her favourite author). She made her final screen appearance in the 1979 Disney comedy chase film The London Connection in the small role of an elderly bystander.
In 1992, Harrison owned up to reaching the grand old age of 100 and received her telegram from the Queen, after a lifetime of making herself out to be six years younger. She was one of Britain’s oldest surviving actresses.
Anthony Hayward
Kathleen Harrison, actress: born Blackburn, Lancashire 23 February 1892; married 1916 John Henry Back (died 1960; one son, one daughter, and one son deceased); died 7 December 1995
Kathleen Harrison’s “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.
During the late 1960s Mills began performing in theatrical plays, and played in more mature roles. The age of contracts with studios soon passed. For her success with Disney she received the Disney Legend Award. Although she has not maintained the box office success or the Hollywood A-list she experienced as a child actress, she has continued to make films and TV appearances, including a starring role in the UK television mini-series The Flame Trees of Thika in 1981, the title role in Disney’s television series Good Morning, Miss Bliss in 1988, and as Caroline, a main character in Wild at Heart (2007–2012) on ITV in the UK.
Mills was born in Marylebone, London. She was 12 when she was discovered by J. Lee Thompson, who was initially looking for a boy to play the lead role in Tiger Bay, which co-starred her father, veteran British actor Sir John Mills. The movie was popular at the box office in Britain.
Bill Anderson, one of Walt Disney‘s producers, saw Tiger Bay and suggested that Mills be given the lead role in Pollyanna. The role of the orphaned “glad girl” who moves in with her aunt catapulted Mills to stardom in the United States and earned her a special Academy Award (the last person to receive the Juvenile Oscar). Because Mills could not be present to receive the trophy, Annette Funicello accepted it for her.
Disney subsequently cast Mills as twins Sharon and Susan who reunite their divorced parents in The Parent Trap. In the film, Mills sings “Let’s Get Together” as a duet with herself. The film was a hit around the world, reaching number 8 on a US TOP TEN list.
Mills received an offer to make a film in Britain for Bryan Forbes, Whistle Down the Wind(1961), about some children who believe an escaped convict is Jesus. It was a hit at the British box office and Mills was voted the biggest star in Britain for 1961.
Mills was offered the title role in Lolita by Stanley Kubrick but her father turned it down. “I wish I had done it,” she said in 1962. “It was a smashing film.”
Mills returned to Disney for an adventure film, In Search of the Castaways (1962) based on a novel by Jules Verne. It was another popular success and Mills would be voted the fifth biggest star in the country for the next two years.
In 1963 Disney announced plans to film I Capture the Castle, from the novel by Dodie Smith, with Hayley Mills in the role of Cassandra. However, Disney never produced the film.
Her fourth movie for Disney did less well though was still successful, Summer Magic (1963), a musical adaptation of the novel Mother Carey’s Chickens.
Mills had a change of pace with Sky West and Crooked (1965), set in the world of gypsies, written by her mother and directed by her father. It was not very popular. In contrast, her last film with Disney, the comedy That Darn Cat!, did very well at the box office.
During her six-year run at Disney, Mills was arguably the most popular child actress of the era. Critics noted that America’s favourite child star was, in fact, quite British and very ladylike. The success of “Let’s Get Together” (which hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, No. 17 in Britain and No. 1 in Mexico) also led to the release of a record album on Disney’s Buena Vista label, Let’s Get Together with Hayley Mills, which also included her only other hit song, “Johnny Jingo” (Billboard No. 21, 1962). In 1962 British exhibitors voted her the most popular film actress in the country.
For Universal, Mills made another movie with her father, The Truth About Spring (1965), co-starring Disney regular James MacArthur as her love interest. It was mildly popular. However The Trouble with Angels (1966), was a huge hit; Mills played as a prankish Catholic boarding school girl with “scathingly brilliant” schemes, opposite screen veteran Rosalind Russell, and directed by another Hollywood veteran, Ida Lupino. She then provided a voice for The Daydreamer (1966).
Shortly thereafter, Mills appeared alongside her father and Hywel Bennett in director Roy Boulting’s critically acclaimed film The Family Way (1966), a comedy about a couple having difficulty consummating their marriage, featuring a score by Paul McCartney and arrangements by Beatles producer George Martin. She began a romantic relationship with Roy Boulting, and they eventually married in 1971.
She then starred as the protagonist of Pretty Polly (1967), opposite famous Indian film actor Shashi Kapoor in Singapore.
Mills made another movie for Boulting, the controversial horror thriller Twisted Nerve in 1968, along with her Family Way co-star Hywel Bennett. She made a comedy, Take a Girl Like You (1970) with Oliver Reed, and made her West End debut in The Wild Duck in 1970. She worked for Boulting again on Mr. Forbush and the Penguins (1971), replacing the original female lead.
In 1981 Mills returned to acting with a starring role in the UK television mini-series The Flame Trees of Thika, based on Elspeth Huxley‘s memoir of her childhood in East Africa. The series was well received, prompting Mills to accept more acting roles. She then returned to America and made two appearances on The Love Boat.
Mills recalled her childhood in the 2000 documentary film Sir John Mills’ Moving Memories which was directed by Marcus Dillistone and written by her brother Jonathan. In 2005 Mills appeared in the acclaimed short film, Stricken, written and directed by Jayce Bartok. In 2007 she began appearing as Caroline in the ITV1 African vet drama, Wild at Heart; her sister Juliet Mills was a guest star in series 4 of the drama.
In 2010 Mills appeared in Mandie and the Cherokee Treasure, based on one of the popular Mandie novels of Lois Gladys Leppard.
Mills made her stage debut in a 1966 West End revival of Peter Pan. In 2000 she made her Off-Broadway debut in Sir Noël Coward‘s Suite in Two Keys, opposite American actress Judith Ivey, for which she won a Theatre World Award. In 1991 she appeared as Anna Leonowensin the Australian production of The King and I. In December 2007, for their annual birthday celebration of “The Master”, The Noël Coward Society invited Mills as the guest celebrity to lay flowers in front of Coward’s statue at New York’s Gershwin Theatre, thereby commemorating the 108th birthday of Sir Noel.
In 1997, Mills starred in the U.S. national tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I.
Mills later had a second son, Jason Lawson, during a relationship with British actor Leigh Lawson.
Mills’ partner since 1997 is actor and writer Firdous Bamji, who is 20 years her junior.
Mills had involvement with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishna” movement). She wrote the preface to the book, The Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking, published in 1984. However, in a 1997 article of People magazine, Mills stated that “she is ‘not a part of Hare Krishna’, though she delved into Hinduism and her own Christianity for guidance.”
In 1988 Mills co-edited, with Marcus Maclaine, the book My God, which consisted of brief letters from celebrities on their beliefs, or lack thereof, regarding God and the afterlife. Mills has been a pescetarian since the late 1990s.
On 18 April 2008, Mills was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery and started, but quickly abandoned, chemotherapy after only three sessions due to the severity of side effects. Mills credits her survival to the alternative treatments she tried out. She told Good Housekeeping magazine in January 2012 that she had fully recovered.
Mills is a trustee of the children’s arts charity Anno’s Africa.
References to Mills sometimes appear in fiction and music. The 1985 song ‘Goodbye Lucille’ by the British band Prefab Sprout refers in passing to Mills.
In 1949, he starred in the film Floodtide, along with actress Rona Anderson. He and Anderson married two years later on 2 June 1951. They had two sons, Graham and Roddy. The same year, he made his London stage debut, appearing in the play Seagulls Over Sorrento by Hugh Hastings.
Gordon Jackson became a household name playing the stern Scottish butler Angus Hudson in sixty episodes of the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs from 1971 to 1975. In 1976, he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Performance by a Supporting Actor for the episode “The Beastly Hun“. In 1974, he was named British Actor of the Year and in 1979 he was made an OBE. Jackson was cast opposite Bette Davis for the American television film Madame Sin (1972), which was released in overseas markets as a feature film.
His next big television role was in the hard-hitting police drama The Professionals from 1977.[1] He played George Cowley in all 57 episodes of the programme, which ended in 1983, although filming finished in 1981. He played Noel Strachan in the Australian Second World War drama A Town Like Alice (1981), winning a Logie Award for his performance.
After A Town Like Alice and The Professionals, Gordon Jackson continued his television work with appearances in Hart to Hart, Campion and Shaka Zulu and the films The Shooting Party and The Whistle Blower. He also appeared in the theatre, appearing in Cards on the Table, adapted from the novel by Agatha Christie at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1981 and in Mass Appeal by Bill C. Davis at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1982. From 1985 to 1986, Jackson narrated two afternoon cookery shows in New Zealand for TVNZ called Fresh and Fancy Fare and its successor Country Fare. His last role before his death was in Effie’s Burning, and this was broadcast posthumously. He died at the age of 66 in 1990.
Joseph O’Conor obituary in “The Guardian” in 2001.
Joseph O’Conor was born in Dublin in 1916. He made his professional stage debut in London in 1939 in “Julius Caesar”. His best known work was in the 1966 BBC series “The Forsyte Saga” which was hughly popular. He was also featured in the musical “Oliver” as kindly Mr Brownlow. He died at the age of 90.
“Guardian” obituary:
The actor Joseph O’Conor, who has died aged 84, appeared in 1966 in BBC Television’s last great success of the black-and-white era, The Forsyte Saga, playing the stern patriarch Old Jolyon.
On the big screen his career ranged from Stranger at my Door (1950) to Luc Besson’s Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) – taking in Mr Brownlow in the 1968 movie of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The latter was a role for which, with his authoritative, kindly demeanour, he was perfect casting.
Joseph O’Conor
But O’Conor’s natural home was the stage. His 60th and last Shakespearean role was as Duncan to Sir Antony Sher’s Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The production began at Stratford in 1999, then toured. O’Conor was flown home from Japan when his failing heart forced him to step down, but within weeks was back for the Young Vic run, his voice older but his presence still commanding. The production was screened on Channel 4 on New Year’s Day.
O’Conor was born in Seattle to Irish parents and, though almost all his life was spent in south-west London, he remained proudly Irish. He was educated at Cardinal Vaughan School in Kensington, and after the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art made his prewar debut in an Embassy Swiss Cottage production of Julius Caesar. At the end of the 1940s he joined the touring company of the last of the great actor-managers, Donald Wolfit, at the Bedford theatre in Camden Town. Wolfit valued his young protégé, giving him a string of Shakespearean parts. The pair alternated as Othello and Iago, and Wolfit vouchsafed his Gravedigger to O’Conor’s acclaimed Hamlet.
At the Bristol Old Vic in the late 1950s he played many leads – alongside Peter O’Toole among others – including the role of Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. There was also a production of his own early play, The Iron Harp, set in his beloved Ireland. That play gave a first important role to Richard Harris, and O’Conor wrote five others.
West End aside, his career took in an American tour, appearances in the York mystery plays, at the Glasgow Citizens’, and at reps such as Windsor and Guildford. As an incurable company man from the 1970s, he enjoyed several seasons with both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His years with the latter were especially happy, founded on great mutual respect and affection.
O’Conor enjoyed a fertile period acting for Jonathan Miller, most notably as the Duke in Measure for Measure in 1975. And the lure in the 70s and 80s of the actor George Murcell’s ill-starred Shakespeare company at the St George’s Theatre in Tufnell Park, London, proved irresistible.
There were many other film appearances, including Tom And Viv (1994) and Elizabeth (1998). A highlight was the festival favourite The Forbidden Quest (1993), directed by Peter Delpuit, which gave O’Conor a unique one-man vehicle as a polar survivor.
I was lucky enough to produce one of the very best of his many TV performances when he led the cast of Drew Griffiths’ and Noel Greig’s Only Connect (1979). As a devout Catholic, O’Conor had an intellectual objection to abortion, adultery and homosexuality, but in his life and work he was understanding and supportive. In Only Connect, he played a man who in extreme youth had had a sexual encounter with the writer and prophet Edward Carpenter. The play confronted a very thorny issue for gay men, that of ageism, and O’Conor embraced the theme with a generous heart.
The production coincided with his marriage to the actress Lizanne Rodger, who was young enough to be his daughter, and so O’Conor had a special connection to the material of the play, which informed his work on it.
In that play, as so often, he was cast older than he was. Kenneth More, who played his son in The Forsyte Saga, was actually two years older than O’Conor, to their shared amusement. Prematurely white-haired, but also unmistakably mature, wise and protective – and sometimes impish and whimsical – he was a natural Chebutykin in Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
He rewrote as novels some of his other plays, such as Inca (sadly eclipsed by Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt Of The Sun) and The Lion Trap. Among his children’s stories, he got to read King Canoodlum and the Great Horned Cheese on television’s Jackanory. In his last months, he completed his memoirs.
He was married first to Naita Moore; they had a daughter Rachel and a son Joseph. With Lizanne Rodger, he had two more children, Charlotte and Kit.
Joseph O’Conor, actor and writer, born February 14 1916; died January 21 2001
His obituary in “The Guardian” can be accessed here.
Her theatre roles include playing Kate in the original production of Dancing at Lughnasa in Dublin (1990). She was married to the musician Sting from 1976 to 1984.
On 1 May 1976, Tomelty married musician Gordon “Sting” Sumner – best known as the lead singer and bassist for the rock band The Police – after knowing him for two years.
They met on the set of a rock-musical called Rock Nativity. She played the Virgin Mary; he played in the band. They have two children together, Joseph (born 23 November 1976) and Fuchsia Katherine (“Kate”) (born 17 April 1982.
