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Brittish Actors

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Nicol Williamson
Nicol Williamson
Nicol Williamson
Nicol Williamson
Nicol Williamson

Nicol Williamson was born in Scotland in 1936.   He made his stage debut with Dundee rep in 1960.   He starred in John Osborne’s “Inadmissable Evidence” in 1964 in London in which he won rave reviews.   He went with the play to London where he won a Tony Award for Best Actor.   In 1968 he starred in a filmed version of “Hamlet”.   He made a number of films including “The Bofors Guns”, “The Reckoning” and “Laughter in the Dark”.   In the late seventies he appeared in some Hollywood films e.g. “The Goodbye Girl”.   His last film credit seems to be “Spawn” in 1997.   Nicol Williamson died in December 2011.

“The Independent” obituary:

Nicol Williamson was the notorious bad boy of the theatre, his unpredictable behaviour, unreliability and blunt rudeness to those he did not respect – which may well have been the majority of those he met in and out of the theatre world – having to be weighed by the theatres that employed him for his undoubted brilliance as an actor, and a star appeal that never fully flowered because of the reluctance of film producers and theatrical impresarios to engage him. Twin devils seemed to co-exist in his lanky body, one that drove his private life to frequent excess and public exhibitionism, and the other in which a creative genius seemed to be about to explode. He was quintessentially a model for the 19th century decadent romantic, a Byron, a des Esseintes or a Rimbaud. As an actor he could be electric: John Osborne declared him to be “the greatest actor since Marlon Brando”.

He was born and brought up in Hamilton outside Glasgow; it is difficult to imagine him as a boy in that quiet little town where the main cultural event of the year is the Salvation Army’s Christmas carol concert. He started his career at the Dundee Rep in 1960, stayed there two years, then went to the Arts Theatre in Cambridge and transferred to the Royal Court from there with That’s Us, staying on with the English Stage Company in a number of demanding roles. They included Jacobean and period drama and modern plays, the most successful of which was Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, a palpable hit that transferred to the West End and had several later revivals, about a complex London barrister, but he was also well cast as Sebastian Dangerfield in The Ginger Man.

One of his greatest performances was as Vladimir in the 1964 revival of Waiting for Godot. Anthony Page, Nicol’s preferred director, was in charge, but Beckett turned up at rehearsals and was unhappy about the way the production was progressing, the actor retaining his London barrister’s accent for the author’s reflective tramp. “Where do you come from? Is that your natural voice?” asked Beckett, and when told that Nicol was Scottish, asked if he could not use his natural non-London intonation. That evening Beckett looked pleased, more so as the days passed, and he commented, “There’s a touch of genius there!” The opening night was a triumph, the audience electrified by his trumpeted scream of “I can’t go on!” at the climax of the great final monologue.

From then Beckett was Williamson’s God. When I invited him in 1965 to take part in a Beckett reading at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford on a Sunday night, he insisted on Beckett’s personal direction, and we visited him at Ussy on the Sunday before. We had launched the previous day and Nicol’s single-minded enthusiasm was such that he cancelled both his Saturday performances of Inadmissible Evidence, then playing at Wyndham’s, next door to our restaurant, and sent on his understudy – who also had to play the whole week following, because Williamson, having returned from the rehearsal in France on the Monday, then disappeared for the whole week.

But the day before the Sundayperformance at Stratford, when I had made emergency changes in the programme, he appeared at my flat to rehearse, and took the audience by storm the next day, throwing the other readers into confusion by his innovations. Patrick Magee said that he would never again appear on the same stage as an actor so selfish.

With the RSC he performed Arden of Faversham at the New Arts Theatre and played Sweeney in the TS Eliot memorial production of Sweeney Agonistes. He became a charismatic actor in films as well, but his appearances, especially in commercial productions, became rarer because his temperament and arrogance did not appeal to directors.

His marriage to the actress Jill Townsend was of short duration, and problems rising from his divorce, his messy private life and his mounting debt to the Inland Revenue forced him to move to New York, where he quickly blotted his copybook by knocking down David Merrick, the most powerful man on Broadway at the time. There he repeated some of his British successes and performed in roles that included Hamlet and Macbeth, but always for short runs.

He was cast as the ghost of John Barrymore, appearing to help a young actor play Hamlet, commented voluably to the press on the weakness of the play and others in the cast, and at an early performance actually stabbed the other actor during a fencing episode. He strode to the footlights and announced, “Something’s gone wrong. You’d better bring down the curtain.” Most thought it was part of the play. The second act started after more than an hour’s interval with an understudy, and Williamson playing normally, but the actors had summoned Equity and the play closed a few nights later.

Williamson’s career was peppered with such incidents. He had a good natural tenor voice and could mimic any crooner perfectly, and if he heard an accent he could imitate it; years later he could still do Beckett’s voice perfectly. He devised a number of one-man shows, songs, patter and extracts from plays and other literature, but, in spite of brilliant moments, they were not successful, and while he could excite an audience, he had little critical judgement in choosing and interpreting a text without outside help.

His films included: Inadmissible Evidence (1967), The Bofors Gun (1968), The Seven Per Cent Solution (1975), The Human Factor (1979), Excalibur (1980) – the film for which he is probably best known, as Merlin – Black Widow (1986) and several others of varying quality, including The Exorcist III. Other plays in which he appeared include The Entertainer (1983), The Lark (1983) and The Real Thing (1985).

In person he was entertaining but often embarrassing company, carrying role-playing to extremes and needing to dominate every assembly at which he was present, especially in his manic moods. When depressive he was pitiable and usually stayed on his own. But whoever saw his Vladimir and heard that despairing scream, embodying the whole anguish of the human condition, which is then followed by a resumption of the human need to regain a vestige of dignity, will never forget it. Metaphorically it also encompassed his life.

Although Williamson’s death was only announced yesterday, his son Luke said that he had died on 16 December of oesophageal cancer.

John Calder

Nicol Williamson, actor: born Hamilton, Scotland 14 September 1938; married 1971 Jill Townsend (divorced 1977; one son); died Amsterdam 16 December 2011.

The “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Article on Nicol Williamson in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:

Once called the finest actor of his generation, and the best since Brando, the supremely talented Nicol Williamson is a somewhat forgotten face of British cinema. But for a while it seemed that both on stage and screen, he was untouchable. From his iconic Shakespearean roles to some incredible screen performances, Williamson dominated each scene with a magnetism rarely seen.

Born in Scotland on September 14th, 1936, Nicol’s screen career began in 1963 with a few brief TV parts and an uncredited bit in the 1964 Kim Novak remake; ‘Of Human Bondage’. Nicol’s noted stage career took off in 1964 with John Osborne’s ‘Inadmissible Evidence’, where he created the role of Bill Maitland, a solicitor despairing at his own life and existence. A little seen but excellent version of Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ was made for TV in 1968, and Nicol was quite astonishing as the simple-minded Lennie, with George Segal as his protector George.

A film version of his acclaimed stage performance ‘Inadmissible Evidence’ was shot in 1968, and he was just as terrific. He was also excellent, though wholly unlikable, in Jack Gold’s ‘The Bofors Gun’, as an Irish soldier and suicidal bully. My favourite performance of Nicol’s was in the 1969 social drama ‘The Reckoning’, which saw Williamson as Michael Marler, a no-nonsense bed-hopping businessman, seeking revenge for his father’s death. He was also good that year in Tony Richardson’s ‘Laughter in the Dark’. Based on the Nabokov novel, it had Nicol as a bored art dealer lusting after Anna Karina’s beautiful but scheming movie usherette.

Staying with Richardson, Williamson made the 1969 movie version of their acclaimed stage production ‘Hamlet’, which had Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia and Anthony Hopkins as Claudius. In 1972 Nicol was an archeology professor in the Political drama ‘The Jerusalem File’, with Donald Pleasence and Bruce Davison. Williamson reunited with director Jack Gold, this time to play President Nixon during the Watergate affair, in a ‘Late-Night Drama’ TV episode called ‘I Know What I Mean’. He made an endearing Little John in Richard Lester’s elegiac ‘Robin and Marian’ (’76), and was very good as Sherlock Holmes in Nicholas Meyer’s personal yet engaging drama ‘The Seven-Per-Cent Solution’ (’76). A guest spot in a 1978 episode of ‘Columbo’ led to a brief bit in the Peter Falk comedy spoof ‘The Cheap Detective’ (’78). Nicol was then a double-agent in Otto Preminger’s final feature, ‘The Human Factor’ (’79), a somewhat convoluted thriller but with a top-notch cast.

For many, Williamson’s best cinematic portrayal was that of Merlin, in John Boorman’s King Arthur tale ‘Excalibur’ (’81). Despite not getting on with co-star Helen Mirren, (they famously fell out during an earlier production of Macbeth) he was wonderful, and it remains one of cinemas most enjoyable portrayals. From here his career waned somewhat. He was a police commander in the entertaining horror flick ‘Venom’ (’81), slumming it but still giving a solid performance. Nicol was however, excellent as an alcoholic lawyer in the 1982 drama ‘I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can’ with Jill Clayburgh.

Nicol would dress up again, this time in dual roles, for the 1985 fantasy ‘Return to Oz’ (’85). Though it sank at the Box Office it has since gained a minor cult following. He was very good as a melancholic Lord Mountbatten in a 1986 mini-series, then was a philanthropist murdered by Theresa Russell in Bob Rafelson’s fun thriller ‘Black Widow’ (’87). A supporting role followed as Father Morning, aiding George C. Scott’s Lieutenant Kinderman, in the horror sequel ‘The Exorcist III’ (’90), which was better than it’s poor reviews suggested. He was then back on British screens in the BBC’s entertaining black comedy ‘The Hour of the Pig’, and was charming as the voice of Badger, in Terry Jone’s enjoyable 1996 version of ‘Wind in the Willows’. Nicol’s final movie was the woeful horror; ‘Spawn’, once again playing a magician.

Williamson had a son with actress Jill Townsend, whom he was married to from 1971 to 1977. Having lived abroad for many years, Nicol Williamson died on December 16th 2011, in Amsterdam, after a two year battle with oesophageal cancer. He was 75. From Broadway to screen, Nicol Williamson was a hard drinking, no nonsense actor, and a towering talent. Uncompromising and fearless, he was also an accomplished poet, singer and writer, and with so many great movie performances it’s surprising he never received an Oscar nomination. Though true to his character, I doubt he ever gave it a thought.

Favourite Movie: The Reckoning
Favorite Performance: The Reckoning

 

 Article above can also be accessed online here.

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Moyna MacGill
Moyna McGill
Moyna McGill

Moyna MacGill was born in Belfast in 1995.   She was the daughter of a solicitor.   She acted on the London stage and in British films.   In 1940 she was a widow and to protect her children from the London bombings she moved with them to New York.   She then went to Hollywood where she worked as a sterling character actress in such films as “Green Dolphin Street”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and on many television programmes.   She died in 1975.   Moyna MacGill was the mother of Angela Lansbury.   Blog on Moyna McGill can be accessed here.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Born  in Belfast, she was the daughter of a wealthy solicitor who was also a director of the Grand Opera House in Belfast, a position that sparked her interest in theatrics. She was still a teen when she was noticed riding the London Underground by director George Pearson, who cast her in several of his films. In 1918, she made her stage debut in the play Love in a Cottage at the West End‘s Globe Theatre.

Encouraged by Gerald du Maurier to change her name to Moyna Macgill (which invariably was misspelled as “MacGill” or “McGill”, and on at least one occasion, the film Texas, Brooklyn and Heaven, as “Magill”), she became a leading actress of the day, appearing in light comedies, melodramas, and classics opposite Herbert Marshall, John Gielgud, and Basil Rathbone, among others.

Twenty-six-year-old Macgill was married with a three-year-old daughter, Isolde (who later married Sir Peter Ustinov), when she became involved romantically with Edgar Lansbury, a socialist politician, who was a son of the Labour MP and Leader of the Opposition George Lansbury. Her husband, actor Reginald Denham, named Lansbury as co-respondent when he filed for divorce. A year after it was finalized, Macgill and Lansbury married and with Isolde settled into a garden flat in London‘s Regent’s Park.

Macgill temporarily set aside her career following the birth of daughter Angela and twin sons Edgar, Jr., and Bruce (both went on to becomeBroadway producers, but Bruce is better known for his work on television, such as the series The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, and his sister’s Murder, She Wrote), although music and dance were prevalent in their upbringing. When they moved into a larger house in suburban Mill Hill, she turned their home into a salon for actors, writers, directors, musicians, and artists, all of whom left an impression on young Angela and were instrumental in directing her interests towards acting.

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

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Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn obituary in “The Independent” by David Shipman in 1993.

After so many drive-in waitresses in movies – it has been a real drought – here is class, somebody who went to school, can spell and possibly play the piano,’ said Billy Wilder. ‘She’s a wispy, thin little thing, but you’re really in the presence of somebody when you see that girl. Not since Garbo has there been anything like it, with the possible exception of Bergman.’ My generation knew Bergman. Garbo we had never seen. Old pictures were not easy to see in the 1950s. Older cinemagoers talked longingly of Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Margaret Sullavan and other enchantresses. From the moment Audrey Hepburn appeared in Roman Holiday (1953), we knew that we had one of our own.

She was born in Brussels to an English banker and a Dutch baroness – and when the war broke out had been trapped in Arnhem with her mother; there they spent the war years, while Hepburn trained as a dancer.

Curiously, several people recognised Hepburn’s particular magic, but few British producers were interested. The revue producer Cecil Landau saw her in the chorus of a West End musical – High Button Shoes (1948) – and engaged her for Sauce Tartare. He liked her so much that he gave her more to do in a sequel, Sauce Piquant. ‘God’s gift to publicity men is a heart-shattering young woman,’ said Picturegoer, ‘with a style of her own . . .’ The magazine mentioned that some people had been to see her perform a couple of dozen times, and among them was Mario Zampi, who was about to direct Laughter in Paradise (1951) for Associated British.

The company’s casting director was equally enthusiastic, but to no avail. She was cast as a hat-check girl: the studio reluctantly allowed her three lines, as against one in the original script. She was signed to a contract, and loaned to Ealing for a couple of lines in the final scene in Lavender Hill Mob (1951), when Alec Guinness is enjoying his ill-gotten loot in South America.

At this point, the producer-director Mervyn LeRoy was looking for a patrician girl to play the lead in Quo Vadis?, MGM’s biggest production in years, and he was excited by Hepburn’s test for him. MGM were not, and the role went to Deborah Kerr. But at last Associated British realised that they might have something in this odd little girl, and they made her a vamp in a parlour-room farce, Young Wives’ Tale (1951), starring Joan Greenwood. It is completely forgotten today, but if you can see it you are likely to be beguiled by two of the most individual actresses who ever appeared in films. They had in common voices with cadences which always alighted on the wrong word to emphasise – as did Sullavan, the other Hepburn, Ann Harding, Irene Dunne, even Judy Garland – turning a statement into a question. In a word, they were never ashamed of their vulnerability; they didn’t seem to be able to cope with life – except to laugh at it. Hepburn’s child-like laugh, deep-throated but tentative, was one of her most distinctive qualities.

But, obviously, it wasn’t unique. Jean Simmons also had it. And it was Simmons who inadvertently launched Hepburn’s screen career. After Young Wives’ Tale, Associated British loaned Hepburn to Ealing again, to play the sister of the star, Valentina Cortese, in a muddled spy drama, The Secret People (1951), and then to a French company for a minor B-movie, Monte Carlo Baby (1951). Hepburn was doing a scene in a Monte Carlo hotel lobby, when Colette happened by. Colette was then working with the American producer Gilbert Miller on a dramatisation of her novel Gigi, about an innocent youngster being trained to appeal – sexually – to men. This wasn’t a subject show-business wanted to know much about. It wasn’t something Hepburn seemed to know about when she played the role on Broadway in 1951.

Meanwhile, contractual obligations prevented Simmons from appearing in Roman Holiday, and Hepburn was successfully tested. The property had been brought to Paramount by Frank Capra and when he left it was inherited by another leading director, William Wyler. It was not a likely subject for either of them but then, like many of our favourite movies – All About Eve, Casablanca – there is no other like it; it resists imitation: the innocent alone in the big city. The innocent is the princess of an unnamed European country who escapes from the embassy to see Rome incognito. She is recognised by an American reporter, played by Gregory Peck, who sees in her a good news-story and doesn’t reckon on falling in love.

She doesn’t know that he’s a reporter till they are introduced formally at a reception, when by a flicker of an eyelid he indicates that he won’t be filing the story. Peck was not the most adroit of light comedians and the direction was rather academic: but Hepburn’s sheer joy at being free and in love was wonderful to experience. You could never forget her eating an ice- cream on the Spanish Steps or putting her hand in the mouth of the stone lion at Tivoli.

The acclaim that greeted Hepburn was instantaneous and enormous – to be matched only a year later by that for Grace Kelly in what became their decade. Simmons, whom she had never met, telephoned to say, ‘Although I wanted to hate you, I have to tell you that I wouldn’t have been half as good. You were wonderful.’ Hepburn was judged the year’s best actress by the New York critics, by the readers of Picturegoer and by the voters of the Motion Picture Academy. Paramount had Hollywood’s brightest new star – only it didn’t: she was under contract to Associated British, which came to a lucrative agreement by which Paramount had exclusive rights to her services.

Billy Wilder directed her in Sabrina (1954), in which she was the chauffeur’s daughter, moving from ugly duckling to glamour, which was a formula followed in several subsequent movies. The plot had her loved by two brothers, played by William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. Bogart got her at the end, establishing another pattern to follow, in which she was wooed by men twice her age: by Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), Paris fashions and the Gershwins’ music; by Gary Cooper in Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957), Paris again and a rather vulgar remake of Canner’s delicate Ariane; and Cary Grant in Donen’s Charade (1963), Paris yet again and Hitchcockian situations.

You could understand why these actors took the risk of being described as cradle-snatchers. Astaire said: ‘This could be the last and only opportunity I’d have to work with the great and lovely Audrey and I wasn’t missing it. Period.’ Leonard Gershe, who wrote Funny Face, described her as a joy to work with, ‘as professional as she was unpretentious’. Hollywood’s best directors also clamoured to work with her. King Vidor said that she was the only possible choice to play Natasha in the expensive Italo-American War and Peace (1956), causing William Whitebait in the New Statesman to observe, ‘She is beautifully, entrancingly alive, and I for one, when I next come to read (the book), shall see her where I read Natasha.’ But Tolstoy had done the job for him: physically, temperamentally Hepburn was Natasha.

About this time she might have played another literary heroine. James Mason knew that he would make a superb Mr Rochester, but 20th Century-Fox would only proceed with the project if he could persuade Hepburn to play Jane. He didn’t even try. As he explained: ‘Jane Eyre is a little mouse and Audrey is a head-turner. In any room where Audrey Hepburn sits, no matter what her make- up is, people will turn and look at her because she’s so beautiful.’ Of the many films she turned down the most interesting are MGM’s musicalised Gigi, in her old stage role (and the studio was prepared to pay her far more than Leslie Caron, who was under contract, and who did eventually play the role), and The Diary of Anne Frank, George Stevens’s version of the Broadway dramatisation. She said that that would have been too painful after her own experience of the Occupation (in the event the role was so disastrously cast that the film failed both artistically and commercially).

At the same time Hepburn accepted another difficult subject, with another fine director, The Nun’s Story, for Fred Zinnemann. Kathryn Hulme’s novel was also based on fact, about a novice who finds, in the end, that she doesn’t have enough faith to continue. The film remains Hollywood’s best attempt at playing Church, both because it regards it with respect and not piety, yet at the same time allowing us to make our own decisions about the dottiness of the convent system. She held her own against the formidable opposition of Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, both playing Mothers Superior with closed minds – and that was partly because the gentle Zinnemann was nevertheless able to blend their different acting styles, and partly because of Hepburn’s innate instinct for what the camera would allow her to do. Despite her voice mannerisms, here at a minimum, Hepburn was the one star of her generation to suggest intelligence and dignity – which is to say qualities which people, as opposed to actresses, have. Grace, beauty and the sine qua non of stardom made her as rewarding to watch as Garbo, and she can’t disguise them in playing this ordinary girl; but she also has gravity.

She was touching as Burt Lancaster’s half-breed sister in John Huston’s huge, vasty western The Unforgiven (1960), but Blake Edwards allowed the latent artifice of her screen persona to surface as Holly Golightly in his film of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Capote described the result as ‘a mawkish Valentine to Audrey Hepburn’ and George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay, criticised her for refusing to convey the fact that Holly was a tramp with no morals or principles. No one else seemed to mind.

She had committed herself to the film only after Marilyn Monroe had turned it down, and when there was an impasse with Alfred Hitchcock over No Bail for the Judge. He was desperate to work with her and had spent dollars 200,000 in preparation, when she had second thoughts about a scene in which she was dragged into a London park to be raped. Furious, Hitchcock abandoned the picture rather than go ahead with another actress.

Hepburn was a controversial choice to play Eliza in My Fair Lady (1964). Warners had paid a record sum of dollars 5.5m for the screen rights to the Lerner and Loewe musical version of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Everyone agreed that its extraordinary success was due to the starring trio of Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway. The last of these was the most expendable, but Jack Warner decided to go with Holloway when James Cagney wisely declined to come out of retirement to play Doolittle. No leading star was prepared to risk a comparison with Harrison’s definitive Higgins (‘Not only will I not play it,’ said Cary Grant, ‘I won’t even go and see it if you don’t put Rex Harrison in it’) which meant Andrews had to be replaced by a solid box-office attraction.

Warners had recently released The Music Man with its Broadway star Robert Preston, but the film’s reception was so spotty that they had not opened it in territories where he was an unknown quality. The irony of the My Fair Lady situation was that, as filming was under way, word was coming from the Disney studio that Andrews was sensational in Mary Poppins. She got an Oscar for it; Harrison got one for My Fair Lady, presented by Hepburn, and was thus photographed with his two Elizas. That Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed did not help her performance (her non-singing voice had done charmingly by the songs in Funny Face), but she brought a street-wise cunning to the role that Andrews lacked. This may not have been what Shaw intended, but George Cukor, who directed, observed that at the end of the film Hepburn fitted Shaw’s own description of Eliza as ‘dangerously beautiful’.

She made only two more successful films: Donen’s Two for the Road (1967), with Albert Finney, a study of a disintegrating marriage written by Frederic Raphael, and Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967), a thriller about a blind girl terrorised by some thugs because they thought there were some drugs stashed away in her apartment. Mention should be made of two other movies, because they were directed by Wyler: How to Steal a Million (1966), a comedy with Peter O’Toole, and The Children’s Hour (1962), a remake of his own These Three. The original Broadway play hinged on a lie told by a child, that two of her teachers have an unnatural affection for each other. The censor would not permit that in 1936, so the plot of the film depended on the child accusing one teacher of filching the other’s fiance. Wyler’s decision to remake the picture was to restore the lesbian element, but the result was flat, despite the fact that Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine were infinitely better actresses than Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, the stars of the 1936 version.

At the height of her career Hepburn made only one out-and-out stinker, Green Mansions, with Anthony Perkins. It may be that WH Hudson’s novel about Rima the Bird Girl is unfilmable (MGM had started shooting one a few years earlier before giving up), but matters here were made worse by the stodgy direction by Mel Ferrer, at that time married to Hepburn. They had met while appearing in Giraudoux’s Ondine in New York in 1954, and he accompanied her to Italy, to play Prince Andrei in War and Peace. When the marriage broke up in 1968 she married an Italian psychiatrist, Andrea Dotti, and announced that a career and marriage were incompatible; so she only intended to film again if she could do so near her homes in Rome and Switzerland.

She came out of retirement five times, and only the first time was worthwhile: to play an ageing Maid Marian to Sean Connery’s Robin in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976). She was an industrial heiress in Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, which was so badly received that she admitted that she had done it because she liked the director, Terence Young. She added that she wanted to go out on a good one – and Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed certainly didn’t provide it. Nobody laughed, including Time-Life, who financed it and dropped it after a few test showings. In 1987 she made a telemovie, Love Among Thieves, and although she herself was praised the press liked neither it nor her co-star, Robert Wagner. In 1989 she played a small role in Always, Steven Spielberg’s remake of A Guy Named Joe, in the role done in the original by Lionel Barrymore as an emissary of the Almighty. She was realistic enough to recognise that there were few meaty roles for actresses of her age – and with Spielberg’s box-office record she hoped to be in a success. She was wrong again.

3rd September 1955: British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 68 No 10 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

She was by now spending most of her time working voluntarily for Unicef and giving interviews to explain what she was doing and what was needed. Unlike some stars whose identification with charities always looked suspicious, as if they wanted to advance their careers, it was clear that in this case there was no career and she wanted to find something useful to do. She also appeared frequently at movie functions, to be awarded lifetime achievement awards or make the special presentation at the end of the evening. Many people had expected her to age badly, because she had been so scrawny as a young woman. The reverse was the case – for she still possessed in middle age what she had always had: radiance, dignity and, above all, style. This last quality may be summed up by a famous exchange of the 1950s, when her clothes were designed by one of the most celebrated couturiers in Paris. ‘Just think what Givenchy has done for Audrey Hepburn.’ ‘No, just think what Audrey Hepburn has done for Givenchy.’

 

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Oliver Reed
Oliver Reed
Oliver Reed

Oliver Reed obituary in “The Independent” in 1999.

Oliver Reed was a big burly presence on film who was well known for his hard-drinking macho .   He was born in 1938 in London and was the nephew of the great film director Sir Carol Reed.   He began acting on film in 1958 in the Norman Wisdom comedy “The Square Peg” where he played a menancing thug.   He spent a few years in supporting parts and then gained larger roles in Hammer Horror movies.   In 1968 his uncle awarded him the plum role of Bill Sikes in the wonderful “Oliver”.   Reed was excellent in the part and I think the best performance in the film.   He went to Hollywood and made several films there and back in Britain.   In his later career the quailty of the films diminished somewhat.   He had a leading role in the excellent “Gladiator” which he was working on in Malta when he died of a heart attack in 2000.   He was buried in Co. Cork Ireland near to his home of several years.

Independent, The (London), May 4, 1999 by Tom VallanceOLIVER REED was something of a rarity among British film stars, a bearish, scar-faced, larger-than-life figure whose off-screen exploits, notably his heavy drinking and the scrapes that it got him into, brought him more fame and notoriety than his acting career.As an actor, he made his strongest impression when playing similarly extrovert figures – such as the tortured heroes of Hammer horror movies or the brutal Bill Sikes in Oliver! Most memorable of all was his work with the director Ken Russell on television (as Rossetti and Debussy) and on film in The Devils, Tommy and their first collaboration, Women in Love, in which the nude wrestling scene between Reed and Alan Bates remains one of the most evocative and remarkable sequences of the Sixties. Russell wrote later: I wonder if people would still be talking about the film today if I hadn’t included that particular sequence. . . it wasn’t in the original script. I didn’t think it would pass the censor and I knew it would be difficult to shoot. I was wrong on my first guess and right on my second. Olly talked me into it. He wrestled with me, ju-jitsu style, in my kitchen, and wouldn’t let me up until I said, “OK, OK, you win, I’ll do it.” Thanks, Olly, we made history.

Original Cinema Exhibitor’s Campgain Book – Press Book

He was born in Wimbledon, south London, in 1938, grandson of the actor- manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree and nephew of the film director Carol Reed, though he later stated, “I never sought anything but advice from my uncle.” He denied as apocryphal the tale that he was expelled from 13 schools (“I left of my own free will”) but he did run away from home at the age of 17 to become a bouncer at a Soho strip club. He had a brief career as a boxer (“I won the first fight, lost the next, then decided I didn’t like being hit”) and worked as a mini-cab driver and mortuary attendant before doing National Service as a member of the Medical Corps. After his two years in the Army were finished, he returned to London determined to be an actor: “When I came out I went to my uncle and he said to go into repertory if I wanted to be an actor. It was good advice, because I ignored it completely. I don’t give a damn for the theatre, films is where it’s at.”

Reed instead took his photograph around to agencies and managed to get bit parts and extra work in British movies including The Captain’s Table (1958), Beat Girl (1959, as a teenage loafer), The League of Gentlemen (1960, as a ballet dancer) and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960, as a bouncer). “Everyone told me not to do horror films,” he later stated, “but I wanted to act. I remember standing on a table blowing bubble gum as a child and everyone applauded. I like that.”

It was a horror film that gave Reed his first major opportunity. Terence Fisher’s Curse of the Werewolf (1961) is considered one of the best of Hammer’s output, an earnest attempt to understand folklore which spends almost the entire first half examining the origins of the werewolf myth (its portrayal of 18th-century Spain caused the film to be banned in that country for 15 years). As the young man fighting the beast within himself, Reed gave a performance described by one critic as “mesmerising”. Further Hammer films included Joseph Losey’s The Damned (1962), in which Reed was the leader of a motorcycle gang, The Pirates of Blood River (1962) and The Scarlet Blade (1963).

In one of Michael Winner’s better films, The System (1964), he was a seaside youth who has a way with the ladies – retitled The Girl-Getters, the film did well in the United States. But it was Ken Russell’s Monitor television film about Debussy (1965), in which Reed had the title role, that marked what he later referred to as his “intellectual breakthrough”. He was now being considered seriously as an actor and had also become one of the British cinema’s most potent sex symbols. Reed received some of his best notices for his performance as a primitive fur-trapper who takes an orphaned mute for a bride in Sidney Hayers’s The Trap (1966), then worked with Winner again in The Jokers (1967) and I’ll Never Forget What’s-‘is-name (1967), co- starring Orson Welles, who became a close friend. Oliver! (1968), in which Reed brought a menace considered by some to be overly brutish to the role of Bill Sikes, was directed by his uncle and became an Oscar-laden triumph. (Carol Reed, fearful of accusations of nepotism, cast his nephew only when the producer John Woolf insisted that the actor was the best choice.)

Oliver Reed was now reputed to be Britain’s highest-paid actor and, after a black comedy, The Assassination Bureau (1968), and Michael Winner’s Hannibal Brooks (1968), a popular comedy-drama in which Reed and Michael J. Pollard were prisoners-of-war taking an elephant over the Alps, he made Women in Love (1970), Ken Russell’s fine adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novel. The film won an Oscar for Reed’s co-star Glenda Jackson, who commented, Oliver and I had absolutely nothing to say to each other off- screen. As people we are chalk and cheese. What I admire in Oliver is his consummate professionalism. It doesn’t matter what state he may be in physically, when they say “Action!” he is ready, and that was the aspect of working with him that I liked. I’ve worked with him a lot and he is an infinitely better actor than he gives himself credit for. He is also a brilliant comic actor and he’s never really explored that in himself.

Reed’s off-screen behaviour was by now getting more publicity than his acting, and his heavy drinking began to affect his appearance, which was becoming increasingly bloated, though he had never considered himself handsome (“I’ve got a face like a dustbin,” he commented, “but people are learning that if you kick a dustbin over and rhododendrons drop out, it’s glorious.”) His next film for Russell was a controversial piece, The Devils (1971), in which Reed’s licentious priest provokes sexual hysteria amongst the nuns. In the unpleasant and violent western The Hunting Party (1971), he headed a gang of rapists and killers, and he was effectively insensitive as a bullying sergeant in Michael Apted’s The Triple Echo (1972), in which he again co-starred with Glenda Jackson. It was around this time that he told a New York reporter, “Do you know what I am? I’m successful. Destroy me and you destroy the British film industry. Keep me going and I’m the biggest star you’ve got. I’m Mr England.”

In Richard Lester’s The Four Musketeers (1974), he was a formidable Athos and in 1975 he gave impressive performances again for Ken Russell in both Tommy and Lisztomania, but he was also making too many pot-boilers, in order to support his penchant for drink and women. In 1970 he had divorced his wife of 10 years, Kate Byrne, by whom he had a son, Mark. He then embarked on a 12-year relationship with the ballet dancer Jacquie Daryl, by whom he had a daughter. He would frequently boast of his appeal for women, and on an aeroplane trip upset the captain by dropping his trousers and asking the hostesses to judge a “prettiest boy” contest. In a hotel in Madrid while filming The Four Musketeers, he stripped during dinner and jumped into a large tank of goldfish. When the police were summoned, Reed shouted, “Leave me alone. You can’t touch me – I’m one of the Four Musketeers!”

“I like the effect drink has on me,” he once said, “What’s the point of being sober?” His exploits were becoming legendary – he is alleged to have spiked the snooker star Alex Higgins’s whisky with Chanel perfume, denied head-butting the actor Patrick Mower at a party by explaining, “I leant across the table to give him a kiss”, and during a drinking marathon at a rugby club in Doncaster he threw pounds 50 on the bar saying, “Get all these working- class pigs a drink.” He once arrived at Galway airport lying drunk on a luggage conveyor, and in 1979 turned a soda siphon on himself and other celebrities at a boxing event in London, then jumped into the ring and did a striptease.

On film sets, however, Reed would still be both professional and courteous. “I like Reed very much,” said Michael Winner. “I think he is a very kind and decent person.” Ken Russell commented, “For all his macho image, Oliver is a sensitive actor who approaches his craft intuitively.”

In 1985 the actor again made news when he married the 21-year-old Josephine Burge, who had been his companion since she was a 16-year-old schoolgirl. The marriage was preceded by a two-day drinking session in which Reed claimed to have consumed 136 pints of beer.

Reed was impressive as the islander who advertises for a wife in Nicholas Roeg’s Castaway (1986), but the filming in the Seychelles was marked with incident – Reed was taken to court for allegedly exposing himself to his co-star Amanda Donohoe during the filming, and he was also accused of throwing his stunt double Reg Prince over a balustrade in a drunken bout. Television viewers will not soon forget Reed’s appearance on the chat show After Dark in 1991 when the plainly inebriated actor swore, fell over a sofa, then announced, “Right, I’m off to have a slash.”

Reed was warned several times by doctors that he would not live long if he did not give up drinking, and he was drinking with friends during a break from filming the Steven Spielberg production The Gladiators when he became fatally ill.

Robert Oliver Reed, actor: born London 13 February 1938;
married 1960 Kathleen Byrne (one son; marriage dissolved 1970), (one daughter by Jacquie Daryl), 1985 Josephine Burge;
died Valetta 2 May 1999.

Source: Tom Vallance, The Independent, May 4th, 1999
URL: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990504/ai_n14233785/pg_1

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Pat Heywood

Pat Heywood. TCM Overview.

Pat Heywood is one of my favourite character actresses.   I saw her on stage in the Royal Court Theatre in London in Mary O’Malley’s “Once A Catholic” and was bowled over by her sense of comic timing and her unique voice.   She had made her film debut as the Nurse in Franco Zefferelli “Romeo and Juliet” in 1967.   For the next twentyfive years she was a decided asset to many films and television series.   She was especially good in an Inspector Morse story “Second Time Around”.   Her last known credit was in 1993 in Zefferelli’s “Sparrow”.   Since then she seems to have completely vanished.   I would like to know where she is now and drop her a line to say how much her work was appreciated.   The wikipedia article on Pat Heywood can be accessed here.

TCM Overview:

10 Rillington Place, poster, US poster art, bottom from left: Judy Geeson, Pat Heywood, Richard Attenborough; top from left: Richard Attenborough, John Hurt, Isobel Black, 1971. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Pat Heywood rose to fame as an actress, gracing the silver screen many times over the course of her  career. She was nominated for a BAFTA Award for “Romeo & Juliet” in 1968. Her work around this time also included a part on the TV movie “The Secret Garden” (CBS, 1987-88). She also contributed to a variety of television specials, including “December Flower” (PBS, 1986-87) and “Christabel” (PBS, 1988-89). She also had roles in film during these years, including roles in the biopic “Young Winston” (1972) with Simon Ward and the Emily Lloyd dramatic period piece “Wish You Were Here” (1987). Heywood focused on film in more recent years, appearing in “Il Giovane Toscanini” (1988), the Jesse Birdsall comedy “Getting It Right” (1989) and the dramatic adaptation “Sparrow” (1993) with Angela Bettis. Additionally, she appeared on the television special “Second Time Around” (PBS, 1992-93). Heywood  acted in “First and Last” (1994) with Joss Ackland.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

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Patrick McGoohan

Patrick McGoohan acheived immortal television fame through his lead role in two cult British series of the 1960’s – “Dangerman” and “The Prisoner”.   He was born in New York in 1928 and raised in Co. Leitrim, Ireland and then in Sheffield in the UK.   He commenced his career on British films such as “Nor the Moon by Night” and “Hell Drivers”.   In 1967 he went to Hollywood to make “Ice Station Zebra”.   He made many high profile television appearances in the U.S. in the 70’s and 80’s and in 1995 he starred with Mel Gibson in “Braveheart”.   He died in 2002.

“Guardian” obituary:

The handsome and steady-eyed Patrick McGoohan, who has died aged 80, was the star, co-writer and sometimes director of one of British television’s most original and challenging series of the 1960s, The Prisoner. In it, he played Number Six, a mysterious, resigned former secret agent who is always trying to escape from the Village, an apparently congenial community which is in fact a virtual prison for people who know too much. They are allowed to be comfortable there only if they conform completely and do not try to escape.

McGoohan was at the time, 1967, the highest earning British TV star, paid £2,000 a week through appearing in a highly successful secret agent series called Danger Man, in which he was John Drake, a European security man who – on McGoohan’s own insistence – never carried a gun or seduced a woman. But he was becoming disenchanted with the series, whose American purchasers from Lew Grade’s British television company ITC were pressing for more stock banalities such as car chases, shoot-outs and sex scenes.

He was invited to lunch with one American executive, who explained that they wanted pictures of him on the screen with glamorous girls – or, as McGoohan himself put it, “the corny showbusiness formula, the publicity machine grinding away”. He declined, and the lunch lasted only six minutes.

McGoohan, who had his own production company, Everyman Films, suggested to Grade a different, seven-part series for which he and others had prepared scripts, called The Prisoner. Grade cheerfully admitted that he had not understood a word of what McGoohan proposed, but had so much confidence in him that he agreed to fund it immediately.

Grade’s chief international customer, however, wanted a longer series. There were 17 Prisoner programmes, each of them loaded with mysterious psychological nuances, and set in an ideally artificial Village – in reality Portmeirion, an experimental community with exotic buildings designed by the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, in north Wales.

From the opening titles, the programme was no easy ride. An angry secret agent drives into London in his fashionable Lotus 7 as a storm threatens, bursts into his boss’s office, throws his resignation down on to his desk, and storms out again. At home later, he finds an undertaker at his door. Gas comes through the keyhole, and he collapses as he packs his bags to go away. He wakes up in the Village, and no one will tell him where he is or why he is there, only that he is Number Six. ” I am not a number, I am a free man!” is his answer – and battle was joined in 17 attempted escapes.

In the series McGoohan met several sinister Number Twos but could never find out who Number One was until the last episode, improvised by McGoohan and his large writing team at the last moment, when Number One’s false face was pulled off to reveal a monkey’s underneath. When that too was pulled off, it revealed the face of McGoohan’s Number Six himself.

The implication that human beings can imprison themselves was timely in the swinging 60s, while at the same time the notion of the security services as the real enemy was seeping its way into fiction that had previously existed in more black and white terms. The programme achieved cult status for both itself and McGoohan personally, who had involved himself in all aspects of the productions in a way his colleagues thought obsessive. He became a darling of the campuses, but found that The Prisoner was a difficult act to follow.

In 1974, Everyman Films went bankrupt with debts of £63,000, at least half of it owed to the Inland Revenue. By the 1980s, McGoohan had recovered, The movie Kings and Desperate Men (1981) was praised by British critics and he starred on Broadway in Hugh Whitemore’s Pack of Lies.

The cosmopolitan variety of his professional interests owed something to his background. He was born in New York to parents who were once Irish farmers. His father, though barely literate, had an ear for Shakespeare, so that when Patrick read plays to him, he would remember and recite whole passages months later.

The family returned to Ireland when he was six months old and then, when he was eight, moved to Sheffield. Patrick later won a scholarship to Ratcliffe college in Leicester, where he played Lear in a school production. Leaving school at 16, he went to work in a wire mill, rising from the factory floor to the offices and then leaving to work in a bank.

This made him feel caged, so he set up instead as a chicken farmer, until an attack of bronchial asthma put him in bed for six months. He walked around Sheffield looking for work and eventually tried the Sheffield Repertory Company, for which he became assistant stage manager. When members of the cast were off sick, he was asked to step in, and found that he was best in the lighter Shakespeare plays, gaining praise for his Petruchio.

McGoohan stayed for four years, by which time he had appeared in 200 plays, including a touring production of The Cocktail Party in a small mining town, lit by miners’ lamps when the electricity failed. He met and married the actor Joan Drummond, with whom he had three daughters.

He made his first appearance in the West End in 1955 as the lead in Serious Charge. Orson Welles saw him there and asked him to play Starbuck in his production of Moby Dick Rehearsed. At the same time he stood in for Dirk Bogarde during a screen test, and was offered a five-year contract with Rank. But the studio’s “charm school” approach irked him and the contract petered out after four films.

After this, he turned more towards television and appeared in a production of Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife, about a paranoid Hollywood producer and the protege actor who he thinks has betrayed him. It was seen by Grade, who thought McGoohan ideal for John Drake in the Danger Man scripts. From 1960, McGoohan played in 86 episodes. At around this time, he turned down the chance to play James Bond in the first Bond movie, Dr No, seeing the Bond character as a stock gunman who treated women badly.

In 1968, when The Prisoner series was ending, McGoohan left Mill Hill, north London, to live in Switzerland after the local council refused him permission to fence his house off from prying eyes. In 1973 he moved to Pacific Palisades in California. There he wrote poetry, a novel and television scripts. He appeared in, wrote or directed some of the Columbo films in which his American friend Peter Falk appeared as the deceptively ruffled detective.

This redoubtable enemy of dumbing-down remained a highly individual operator into the 1990s. In 1991 he came to London to make the TV version of Whitemore’s play The Best of Friends, in which he played with considerable plausibility and élan another Irishman not frightened to swim against the tide, George Bernard Shaw. In 1995 he was cast as Edward I in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

In 2000, he provided the voice of Number Six for an episode of The Simpsons, and gained his last film credit in 2002 as the voice of Billy Bones in Treasure Planet. A proposed film version of The Prisoner has yet to make it to the screen, but a remake of the TV show has recently been filmed by ITV, with the US actor James Caviezel as Number Six, and is due to be transmitted later this year.

McGoohan is survived by his wife, three daughters and five grandchildren.

Patrick Joseph McGoohan, actor, writer and director, born 19 March 1928; died 13 January 2009

• This article was amended on Thursday 15 January 2009. Portmeirion is in north, not south, Wales. This has been corrected.

 

Dennis Barker’s obituary in “The Guardian” can be accessed here.

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Bernadette O’Farrell
Bernadette O’Farrell

Bernadette O'Farrell
Bernadette O’Farrell

Bernadette O’Farrell.

IMDB entry{

Bernadette O’Farrell was born in Birr, Co Offaly in Ireland in 1924.   She auditioned for and won a small part in the Frank Lauder film “Captain Boycott” in 1947.   She later married Frank Lauder.   She gained international recognition in the 1950’s for her role as Maid Marian to Richard Greene’s Robin Hood on television’s “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.   The series was a huge success in Britain and the U.S.   She acted occasionally on film and her last movie was “The Bridal Path” in 1959.   She retired to Monaco with her husband and she died there in 1999.   Her obituary in “Variety” can be accessed here.

Although often seen in the St. Trinian’s movies, written by Sidney Gilliat and her husband, Frank Launder, it was her role as Maid Marian in the long-running Robin Hood series that catapulted her to stardom. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955) became one of the first British Television programs to succeed in the United States, having over 30 million viewers. O’Farrell left the series in 1957 despite receiving thousands of letters asking her to stay. She was born in Birr, County Offaly, Ireland, in 1926. Her father was a bank teller, and her mother was an amateur actress. After being educated at a local convent, she was working as a secretary when she was invited to an audition by Sir Carol Reed.

Through Reed, she met Frank Launder, who gave her a small part inCaptain Boycott (1947) opposite Stewart Granger. After several movies, including Launder’s St. Trinian’s series, some stage work and Robin Hood, she starred in her last movie, The Bridal Path (1959) in 1959. She retired from acting to spend time with her family on their farm in Buckinghamshire, England, UK. She and Launder were married in 1950 and had two daughters. They would later move to Monaco and become active in local charities and stage productions. While living in Monaco, Frank suffered a serious stroke in 1989 and, finally, a fatal heart attack in 1997. Bernadette O’Farrell died on September 29, 1999, after battling with cancer.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Mick Williams <host@cyber-line.com>

“Irish Times” obituary:

In the mid-1950s, Bernadette O’Farrell was one of the best-known Irish actresses in the world. As Maid Marion in the television series The Adventures of Robin Hood, she was watched by an estimated 30 million people each week. She gave up the role after two years when shopkeepers started addressing her as Maid Marion.

The daughter of a bank manager, she was born in Birr, Co Offaly, on January 30th, 1924, and educated at a local convent.

She was working as a solicitor’s clerk when the film director Carol Reed, a friend of the family, suggested she audition for producers Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. They had set up a film unit in Ireland to make Captain Boycott, a film based on the tenant farmers’ revolt of 1880.

The result was the part of the wife of a farmer (Liam Gaffney), who joins others to ostracise the ruthless landlord, Boycott. When the landlord, defeated, leaves Ireland, the local priest advises the community to “boycott” anyone else who tries to do them harm, thus bringing the word into the English language.

Launder later commented, “It was a fascinating and memorable film to make, and I met a lot of marvellous people on it, including my wife”.

He married Bernadette O’Farrell in 1950, and in the same year cast her in The Happiest Days Of Your Life, which told of the hilarious results of a group of girls being mistakenly billeted at a boys’ school.

Among other films were Lady in the Fog (1952) in which she co-starred, helping a reporter (Hollywood actor, Cesar Romero) track the killer of her brother; The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953), as a member of the D’Oyly Carte company; and The Square Ring (1953), as the wife of an ageing boxer attempting a comeback.

But it was her casting in the Robin Hood series in 1955 which made her a household name, as she pluckily helped her sweetheart thwart the plans of his arch enemy the Sheriff of Nottingham. The high-quality scripts, many written under pseudonyms by blacklisted American writers, and the show’s theme tune (“Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen . . .”) were other elements in the show’s success. Its popularity in America led to a tour of the country by Bernadette O’Farrell and her co-star Richard Greene in 1956.   Three years later she retired to raise her two daughters on the family farm in Buckinghamshire, and on her husband’s retirement, the couple moved to Monaco. Frank Launder died in 1997.

Bernadette O’Farrell is survived by her two daughters.

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Alan Bates
Alan Bates
Alan Bates

Alan Bates obituary in “The Independent” in 2003.

Alan Bates was a brilliant versatile actor who made many fine films in both Britain and the U.S.   He started his career on film with “The Entertainer” with Sir Laurence Oliver.   He was part of that great group of young British actors including Michael York, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Tom Courtney  and Terence Stamp who sored to stardom in the 1960’s.   He went to the U.S. to make “An Unmarried Woman” and “The Rose”.   He continued to make many fine films and act on the stage until his death in 2003.

His obituary by Alan Strachan from “The Independent”:

The quiet man among his generation of British stage and film stars, Alan Bates had a charisma, with a potent suggestion of banked and often ambivalent inner emotion, which marked him out as a leading actor of rare quality.

He had an undervalued comic gift – his performance in Clive Donner’s filmNothing but the Best is as slyly funny as anything in an Ealing classic – but the brooding power behind such stage portrayals as Redl in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me and the title role in Simon Gray’s Butley; and, on screen, Gabriel Oak in Far From the Madding Crowd, Anthony Quinn’s English friend in Zorba the Greek, or Julie Christie’s lover in The Go-Between, inevitably will be best remembered.

Bates was a Derbyshire boy and returned there often; he helped open a new Playhouse in Derby in 1976 by leading a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. His grammar-school education in Belper began his love-affair with Shakespeare; his theatre-loving mother also often took him to the Derby Little Theatre Club. He trained for the stage at Rada at a time when a new breed of British dramatists were creating the chances for young actors such as Bates, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Kenneth Haigh to bring distinctive voices to the stage alongside the well-bred tones of a West End then still in thrall to the deferential, well-made play.

More or less straight out of Gower Street, Bates was snapped up by George Devine for the new ensemble based at the Royal Court Theatre directed by Devine and his young associate director Tony Richardson. The English Stage Company bridged the generations from the pre-war glory days of companies led by John Gielgud and Michel Saint-Denis to the emergent new wave, its acting talent ranging from Devine, Peggy Ashcroft and Rachel Kempson to Bates, Haigh, Joan Plowright and Mary Ure, with its designers including Gielgud’s Motley (with “Percy” and Sophie Harris) and the younger Jocelyn Herbert and Alan Tagg.

Bates thrived in the “family” atmosphere at Sloane Square. It was there to a large extent, surely, that he absorbed the values of the company ideal so important to his standards as an actor subsequently. Always much loved and deeply respected by colleagues, he had when an established star the rare gift of being the centre of a company without dominating it.

In that unpredictable first 1956 ESC season, Bates had a good run of roles, following Simon in Angus Wilson’s comedy The Mulberry Bush with Hopkins in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (surprisingly tepidly received critically) and then Cliff Lewis in the premiere of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which justified the whole ESC enterprise as a forcing-ground for new talent. Often in production simply a feed to Jimmy Porter, opposite Kenneth Haigh’s Jimmy, Bates as Cliff found a dogged, often baffled and torn devotion at the heart of the role, most powerfully in its suggestion of Cliff’s unvoiced love for the Alison of Mary Ure. After further ESC work, Bates made a highly praised Broadway début with Look Back in Anger (Lyceum, NY, 1958), an experience which provided him with many splendid anecdotes featuring the provocative behaviour of its producer, themonstre sacré David Merrick.

Back in London, Bates startled even those who had marked him out as a gifted younger actor with the edgy emotional tension which he brought to Edmund, the consumptive younger brother of the haunted Tyrone family at the centre of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (Globe, 1958) in the play’s British premiere. Even in a glittering company including Anthony Quayle, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Ian Bannen, this was excitingly risky high-wire acting, refreshingly free from the costive restraint of so much contemporary work.

That sense of the primal also stamped Bates’s Mick in the first production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (Duchess, 1960 and Lyceum, NY, 1961); there was a dangerous glint, something feral at the heart of this wide boy, that was distinctly unsettling. Bates stayed on in New York after The Caretaker. By now an established London and Broadway star, he was headlined in a new play by the popular comedy dramatist Jean Kerr, Poor Richard (Helen Hayes, 1964), but in trying to extend her range Kerr’s tone was uncertain, although Bates’s endearingly self-deprecating performance carried the play to a moderate success.

Broadway offers were abundant, and movies in England and Hollywood were also luring him. Having launched his film career with The Entertainer (1960) for Tony Richardson, he followed it with beautifully gauged performances in Whistle Down The Wind(1961) as the mysterious Messiah-figure and as the trapped anti-hero of Alan Sillitoe’s A Kind of Loving (1962) for John Schlesinger. Bates, however – as would be evident throughout his career – was never particularly keen to follow the easiest or most lucrative path.

Returning to England and to the theatre he took on the challenge of Arnold Wesker’s The Four Seasons (Saville, 1965). A two-hander love-story packed with dense, often heightened language, this somewhat unexpected departure by Wesker baffled most critics and the play was a commercial flop but, opposite Diane Cilento, Bates was in formidable form, coping with the dramatist’s technical demands (he had to make strudel-dough on stage) with as much aplomb as he handled a difficult text.

He then moved off to Canada to take on classic work at Stratford Ontario; in its 1967 season he was an unusually dark Ford, eaten by self-loathing jealousy, in The Merry Wives of Windsor and appeared even darker in the title-role of Richard III, the sardonic joker, flicking off his jests and quips with whiplash zest, collapsing into hideous and terrified despair. This remarkable double was followed by his truthfully understated playing in David Storey’s family play In Celebration (Royal Court, 1969) under Lindsay Anderson.

With his unselfish, touching screen performance in Zorba the Greek(1964), Bates became a genuinely international star. For a brief period he concentrated on movies, but deliberately kept ringing the changes, reluctant always to succumb to the siren-lures of the Hollywood Hills. He combined quirky British choices – Nothing But the Best (1964) in which he and Denholm Elliott gave master-classes in the timing of cool comedy, and the surprise-hit of Georgy Girl(1964) – with off-beat American films such as The Fixer (1968, for which his performance rightly brought him an Oscar nomination) and foreign work including King of Hearts (1967) as well as two of the most successful British pictures of the later 1960s, Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) and Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969). InWomen in Love, he and Oliver Reed were ideally cast as D.H. Lawrence’s contrasted heroes, both actors committing wholeheartedly (aided by generous swigs of vodka) to the famous nude wrestling scene.

The 1970s saw some remarkable performances from Bates as he alternated between stage and screen. His long association with the work of Simon Gray, usually directed by Harold Pinter, began withButley (Criterion, 1971 and NY, 1972) which won him Evening Standard Best Actor and Tony Awards. He was mesmerising as Gray’s troubled don, totally inhabiting the character’s acid wit and mordant irony and never once playing for sympathy; in Butley’s more reflective moments, the performance fused some of the qualities which had distinguished Bates’s Hamlet (Cambridge Theatre, 1971). This was in a somewhat antiseptic production but Bates’s performance was remarkable for its sense of inner solitude; this Hamlet was almost paralysed into emotional immobility by the loss of a clearly adored father, freighting his scene opposite Gertrude (Celia Johnson) with a powerful mixture of resentment and love.

The Gray/Bates/Pinter team had an even bigger success withOtherwise Engaged (Queens, 1975) with Bates at the centre of a Rolls-Royce cast as the music-loving Simon, a man with an almost monastic dedication to the practice of detachment, humanised by Bates with his uncanny ability to suggest subterranean lets and hindrances in his characters. He gave an equally subtle portrayal as the tutor at the heart of Life Class which happily returned him to Sloane Square (Royal Court and Duke of York’s, 1974) by David Storey, another dramatist to whose writing Bates always brought a special affinity. Another Simon Gray piece, a less than thrilling thriller, Stage Struck (Vaudeville, 1979) gave Bates the chance to play a juicily bravura, devious character, which he clearly enjoyed and which he made extremely successful at the box-office.

His next noteworthy stage appearance was not until 1983 when he played the tortured Redl in Osborne’s epic play, A Patriot For Me(Chichester and Haymarket), unrevived since its Royal Court premiere. Ronald Eyre’s production was a lucid reappraisal of a flawed masterpiece with Bates’s performance its vital centre. The sexual confusion of the character was movingly traced but Bates also crucially brought to his performance the sense of a character who felt himself also an outsider socially, fatally nudging him into his career of espionage.

After a wonderfully bold black comedy take on Strindberg’s The Dance of Death (Riverside Studios, 1985), a Pinter double-bill ofVictoria Station and One for the Road (Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, 1985), a selflessly loyal performance in Peter Shaffer’s strenuousYonadab (National Theatre, 1985) and another Gray, Melon(Haymarket, 1987), Bates returned to ensemble-based theatre with a West End season of Chekhov’s Ivanov in tandem with Much Ado About Nothing (Strand, 1989). He and Felicity Kendal had a lovely partnership, full of quicksilver raillery in the Shakespeare, Bates wryly funny as a soldier surprised by late- flowering love, splendidly contrasting with the volatile, shambolic emotional mess that he created of Ivanov.

A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, poster, poster, from left: Alan Bates, Janet Suzman, 1972. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Bates had not acted for the Royal Shakespeare Company since a disappointing Taming Of The Shrew in 1974. He returned in 1999 to take on a role he seemed born to play – Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, opposite Frances de la Tour. The production was cordially loathed by many, with its opening scenes of graphic oral sex and the well-intentioned but in practice faintly risible notion of dead bodies rising up to walk off stage. Undoubtedly the production has its flaws, but its leading players brought to it an exhilarating emotional energy and erotic charge; Bates was immeasurably moving in those perilous later scenes as Antony faces his end. Sadly, illness meant his withdrawal from the same season’s Timon of Athens, another role to which he was ideally suited.

A good number of Bates’s later films after the New Cinema resurgence of the 1960s were, as he owned, poor stuff. After the triumph of The Go-Between for Joseph Losey (1971) there were some genuine turkeys, not least the Bette Midler vehicle The Rose(1979), with a heavily bearded Bates looking somewhat uneasy as the rock diva’s manager, while the truly terrible Michael Winner remake of The Wicked Lady (1984) was even worse.

Bates’s best later films tended to be in low-budget or independent pictures – in the underrated Merchant-Ivory Quartet (1982), he had a delightful, rumpled avuncular charm as a Ford Madox Ford figure and he was also impressive in the film version of Patrick McGraph’sThe Grotesque (2000).

After a period of some disappointing films, a time also marked by personal sadness (the early death of one of his twin sons, closely followed by his wife’s death) and illness, Bates’s later work happily saw him in full flower once more. In one of his final films – Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2002) – his performance of unctuous rectitude was a highlight even in an unusually lustrous cast, while on stage he had a New York success opposite Eileen Atkins in Yasmina Reza’s delicately poised two-hander The Unexpected Man (NY, 2001); he returned to match that success for one last Broadway appearance with Fortune’s Fool (NY, 2002) in which he had previously appeared at Chichester (1996).

Bates’s comic gift perhaps had its best opportunities on the smaller screen; even the most rabidly loyal Mitfordists had to concede that in the most recent television version of Love In a Cold Climate (2001), his Farve, splenetically disappearing behind the useful carapace ofThe Times or boggling in bug-eyed disapproval at the sight of any potential suitor for his daughters, was the real thing.

Other memorable Bates television appearances included the son in John Mortimer’s autobiographical A Voyage Round My Father(1983), quizzically tender opposite Laurence Olivier’s glorious English eccentric, which appeared in the same year as one of his supreme performances, in Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad. Based on the meeting in Moscow between the actress Coral Browne (who played herself) and the defected traitor Guy Burgess in 1959, John Schlesinger’s film revolved round Bates’s glorious performance.

Looking like a debauched Botticelli angel and seemingly gleefully unrepentant, still full of the camp, mandarin Cambridge style of the 1930s, cannily and gradually Bates revealed the hollow man below, lost and loveless in his chosen promised land. The film ends with Browne, as requested, arranging for a new suit to be made by Burgess’s old Savile Row tailors; the final shots of a seemingly revived and squeaky-clean Burgess encased in his new pinstripes, with bowler and tightly-furled brolley, beaming as he strides jauntily through the Moscow crowds, to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “To Be an Englishman”, are unforgettable.

Alan Strachan’s obituary from the “Independent” can also be accessed online here.

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Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn

Vera Lynn

The magnificent Dame Vera Lynn became in 2009 the oldest living artist to have a Number 1 album chart at the age of 92. 

  The Forces Sweetheart of World War Two published her autobiogaphy in 2010 and has given several television performances which show her genuineness and gentleness. 

  She made three films in the 1940’s, the most popular been “We’ll Meet Again” in 1942 with the beautiful Patricia Roc. 

  A boxed set of these three movies has just been rele

ased on DVD in 2010

Interview with Dame Vera Lynn in “Saga” magazine can be accessed here.

Dame Vera Lynn obituary

Singer known as the ‘Forces Sweetheart’ whose recordings of We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover shaped the national mood in wartime Britain

Vera Lynn in uniform in 1941. Her songs embodied the wartime spirit in Britain.
Vera Lynn in uniform in 1941. Her songs embodied the wartime spirit in Britain. Photograph: Popperfoto

Dave LaingThu 18 Jun 2020

At the start of the second world war, Vera Lynn, who has died aged 103, was an up-and-coming dance band singer. By 1945, this working-class young woman had become a symbol of the British wartime spirit, with a status comparable to that of the patrician prime minister, Winston Churchill. After the war, her friend Harry Secombe liked to joke that “Churchill didn’t beat the Nazis. Vera sang them to death.”

Lynn’s iconic status as the “Forces’ Sweetheart” was due to the success of her radio series, Sincerely Yours, which linked the soldiers at the front with their loved ones at home. In 1944, she visited the troops in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, which kindled her lifelong commitment to the welfare of veterans, especially those of the Burma campaign. Above all, her celebrity was due to her hit songs. Such numbers as We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover caught and moulded a national mood, despite the harsh criticism her crooning style provoked from some politicians and BBC managers.

After VE Day, Lynn resumed her career as a variety artist and recording star, but her association with wartime Britain remained central to her identity and reputation throughout her long life. Until very recently, Lynn was a prominent presence at commemorations of the war. Her place at the heart of national life was officially recognised when she was made OBE in 1969, a dame in 1975 and a Companion of Honour in 2016; her 100th birthday, in March 2017, was marked by the release of a new album and a concert in her honour at the London Palladium. Equally, she became part of popular culture as cockney rhyming slang made her synonymous with gin, chin and skin (as in cigarette papers), she was hymned by pop singers of later generations including Pink Floyd and Ian Dury, and she was the subject of numerous comic impersonations, something she tried unsuccessfully to control through court action in the 1950s.

She was an unlikely candidate for the role of national heroine. Born in the penultimate year of the first world war, she was the second child of a working-class family who lived in a small apartment in East Ham, east London. Her father, Bertram Welch, had various jobs, including working as a plumber and docker. Her mother, Annie, was a dressmaker.

Vera’s vocal talent was evident from a very early age. After singing at family parties, she made her public debut at a local working men’s club aged seven, billed as a “descriptive child vocalist”. Adopting her grandmother’s maiden name, Vera Lynn soon joined a juvenile concert party, the Kracker Kabaret Kids.

In 1932, still only 15, she was signed up by Howard Baker, a bandleader and agent, who supplied dance bands for functions throughout the East End of London. A brief period with Billy Cotton’s band followed, culminating in a week’s engagement in Manchester, from which Cotton sent Vera home. He later described this as “the worst day’s work I ever did”. Cotton’s loss was the pianist Charlie Kunz’s gain. Vera sang with his band on BBC broadcasts.

Unusually for the time, Kunz gave Lynn free rein to choose the songs. She visited music publishers in Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley. There Vera met Walter Ridley, of the Peter Maurice company, who not only found songs for her but undertook to transpose them to a suitable key for Lynn’s unusually deep voice, which was variously described in the press as a “rich contralto” and “a freak mezzo-soprano with an irresistible sob”.

From 1937 to 1940, Lynn worked with another top bandleader, Bert Ambrose, who was impressed by her enunciation of lyrics. She toured variety theatres with the Ambrose Octet and took part in broadcasts for the BBC and for Radio Luxembourg, in a show sponsored by Lifebuoy soap. There was also a debut television broadcast from Alexandra Palace in 1938. The following year, she recorded We’ll Meet Again for the first time, shortly before a newspaper columnist claimed she was selling more records than either Bing Crosby or the Mills Brothers.

Dame Vera Lynn with her daughter, Virginia, in 1969, after being made OBE.
Dame Vera Lynn with her daughter, Virginia, in 1969, after being made OBE. Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

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Her growing success was reflected in the growth of her fan mail and in her increasing salary. In 1938, she was able to move her family to a new house in Barking and to buy a fur coat and her first car, an Austin 10.

In 1939, a new saxophonist joined the Ambrose orchestra. Harry Lewis soon showed his admiration for Vera and in 1941 they were married. Very soon afterwards, the band felt the full impact of the war as Lewis and others volunteered for military service. As members of the RAF they set up the Squadronaires, a dance and jazz group that continued after the cessation of hostilities. Lewis was to give up his career in the late 1940s to become Lynn’s personal manager. He became well known for answering the phone with “What do you want her for?”

By 1941 Lynn was a star in her own right and she left Ambrose to begin a solo career. She soon found work on the variety theatre circuit, beginning at Coventry Hippodrome, often topping the bill working with only a piano accompanist.

At this time, BBC producers were seeking new ideas for the Forces Programme, which had been established to broadcast to the British expeditionary force. Howard Thomas, later a pioneer of commercial television, proposed a format that would be “a letter to the men of the forces in words and music”. Lynn had previously been voted “No 1 forces sweetheart” by Forces Programme listeners and was an ideal choice to read and sing such a letter. To quote the music historian Paul du Noyer, “she was not a glamorous sex-bomb pandering to the lonesome soldiers’ lower instincts. Instead she aroused a wistful yearning for the idealised fiancee.”

It was an immediate success. Up to 2,000 messages were received each week from domestic listeners from which Lynn read out a small sample. She also sent out signed photographs and brief letters to servicemen at the front. This occasionally led to misunderstandings, as when she was accosted by a wife who had found a letter to her absent husband and accused Lynn of stealing him.

Above all, Sincerely Yours was about Lynn’s voice and her songs. Three songs came to embody the wartime spirit and became indelibly associated with her. Yours (recorded in 1941) was a straightforward song of love and fidelity; We’ll Meet Again (1939) expressed a mood of fervent optimism and was described by Lynn as a “greetings card song: a very basic human message of the sort people want to say to each other but find embarrassing actually to put into words”; and The White Cliffs of Dover (1942) was intensely patriotic – despite having been composed by Americans.

While Sincerely Yours had exceptional audience numbers, behind the scenes at the BBC controversy raged. A committee minute noted that the assembled members deplored Sincerely Yours but “noted its popularity”. The opposition to the show was part of a wider dislike of crooners, whose vocal style was held to be over-sentimental and tinged with Americanisms. Male crooners were especially denigrated but Lynn was in the eye of the storm because her show attracted such a large listenership. It was attacked in parliament as liable to undermine the morale of British fighting men. One MP went further in criticising Lynn’s speaking voice as “refaned cockney”. She was stung into responding that “millions of cockneys are fighting in this war”.

So great was her public profile that she starred in three films between 1942 and 1944. They traded on Lynn’s persona, to the extent that We’ll Meet Again and Rhythm Serenade borrowed titles of her songs. All had wartime themes as a backdrop to lightweight romantic stories, which did not fulfil the promise of the title of the third, One Exciting Night. While they served their morale-boosting purpose, Lynn did not pursue a career in cinema after the war.

The most affecting phase of her wartime career came in 1944 when she volunteered to travel abroad for Ensa, the organisation set up to provide entertainment for the forces. The five-month trip took in concerts and hospital visits in the Middle East, India and finally Burma. The weeks she spent with troops in this relatively forgotten theatre of war remained with her for the rest of her life and she became the most ardent advocate for the remembrance and care of veterans of the 14th Army who fought in Burma.

Dame Vera Lynn applauded by Cliff Richard during her final public performance, at a VE Day 50th anniversary concert in Hyde Park, London.
Dame Vera Lynn applauded by Cliff Richard during her final public performance, at a VE Day 50th anniversary concert in Hyde Park, London. Photograph: Kieran Doherty/Reuters

In the changing conditions of peacetime, Lynn faced competition from new and sometimes younger rivals, such as Anne Shelton, Dorothy Squires, Eve Boswell and Petula Clark, all of whom made rival recordings of new songs in the 50s. She remained in demand for variety theatre tours and starred in the long-running London Laughs with the comedians Jimmy Edwards and Tony Hancock in 1952-54. But she was not offered work by BBC radio for several years because in 1949 the head of variety, Michael Standing, told her that “sob stuff” was outmoded. A few years later he was quoted as “still looking for the new Vera Lynn”.

In the meantime, Lynn made broadcasts for Radio Luxembourg. Several of these shows were recorded with an audience of RAF servicemen, who occasionally joined in the chorus of a song. That combination was repeated on bestselling Decca recordings, billed as “Vera Lynn with Soldiers and Airmen of HM Forces”. Among these were Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart, The Homing Waltz and The Windsor Waltz. The first of these inspired the title of the 80s sitcom Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. The disc was listed in the first published British hit parade in the New Musical Express in 1952 and topped the American charts, selling over a million copies there. Her biggest hit in Britain was My Son, My Son, co-written by the trumpeter Eddie Calvert, which reached No 1 in 1954.

With the arrival of commercial broadcasting in 1955, Lynn was given her first television series and in the following year the BBC invited her back with a two-year exclusive contract to include both television and radio appearances.

Unlike some of her contemporaries’ careers, Lynn’s continued to prosper despite the arrival of rock’n’roll and, later, the Beatles. During the 60s and 70s, she made frequent concert performances, recordings and television appearances. For many of these, including two nostalgic LPs of “Hits of the Blitz”, she reprised her wartime and 50s favourites, but she was briefly persuaded to record contemporary songs such as Lennon and McCartney’s Fool on the Hill and Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix, and to make an album in Nashville. Several CD reissues of her recordings have been made, including the No 1 album We’ll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn (2009) and Unforgettable (2010), which included three previously unreleased tracks from the 40s.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/T5C4meGkNyc?wmode=opaque&feature=oembedVera Lynn sings We’ll Meet Again in the musical film of the same name (1943)

A prominent feature of Lynn’s career was her commitment to charities, including several that support ex-service personnel and others concerned with polio, breast cancer, blindness and cerebral palsy. A trust for children with cerebral palsy was set up in her name and continues to support a school near Lynn’s home in West Sussex.

In 1995, Lynn made her final official public performance at a VE Day anniversary event at Hyde Park. Even afterwards, she attended second world war commemorations, sometimes giving a speech, as at the 2005 VE Day event at which Katherine Jenkins, Lynn’s preferred successor as the forces’ sweetheart, performed We’ll Meet Again. Jenkins later recorded the song to add to Lynn’s original. Their virtual duet was included on the 2014 CD release, Vera Lynn – National Treasure. 

Three days before her 100th birthday, she released Vera Lynn 100, featuring new orchestrations of her best-known songs alongside her original vocals. She was joined on the album by the British singers Aled Jones, Alexander Armstrong and Alfie Boe. Her birthday was also marked with a projection of her face on to the white cliffs of Dover. The album went to No 3, making her the first centenarian to enter the UK charts, and charted again in May this year following the 75th anniversary celebrations of VE Day, which were also marked by a duet between Jenkins and a hologram of Lynn at the Royal Albert Hall, and the re-release of We’ll Meet Again.

The Queen invoked the spirit of the song as she addressed a nation in coronavirus lockdown in April, assuring Britons “We will meet again”, and echoing Lynn’s own message to fans in March: “In these uncertain times, I am taken back to my time during World War II, when we all pulled together and looked after each other. It is this spirit that we all need to find again to weather the storm of the coronavirus.”

Harry died in 1998. She is survived by her daughter, Virginia.

 Vera Lynn (Vera Margaret Welch), singer, born 20 March 1917; died 18 June 2020

 Dave Laing died in 2019

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ABOUT ME

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.

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