Child actors of prominence in British films are few and far between. Mandy Miller was one of the few children to gain widespread public recognition in British films of the 1950’s. She was first noticed in a small part in the Ealing comedy “The Man in the White Suit” with Alec Guinness in 1951.
The following year she gained national fame for the title role of “Mandy” about the trials and tribulations of a young girl who is profoundly deaf. She made her last film in 1959 when she made “The Snorkel” when she 15. She continued to act on television uuntil the mid 1960’s when she retired from performing.
When she was a child she even had a hit children’s song which is still heard to-day – “Nellie the Elephant”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
The sensitive-looking British child star of the fifties was born Carmen Isabella Miller in 1944 but affectionately called “Mandy” practically from birth. Her father, a BBC Radio producer, took Mandy (then age 6) and her older sister, Jan Miller to watch a film being made at Ealing Studios. Instead of her sister, it was Mandy who impressed the powers-that-be at the studio commissary that day and was offered a small role in the Alec Guinness film The Man in the White Suit (1951).
The little girl took gingerly to acting and signed up for classes along with dancing lessons, finding some work in commercial modeling. She achieved in the 1950s what popular child star Hayley Mills would accomplish a decade later, except in a dramatic vein for Mandy’s strong suit was no-holds-barred tearjerkers. Her finest hour in film came with the movie Crash of Silence(1952), in which she portrayed a disturbed deaf girl called “Mandy”.
Other moving performances came in Edge of Divorce (1953), as the young product of a bitter divorce,The Secret (1955), which was a covert thriller, and Child in the House (1956), which proved to be another sob story suited to her talents. In her final film, The Snorkel(1958), Mandy played a young teen who leads police to her mother’s murderer. After guest shots on TV’s The Avengers (1961) and The Saint (1962), she left the limelight, forever. At the age of 18, she moved to New York to become an au pair. Mandy married an architect in 1965, had three children (two girls and a boy), and settled down to a life of domesticity.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Review of the film “Mandy” in “MovieMail” can be found here.
David Robb has many television appearances to his credit including a major role with Haley Mils in “The Flame Trees of Thika”. He is a very interesting actor and brings great characterisation to his guest roles on such television series as “Taggart”, “Rebus”, “The Bill”, “Casualty”, “Monarch of the Glen” etc etc.
TCM Overview:
Actor David Robb was known for his roles on the silver screen. Robb started off his acting career mostly in film roles, appearing in “The Swordsman” (1974), the Michael York dramatic adaptation “Conduct Unbecoming” (1975) and “The Wars” (1983). He additionally landed roles in the TV movies “The Four Feathers” (NBC, 1977-78) and “Ivanhoe” (CBS, 1981-82). He worked in series television while getting his start in acting, including a part on “The Flame Trees of Thika” (PBS, 1981-82).
His film career continued throughout the eighties and the nineties in productions like the Pierce Brosnan dramatic adventure “The Deceivers” (1988), the action film “Hellbound” (1993) with Chuck Norris and the Robert Sean Leonard dramatic musical “Swing Kids” (1993).
He also worked in television around this time, including a part on “King Arthur” (1987-88). More recently, he continued to act in the action picture “Treasure Island” (2002) with Jack Palance, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (2007) and the historical love story “The Young Victoria” (2009) with Emily Blunt. Most recently, Robb appeared in “Wolf Hall” (2014).
David Robb’s interview in “Daily Express” can be found here.
Had she wanted it, Diana Wynyard might have had a screen career as long and distinguished as that of Davis or Hepburn. As a stage actress she was excellent but seldom outstanding, nor was her later screen work likely to make anybody’s eyes pop out.
But her early film work is quite, quite stunning. Quiet, cool, gracious, ladylike, she was warmer and more believable than those adjectives imply: either her acting has not dated an iota or it was years before it’s time.
In “Rasputin and the Empress” the Barrymores are acting away like mad and about as convincing as a tree-full of parrots, but Wynyard simply exists ion the same way that someone like Spencer Tracy existed.
In “One More River” the cast are expectedly more subdued, the film is still Galsworthy junk but when Wynyard is on screen at any point, you might be watching a film made yesterday” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars” (1970).
E5NBEF THE FUGITIVE, (aka ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE), top left: Ralph Richardson; right, from top: Mary Clare, Romney Brent, Diana
Diana Wynyard was born in London in 1906. She had a cool calm presence on film and was seen to best effect in the UK made “Gaslight”, and “An Ideal Husband”.
In the earlier part of her career she made films in Hollywood including “Rasputin and the Empress” and “Cavalcade” by Noel Coward. Diana Wynyard had a flourishing stage career and was in rehersal for a new play with Maggie Smith when she died suddenly in 1964. An article reviewing Diana Wynyard and her role in “Cavalcade” can be found here.
TCM Overview:
A luminous and intelligent British actress, Diana Wynyard brought genteel grace and an aristocratic dignity to a highly successful stage career. With a carriage and mien well-suited to period drama, she briefly made her mark in several classy roles in Hollywood during the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. Her US film stardom didn’t take, however, but she was sporadically active in British film for 20 years thereafter, leaving behind several outstanding performances that made one wish she had done more in film.
“Apart from Oliver, none of the serious highly regarded top-drawer British actors has had such a successful career in films as Alec Guinness. He has been in many very popular films,most of them enhanced by his performance. His versatility has been a byword over the past 30 years and perhaps it is the diffidence in his character which has prevented him from being a really magical actor” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972).
Alec Guinness was one of the most distinguished British screen actors ever. His first screen role was as Herbert Pocket in “Great Expectations” and then went on to play Fagin in “Oliver Twist”. Both of these films were directed by David Lean and Guiness made several films with Lean over the years including “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, “Laurence of Arabia”, “Dr Zhivago” and “Passage to India”. He won an Oscar for his performance in “Kwai” but he was dreadfully miscast as an Indian in “A Passage to India”. He won critical acclaim for his performance on television in the series “Tinker, Tailor, Spy” as George Smiley. Alec Guinness was also an accomplished write and had several books published. He died in 2000 at the age of 86.
Tom Sutcliffe’s”Guardian” obituary:
Sir Alec Guinness, who has died aged 86, was one of the best known and loved English actors of the 20th century. He was also a profoundly unostentatious and reserved man, and although he undertook a great variety of roles, all were informed at heart with the wisdom of the sad clown. It was this spiritual severity, together with those cool, clear, wide-open eyes, capable of melting on screen to the most reassuringly serene of smiles, which lent his performances force and authenticity.
In his later career, Guinness became something of an icon of spirituality and enlightened human understanding – especially after playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, in Star Wars (1977), with a notable and profound emotional charge. Subsequently, he was bemused to find himself being consulted as an agony uncle by American students, as a sort of substitute for CS Lewis. More important for him personally, his Star Wars contract guaranteed 2% of the profits, though the role had been much reduced, and he had nearly left the production.
The resulting financial security made this already fastidious actor even choosier about live stage roles. After Star Wars he was in just two West End plays, and was an unusual and sensitive Shylock at Chichester in 1984.
But Guinness was not the first great actor to find the ability, and the inclination, to learn parts after 70 much reduced. He had already avoided the theatre for six years when he came to star as TE Lawrence in Terence Rattigan’s Ross in 1960. More than any other English star of his generation, he was equally at home on stage, in film and on television – where he had an Indian summer as John Le Carré’s spymaster, Smiley, in the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1981-82) .
Guinness had an impecunious childhood, with a modest boarding-school education at Pembroke Lodge, in Southborne, and Roborough, in Eastbourne. At 18, he got a job as a junior copywriter in Arks Publicity, an advertising agency.
In his discreet autobiography, Blessings In Disguise (1985), he describes how the acting bug had bitten him. On the recommendation of John Gielgud, who assumed he was related to brewing and money, he got in touch with the formidable and eccentric Martita Hunt. She was, he noted, the first woman he had met who wore silk trousers and painted her toenails, and she coached him to audition for a Leverhulme scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But Rada were not giving the award that year, so he enrolled at the Fay Compton studio for as long as his money lasted, and then rapidly went to work in the London theatre. He made his debut at 20, walking on in Libel! at the Playhouse.
In his unpretentious and beautifully written book, Guinness exorcised a long-suppressed anxiety about his origins. He was, he made clear, illegitimate – his name a mystery, his father probably called Geddes, the circumstances of his conception vague. His mother was Agnes Cuffe, and he was registered as Alec Guinness de Cuffe.
Finally, the question of his birth did not matter to him, but in the beginning it must have. A reluctance to expose himself, an almost neurotic discretion, was famously the mark of both his professional and his personal style. In a 1953 monograph about him, the critic, Kenneth Tynan, wrote: “Were he to commit a murder, I have no doubt the number of false arrests following the circulation of his description would break all records.”
While still only 20, Guinness was a flowery Osric, in Gielgud’s Hamlet at the New Theatre. Thereafter, until the outbreak of the second world war, his career alternated between working with Gielgud, or with Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic, where he impressed with a modern-dress Hamlet in autumn 1938. Even the Sunday Times’s formidable critic, James Agate, conceded that Guinness’s refusal to play the role in a traditional way had “a value of its own”.
Guinness always denied having any technique as an actor – or knowing what technique might be. Yet he was proud of his gift. A favourite story, which he told quite often, concerned his time in The Seagull, in May 1936, playing the small part of Yakov. The director Komisarjevsky, a big influence, was convinced that he was pulling a rope to open the little stage curtains for the play within a play in the first act. But, as Peggy Ashcroft pointed out to Komis’s chagrin, there was, in fact, no rope.
For Guinness, the purpose of acting was to make believe. The theatre was an act of faith, whose object was to tell the inner truth about situations and feelings, not to embroider falsehood with trickery and display.
He was a master of disguise, as he demonstrated in the Ealing comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949), with a multiplicity of roles. But the Kind Hearts gallery of family victims was consciously broad brush. Guinness was an actor, not an entertainer or vaudevillian like Peter Sellers, who specialised in pretence and adopting other personas. The spiritual core of his inner conviction remained the same – whatever game of actorish disguise he might play.
Guinness’s conversion to Roman Catholicism followed an episode in France during the 1954 filming of Father Brown, in which he was GK Chesterton’s cheery cleric-cum-detective. Walking back in the dark to the station hotel of a village near Macon, and still wearing his cassock, his hand was seized by a small boy, a complete stranger, who called him “Mon père” and trotted along beside him chatting in French. Despite his phony credentials as a cleric, Guinness felt strongly that the reality of this trust was important. When his 11-year-old son Matthew was temporarily crippled with polio, he had taken to dropping in on church and praying.
As an actor, Guinness had acute and particular tastes, an infallible instinct for the apt moment, the ideal tone, the canny strategy. When he was Fool, to Laurence Olivier’s unsuccessful King Lear (1947), he explained to me once, the irritating (to Olivier) fact that he, Alec, had the lion’s share of the reviewers’ favour was a direct consequence of Larry’s actor-managerish vanity.
“Every time Larry came on stage, the lights went up in his vicinity. All I had to do was just stay very close to him.” Guinness, of course, could not fail to be noticed – if only because he was doing so little so well.
He knew his own vulnerabilities and exploited them with courage. That lent the danger to his best performances. He had resented, for instance, the Oliviers’ assumption, in the mid-1930s, that he was Gielgud’s boyfriend. Not because he could not have been, or was ashamed or offended to be cast in that role, but because he was not, and they had no reason to assume it. In 1938, Guinness became a scrupulous husband and father – though his sexuality was complex.
Typically, he did not balk at playing the transvestite criminal Mrs Artminster in Wise Child (1967), with the then glamorous-looking Simon Ward. His Lawrence, in Ross, rang dangerously true to self. Being mixed-up, discreet, acutely intelligent and voraciously well-read fuelled the neurotic, but muffled, engine that drove him as an artist.
Being so private a personality let Guinness bring out the normally hidden interior aspects of Harcourt Reilly, in TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. He played this role at Chichester, Wyndham’s and the Haymarket in 1968 and 1969, as well as in Edinburgh and New York in 1950. His radio reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets were spellbinding. He was perfect material for Alan Bennett’s Old Country (1977) and Habeas Corpus (1973). In the latter, he devised – and performed alone – a typically self-revealing dance at the end.
Tynan’s fine portrait of him misinterpreted the diffidence and humility. Guinness, Tynan wrote, “never will be a star in the sense that Olivier is . . . He does everything by stealth . . . He will illumine many a blind alley of subtlety, but blaze no trails . . . His stage presence is quite without amplitude; and his face, except when, temporarily, make-up transfigures it, is a signless zero.” The suggestiveness, the wish to avoid being domineering, was a different sort of contract with the audience’s imagination. Guinness also wielded glacial fierceness and terror with unchallengeable authority.
His greatness did without Olivier’s showmanship, Ralph Richardson’s abandoned cussedness or Gielgud’s resonant lyricism. Tynan admired, but was inclined to patronise, Guinness’s poetry and versatility. At 24, in 1951, the critic was engaged by Guinness as Player King, in his second Hamlet. Guinness invested much amour propre in this production. Tynan called it “Hamlet with the pilot dropped”, and said it was cast with “exuberant oddness”.
Yet, ironically, its failure turned out to be a major factor in Guinness’s career, leading him away from the classics and Shakespeare into films, ultimately television, and new plays. Tynan found Guinness less potent in the classical arena because he expected actors to perform like concerto soloists.
I did not see Guinness’s inspirational Richard II, for Ralph Richardson’s Old Vic company, at the New Theatre (now Albery) in 1947. But his Macbeth at the Royal Court (1966) was certainly a quiet, clipped tragic victim, without the expected sexiness and physicality.
In fact, Guinness was an actor for a new theatrical style, subtle and undecorated. From the 1960s, in the West End, he mostly created roles in brand new plays, rather than challenging memories of Gielgud, Richardson or Olivier. He might have been a marvellous and unusual Lear, but, when he took the role on radio, it was underwhelming. Though his work in Alan Bennett’s plays was superb, he was far less inclined at the end of his career to accept risks as Gielgud – secure in a theatrical dynasty – famously did with Harold Pinter, David Storey and Julian Mitchell.
He was always a bit of a social upstart in an English theatre world full of great families, a self-made actor with no advantages, dependent on a very spiritual stillness and charisma. When I first met him in the mid-1970s, he had a slightly grand shyness off-stage. Yet, of all the great British stage actors, his was the busiest film career, for which his modest way of acting was flawless.
Guinness was not just an actor. He was good at drawing and did a really charming, diffident design for his own Christmas cards each year. Like Caruso, he was a natural at caricatures, especially of himself. His handwriting was beautiful. He was a very able author. Just before the war, his stage version of Great Expectations – later the basis of David Lean’s film – had been directed by George Devine.
His adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, directed by Peter Brook in 1946, marked his return to the stage, as Mitya, after war service in the Royal Navy. He had joined as a rating in 1941, been commissioned in 1942 and commanded a landing-craft ferrying supplies to the Yugoslav partisans. He also appeared in the West End during the war, in Rattigan’s Bomber Command play, Flare Path.
After playing Herbert Pocket, in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), and Fagin, in Oliver Twist (1948), Guinness went on to a series of glorious Ealing comedies – perhaps most memorably as the bankteller-turned-robber Henry Holland in Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and as the criminal Professor Marcus, in Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955).
His greatest film role was probably Colonel Nicholson, in Lean’s The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), where his quintessentially English stiff upper lip under dreadful Japanese maltreatment and, eventually, obsessive unreasonableness, won him a best actor Oscar and numerous other prizes.
Further work included the artist Gulley Jimson, in The Horse’s Mouth (1958) – another Oscar nomination – with his own screenplay based on Joyce Carey’s novel. In 1959, he starred in Carol Reed’s Our Man In Havana, and a year later gave a brilliantly unpleasant Scottish impersonation of an irascible soldier in Tunes Of Glory. It was not followed by many more good film starring roles, and Guinness settled mostly for lucrative supporting parts in films like The Quiller Memorandum (1966), The Comedians (1967) and Cromwell (1970).
Yet some of those supporting roles were distinguished – Prince Feisal, in Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), General Yefgrav Zhivago, in Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Professor Godbole, in A Passage to India (1984). In Anthony Mann’s The Fall Of The Roman Empire (1964), Guinness’s Marcus Aurelius was one of the film’s few redeeming features.
He was again nominated for an Oscar with Star Wars (1977), and six years later appeared in its sequel, Return Of The Jedi. Yet another Oscar nomination followed his appearance as Dorrit, in Christine Edzard’s epic adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1988).
At the end of the 1970s, he achieved a new fame with his television appearances in the BBC2 adaptations of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. These works were effectively his screen monument, and for which he achieved Bafta awards.
Guinness was a charming, fascinating and elusive companion. He did not enjoy playing the star, though he liked the respect he got when visiting famous restaurants. From the mid-1950s, he lived in a modest way outside Petersfield, in Hampshire, with a large garden that much occupied his wife, Merula, whom he had married in 1938.
He had a small circle of particular friends, many outside the theatre. For years, he and Merula were close to Rachel Kempson and Michael Redgrave. If one visited him in his dressing room in the West End in the 1970s, one might find a surprisingly broad collection of people there, many of whom were never destined to discover what the others’ link with the great actor might be. He preferred to keep his friends separate; he was a one-to-one person.
He liked good food and drink. His favourite London hotel was the Connaught, with its superb cuisine. He was not a club man. He was knighted in 1959 and made a Companion of Honour in 1994.
Anybody outside his immediate circle was intrigued by the Guinness enigma. But the reserve through which that attractive generosity and warmth powerfully shone was, for him, an impenetrable and necessary protection.
He is survived by Merula and his son, Matthew.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
A “Guardian” article by Xan Brooks on Alec Guiness’sbest movies can be found here.
June Ritchie has one great role on film to her credit – ‘Ingrid’ opposite Alan Bates in “A Kind of Loving” in 1962. She was born in 1938 in Manchester. Her other films include “Live Now – Pay Later” and “Man in the Moon”. Details on her best known film “A Kind of Loving” can be found on the IMDB website here.
TCM Overview:
June Ritchie was a big screen film actress known for powerful performances.
Ritchie found her beginnings in film with roles in “A Kind of Loving” (1962) and “Live Now – Pay Later” (1962).
She went on to act in the Margaret Rutherford adaptation sequel “The Mouse on the Moon” (1963) and “Pere Goriot” (PBS, 1970-71).
Later in her career, Ritchie appeared in “December Flower” (PBS, 1986-87).
Evelyn Laye obituary in “The Independent” in 1996.
Evelyn Laye was a British musical comedy star who made her Boradway debut in 1929 in Noel Coward’s “Bitter Sweet”. She made a few films in Hollywood before returning to Britain to concentrate on stage and film there. One of her last roles was as Jean Simmon’s mother in “Say Hello to Yesterday”. She died in 1996 at the age of 96. Article about Evelyn Laye and Jessie Matthews can be accessed here.
“Independent” obituary:
“They don’t make them like that any more,” was the refrain of Evelyn Laye’s hit number in the 1969 musical Phil the Fluter at the Palace Theatre, and as she sang it audiences must irresistibly have related the sentiment to the singer herself – for, even 27 years ago, they were being enchanted by an artist who had been a major figure in the British musical theatre for over 50 years.That, if you think about it, was no easy feat. The musical part of Laye’s career belonged to the era long before the use of amplified sound had ruined the immediacy and charm of the naturally projected singing voice in the theatre, and when leading ladies were expected to give the full complement of eight performances a week in the identical large venues used by today’s miked singers, who can rarely be prevailed upon to manage more than five.
As for miming to a pre- recorded “click” track – another creeping disease afflicting the musical theatre – I once saw her at a rehearsal for a Royal Gala Charity performance refuse point blank to cheat the public in this way, with the result that, of all the many singers who took part, only she and Dame Vera Lynn actually sang their numbers live on the night.
I doubt if any artist has ever had a fiercer commitment to the “profession” than Evelyn Laye had – it was, without doubt, the ruling passion of her life. Her adored parents, Gilbert Laye and Evelyn Stuart, were minor touring actors forever struggling to make a living between their annual pantomime engagements (her mother was a respected provincial Principal Boy), and eking out their precarious existence either in theatrical digs, or, when there was no work, in a series of furnished rooms.
Nevertheless, they were the kind of old pros who would never even consider “giving it up” and changing their way of life, and it was this sense of dedication that they passed on to their daughter. No wonder that a theatre was the only place in which she really felt she was at home, and why she was still working in the theatre even in 1992, when she was 92 years of age.
She was only 15 when she made her debut at the Theatre Royal, Brighton (where her father was briefly manager of the pier), as a Chinese servant girl in a touring company of the London success Mr Wu. For three years she played the provinces in a variety of parts (including a revue, Honi Soit, and the Principal Girl in pantomime at Portsmouth), by which time her singing voice and emerging beauty had begun to be recognised.
She made her London debut in 1918 when she took over a supporting role in The Beauty Spot at the illustrious Gaiety Theatre in the Strand, still basking in the glory that its late manager, George Edwardes, had bestowed on it by mounting a long succession of glamorous musical comedies. She remained a “Gaiety Girl” for the next three years, appearing in such shows as Going Up (during the run of which she made the first of her many records), and The Kiss Call. Whilst playing in the theatre every night, it was typical of her determination to equip herself for stardom that she sought to add to her armoury all the techniques she might conceivably need to help her to gain it. So her days were filled with dancing, fencing and singing lessons, all paid for out of her meagre salary.
She did not have long to wait. Seymour Hicks and his wife, the exquisite Ellaline Terriss, had had an enormous success at the Gaiety in 1894 with The Shop Girl. Now it was to be revived under Hicks’s direction, and he chose the 19-year-old Laye to play the lead. Her reception was so rapturous that it made her a star overnight. As the applause roared over her, Ellaline Terriss, standing up in her box, threw her own bouquet down at the young girl’s feet, whilst in the dressing-room afterwards, Sir Alfred Butt, the manager, tore up her contract for pounds 20 a week and trebled it.
London was now hers to command, and the successes of the next 20 years consolidated her position as the undisputed leading lady of the English musical comedy stage. Among them were three shows for Charles B. Cochran, a revival of The Merry Widow, and, most ambitious of all, her assumption of the Fritzi Massary role in Leo Fall’s Madame Pompadour (Daly’s Theatre, 1924).
Massary was no less than a theatrical genius, and the arch-sophisticate of German operetta, so no one thought that Evelyn Laye would be able to touch the role. But her success in it was emphatic, and the critics wrote lavishly in praise of her perfomance, noting that, in addition to the “inventory of beauty which is Miss Evelyn Laye” (James Agate’s phrase) and the lovely quality of her singing voice, was now added the confidence and ease of an accomplished actress. Other musicals – The Dollar Princess, Cleopatra, Betty in Mayfair, Princess Charming, Lilac Time, and Jerome Kern’s Blue Eyes – soon followed.
In 1925 Laye fell in love with and married the light comedian Sonnie Hale, much against the wishes of her parents, who refused to attend her wedding or to give her a reception afterwards. Since she had never before been separated from them, her deep distress soon led to a reconciliation, but it may well have been the strain that this must have imposed on the marriage that led Hale to abandon her in 1928 for another emerging talent, Jessie Matthews. The break-up led to the greatest mistake of her career.
Noel Coward invited her to star in his new musical play Bitter Sweet – she refused out of pique because it was to be presented by Cochran, who at that time was employing both Hale and Matthews in a Coward revue at the London Pavilion. Only when she saw Peggy Wood playing Sari in Bitter Sweet at a matinee did she realise the extent of her folly, and, as she admitted in her autobiography Boo To My Friends (1958), “I had broken the great rule of the theatre; I had not put it first.”
It was a mistake I doubt she ever made again. She had the considerable guts to swallow her pride and ask them humbly if she could be considered for the part when it was produced in New York. Meanwhile she was appearing in Sigmund Romberg’s The New Moon at Drury Lane, in which, with the cruellest irony, she nightly had to sing the hit number of the show, “Lover, Come Back to Me”.
In his autobiography Present Indicative, Noel Coward, describing the Broadway opening of Bitter Sweet, paid her the tribute of a lifetime:
It was Evelyn’s night from first to last. She played as though she were enchanted . . . Early on in the ballroom scene she conquered the audience completely by singing the quick waltz song so brilliantly and with such a quality of excitement, that the next few minutes of the play were entirely lost in one of the most prolonged outbursts of cheering I have ever heard in a theatre . . . It was she, and she alone, who put the play over that night.
In a letter to his mother, he also wrote, “How right you were about Evelyn, she certainly does knock spots off Peggy.”
Laye’s tremendous success on Broadway led to a Hollywood contract with Sam Goldwyn, for whom she made just one film, One Heavenly Night (1932). Seeing it today, even an appalling script and mediocre songs do not entirely efface her charm and beauty. But the experience made her escape back home to play Bitter Sweet in London, where she was triumphantly received.
At the Adelphi Theatre in 1932, she starred in Helen!, for which Cochran had assembled an astonishing array of talent. The musical adaptation of Offenbach’s La Belle Helene was by Korngold, the translation by A.P. Herbert, the choreography by Massine, the designs by Oliver Messel (the revolutionary all-white bedroom scene with the bath shaped like a great white swan), and the production by Max Reinhardt, the most admired director in Europe. Reinhardt’s telegram to her read: “You are that rare and holy trinity of the stage, a great singer, a great actress, and a great beauty. If I have added to your splendour at all, I could not have given you anything that was not already in you.”
After Helen! she made several British films, among them Evensong (1935), based on Beverley Nichols’s bitchy novel about the supposed rivalry between the opera-singers Nellie Melba and Toti dal Monte, in which she played Melba to Conchita Supervia’s Dal Monte. By this time, she had become romantically attached to the charming actor Frank Lawton, and, after a protracted courtship, they were married in 1934 in Hollywood, where he was playing David in MGM’s all-star production of David Copperfield. She made her second Hollywood film there, The Night is Young (1936), with Ramon Navarro, and the score by Sigmund Romberg included one of the many songs which will always be associated with her, “When I grow too old to dream”. Eventually they stayed in the United States for three years, while Lawton completed his contract, and she played on Broadway and in Los Angeles. Their marriage, though childless, was a famously happy one.
On her return, Cochran mounted a lavish production of Lehar’s Paganini (Lyceum, 1937), in which she played opposite the great Austrian tenor Richard Tauber. When, early in the rehearsals, she confessed that she was terrified of ruining their duets by singing flat, he immediately reassured her by saying that, when it came to her top notes, he would slip his arm round her waist and support her diaphragm, and this he did at every performance that they gave. Unexpectedly, the production was not a success and, for the first time for years, she found herself out of work and with no offers coming in. Since she couldn’t abide idleness, she launched a new career in variety and pantomime, where she improved on the family tradition by becoming the most sought-after Principal Boy of her time, as well as being top-of- the-bill at all the best variety theatres.
On the outbreak of war, she immediately volunteered to sing for the troops, and, on the formation of Ensa, she was put in command of all entertainments for the Navy. She also did her last Cochran show, Lights Up, at the Savoy, as well as three musicals, all of which were adversely affected by the wartime bombing. When the war finished, she made a success, even if it was not a smash hit, of the Yvonne Printemps roles in Oscar Straus’s Three Waltzes (Prince’s 1945), and, for the next nine years, developed her acting skills, largely in a series of touring versions of West End successes.
In 1954 she accepted a smallish role in a new musical starring Anton Walbrook, Wedding in Paris. During rehearsals, however, her part was constantly being built up, so that when the production opened at the Hippodrome in April, she was co-starred, and found herself once again the toast of London. She stayed with the show for almost two years, just as she later did in 1959 when she had another smash hit with the comedy The Amorous Prawn at the Saville, and for the first two years of the long-running No Sex Please – We’re British at the Strand (1971). By this time she had become a highly accomplished comedienne. In 1973 she was appointed CBE for her services to the theatre. Astonishingly, and surely most unfairly, this was the only honour she was to receive.
In 1969, Frank Lawton died. Though never a star of her magnitude, he was a respected and much-liked actor whose love and support throughout their marriage was matched by her devoted nursing of him during the numerous illnesses he endured at the end of his life.
As Laye’s career gradually slowed down, she still responded to any challenge that came her way. She continued to work on the stage, in radio, films and television. Retirement was anathema to her and as recently as 1992 she had been appearing to sold-out houses on Sunday nights at theatres all over the country. Though her singing voice was by now little more than a husky croak, the authority, the charm, the projection and the star quality were still intact, and audiences responded to it with standing ovations at the final curtain. This culminated in a memorable Sunday night performance at the London Palladium (26 July 1992) given in aid of the Theatrical Ladies Guild, of which she was President. The packed house included many hundreds of her fellow actors, and they seized the opportunity to show their affection and admiration for her superb professionalism and courage.
The genres of musical and light comedy to which she devoted her life may be thought of as essentially lightweight and frivolous. The secret of Evelyn Laye’s triumphant career was the total dedication she gave to honing her talents to as near perfection as it was in her to achieve. She was adored by every company she ever led, but beneath the beauty, the charm and the glamour was an artist of deep seriousness and absolute commitment. She was indeed a very bright, particular star, and one of the great glories of the English stage has finally left the scene.
Elsie Evelyn Lay (Evelyn Laye), actress and singer: born London 10 July 1900; married 1926 Sonnie Hale (marriage dissolved 1931), 1934 Frank Lawton (died 1969), died London 17 February 1996
The “Independent” obituary above can also be accessed online here.
Mona Washbourne was a terrific character actress who had acted on the stage since the 1920’s. She only hit her stride in the 1960’s when she herself was in her sixties. She was born in 1903 in Birmingham. She went to Hollywood to play the housekeeper Mrs Pearce in “My Fair Lady”. Other successes she had included the lion aunt to Glenda Jackson in “Stevie” about the poet Stevie Smith and the nanny to Anthony Andrews on TV’s “Brideshead Revisited”. She died in 1988.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Beloved round and roly-poly British character player Mona Washbourne was a natural symbol for the working-class as much of her early career was in playing midwives, barmaids, nannies, landladies and factory workers. Born November 27, 1903, in Birmingham, England, the daughter of Arthur Edmund Washbourne and his wife Kate (Robinson), the piano was to be her early passion and she initially trained at the Birmingham School of Music. Following concerting on the stage and broadcast playing on radio, she made her professional stage debut in 1924 with the “Modern Follies” concert party, as both pianist and soubrette. From this point, she delved herself completely into acting and went on tour with the “Fol-De-Rols” revue for three seasons, developing a special flair for bawdy, eccentric comedy. She performed in various repertory companies and earned her first major dramatic success on the London stage in 1937 with “Mourning Becomes Electra”. On the quirkier side, she won kudos for her “Madame Arcati” in “Blithe Spirit” (1945) and for her doting journalist in “The Winslow Boy” (1946). She went on to transfer her role in The Winslow Boy (1948) to film in the postwar years and saw a new avenue for her talents open up.
While most of Mona’s early film roles tended toward the small and dowdy, they were also quite colorful and seldom failed to make some sort of impression. They also grew in size as years passed. She played a midwife in Doctor in the House (1954); the older, ill-fated first wife to Bluebeard-like charmer Dirk Bogarde in Cast a Dark Shadow (1955); the protagonist’s mum in Billy Liar (1963) (another role she originated on stage in 1960); the no-nonsense “Higgins” housekeeper in My Fair Lady (1964); an aristocratic old shrew who employs psycho Albert Finney in the remake of Night Must Fall (1964); and a doddering aunt to another psychopath, Terence Stamp, in The Collector (1965).
ONE WAY PENDULUM, US poster, Erie Sykes (top), Peggy Mount (bottom right), 1964
Continuing to impress on the stage with roles in Noel Coward‘s “Nude with Violin” (1957) and “Present Laughter” (1958), she also appeared to great effect in “Misalliance” (1967) and was a natural for her perplexed aunt role in a madcap production of “Harvey” (1975). Here in the States, she earned a Tony nomination for her contribution in “Home” (1970). Mona crowned her career remarkably alongside Glenda Jackson as the dithery maiden aunt who lives with her eccentric niece, the poet “Stevie Smith”, in the play “Stevie”. A two-person show, she and Jackson won additional acclaim when they took Stevie (1978) to film. Mona won the top critics supporting awards, including New York, Boston and Los Angeles, but was surprisingly snubbed by the Academy at Oscar time. Her final career years (in the early 1980s) were spent on TV with roles as “Mrs. Higgins” in a version ofGeorge Bernard Shaw‘s Pygmalion (1981) starring Twiggy and Robert Powell; “Nanny Hawkins” in the epic miniseries, Brideshead Revisited (1981) and the “Queen Mum” inCharles & Diana: A Royal Love Story (1982). Long married to actor Basil Dignam, he died in 1979. Mona passed on slightly less than a decade later, in 1988, at age 84.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
“Los Angeles Times” obituary:
Mona Washbourne, the self-described “silly and rather charming” character actress best known for her stage and film representations of bosomy old biddies, has died at the age of 84.
Robert Enders, the producer-director who directed her in “Stevie,” in which she played poet Stevie Smith’s loving maiden aunt, said Monday that he had just learned that she died in a London nursing home on Nov. 15.
One of the last of the “Dear Old Things” who once abounded in English stage productions, Miss Washbourne typically garnered second, third or fourth billing but often as not came to be the character audiences remembered most fondly and best.
The Daily Telegraph of London, in writing of her death, remembered her as a performer who “came to symbolize in post-war British films and plays all that is decent and decorous in middle- or lower-class aunts and mothers.”
Although cast often in lower socioeconomic roles, she brought to them “domestic security and concern,” the Telegraph said.
Enders said of her Monday that “of all the actors I have known she left a lasting impression.”
Not all of that impression was on stage or in front of a camera. Enders remembered the time she came to New York to accept awards from the New York Critics and the National Board of Review for her work in “Stevie,” opposite Glenda Jackson, and that “she cashed in a first-class ticket so she could afford to bring a companion.”
Or the mink coat she refused to take off during interviews because “I worked hard enough to get it.”
Or the call Enders made about a year ago to the nursing home where she died only to find that she couldn’t come to the phone because, an attendant said, “I believe she’s having her gin now.”
Over the years Miss Washbourne worked with such giants of the theater as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Albert Finney and director George Cukor.
She clucked her way through dozens of roles, always seemingly unaware of how funny she actually was.
In “Stevie,” for instance, she exits into the kitchen to see how a roast of lamb is progressing, saying to no one in particular, “I must go and prod the joint.”
In a 1978 interview with The Times, a writer called her a “truly dear old thing, like her characters, but a bit cleverer than her scripts allow her to be.”
‘Nymphomaniac With Bad Feet’
In “Home,” opposite Gielgud and Richardson, she played a woman she described as “a nymphomaniac with bad feet.” She was Tom Courtenay’s mother in “Billy Liar” and Rex Harrison’s housekeeper in “My Fair Lady.”
She played four roles in one film, “O Lucky Man” in 1973, and spouted Shakespeare in Disney’s “The London Affair,” made originally for television.
Born in Birmingham, she trained as a pianist at the School of Music there and came to support herself by accompanying silent pictures. Later she worked with small orchestras, playing what she called “cheeky songs.”
She joined a repertory company and made her stage debut in 1924. For the rest of her career she moved back and forth between theater and film.
John Stride, who has died aged 81, was a golden boy of the early years of the National Theatre – he was a founder member of Laurence Olivier’s company at the Old Vic, appearing as Fortinbras in Hamlet, the inaugural production starring Peter O’Toole in 1963 – and a television star of some magnitude, playing the promiscuous lawyer David Main in four series of The Main Chance between 1969 and 1975.
His pre-National breakthrough was as Romeo to Judi Dench’s Juliet at the Old Vic in 1960. Kenneth Tynan hailed Franco Zeffirelli’s production as “a revelation, perhaps a revolution,” in that the lovers’ passion was, for the first time, so young, immediate, contemporary and palpable. The play was re-born.
And Stride double-booked his place in the history books with the first professional performance of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1967, playing the garrulous, amiably philosophical Rosencrantz opposite Edward Petherbridge’s irritable and sarcastic Guildenstern; in the opening coin-tossing scene of a play that placed the attendant lords centre stage with the tragedy of Hamlet as its scenery, Stride had called 85 “heads” in a row – correctly. The show, said the critic Peter Lewis, came out of the dark like a spot-lit jewel full of vibrations.
Stride could be brusque off stage, said Petherbridge, but was always impeccable on. He was a strikingly good-looking juvenile, with cherubic features, fine bearing and a voice that was God-given, according to another friend and contemporary, the actor David Weston: “John spoke verse as well as anyone I’ve ever heard.” But after his great bulge of success in the 1970s, Stride’s career foundered in the 80s and petered out with a florid performance as an ageing actor trying to make a come-back in Melvyn Bragg’s King Lear in New York, at the Chichester Festival theatre in 1992.
It was as though, starting as Peter Pan, a “Tennant’s boy” in the West End – hired by the all-powerful Binkie Beaumont of HM Tennant – and then Romeo and a National Theatre star, he failed to adjust to an older, middle-aged model.
He was born into a working-class family in South Norwood, south-east London, one of the five children of Alfred, a gardener and mechanic, and his wife Margaret (nee Prescott). He won a place at Alleyn’s school, Dulwich, then a direct grant grammar school, where he played soccer and water polo to high standards; he had extremely large hands, which earned him the nickname “Navvy”.
The key figure in his early life was the Alleyn’s English and drama master Michael Croft, who would later found the National Youth Theatre, in 1956. In a school production in 1952, Croft cast Stride as Hamlet, followed by Macbeth, and then as Antony. As a result, Stride won a scholarship to Rada – to the disapproval of his parents – alongside Alan Bates and O’Toole. He did his national service for two years with the Royal Artillery before playing a season at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1957 and making his West End debut in 1959 in Peter Shaffer’s Five Finger Exercise, a role he took over from Brian Bedford.
He then joined the Old Vic where his roles, apart from Romeo, included Lysander, Prince Hal and Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice. With the Old Vic he made his New York debut in 1962 as Malcolm in Macbeth and as Romeo. With Olivier’s new National, he was a fine Cassio in Othello (with Olivier and Maggie Smith), Dunois in Joan Plowright’s Saint Joan, Valentine in an exquisite production of Congreve’s Love for Love, Andrei in Three Sisters and the title role in Brecht’s version of Marlowe’s Edward II.
As he eased away from the National, the film career he had started in 1963 as a sympathetic barman in Bitter Harvest (1963) – starring Janet Munro as a Welsh innocent abroad in London, and based on a Patrick Hamilton novel – picked up with roles as Ross in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), with Jon Finch in the title role and Francesca Annis as a stunning, nakedly sleep-walking Lady Macbeth, John Wayne in Douglas Hickox’s Brannigan (1975) and with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick in Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), in which he played a psychiatrist.
But in none of these films did he make the same impact as in The Main Chance on television, and that is where he stayed, with a couple of significant sorties into the commercial theatre: co-starring with Eileen Atkins in Marguerite Duras’ Suzanna Andler in 1971 at the Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford; and with Vanessa Redgrave and Jeremy Brett in Michael Blakemore’s superb 1973 West End revival – retrieval, really – of Noël Coward’s Design for Living at the Phoenix; this “disgusting, three-sided erotic hotchpotch”, as one of the “excluded” characters in the play dubs it, as restored to the repertoire as a modern classic.
His TV follow-up to The Main Chance was Wilde Alliance (1978), in which he and Julia Foster were a husband and wife team of amateur detectives, but it lasted for only one series. After playing Bluntschli in Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Oxford Playhouse in 1976, he became a stranger to the stage until the Bragg play in Chichester. And in this same year, 1992, he scored heavily, for the last time on television, as two debauched characters: a lecherous businessman, Sir Bernard Bellamy, in Fay Weldon’s Growing Rich; and as the promiscuous Welsh “media type” Alun Weaver in Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.
By the time he played Bragg’s actor-laddie, he seemed to be a caricatured, bloated version of his former self. The play, anyway, was a poor re-tread of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser (1980), in which Freddie Jones (and, on film, Albert Finney) played a version of Donald Wolfit as Lear during the blitz; Stride’s Lear in modern Manhattan, besieged by two wives, a strident television gossip journalist and a drug addict daughter, was too forced a dramatic analogy, and Stride himself seemed to have morphed into a snowy-haired, bibulous and bulging version of Bragg’s old director buddy Ken Russell. It was, nonetheless, a memorable and agreeably growling performance, and approved by the critics, who were collectively delighted to see him back in action.t
Stride was twice married, first in 1958 to his Rada contemporary Virginia Thomas (the marriage ended in divorce) and then, in 1972, to the actor April Wilding.
She died in 2003 and there are friends who say he never fully recovered from this blow. His last years were spent in a nursing home near Oxford. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage and one from his second.
• John Edward Stride, actor, born 11 July 1936; died 20 April 2018
Ben Cross was born in 1947 in London. Upon graduating from RADA, he began his career on the stage appearing in such plays as “Royal Hunt of the Sun” and “Death of a Salesman”. In 1978 he played Billy Flynn in the musical “Chicago”. He had a major success with his role as Harold Abrahams in “Chariots of Fire”. He also scored with leading roles on TV in A.J. Cronin’s “The Citadel” and “The Far Pavilions”. In 2007 he was cast in the new Star Trek film. Interview with Ben Cross in “The Jewish Chronicle” can be accessed here. Sadly Ben Cross died aged 72 in Vienna in August 2020
“Guardian” obituary in 2020
The actor Ben Cross, who has died of cancer aged 72, took the film world by storm in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire when he played Harold Abrahams, the British Jewish athlete driven as a runner not just to win gold at the 1924 Paris Olympics, but also to battle antisemitism. A fellow British team member, the devout Scottish Protestant missionary Eric Liddell, played by Ian Charleson, is similarly seen in a quest to combat discrimination. Abrahams wins the 100 metres, while Liddell triumphs in the 400 metres.
The two stars shared one of the most memorable opening scenes in film history, among the sprinters on a training run along a Scottish beach, enhanced dramatically with moments in slow motion and Vangelis’s inspirational music.
“The water was freezing,” recalled Cross, “and we had bare feet – completely ridiculous. If you spoke to a sports trainer about running barefoot in ice-cold water, they’d ask you if you were mad. But, look, it made for a good opening sequence.”
The 1981 film, produced by David Puttnam and directed by Hugh Hudson, won four Academy awards at the following year’s Oscars ceremony. However, despite Colin Welland’s “warning” to Hollywood that “the British are coming” as he accepted his statuette for best original screenplay, the two stars never quite fulfilled the promise they had shown in such a high-profile film – even though they jointly received the Variety Club’s most promising artiste award.
While Charleson chose to spend much of his time on stage before his premature death from Aids in 1990, Cross found most of his best roles on television, which utilised his bony features and earnest, sincere air, and said he had no hunger for theatre.
“Of all the jobs I’ve been offered, television was the best quality,” he later said. “I haven’t liked most of the films I’ve been offered. Film has the greatest international audience, so you have to be very choosy about what you do.”
He had his first starring role on the small screen in The Citadel (1983), the BBC’s 10-part adaptation of AJ Cronin’s semi-autobiographical novel about a doctor who swaps his crusading job in a poor Welsh mining village of the 1920s for a wealthy existence taking care of London society before realising he has sacrificed his ideals.
Going from the parochial to the international, Cross headed the cast in The Far Pavilions (1984), a lavish mini-series set in 19th-century India during the days of the British Raj. As the dashing romantic hero Ashton Pelham-Martyn (“Ash”), he played a British officer in love with a princess and battling to understand his own identity, having been orphaned and previously believing himself to be of Indian birth. To prepare for the role, Cross went to the country four weeks before shooting began in order to absorb the atmosphere – just as he had spent three months “training like a madman” for Chariots of Fire.
“The man discovers he is English, yet his heart and emotions are very much Indian and he’s accepted in neither world,’’ reflected Cross at the time. “These misfit roles seem to seek me out. I always seem to play people not totally at home in the situation we discover them.”
Ben Cross and Amy Irving The Far Pavilions, 1984. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock
Born in Paddington, London, to Catherine (nee O’Donovan), a cleaner, and Harry, a doorman, Cross was brought up a Catholic and attended Bishop Thomas Grant school in Streatham, south London.
Playing the title role in a school production of Toad of Toad Hall brought him laughs – and an ambition to act that was a long time unrealised after leaving home at 15, living in a van and working as a window cleaner.
He eventually found jobs backstage, as a carpenter for the Welsh National Opera and property master at the Alexandra theatre, Birmingham. Then, during two years at Wimbledon theatre, watching a different show every week, Cross decided to get himself under the stage lights, successfully auditioned for Rada and graduated in 1972, aged 24.
Apart from a handful of TV roles over the rest of the decade, his only screen appearance was as Trooper Binns – described by Cross as a “glorified extra” – alongside an all-star cast in the 1977 war film A Bridge Too Far.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/CSav51fVlKU?wmode=opaque&feature=oembedRunning scenes from Chariots of Fire, with Vangelis’s theme music for the film
However, he began to get attention on stage. During a stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company he took the role of Kevin Cartwright in the world premiere of the Peter Nichols national service farce Privates on Parade (Aldwych theatre, 1977). His singing voice was showcased when he played Wally in the original London production of the Cy Coleman-Michael Stewart musical I Love My Wife (Prince of Wales theatre, 1977-78) and, at the time of auditioning for Chariots of Fire, he was Billy Flynn, Roxie Hart’s lawyer, in Chicago (Cambridge theatre, 1979-80), observed by the Stage as “strong and sly as the courtroom superstar”.
His other television roles included Padre Rufino, a Franciscan monk aiding Jewish wartime refugees, in The Assisi Underground (1985), the vampire Barnabas Collins in the 1991 mini-series Dark Shadows, Rudolf Hess in Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial (2006), Prince Charles in William & Kate (2011) and the ruthless Ukrainian mob boss Mr Rabbit in the first two series (2013-14) of the American drama Banshee.
Ben Cross in London in 2012. Photograph: Jon Furniss/Invision/AP
The Italian production Honey Sweet Love (1994) gave him a rare starring film role, as a British army officer falling in love in Sicily during the second world war. He was also seen on the big screen as Prince Malagant in First Knight (1995) and as Sarek, Spock’s father, in the 2009 film Star Trek.
Cross’s first two marriages, to Penelope Butler (1977-92) and Michele Moerth (1996-2005), both ended in divorce. In 2018 he married Deyana Boneva in Bulgaria, where he had been living for more than 10 years.
She survives him, along with the two children of his first marriage, Lauren and Theo.
• Ben Cross (Harry Bernard Cross), actor, born 16 December 1947; died 18 August 2020
