Margaret Leighton died yesterday at the age of 53. She was an actress as intelligent as she was beautiful. From her youth she had rare poise and period sense qualities evident in her final part, a Compton Burnett dowager in last year’s stage version of “A Family and a Fortune.”
Born in Worcestershire on February 26, 1922, and educated at Birmingham, she was one of Sir Barry Jackson’s Repertory Theatre discoveries. In 1938, as a tall, glowingly fair girl of 16, she began by scrubbing the stage and doing the work of a junior ASM. Early in the war she toured with Basil Langton’s company; but it was at the Repertory, especially between 1942 and 1944, that in such parts as Katharina, Rosalind, Barrie’s Lady Babbie, and the step-daughter in Six Characters”, she made the great regional reputation, justified during three years in London with the Old Vic. During the first three years, 1944-47, of the company’s famous stay at the New Theatre, she acted, among much else, Raina in “Arms and the Man”, Yelena in “Uncle Vanya”, Roxane in “Cyrano de Bergerac”, and a Regan, to Olivier’s Lear.
Always she was far more than decorative. She had a cutting truth, and her repetory training (though she never entirely lost her nervousness) prepared her for anything. From the Vic company she went to to a trio of parts in the Criterion revival of Bridie’s “A Sleeping Clergyman” (1947), welcoming the chance to act with Robert Donat: later she was with him in the film version of “The Winslow Boy”, her introduction to the work of Terence Rattigan.
She was Celia in the London production of “The Cocktail Party” (1950) and 12 months later appeared as Masha in a revival of “Three Sisters” for Festival of Britain year. In 1952, as Stratford upon Avon’s leading lady again, it was said, as the toast of the Midlands, she was Lady Macbeth, a Rosalind of jetting raillery and an Ariel described by a critic as a silver arrow.
Afterwards, though she remained among the first half dozen of English actresses, she never found the sustained full-scale triumph (long runs aside) for which one had hoped. Certainly there were long runs. After a few months as Orinthia to Noel Coward’s Magnus in the Haymarket revival of “The Apple Cart” (1953) and another Eliot heroine, Lucasta in “The Confidential Clerk”, she had nearly four years, in London and on Broadway, as two amply contrasted characters in the double bill of Terence Rattigan’s “Separate Tables”. Her Rose, a former Midland girl, in his “Variations on a Theme” (Globe, London, 1958) had to be less satisfying. She acted a gleaming Beatrice to Sir John Gielgud’s Benedick in New York (September, 1959). Then, after two more London parts – the second of them Ellida in “The Lady From the Sea” (1961) – she spent five years in New York where she won the Antoinette Perry Award for the best actress of 1961-62, as Hannah in Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana”. She was also in Enid Bagnold’s “The Chinese Prime Minister” when the dramatist spoke of her as “an extraordinary and shining woman, made of moonshine and talent and deep self-distrust, astonished at success.”
Her return to London (1967) was in an undemanding play “Cactus Flower”. Within two years at the Chichester Festival, she reached the part many thought she should play, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (to the Antony of Sir John Clements), royal in her aspect but never theatrically voluptuous. But the Festival period was brief. And of her three later parts, two were at Chichester, Mrs Malaprop in “The Rivals” and Elena in “Reunion in Vienna” (also for a short time in London). Finally there was the dowager she acted with such sharp assurance in “A Family and a Fortune” (Apollo, 1975). These were all performances, varying in scope, and of much style and vigour in execution, but without the transcendent quality we knew Margaret Leighton could achieve. We hoped she might again. It is too late now;but she is remembered, as “Maggie”, in and out of the theatre, with deep affection.
Margaret Leighton acted in several films besides “The Winslow Boy”. She received a Best Supporting Actress Award for her performance in “The Go-Between” in 1971, and her other credits included “The Loved One” (1965), “Lady Caroline Lamb” (1972), and “Bequest to the Nation” (1973). She was married three times – to Max Reinhardt, to Laurence Harvey, and lastly to Michael Wilding. The above “Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Lewis Collins is probably best known for his tough-guy role as ‘Bodie’ in the TV series “The Professionals”. The series ran from 1977 until 1983 and was one of the most popular shows in the United Kingdom. With the release of DVD boxed set of all the series, the show and its actors are having renewed popularity. Collins also played an SAS officer in the film “Who Dares Win”. He livesdwith his family in California. He died in 2013.
“Guardian” obituary:
In a 1980 episode of the hit British cop show The Professionals, an ill-advised villain tries to threaten the ex-mercenary William Bodie with his snarling doberman pinscher. After a brief altercation, Bodie, all sang-froid and minimally curled lip, inquires: “Would your little dog like to chew this electric fire? Or maybe you’ll just leave.”
This kind of butch badinage, along with rugged good looks, helped make Lewis Collins, who played Bodie in all 57 of the show’s episodes from 1977 and 1983, and who has died aged 67 after suffering from cancer, into a household name. During that time he formed one half of Britain’s answer to Starsky and Hutch, a crime-fighting duo called Bodie and Doyle who worked for a shadowy criminal intelligence agency, CI5, headed by Gordon Jackson’s strait-laced George Cowley. At its height, The Professionals was watched by 12 million viewers a week, and Collins became a heart-throb. He was even considered to replace Roger Moore as James Bond.
Of all the many unreconstructed hardmen of 70s and 80s British TV, Collins was the most unremittingly macho in real life. He was a black belt in jujitsu and a crack shot, and had taken the entrance tests to join the SAS. He and Martin Shaw, who played Ray Doyle, worked out in the gym for their roles; and Collins often did his own stunts.
The actor Anthony Andrews had originally been cast as Bodie, but left after only four days on set. Collins quickly made an impression, not just for his hardman aura, but for comedy, an acting skill he had developed in the mid-70s Granada sitcom The Cuckoo Waltz. “You CI5 boys think you’re the cat’s whiskers, don’t you?” asks a CID sergeant in one episode of The Professionals. “Well,” retorts Bodie, “at least we’re at the right end of the cat.”
His character was never troubled by self-doubt. When asked by a besotted, helpless woman (there were plenty of those in The Professionals) which is Bodie and which Doyle, Bodie replies insouciantly: “Bodie’s the incredibly handsome one.” “That still doesn’t tell me which is which,” she says
Lewis Collins
Perhaps inevitably, Bodie and Doyle were satirised. In a Nissan car ad a few years later, one Professionals-like rogue cop remarks: “This car’s well-sprung,” prompting the reply: “Yeah, just like your perm.” In 1984, Keith Allen and Peter Richardson played Bonehead and Foyle in The Bullshitters, in which two disgraced agents return to crime-fighting to rescue their ex-boss’s kidnapped daughter. But John Simm, who starred in the hit cop show Life on Mars (2006-07), acknowledged Collins’s influence on his portrayal of Sam Tyler, saying: “If there’s anything in my head about the way Sam looks and acts, for me it’s Bodie as played by Lewis Collins.”
Before The Professionals finished its run, Collins starred in the British film Who Dares Wins (1982). He played an SAS officer, Captain Peter Skellen, who goes undercover to foil a group of anti-nuclear terrorists. It was widely derided for its hawkish politics and for its implausibility, with the critic Roger Ebert remarking: “There are so many errors of judgment, strategy, behaviour and simple plausibility in this movie that we just give up and wait for it to end.”
Nonetheless, after the film’s release, Collins was invited to meet the James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli, who was looking for a new 007. “I was in his office for about five minutes, but it was really over for me in seconds,” Collins said later. “He’s expecting another Connery to walk through the door but there are few of them around. He found me too aggressive.”
Collins was born in Bidston, Birkenhead, Merseyside. He struggled at school, but developed an interest in martial arts and shooting. He also learned to play the drums that his father, Bill, a jazz dance band leader, bought him, and by 13 was playing in the Renegades, who were occasionally on the same bill as the Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It was even suggested that Collins should audition to replace Pete Best as the Beatles’ drummer.
Instead, he became a hairdresser. Later, he learned to play the guitar and was hired as bassist for the Mojos, featuring on their singles Goodbye Dolly Gray and Until My Baby Comes Home, but he grew exasperated with the music scene and decided to become an actor. “It was like saying you wanted to be an astronaut,” he recalled. “Everyone laughed in the pop business but I really felt I could do it.”
In 1968, Collins auditioned successfully for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduation, he worked at Glasgow Citizens theatre and theRoyal Court, London, before, in 1974, landing his TV debut in the police series Z Cars. But it was in The Cuckoo Waltz, in which he was the lodger to impoverished newlyweds played by Diane Keen and David Roper, that he made his name. As Gavin Rumsey, he played the kind of self-regarding Lothario who was not a million miles away from Bodie.
After The Professionals concluded, Collins went on to play several relatively minor TV roles – including a sheriff of Nottingham in Robin of Sherwood (1986), and Colonel Mustard in six episodes of a British TV game-show adaptation of Cluedo (1991-92). But he was never able to match his success in The Professionals and in later years lived quietly with his family in Los Angeles.
He is survived by his wife, Michelle, whom he married in 1992, and three sons, Oliver, Elliot and Cameron.
• Lewis Collins, actor, born 26 May 1946; died 27 November 2013
• This article was amended on 29 November 2013. The original stated that Lewis Collins played the sheriff of Nottingham in Robin of Sherwood. The character he played, Philip Mark, was briefly appointed sheriff of Nottingham in place of Robert de Rainault, the longstanding sheriff played by Nickolas Grace.
To view his obituary in The Guardian”, please click here.
Jean Shrimpton was the top model in the world in the mid 1960’s. She was an icon that represented Swinging London and Caranaby Street. She only made one film which was directed by Peter Watkins and also starred the pop singer Paul Jones. She had retired from modeling in the 70’s and now runs a hotel in Penzance in Cornwall with her family. To view her hotel, “The Abbey”, please click here.
“Guardian” interview from 2011:
Jean Shrimpton is nonplussed. She has just discovered that Karen Gillan, of Doctor Who fame, is to play her in a forthcoming BBC4 drama about her love affair with photographer David Bailey. Filming of We’ll Take Manhattan, which reprises a heady Vogue photoshoot in 1962, is due to start next month, but the world’s first supermodel could hardly be less interested. “I don’t live my life through the prism of the past,” she says. “I know vaguely about the BBC’s drama, but I don’t look back on my life.” While Gillan chattered excitedly about her delight at “playing somebody who had such a lasting impact on the fashion world”, Shrimpton said she was not in the least bit “bothered” who played her. “It’s of no interest,” she added.
Shrimpton’s lack of enthusiasm about the film is no surprise. She has been reticent to the point of reclusive ever since she quit fashion, once and for all, in her early 30s. A clue to the reasons for her withdrawal from the world that made her famous comes early in our conversation in the drawing room of the Abbey Hotel in Penzance, which she has owned and run for over 30 years “Fashion is full of dark, troubled people,” she says. “It’s a high-pressured environment that takes its toll and burns people out. Only the shrewd survive – Andy Warhol, for example, and David Bailey.” We are talking about British fashion designer John Galliano, who was sacked by Dior last month after allegedly making antisemitic comments. Shrimpton, dressed in a simple, unostentatious black dress – more bohemian than haute couture – is quick to lament the fashion world’s excesses. “No one can condone what he said – it’s reprehensible. But it’s hypocritical to pretend that fashion is normal, that people in it are role models. And it’s stupid to deny that people behave badly.”
We have heard little of “The Shrimp” since she vanished from swinging London and took off to the West Country. She recently popped up in Channel 4’s Country House Rescue, and in 1990 a ghostwritten autobiography appeared, but Shrimpton makes no bones about why she played ball. “I needed some money to renovate the roof of the hotel,” she says, her blue eyes flashing, arms firmly folded. She adds, curtly: “I didn’t want the book to appear. I’ve hated publicity all my life. I didn’t even like it when I was a model.” So quixotic a statement must be mischievous; after all, Shrimpton travelled the world for a decade, enjoyed a life of luxury and appeared so often on the covers of the likes of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Time and Glamour that she, more than any other model of the 60s, can lay claim to having been the world’s first supermodel. And now, aged 68 and despite, as she puts it, having done “precisely nothing” to preserve her looks, her face is still remarkable – high cheekbones, retroussé nose, arched eyebrows above large, dramatic eyes, and a body as willowy as it was in her heyday. But no, Shrimpton is adamant. “I never liked being photographed. I just happened to be good at it.”
But the High Wycombe-born, 5ft 10in Shrimpton was not merely good at modelling – she was a revelation. Steve McQueen, with whom she was photographed by the legendary American photographer Richard Avedon for American Vogue, quickly spotted her preternatural poise in front of the camera. “You just turn it on and off,” he said, after a photoshoot. Shrimpton shrugged. “I told him it was just my job, and it was. The ability to turn on and off again until the photographer is happy is what all the best models have. It’s an automatic reflex.”
David Bailey was the first photographer to capitalise on this quality, taking an ingenue from Buckinghamshire to stardom almost as quickly as the click of a camera. The pair became emblems of London in the early 60s, but little in Shrimpton’s early life suggested that she was destined for international acclaim. “My upbringing was very rural,” she says. “I was brought up on a farm, surrounded by animals. To this day I can remember Danny, a black Labrador we owned. He was trained by my father to collect eggs and bring them to the kitchen.” She recalls a happy childhood, one in which she lived her life for animals – horses were a passion – and did just enough to get through school, without really feeling that she fitted it. “I was a reserved girl. I was never part of a gang, and yet I wanted to please, too.”
Without any real sense of purpose, Shrimpton enrolled at Langham Secretarial College in London when she was 17. “I managed to get 140 words a minute for shorthand and 70 for typing, just about scraping through,” she says, but already her looks – waifish and coltish, she calls them – had been noticed by the film director Cy Endfield. “I was dawdling at a zebra crossing near Langham Place when an American voice asked if he could talk to me. It was Endfield, and he thought I might be suitable for Mysterious Island, a film he was shooting based on a Jules Verne novel. He told me to go along and see the producer.” Shrimpton, mindful of Lana Turner’s discovery in a drugstore, took up the offer, but Mysterious Island’s producer wasn’t keen. “I left feeling crushed,” she recalls, but took up Endfield’s alternative suggestion – that she enrol on the Lucie Clayton modelling course. Before long, Shrimpton was on Clayton’s books and, while still a teenager, worked as a catalogue model. Magazine work soon came her way, and it was on a shoot for Vogue that she met one of the most influential men in her life, David Bailey. “‘Bailey’ was how he introduced himself,” says Shrimpton. “And that was all I ever called him.” Aged 18, Shrimpton rapidly found herself entwined with the East End boy on the up, who was five years her elder. “We were instantly attracted to each other,” she says. Shrimpton broke off a relationship and Bailey ended his marriage so they could be together. “He was a larger-than-life character, and still is. There’s a force about him. He doesn’t give a damn about anything. But he’s shrewd, too. He made a lot of money out of me.
“I’m not bitter,” adds Shrimpton. “But I’m irked. That’s all. Bailey was very important to me. I’m sure today’s models are a lot more switched-on than we were. Image rights didn’t exist back then. What happened – the creation of the fashion industry – just happened.” Shrimpton’s romance with Bailey did not last long. It was the heady, early days of the swinging 60s and the couple worked tirelessly together, but Shrimpton left Bailey to begin a relationship with Terence Stamp. “Our paths first crossed when Bailey photographed us together for Vogue, and then we met again at a wedding. I was aware of him because he was so good-looking. But it was Bailey who accidentally brought us together. Stamp seemed ill at ease, self-conscious and standoffish, but Bailey talked to him, as he always does with people, and ended up inviting him to come with us to see my parents in Buckinghamshire later that day.”
But if Stamp’s looks captivated Shrimpton, his personality was less straightforward. The beautiful duo were soon an item – to Bailey’s dismay – but their three years together left Shrimpton puzzled. Certainly, there is no love lost now: “Terry has said that I was the love of his life, but he had a very strange way of showing it. We lived together in a flat in Mayfair, but he never gave me a set of keys; one day I walked into his room to talk to him and he simply turned his back on me, swivelling his chair to stare silently out of the window. That sort of thing was typical. He was very peculiar.” Why, then, did she stay with him? “His otherness was a challenge,” is Shrimpton’s reply, but she is deadpan about being one half of London’s most gorgeous couple: “We were two pretty people wandering around thinking we were important. Night after night we’d go out for dinner, to the best restaurants, but just so that we could be seen. It was boring. I felt like a bit part in a movie about Terence Stamp.”
Work, though, was good. By her mid-twenties Shrimpton was known the world over, and she’d also made a major, if unwitting, contribution to fashion when she was hired to present prizes for the Melbourne Cup in Australia. Shrimpton’s dressmaker, Colin Rolfe, was given insufficient fabric, but pressed ahead regardless, making four outfits which were all cut just above the knee. The miniskirt was born – to the shock of conservative Australia at the time.
But for all the fame, the exotic travel and approaches from famous stars such as Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson – “they’re the kind who can’t help themselves, it’s in their nature, though Jack was more subtle than Warren” – Shrimpton was not happy. She loathed the name “The Shrimp” and felt disenchanted with the fashion world. With hindsight, she says her true self only began to emerge in her next relationship, with photographer Jordan Kalfus, 12 years her senior, in New York. “I discovered museums, art and literature. It was an awakening. There was so much happening in American literature at the time. Mailer, Bellow, Burroughs, Ginsberg – they were all the rage.”
She began to read voraciously, and bought fine art. Back in Britain a turbulent relationship with the anarchic poet Heathcote Williams was followed by another with writer Malcolm Richey, with whom she moved initially to Cornwall. By now, in her early thirties, Shrimpton was only too pleased to forsake modelling completely. She opened an antiques shop in Marazion and took a series of intriguing black-and-white photographs of local Cornish characters. She has never exhibited the images, and has no intention of doing so, but one was of Susan Clayton, then a waitress at the Abbey Hotel. After Shrimpton met her husband, Michael Cox, and became pregnant with their son, Thaddeus, she was told by Clayton that the Abbey might be up for sale.
“I jumped at it,” she says. “If we’d had a survey, we wouldn’t have bought it, and running it has been a labour of love, but it’s been my life for over 30 years.” She and Michael had their reception at the Abbey, a milllion miles from the fashion-world weddings of St James’s. “We had champagne with fish’n’chips, but the only guests were our two registry office witnesses.”
Shrimpton loves the raw, wild beauty of the far west of Cornwall, but does she have any regrets about turning her back on the life she once led? “No,” she says, “but I am a melancholy soul. I’m not sure contentment is obtainable and I find the banality of modern life terrifying. I sometimes feel I’m damaged goods. But Michael, Thaddeus and the Abbey transformed my life.”
Around us, in the Abbey’s drawing room, are the books she and Michael have collected. There is The Rings of Saturn, by WG Sebald; Russian Criminal Tattoo, an outre encyclopaedia; René Gimpel’s Diary of An Art Dealer and a collection of British short stories featuring The Burning Baby, by Dylan Thomas, one of Shrimpton’s favourite works. It’s an unusual collection, not what you’d expect to find in the homes of the likes of Kate Moss. But Shrimpton is a fan. “I like her. She’s a free spirit. Somewhere in herself she’s honest. She’s a naughty girl – but you’ve got to have a few naughty girls.”
Michael York garnered very favourable reviews for his first three major films in the 1960’s. They were Joseph Losey’s “Accident” and Franco Zefferelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Romeo and Juliet”. After the success of the film “Cabreet” with Liza Minnelli, he went to Hollywood. Although he makes films all over the world, he is now based in the USA. He recently received recognition with younger audiences with his participation in the Austin Powers film where he plays Basil Exposition.
A classically trained British actor who honed his craft on the stage, Michael York made a smooth transition to the screen with several noted Shakespearean performances in films made by Italian director Franco Zeffirelli. Though not a leading performer, York delivered strong turns as Lucentino in “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967) and Tybalt in “Romeo and Juliet” (1968), before he played more seductively charming men in “Something for Everyone” (1970) and “Cabaret” (1972). While starring as D’Artagnan in “The Three Musketeers” (1973) and Logan in the sci-fi cult classic “Logan’s Run” (1976), he also turned to television to play Pip in “Great Expectations” (NBC, 1974) and John the Baptist in the epic miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977).
In the following decade, York joined the cast of “Knot’s Landing” (CBS, 1979-1993), while stepping back into guest starring spots on shows like “Babylon 5” (TNT, 1993-98) and “Sliders” (Fox, 1995-99). Though he made fewer appearances on the big screen later in his career, York was quite memorable as the affable Basil Exposition in the “Austin Power” series, starring Mike Myers. As he continued forward, York diversified his talents to include voice work for both animated projects and a host of audiobooks, which served to underscore the wide breadth of the actor’s talents.
Born on March 27, 1942 in Fulmer, Buckinghamshire, England, York was raised in the London suburb of Burgess Hill by his father, Joseph Johnson, an ex-army officer-turned-executive for Marks and Spencer department stores, and his mother, Florence, a musician. While receiving his education at Bromley Grammar School for Boys, he began his acting career as a teenager in a production of “The Yellow Jacket” (1956). Three years later, York made his West End debut with a one-line role in a staging of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” He continued to study acting at Oxford University, where he was a member of the Dramatic Society, and spent his summers working with Michael Croft’s Youth Theatre while touring Italy in a production of “Julius Caesar.”
From there, he joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre in Scotland, where he played Sergius in “Arms and the Man” (1964) and first adopted the name Michael York. That same year, he graduated from Oxford and was invited to join England’s National Theatre, which led him to be immediately cast by Italian director Franco Zeffirelli in his production of “Much Ado About Nothing” (1965).
With his stage career taking off, York took the logical next stepping of making his screen debut as Young Jolyon in the acclaimed and fondly remembered drama series “The Forsyte Saga” (BBC, 1966). A year later, Michael York made his feature debut as Lucentino in Zeffirelli’s film, “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967), starring the tumultuous Elizabeth Taylor and her on-again/off-again husband Richard Burton. Now a bona fide movie actor, York scored again as Tybalt in Zeffirelli’s next Shakespearean screen adaptation “Romeo and Juliet” (1968).
Later that same year, York married his sweetheart, Patricia, an American photographer, whom he met while filming “Smashing Time” (1969) when she was assigned to photograph the star. The couple remained husband and wife well into the next century. Meanwhile, York went on to effectively portray a variety of well-bred, charming men like the manipulative bisexual of “Something for Everyone” (1970) and the adventurous expatriate in Bob Fosse’s Academy Award-winning “Cabaret” (1972), opposite Liza Minnelli.
From there, his role as D’Artagnan in Richard Lester’s romping version of “The Three Musketeers” (1973) and as Logan in the cult sci-fi classic “Logan’s Run” (1976) cemented York’s cinematic stardom on both sides of the pond. He played opposite Burt Lancaster in the critically panned adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1977) and he even played himself in Billy Wilder’s old fashioned missive on Hollywood, “Fedora” (1977). A series of well-received landmark TV miniseries followed, including roles as the Charles Dickens’ hero Pip in “Great Expectations” (NBC, 1974) and a reteaming with his illustrious mentor Zeffirelli in “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977), where he played John the Baptist to Robert Powell’s titular Jesus. York returned to his theatrical roots in the 1979 Broadway production of “Bent,” where he succeeded Richard Gere in the lead role of Max, a homosexual concentration camp inmate who pretends to be Jewish. That same year he produced his first movie, a slow-moving adaptation of Erskine Childer’s prototypical spy thriller, “The Riddle of the Sands” (1979).
Heading into the 1980s, Michael York attempted his first stage musical, “The Little Prince,” which failed miserably during its Broadway previews and led to his decision to return to the comfort of the small screen. York proved he could still be a dashing and stalwart swashbuckler in “The Master of Ballantrae” (CBS, 1984) and earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for the ABC Afterschool Special, “Are You My Mother?” He next joined the cast of the long-running primetime serial “Knot’s Landing” (CBS, 1979-1993) for the 1987-88 season, playing the love interest to Donna Mills. In the 1990s, York continued to work on the small screen with episodes of popular shows like “Babylon 5” (TNT, 1993-98) and the time travel adventure “Sliders” (Fox, 1995-99), while tackling prominent roles in TV movies like “Not of This Earth” (Showtime, 1995), “Dark Planet” (Syfy, 1997), “The Ripper” (Starz, 1997) and “A Knight in Camelot” (1998). Of course, York continued making big screen appearances, playing the prime and proper head of British intelligence, Basil Exposition, in the Mike Myers franchise “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” (1997), a role he reprised in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999) and “Austin Powers: Goldmember” (2002).
Finding a new audience, York played media mogul Stone Alexander in the religious-themed “The Omega Code” (1999) and its sequel “Megiddo: Omega Code 2” (2001) – two films that were not theatrical blockbusters, but nevertheless performed extremely well in their niche market. Meanwhile, York’s highly distinctive voice made him perfect for recording audio books, in which he was credited with over 70 productions, such as The Book of Psalms, Carl Jung’sMemories, Dreams, Reflections, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, and his own children’s book, The Magic Paw Paw.
Of course, York also voiced numerous characters on screen, from Murdstone in “Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield” (NBC, 1993), King Sarastro in “The Magic Flute” (ABC, 1994) and Kanto on “Superman” (ABC, 1996-99) to The King in “A Monkey’s Tale” (2001) and Prime #1 in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (2009).
In live action, he appeared in episodes of “The Gilmore Girls” (The WB, 2000-07) and “How I Met Your Mother” (CBS, 2005- ), before joining Rutger Hauer and Charlotte Rampling for the Polish-made religious drama “The Mill and the Cross” (2011). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Adam Faith was primarily known as a pop singer in Britain in the early 1960’s. However he did make some very good movies at the same time. Later on he became a very accomplished television actor . He was very effective in “Budgie” and “Love Hurts”. He was badly injured in a car accident and he required extensive plastic surgery. He died at the age of 62 suddenly from a heart attack.
Dave Laing’s 2003 obituary in “The Guardian”
Adam Faith, who has died of a heart attack aged 62, was one of Britain’s leading pop singers in the early 1960s. One of the first generation of home-grown British stars, he vied for popularity with Billy Fury and Cliff Richard. His brief career as a pop idol was eclipsed when guitar groups, such as the Beatles, took over and his style of beat ballad seemed outmoded. But he did not disappear from the limelight. Instead, he reinvented himself several times, as music businessman, financial expert and, in particular, as an actor. His acting career reached a peak in 1971 when he starred in the television series Budgie, scripted by Keith Waterhouse.
He was born Terence Nelhams in Acton, west London, the third of five children of a coach driver and an office cleaner. After leaving school, he worked in the film industry, progressing from messenger boy to assistant film editor. He was inspired to form the Worried Men skiffle group in 1956 by Lonnie Donegan’s recording of Rock Island Line. As Faith said in his first autobiography Poor Me (1961): “Skiffle hit Britain with all the fury of Asian flu. Everyone went down with it.” Faith later repaid his debt by producing a 1978 comeback album for Donegan, Puttin’ On The Style.
While performing at the Two Is coffee bar in Soho, in a live broadcast for BBC TV’s 6-5 Special show in 1958, Nelhams caught the eye of producer Jack Good, who told him that he could be a successful singer with a change of name. Good gave him a book of Christian names from which Terry picked Adam from the boys section and Faith from the girls.
His big break came when John Barry, the musical director of 6-5 Special, recommended him to Stewart Morris, the producer of a new TV series, Drumbeat. Morris created the moody Adam Faith image by ordering him to cut his James Dean-style mass of blond hair and forbidding him to smile on camera, resulting in Faith’s trademark “sunken cheek, hungry look”.
UNSPECIFIED – JANUARY 01: (AUSTRALIA OUT) Photo of Adam FAITH; Film poster for Beat Girl (Photo by GAB Archive/Redferns)
His first recording, in 1959, for the Parlophone label, What Do You Want, was masterminded by John Barry, songwriter Johnny Worth and producer John Burgess. They reinvented Faith as an Anglicised Buddy Holly with Barry’s pizzicato string arrangement and quirky vocal mannerisms like the oddly pronounced “biya-bee” for “baby”. The record was soon selling 50,000 copies a day and became No 1 in the hit parade and the first of Adam’s 16 Top 20 records over the next five years. His other hits included Poor Me, Who Am I, Someone Else’s Baby and Lonely Pup (In A Christmas Shop).
Adam Faith was quickly established as a teen-idol. From 1960 to 1962, he appeared in the films Beat Girl, Never Let Go, What A Whopper! and Mix Me A Person, a psychological drama which established his acting credentials. John Barry’s scores for three of the films provided the springboard for his subsequent work for the James Bond series.
Such was his instant celebrity that in December 1960 Adam Faith was interviewed on the BBC TV programme Face To Face by John Freeman to whom he revealed that his favourite composers were Sibelius and Dvorak and his favourite book Catcher In The Rye. In the words of pop pundit Nik Cohn, Faith thereby introduced “the concept of pop singer as thinker”.
By 1963, in order to compete with the new popularity of groups such as the Beatles, Adam Faith hired the Roulettes to accompany him on his live appearances and commissioned songs from a younger writer, Chris Andrews. Nevertheless, by 1967, Faith’s star had waned and recognising that “the worst thing in the world is to be an ex-pop singer doing the clubs” he focussed on an acting career.
He toured as the lead in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s Billy Liar, appeared as Feste in Twelfth Night and with Dame Sybil Thorndyke in Emlyn Williams’ Night Must Fall. His role in Budgie, as the diffident small-time crook, suited Faith’s stage persona and the show ran for several seasons. In 1988 a stage musical version was produced.
In the early 1970s, Faith returned to the music business as a manager and producer rather than a performer. While touring in 1964 he had discovered the singer Sandie Shaw and now he recognised the potential of Leo Sayer. Faith managed him until 1985 when the relationship soured and Sayer sued Faith for unpaid earnings. Faith also coproduced Sayer’s early albums and the first solo album by The Who’s Roger Daltrey in 1973.
In August 1973 he was seriously injured in a car accident, an event that he described later as the turning point of his career. The crash inspired the title song of I Survive, Faith’s first recording for seven years. Although the album received good reviews, it was not a commercial success and it marked the end of his singing career.
In 1974 he returned to film acting. Producer David Puttnam persuaded him to play the manager of the rock star character played by David Essex in Stardust. In the Guardian, Derek Malcolm enthused that Faith’s “portrait of a rough diamond on the make could scarcely be more authentic”. Faith later starred in Yesterday’s Hero (1979) and McVicar (1980). On the West End stage he appeared in Stephen Poliakoff’s City Sugar (1975).
In the 1980s, Faith reinvented himself again, this time as a financial guru for the yuppie generation. Although he had invested in property since the 1960s, he had less success on the financial markets. He became a columnist for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday but was also associated with Roger Levitt. When Levitt’s investment empire collapsed, Faith was reported to have lost £10m. Faith later became a partner in The Money Channel on cable and satellite television, but its failure in 2001 cost him £32m and forced him into bankruptcy.
In the 1990s, Faith returned to stage and television acting, appearing in the sitcoms Love Hurts with Zoë Wanamaker and The House That Jack Built with Gillian Taylforth. In the West End he starred in a revival of Bill Naughton’s Alfie and in the musical A Chorus Line. In 1996 he wrote a memoir, Acts Of Faith.
He had a history of heart problems and was given open heart surgery to relieve blocked arteries in 1986.
He is survived by his wife, the former dancer Jackie Irving, whom he married in 1967, and their daughter Katya.
· Adam Faith (Terence Nelhams), singer, actor and businessman, born June 23 1940; died March 8 2003
• This article was amended on 3 July 2012. The original stated that Faith married Jackie Irving in 1975. This has been corrected.
Adam Faith’s obituary in “The Guardian” can be accessed online here.
Joyce Grenfell was born in 1910 to a wealthy family. Her mother was American and her aunt was the famous politican Nancy Astor. She made her first stage appearance in “The Little Revue” in 1939. During World War Two she toured India, North Africa and the Middle East to entertain the British troops. After the War she started making films in England, many of which have become classics e,g. “Genevieve” and “The Happiest Days of Your Life”.
She appeared on Broadway in her own one-woman show. In 1956 she was on “The Ed Sullivan Show” alongside Elvis Presley. She continued to perform on British television until she became ill and she died in 1979. Great radio docimentary on BBC Radio 4 on Joyce Grenfell can be assessed here.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Toothy Britisher Joyce Grenfell with her stark, equine features charmed and humored audiences both here and abroad on radio, stage, revues, film and TV for nearly four decades. Lovingly remembered as a delightfully witty monologist and raconteur, she inherited her bold talents from her eccentric socialite mother, who just so happened to be American and the sister of Lady Nancy Astor. Born Joyce Irene Phipps in 1910, her father was an architect and she was educated both in London and Paris. Her first job in the entertainment business was as a radio critic columnist. In 1939, she performed in her first revue wherein her spot-on impersonations, characterizations and satirical songs became a big hit. One song “I’m Going to See You Today”, which she herself wrote in 1942, became her signature song. Performing for the troops during WWII, she finally was sought after for films, finding an opening playing gawky matrons in rollicking comedies.
Joyce Grenfell
The best of the lot would include The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), Laughter in Paradise (1951), The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954), and the resulting ‘Trinian’ sequels. She also put out highly popular comedy albums over the years. Joyce’s last performance was in 1973 before Queen Elizabeth and her guests at Windsor Castle. Her health began to fail soon after. An eye infection resulted in a loss of sight in one eye and she was forced to retire. Six years later the eye was diagnosed as cancerous and, though it was removed, she continued to decline, dying on November 30, 1979 at home. She was later commemorated on a postage stamp.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Digital StillCamera
Immortalised as toothy, gauche games mistress, Gossage (“Call me Sausage”) in The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), former journalist Grenfell invaded over 20 often-unexceptional British films, creating moments of treasurable idiocy.
She is wonderfully exasperated with Alastair Sim’s further postponement of their wedding (“I’ve been home three weeks and I’ve had a bath”) in Laughter in Paradise (1951), is all fringe and jangling beads as the hotel proprietress in Genevieve (1953), was several times hilariously love-lorn Policewoman (later Sergeant) Ruby Gates in the St Trinian’s series.
As a celebrated monologuist, gently caricaturing the middle classes, she showed wider emotional range than films ever explored. Appeared in many revues, as well as her own inimitable one-woman shows, which she wrote and with which she toured extensively. She was living proof that you could be a sharp satirist without – miraculously – descending to malice; she is as English as glee-singing and much more fun. She was awarded an OBE in 1946.
Article from “The Catholic Herald” on Patricia Routledge here.
Biography from Carole Jackson:
Katherine Patricia Routledge was born on February 17, 1929 in Birkenhead (Merseyside), the daughter of Catherine (nee Perry) and Isaac Edgar Routledge. Her father was a haberdasher and the family, including brother Graham, lived behind the shop. Patricia says she was a much-loved, “cosseted” child, and every day when she came home from school, she would call to her father, who would come out and see her safely across the road. During the outbreak of War, her father built reinforced bunks in the basement of the shop and Patricia and her brother, Graham, would spend hours down there, doing their homework and playing monopoly. The family slept there for weeks on end. Patricia attended Birkenhead High School, where she admits she was a bit of a show-off, disrupting classes, telling jokes, and imitating people. “I was a plump girl with a loud voice. I used to ride my bike round the country lanes thinking great thoughts and spouting pieces of poetry.” While at school, she sang in the Congregational Church Choir and ran the Sunday School, bringing the numbers of students up from four to ninety-four by “bribing kids with pictures for their attendance books and by telling them vivid Bible stories.”
Although at this early date all the signs would seem to point to a performing career, Patricia read English at Liverpool University, with dreams of being an avant-garde headmistress and spending her summers having affairs in Europe. But her experiences with each end-of-term play began to be very important to her. “I was fully alive and it frightened me. I was in a tremendous turmoil about it.” She finished her course and took a year off to think about her future direction, while working as an unpaid assistant stage manager at Liverpool Playhouse. Soon she was asked to join the company, and made her theatre debut as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1952, at the royal salary of £5 a week, from which she bought her mother a box of Meltis fruits every Saturday. She was still living at home.
Patricia finally moved out of her childhood bedroom at the age of 23 when she went to Bristol to attend the Old Vic Theatre School. She left behind not only her family but her wonderful singing teacher, Elizabeth Sleigh of Birkenhead, of whom Leonard Bernstein would some 20 years later say, “She did a good job!” She made her London debut in 1954 when she played Carlotta in Sheridan’s The Duenna at the Westminster Theatre. She was only 28 and appearing at London’s Saville Theatre in Zuleika when her mother died of a sudden heart attack. Patricia was very close to her family, especially her mother, and speaks with great affection of her parents and with gratitude for her loving and happy childhood. She draws constantly off her memories, saying, “You can cope if you know that as far back as you remember you were cherished.”
In 1966, Patricia made her Broadway debut playing the roles of Violet, Nell, and Rover in How’s the World Treating You, which transferred from the West End. She calls it the play that changed her life. Jule Styne saw her performance and the next year invited her back to star in his musical Darling of the Day, for which she won a Tony Award in 1968 for best actress in a musical. Vincent Price was her co-star. In 1972 she brought the house down with her performance in the revue, Cowardy Custard in London. Following this success, she recorded an album of her favourite songs, Presenting Patricia Routledge.
Patricia has had an impressive career on stage, has appeared on both the large and small screens, and has worked extensively in radio. Her film appearances include Clinty in To Sir with Love with Sydney Poitier; Miss Reese in The Bliss of Mrs Blossom with Shirley MacLaine; Mrs Featherstone in If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium; and Miss Beatty in Don’t Raise the Bridge Lower the River with Jerry Lewis. Her radio work includes Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Present Laughter with Paul Scofield; The Cherry Orchard; The Beggar’s Opera; and the much-praised series Beachcomber by the Way. She has recorded several of the classics, with her exquisite readings of Wuthering Heights in its entirety; Alice in Wonderland; and some of the Beatrix Potter tales.
She has worked in television since 1952, in both comedic and dramatic roles, among them Victoria Regina for Granada in 1964; Kitty in Victoria Wood As Seen on TV from 1983-85 (in whom we see the forerunner of Hyacinth Bucket); Barbara Pym in Miss Pym’s Day Out in 1991; and the Omnibus production, Hildegard of Bingen in 1994. She most recently received international acclaim with her portrayal of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bou-quet) in Keeping Up Appearances (1990-95), which earned her the title of Top Television Comedy Actress for 1991. In the same year the Grand Order of Water Rats pronounced her Personality of the Year and in 1993 she was similarly honoured by the Variety Club of Great Britain. Patricia was awarded the OBE in the 1993 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to the Performing Arts. Her most recent honour was to be voted Britain’s all-time favourite actress in 1996. She is now preparing to do the third series of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates For BBC1.
Patricia is well known for her work in her good friend, Alan Bennett’s plays, A Woman of No Importance (1982) and A Lady of Letters (1988), both of which he wrote especially for her. Her one-woman show Come for the Ride premiered in her hometown of Birkenhead in 1988 and has played in venues throughout the UK. Also in 1988, Patricia played the Old Lady in Jonathan Miller’s production of Bernstein’s Candide, for which she won an Olivier Award. She had first worked with Bernstein in 1976, playing the presidents’ wives in Alan Lerner’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Broadway. Bernstein wrote the solos especially for her, the very moving ‘Take Care of This House’ and the tour de force ‘Duet for One’. In 1992, she played Nettie Fowler in Nicholas Hytner’s revival of Carousel at the National Theatre and in 1994 she played the definitive Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals at the Chichester Festival Theatre, transferring to the West End. Her most recent theatrical role was as Beatrix Potter in the one-woman show, Beatrix.
Acting is her whole life as she says, “There is nothing like that audience response when it’s working with you – nothing.” She speaks with awe of Alastair Sim, her idol, with whom she worked in Chichester in Pinero’s The Magistrate and in London in Dandy Dick. “To be on stage with him was an education. When he reached that pitch of obsession with a situation, however absurd, there was nothing he could not do with those staring eyes, that jabbing finger, the swoops and wobbles of his voice. Playing opposite him taught me so much.” Anyone who has seen her perform can see that Sim was indeed an excellent teacher as Patricia plays his style to perfection.
Patricia has never married, admitting her expectation of marriage has been too high to allow her to make that commitment and she couldn’t have borne not to give her children the complete love and attention she’d been given as a child. “People have always pitied spinsters,” she says. “We have been derided, as if we had missed out on life. Well, we need not miss out on anything today!” she says with a sparkle in her eye. She has been in love and speaks of a bittersweet grand passion that broke her heart when she was young, when she fell in love with a married man. Not too many years ago, feeling entirely at peace with her single status, she unexpectedly found love once again. But sadly, the love of her life died suddenly of a heart attack. She’s not revealing any names, but says that a corner of her heart has been taken once again by a very special person.
Patricia leads a quiet private life, living alone in her lovely Kensington home she bought in 1969. She also has a cottage in Surrey. She says she appreciates rather a lot of her own company while still enjoying her many friends. She likes doing practical things, washing clothes, cleaning, and polishing wood. She also likes cooking and having friends to dinner. She admits to being a very emotional person “but I keep the clamps on it – you cannot go round being emotional. It can be channeled.” Most easily into acting. “The life of the imagination becomes a very strong relief. I want the theatre not to give me escape but to take me out on the uplands and make me realize that life in spite of setbacks and pain and evil can go on at its best and most enjoyable; above all (and this embraces the tragi-comical condition of mankind) that the human spirit will triumph.” She says she is both an optimist and a realist. Her religion is important to her and she believes in prayer. “I don’t think you can go it alone. There is a positive force for good outside oneself, call it God if you like, that has the strength to turn darkness into light.” She is a patron of St. Richard’s Hospice in Worcester and president of Claire House, Merseyside.
Patricia’s father died in 1986 and her brother, who was canon residential at St. Paul’s Cathedral, in 1989. She says, “I don’t believe in eliciting spirits of people who have passed on, but there are times when I physically feel one of them taking over. I can be doing some quite ordinary things like ironing or getting hold of a pan of sprouts and something in my head will say, ‘That is exactly how your father or brother would have dealt with that.'” Thinking further on the subject she says, “When I approach the pearly gates, I’d like to hear a champagne cork popping, an orchestra tuning up, and the sound of my mother laughing.”
But Patricia has no plans to leave us for a long time yet – and no plans to retire. “I just want to do good work with good people in good places. And as for retirement, I can hardly spell the word. I’m driven, really. The demons won’t lie down.” Which her fans are very happy to hear. We look forward to seeing Patricia Routledge in many more wonderful roles and to enjoying the pleasure of her company for years to come.
Dermot Walsh was born in Dublin in 1924 and studied and acted at both the Abbey theatre and at the Gate. His first film “Hungry Hill” with Margaret Lockwood was made in Ireland. His other films include “Bedelia” and “The |Mark of Cain”. During the 1950’s he made many B movies and then turned to the stage. He was married at one time to Hazel Court. His daughter is the actress Elizabeth Dermot Walsh. He died in 2002.
“Guardian” obituary:
Filmgoers in the 1950s had to sit through many a dire, low-budget second-feature, made to satisfy the government ruling that a percentage of films shown in British cinemas must be home-grown rather than Hollywood imports. Dermot Walsh, who has died aged 77, starred in more than 20 such movies, and could have laid claim to be king of the quota quickies.
Tall, dark and handsome, he had once seemed set for true stardom. Born in Dublin, where, while studying law, he went to the Abbey theatre school of acting, he spent three years with Lord Longford’s repertory company, and was in productions at the Gate and Croydon repertory theatre, before being spotted by a Rank talent scout.
His first three films were enjoyably risible melodramas starring Margaret Lockwood, then at the peak of her stardom. Little noticed as a chauffeur in Bedelia (1946), Walsh made an impression later that year, in Hungry Hill. In this adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel about an Irish family feud spanning three generations, he played Lockwood’s profligate son, although he was only eight years her junior. In Jassy (1947), he graduated to being her lover, and was well cast as a dispossessed heir whom the half-Gypsy Lockwood steals from sweet Patricia Roc.
Nothing else Walsh did in features was as good. A few feeble films followed, including Third Time Lucky (1949), in which he starred with Glynis Johns. In the same year, he married Hazel Court, with whom he co-starred in My Sister And I (1948), the first of a number of plays and films they would appear in together. Back on the stage, he was in the first production of Shaw’s Buoyant Billions, as well as in Reluctant Heroes and JB Priestley’s Laburnum Grove.
In 1952, Walsh started his cycle of leading roles in shoestring second features, many of them murky crime thrillers, shot in two weeks, and middlingly directed by John Gilling and Lance Comfort. Despite the functional scripts, Walsh actually gave a good account of himself in, among others, The Frightened Man (1952), Ghost Ship (1952) and The Floating Dutchman (1953).
One of the better of these films, directed by Gilling, was The Flesh And The Fiends (1959) aka Mania, The Fiendish Ghouls and Psycho Killers, about the grave robbers Burke and Hare. In it, Walsh played the medical assistant to Peter Cushing’s Dr Knox, who bought the bodies for experiments. He also played straight man to Arthur Askey in Make Mine A Million (1959). The same year, in Crash Drive, he portrayed a racing driver who believes he cannot walk after an accident.
Because the budgets seldom allowed retakes, Walsh explained that, in one scene, “the doctor is supposed to say to the driver’s wife, ‘I have bad news. Your husband has no legs – I don’t mean literally, I mean metaphorically.’ Instead of that, the actor said, ‘Your husband has no legs – I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean literally,’ and they printed it. Of course, eventually, I get out of the wheelchair and walk.”
When the quota quickies faded, Walsh starred in the 39 episodes of the swashbuckling children’s adventure series Richard The Lionheart (1961-62). His last film appearance was in The Wicked Lady (1983), but he continued to act on stage until fairly recently, in The Rivals at Birmingham Rep, Joe Orton’s Loot in London, and Harold Pinter’s A Kind Of Alaska in Cambridge.
He and Court divorced in 1963; their daughter survives him, as does his son by Diana Scougall and two daughters by his third wife, Elizabeth Knox, who predeceased him.
· Dermot Walsh, actor, born September 10 1924; died June 26 2002 “The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Dubbed the ‘new Grace Kelly’, Irish actress Constance Smith was a big-screen starlet before drink and drug addiction led her to an impoverished death 10 years ago. As a fusion of dark beauty queen, femme fatale and flawed heroine, Smith was a film performer whose own life might have served the plot of a lush fifties melodrama, say one directed by Douglas Sirk.
Constance who?
People might wonder if they’ve either forgotten her name or never even heard of her, but in the 1950s she was a promising Hollywood newcomer to the Fox studio and presented an award at the 1952 Oscars, a responsibility that carries the peer respect of the film industry. She was born impoverished in Limerick city, in 1928 and last month marked 10 years since her death, in London, almost penniless and almost completely forgotten.
Despite this, Smith’s lifetime experiences almost reflected the arc traced by any memorable movie character or story protagonist. Talk about ups and downs. Smith followed a path from poverty to celebrity to notoriety to obscurity. As a young actress she was, for a short period, the special muse of Darryl F. Zanuck, invited and initially welcomed into the rarefied air of Hollywood.
As an older woman she was, for a short period, the special guest of Her Majesty, imprisoned for knifing her husband in a drunken domestic dispute. The husband, maverick documentary maker Paul Rotha, escorted her to the prison gates and met her there on her release. Smith and Rotha then remained a couple, on and off, for decades until his death.
But Smith’s dusky sexual allure always had a bewitching effect on her men. She had three husbands, including one who was the son to an Italian Fascist senator, who regarded his daughter-in-law as a shoeless Irish peasant. More significantly, she married Bryan Forbes, the challenging British film-maker who madeWhistle Down the Wind (1961) and The L-Shaped Room (1962).
Forbes witnessed first-hand how the studio system first supported then crushed Smith in her Hollywood career, and it’s tempting to imagine that some of what he saw influenced his dystopian sci-fi drama The Stepford Wives (1975).
Having been first cosseted by Zanuck and the Fox studio, Smith was summarily dumped. Fox had forced her into an abortion and tried, unsuccessfully, to make her change her name. Forbes later wrote: “When the blow fell… the Hollywood system allowed of no mercy. She was reduced to the status of a Hindu road sweeper.” The difficulty for Smith was making her mark in American cinema when Irish performers were thought suited to mildly-exotic, fiery or fantastical roles, rather than the darker, sultry ones that fitted her looks. Yet with Jack Palance in Man in the Attic (1951) and in Impulse (1957), she showed signature noir-like qualities. Palance once called her the “Dublin Dietrich”
. Elsewhere she was dubbed “an intelligent man’s Elizabeth Taylor” and she was frequently termed the new Maureen O’Hara or Grace Kelly. Smith originally earned her chance in movies by winning a Hedy Lamarr look-a-like competition and perhaps her acting development was hindered by constant comparisons to established figures. Later, when she fell out of the limelight and into drink and drugs addiction,
15th October 1955: Irish film actress Constance Smith (1928 – 2003) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 69 No 03 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
she worked as a cleaner and workmates remarked that she looked familiar but they couldn’t place her. “It seems regrettable that Constance Smith should have been so completely forgotten given that she was once, if briefly, a Hollywood star,” observes Ruth Barton, film scholar and author of Acting Irish in Hollywood.
It’s to Barton’s credit that she does the proper work of an historian, which is to retrieve from the past those details that make us rethink what we believe we know. How few of us knew there was an Irish film figure of such intrigue? We might nowadays recall Smith’s name with the likes of O’Sullivan, O’Hara and Kelly, had her fortunes not turned so sour. In Emeralds in Tinseltown, Steve Brennan and Bernadette O’Neil’s glossy span of the Irish influence upon Hollywood, the authors relegate Smith to the also-rans section. Barton, meanwhile, rescues her from the dustbin of history.
But while we should remember Constance Smith, we should not pity her. While perhaps we should mourn her as a faded talent, we should not patronise her as a tragic victim. Instead, she was a survivor, even an inspiring one, who found some success in a most demanding field, absorbing the blows as best she could when the sinister side of that success turned upon her.
Perhaps Hollywood was over-subscribed with dark-haired beauties in the forties and fifties, when Dorothy Lamour, Jane Russell, Gene Tierney and Ava Gardner literally dominated the scene.
Certainly we should not see Constance Smith as tragic merely because she lost her fame, a phenomenon that’s often a hollow reed. What’s sad is that she never fully realised her potential as a drama performer, even while her own life was so dramatic.
She was not quite right for those flamboyant, flame-haired roles played by Maureen O’Hara or the pristine, ice-queen personas of Grace Kelly. She was more a Scarlett O’Hara type, who rolled with the punches as her world crumbled around her, and lived by the mantra that “tomorrow is another day.”
For Irish Post article on Constance Smith, please click here.
Limerick Life article in 2016.
Constance Smith was born in 1928 at 46 Wolfe Tone Street, just a short walk from Limerick train station. It was to be an auspicious sign for the little girl who would grow to be a celebrated actor; her extraordinary life would transport her from that small terraced house in Limerick to a convent in Dublin, from a Hollywood mansion to an Italian villa and finally, from Holloway Prison to a sad, troubled end in a London hostel.
While most film fans are familiar with Irish movie stars of the past such as Maureen O’Hara, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris, few people, even in Limerick, are aware of Constance Smith and her short-lived Hollywood career. Ruth Barton is an academic and author of Acting Irish in Hollywood: from Fitzgerald to Farrell in which she dedicates a chapter to Constance Smith, to retrieve her and other lost stars “from historical oblivion”. Much of what you’ll read below emanates from her painstaking research.
Constance Smith was born to Mary Biggane, a Limerick native, and Sylvester Smith, a former British soldier and veteran of World War One. Initially, her father, a Dubliner, worked as a labourer at the Ardnacrusha plant, but when the project was completed in 1929, he moved his family back to the capital. There they settled in a one-room tenement in Mount Pleasant Buildings, Ranelagh, described by the Irish Times as a ghetto, “used by the Corporation as dumping grounds for problem families.”
Life was arduous and often dangerous in the slums of Mount Pleasant. Communal toilets were poorly maintained, overflowing rubbish bins were infested with rats, and cold, lung-choking air seeped through the damp brick walls; it was little wonder that Irish infant mortality rates were among the highest in Europe at the time. Indeed, many of Constance’s ten siblings did not make it to adulthood.
The only respite from the grinding poverty was a sort of ad-hoc community theatre which developed among the residents. Groups gathered together in the evenings, sang songs from penny-sheets, performed skits for one another and, if the owner was feeling generous, listened through open windows to the street’s one wireless radio. It was in this way that Constance likely received her first training in the dramatic arts.
Constance’s father died when she fifteen. Unable to support her surviving children on her own, Mary Biggane sent her daughter to St. Louis Convent School in Rathmines. The headstrong teenager escaped early, however, taking casual jobs as a shop girl and housemaid to support herself.
It was this latter position that set her on the path to stardom. In 1945 she was placed in a ‘big house’ in Rathmines and the family for whom she worked encouraged her to enter a ‘Film Star Doubles’ contest in The Screen, an Irish film-industry publication. She went on to take first place – dressed as Hedy Lamarr in a borrowed dress – at the magazine’s ball, attended by local actors, theatre producers and crucially, international talent scouts.
She was invited to screen-test at Denham Studios in England by Rank Organisation, who saw potential in the beautiful, sultry-eyed young woman. In 1946 she signed a seven year contract with the group and was put through the rigours of their ‘charm school’ at Highbury, in London. This was essentially a factory for starlets, in which young ingénues were taught elocution, breathing exercises and comportment, along with more traditional drama lessons and script rehearsals. Objecting, perhaps, to spending her time balancing books on her head, Constance lasted only a few years in the school. She resisted attempts to change her name (‘Tamara Hickey’ was suggested, straddling the line between thrillingly exotic and reassuringly local) and steadfastly clung to her Irish accent, a refusal which eventually led to her dismissal from Rank Organisation. Her private life was faring better, however, as she became engaged to British film producer John Boulting.
Once again, life was to take a fortuitous turn for Constance. She won a small part playing an Irish maid in the film The Mudlockin 1950, receiving £20 per day for five weeks. In four short years, she had come a long way from a position as a housemaid for £2 a week. She was spotted in this film by Darryl Zanuck, a legendary Hollywood mogul and co-founder of the movie studio 20th Century Fox. He took a close interest in her – whether his intentions were purely professional is unknown – and championed her as an undiscovered star. She was granted a seven year contract with the studio and placed opposite Tyrone Power in The House in the Square, to begin shooting in London in 1950. The movie was a big, all-star production, and the media fanfare began early.
However, the young, untrained actor struggled to perform alongside experienced heavy-weights such as Power. Midway through filming she found herself unceremoniously dumped from the picture, losing all the publicity and career momentum it had brought. The studio cited illness, and replaced her with Ann Blyth, reshooting all her scenes at a rumoured cost of £100,000. Constance was devastated, but found comfort on the shoulder of a successful British actor named Bryan Forbes (best known for directing The Stepford Wives, 1975), whom she married in 1951.
Back in Hollywood, she found herself packaged and presented as a beautiful but feisty Irish ‘colleen’, the new Maureen O’Sullivan (remembered as Jane in the Tarzan movies). Whether acting on her own volition or that of the studio’s, Constance had an abortion just before Christmas of 1951. 20th Century Fox paid the $3,000 fee.
Her marriage failed soon after, but her career was steady. She shot a number of films, receiving praise for her sensuous, noirish performances from fellow actors (Jack Palance referred to her as the ‘Dublin Dietrich’) and the occasional breathless review from critics. One paper, in the parlance of the time, noted that she possessed “a pair of the nicest gams to ever leave the Old Sod.” In 1952 she was invited to present a trophy at the Annual Academy Awards.
Having parted company with 20th Century Fox, she signed with Bob Goldstein in 1954, who promptly put her to work filming the thriller Tiger in the Tail, in London. Frustrated by the lack of first-rate roles, she left for Italy in 1955, casting off her rebel charm to reinvent herself as the descendent of Irish aristocrats. There, she met an Italian photographer named Araldo di Crollolanza and married him a year later, at the age of twenty-eight. His father – a Fascist senator who had served under Mussolini – reportedly disinherited his son upon learning of the union, even going so far as to refer to his new daughter-in-law as a ‘barefoot Irish peasant’. She made four films in Italy, but her career began to falter and she took an overdose of sleeping tablets in 1958. Her husband left her and she returned to England.
In 1959 she met Paul Rotha, a married man of fifty-two and a much-celebrated filmmaker and writer. They couldn’t have made a more different pair; a neat, precise and serious Englishman, who fell in love with a tempestuous, free-spirited and creative Irishwoman. Theirs was a predictably fiery relationship, only made more difficult by their mutual propensity for hard drinking. They shared similar socialist-leaning political beliefs though, both avowedly anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. Constance was no longer acting, but she remained well-known in film-industry circles in London. She was, one contemporary noted, ‘an intelligent man’s Elizabeth Taylor’.
Together, she and Rotha travelled to Germany to research a documentary on Adolf Hitler’s life. There, they met close aides to the dictator, as well as survivors of the concentration camps. She was said to be greatly affected by this experience.
In 1961, the couple visited Constance’s birthplace, calling to the house on Wolfe Tone Street in Limerick. They were greeted with much fanfare by Constance’s former neighbours, many of whom clamoured for photographs and autographs. The purpose of the visit, Rotha told reporters, was for research – he intended to write a book on his Constance’s life, entitled ‘A Weed in the Ground’, a project which failed to materialise.
Back in London, the couple’s relationship was growing increasingly turbulent. Their fights were frequent and quite often physical; after one altercation Rotha’s face was so badly bruised that he had to postpone an overseas trip. In 1961 a particularly nasty row very nearly turned fatal when Constance stabbed Rotha, leaving him lying on the floor of his flat, bleeding heavily. She also tried to slash her own wrists.
Rotha recovered from his extensive injuries, and supported his lover during her trial in 1962. In court, Constance’s defence team made much of her poverty-stricken childhood, her failed movie career and her traumatic experience in post-war Germany. She was given a three month sentence, and upon her release from Holloway Prison she was met at the gates by Rotha.
They were reunited, but the period was not a happy one. They sold their story to a tabloid newspaper, which salaciously reported their living together out of wedlock. Constance’s mental health deteriorated and she spent time in psychiatric care. In 1968, she stabbed Rotha again, this time sinking a steak knife into his back. The court placed a restraining order against Constance but again, Rotha stood by her. They eventually married in 1974, some fifteen years since they had first met. It was to be her third and final marriage.
Time in prison hadn’t quietened her demons however, and Constance was back in Holloway Prison in 1975, for yet another stabbing offence. While she made a half-hearted attempt to leave Rotha, she quickly returned to him, and together, they descended into a spiral of alcohol abuse, poverty and physical violence. The once highly-respected author and filmmaker took to charging visitors £50 for interviews, along with a bottle of Scotch for himself and Vodka for his wife.
By 1978 they were effectively homeless, and Constance had taken a job as a hospital cleaner. Around this time, after almost twenty years together, the couple broke up. Rotha wrote at the time, “my wild Irish wife has finally left me, gone God knows where.”
Constance Smith’s final act was slow to play out, despite the fiercely harsh circumstances of the latter years of her life. She lived for a while in destitution, losing toes to frostbite and drinking on the streets of Soho. She spent the next two decades on a miserable carousel of psychiatric hospitals, hostels and homelessness, before eventually dying of natural causes in Islington in 2003.
She lived through a fascinating era of modern history; born in the infancy of the Irish Free State, she found herself living in a Blitz-ravaged London a year after VE Day. She went on to work with black-listed artists during the infamous Red Scare in Hollywood and married the son of a Fascist Senator in Italy. She worked with one of Britain’s best-known documentary makers and interviewed survivors of the Holocaust. The life of Constance Smith is more interesting, more dramatic and more poignant than any Hollywood blockbuster. Perhaps it was just too much, too soon for the girl from Wolfe Tone Street.
In her book, Ruth Barton writes perhaps the most sympathetic and understanding epitaph for the Irish actor who flew too close to the sun. Constance, she writes, was, like many almost-stars of the period, “overwhelmed by an unforgiving system for which their background left them unprepared.”
Today, Constance Smith is fondly remembered by those neighbours for whom she signed autographs in 1960, and her memory is maintained by Ms Barton and her fellow academics, by interest groups such as the Limerick Film Archive and by artists like Kate Hennessey.
If you happen to pass Ms Hennessey’s mural on Clontarf Place, stop for a moment and cast your eyes upwards. Among the many Limerick women celebrated there, you’ll find the dark-haired, smiling face of Constance Smith, just a stone’s throw from her family home.
Dictionary of Irish biography:
Constance Mary (1928–2003), actor, was born in January or February 1928 in Limerick. Her father, a Dublin native who had served in the British army during the first world war, was working on construction of the Ardnacrusha power station; her mother Mary was from Limerick. On completion of the station in 1929 the family moved to Dublin; her father died soon thereafter. One of seven or eight children, Constance was reared in extreme poverty in a one‐room flat in Mount Pleasant Buildings, Ranelagh, and was educated at St Louis convent primary school, Rathmines. She worked in a local chip shop, an O’Connell Street ice‐cream parlour, and as a domestic servant. A blue‐eyed brunette, strikingly beautiful from a young age, in January 1946 she won a special prize in the Dublin film star doubles contest (as Hedy Lamarr), on foot of which she was screen-tested by the Rank Organisation, and signed to a seven‐year contract. Moving to London, she was groomed in etiquette, poise, and acting technique in the Rank acting school (the so‐called ‘charm school’). She first appeared on screen in an uncredited, but eye‐catching role, as a cabaret singer in the underworld classic Brighton rock (1947); she was engaged for a time to the film’s director, John Boulting. Though never cast in a Rank film, she appeared in several independent productions, including Room to let (1950), as the daughter of a landlady whose mysterious new tenant turns out to be Jack the Ripper. About 1950 she was sacked by Rank, supposedly for objecting to criticism of her Irish accent; she also resisted the studio’s efforts to change her name.
Her vivacious performance as an Irish maid in The mudlark (1950) attracted the attention of Darryl Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century Fox, who signed her to a seven‐year contract, and vigorously promoted her as his Emerald Isle discovery. En route to Hollywood, she worked on location in Canada in Otto Preminger’s impressive film noir The 13th letter (1951), as the wife of a hospital doctor (played by Charles Boyer) in a small Québec village, who is suspected, on the basis of poison‐pen letters, of an adulterous involvement with a newly arrived English doctor (played by Michael Rennie). Cast in a coveted role opposite Tyrone Power in The house in the square (1951), she returned to London for filming, but was soon embroiled in studio politics, and uncomfortable in a part too demanding for her experience and skills. After six weeks on set she was abruptly dropped, her role was recast, and her scenes re‐shot.
Despite this setback, for the next few years she was cast by Fox in starring roles opposite some of the studio’s leading male actors. Nonetheless, her own star status seems to have been generated more by intensive studio publicity than by the quality or success of her movies. She appeared on the cover of Picturegoer, the leading British film magazine of the period (March 1951), and was a presenter at the 1952 Academy awards ceremony. Her image was that of a spirited, innately rebellious individualist, unafraid to defy studio manipulation – qualities attributed by the entertainment press to her Irish ethnicity. One industry colleague remembered her as ‘the intelligent man’s Elizabeth Taylor’ (Barton, 117). Her credits included Red skies of Montana(1952), as the wife of the chief of a crew of forest‐fire‐fighters, played by Richard Widmark; Lure of the wilderness (1952), with Jeffrey Hunter; Treasure of the golden condor (1953), opposite Cornel Wilde; and Taxi (1953), as a newly landed Irishwoman assisted by a New York cabdriver in searching for the American husband who abandoned her. She gave a lively and rounded performance in Man in the attic (1953), another take on the Ripper legend, as the showgirl niece of the murderer’s landlord and his wife, a role that highlighted her singing and dancing talents. Her co‐star, Jack Palance, suggested that she be billed ‘the Dublin Dietrich’, and some reviewers detected her potential as a live nightclub performer.
By 1954 she had left Fox; it is possible that the mental instability and problems with alcohol that would later become obvious were already afflicting her career. She appeared with Richard Conte in an intriguing noir, The big tip off (1955), and made two films in London: Tiger by the tail (1955), as the reliable English secretary of an American journalist pursued by gangsters, and Impulse(1955), as a seductive femme fatale. Her star waning, in the latter 1950s she made five films in Italy, where she was promoted as a brunette Grace Kelly. Giovanni dalle bande nere (The violent patriot) (1956), a costume swashbuckler, played the USA drive‐in circuit. Her last film was La congiura dei Borgia (1959).
Smith married firstly, after a whirlwind romance in London (1951), Bryan Forbes , an aspiring British actor, and later a successful screenwriter, director, novelist, and memoirist. Though he followed her to Hollywood, the marriage had broken by the end of the year, but not before Smith had succumbed to studio pressure and terminated a pregnancy by abortion. The couple divorced in 1955. She married secondly, in Italy (1956), Araldo Crollolanza , the photographer son of a former fascist senator (who opposed the match and disinherited him); the marriage failed by 1959. In the latter year Smith began a relationship with Paul Rotha (1907–84), a leading British documentary filmmaker, film historian, and critic, whose portfolio included two films of Irish interest: No resting place (1951), a fiction film about Irish travellers, and Cradle of genius (1958), a short documentary on the history of the Abbey theatre, which received an Oscar nomination. Smith accompanied Rotha to Germany and Holland during research and filming of a documentary on the life of Adolf Hitler (1961) and a fiction film based on the Dutch wartime resistance (1962). The couple shared leftist, anti‐imperialist political convictions, and a passion for jazz music; Smith painted, and cultivated her interest in the fine arts, while Rotha contemplated writing a book about her life and casting her in films. Ominously, they also shared an addiction to heavy drinking; ferocious rows, often physically violent, became a commonplace. In December 1961 Smith knifed Rotha in the groin and slashed her own wrists in their London flat; pleading guilty to unlawful and malicious wounding, she served three‐months’ imprisonment in Holloway. Defence counsel at her trial referred to two previous suicide attempts, and described her as ‘a poor but beautiful girl who was squeezed into a situation of sophistication and fame when emotionally quite unable to cope with it’ (Times, 12 Jan. 1962).
For the next two decades Smith and Rotha continued their turbulent, on‐again, off‐again relationship, marked by mutual alcoholism, unemployment, increasing financial hardship, episodes of domestic violence, and Smith’s repeated suicide attempts, and admissions to psychiatric hospitals and halfway hostels. During intermittent periods of recovery, she worked as a cleaner and (incredibly) in childcare. After stabbing Rotha in the back in 1968 she received three‐years’ probation; another stabbing in 1975 resulted in a second term of imprisonment. The couple, who married in 1974, did not break up permanently till 1979. In the early 1980s Smith was living destitute and homeless in London; former colleagues would see her, virtually unrecognisable, drinking in Soho Square. The few friends who attempted to retain contact lost track of her in the mid 1980s. She is reported to have died of natural causes 30 June 2003 in Islington, London
