Laurence Oliver died in 1989, just as Kenneth Branagh was launching the film of ‘Henry V’, which he wrote and directed and in which he starred. The coincidence made some journalists, especially in the U.S. wonder whether Branagh as the new Olivier.
Then, when Branagh’s performance was nominated for the annual awards at the end of the year he seldom looked like being strong competition against Daniel Day-Lewis.
For ‘My Left Foot’ this second young British actor swept all before him. That is not to say that Day-Lewis is the next Oliver, for which over the years there have been many failed claimants.
Certainly it does not look likely that Day Lewis will seek greatness on the stage, as Olivier did. But it would seem that we have a chameleon, one gifted with sensitivity and authority.
Because of his looks and the Oscar won while so young he may become a leading romantic actor in Hollywood – of that is what he and Hollywood want ( and with the British film industry in its depressed state let us at least hope he will dazzle us with his versatility from there). But the closest analogy with Olivier is one that both actors probably would appreciated – that other actors are in awe of him”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The Independent Years”. (1991).
One Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;Original Cinema 1-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters
Daniel Day-Lewis has created a gallery of terrific characters since his first major film in 1985. He was born in 1957. His range is astonishing. Witness his Christy Brown in “My Left Foot” and compare it to Hawkeye the scout in *Last of the Mohicans”, Bill the Butcher in “Gangs of New York” or the right-wing punk in “My Beautiful Launderette”. As he is very selective about what work he takes on, one can be deprived of his great acting for long periods of time. Each new performance is always highly anticipated.
When he was making “The Boxer”, I met him when traveling to London from Dublin when we were beside each other on the plane. He was very friendly and spoke about his various films especially about “The Last of the Mohicans”.
Interesting interview in “The Guardian” can be accessed here.
Barbara Mullen was an Irish actress well known in the UK for playing the part of Janet McPherson, the housekeeper in Dr. Finlay’s Casebook. Although the role of Janet brought her fame in later years, she already had made her mark in the theatre.
Mullen’s parents, Pat and Bridget, were from a fishing family on Inishmore island off the coast of County Galway, Ireland. The family had emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, where Mullen was born. She made her stage debut as a dancer at the age of three. When her father returned to Aran, later contributing to the making of Man of Aran, the classic documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty,[3] her mother stayed in the U.S. to bring up the 10 children. Mullen sang and danced in various theatres all over the U.S. and then moved to the UK in 1934, where she trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
She wrote Life is my Adventure, her autobiography, at 23. A year later she made her London debut, acting the title role in the London West End production of Jeannie, a comedy about a Scottish girl taking a European holiday after coming into money. She became an overnight star.
Mullen repeated the role of ‘Jeannie’ on television and in the 1941 British film, which was her cinema debut, alongside Michael Redgrave, and she followed this with appearances in 20 more films, including A Place of One’s Own, Corridor of Mirrors and Innocent Sinners. She also played a notable role in the 1942 film version of Robert Ardrey‘s Thunder Rock as Ellen Kirby, the feminist who is jailed for her subversive ideas.[4]
She was married to documentary film-maker John Taylor, Man of Aran’s cameraman, [1]and they had two daughters, Briged and Susannah.
She appeared on television in America and Britain in programmes such as Juno and the Paycock and The Danny Thomas Show before being offered the role in Dr. Finlay’s Casebook, which began on the BBC in 1962. Her character, Janet McPherson, was the ever-efficient housekeeper to Doctors Finlay and Cameron at Arden House in the fictional Scottish village of Tannochbrae. When the series finished on television nine years later, it transferred to radio, running until 1978.
Barbara Mullen died of a heart attack in London, England on 9 March 1979.
Barbara Mullen was born in 1914 in Boston U.S.A of parents who came from the Aran Islands. When she was 24 she wrote her autobiography “Life Is My Adventure”. In 1935 she became an overnight star on the London stage with her performance in the lead in the play “Jeannie”. She later replaced Celia Johnson in the London stage adaptation of Daphene Du Maurier’s “Rebecca”. Her greatest fame though came from the long-running BBC series “Dr Finlay’s Casebook” where she played the housekeper Janet. The series ran from 1962 until 1971 and then ran on radio until 1978. Barbara Mullen died in 1979. Interview from 1974 in “The Catholic Herald” can be accessed here. Good biography on Oxford database here.
Ann Todd, actress: born Hartford, Cheshire 24 January 1909; married 1933 Victor Malcolm (one son), 1939 Nigel Tangye (one daughter), 1949 David Lean (died 1991; marriage dissolved 1957); died London 6 May 1993.
The Seventh Veil (1945) was the perfect film for its time; a heady brew of psychiatry, classical music and a long-suffering heroine who finally has to choose from four handsome leading men, it was an epitome of the Hollywood melodramas being turned out for stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Enormously popular all over the world, it made Todd an international box-office name and consolidated James Mason’s status. The scene in which he smashes his cane down upon the keyboard at which Todd sits (‘Well, Francesca, if you won’t play for me you shan’t play for anyone else ever again’) has become one of the most famous in film history.
Born in 1909 in Hartford, Cheshire, Todd studied at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art with the intention of becoming a teacher of elocution and fencing, but after being asked to play a ‘Faery Child’ in WB Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire at the Arts Theatre, London, in 1928, she decided to be an actress. She made her film debut in Keepers of Youth (1931) but during the next decade spent more time on the stage (including roles in The Middle Watch, Cynara, When Ladies Meet, No More Ladies, Flood Tide and The Man in Half Moon Street) than in films. Screen appearances included The Ghost Train (1931), The Water Gypsies (1932) The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934), Things to Come (1936) and The Squeaker (1937).
The first of three films in which she was directed by David Lean, The Passionate Friends (1949, updated by Eric Ambler from HG Wells’s novel) had excellent performances by Todd, Trevor Howard and particularly Claude Rains as wife, lover and husband. (It was retitled One Woman’s Story in the US, where the Production Code forbade the use of ‘passionate’ in a title). After its completion, Todd and Lean were married and he acceded to her request to portray Madeleine Smith on screen.
She made a strong impression as Ralph Richardson’s neurotic wife in South Riding (1937), in one sequence riding her horse up a mansion staircase before beating Richardson with her riding crop, then played a sensitive ingenue in Poison Pen (1939) and a seductive singer (her voice dubbed) in Ships with Wings (1941) before returning to the London stage to play the title roles of Peter Pan (1942) and Lottie Dundass (1943). She wanted to make a film version of the latter, but the producer Alexander Korda told her that she was not yet ready to play a murderess on the screen.
Todd’s next West End role was that of Madeleine Smith, the enigmatic suspected murderess in The Rest is Silence (1944). Todd became fascinated with the real-life character and conceived an ambition to play her on screen. She returned to films with the small but effective role of Robert Donat’s understanding nurse in Perfect Strangers (1945) and this led to her casting in The Seventh Veil.
An international star with the film’s success, Todd made Gaiety George and the bleak Daybreak (both 1946) before journeying to Hollywood, where her experience was to be no happier than that of Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert and Patricia Roc before her. Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) gave her the thankless role of Gregory Peck’s wife in a static thriller which put its emphasis on the accused murderess played by Alida Valli, while Lewis Allen’s So Evil, My Love (made in England) was a darkly brooding film noir which was not popular.
Though not a commercial success (the public awareness that the story ended with a ‘not proven’ verdict and the question of guilt undetermined was doubtless a deterrent), Madeleine (1950) remains one of Lean’s most impressive works in which he makes brilliant use of the glacial blonde Todd’s cool, Garboesque quality, allowing the viewer to read a myriad of emotions and motives into her sphinx-like features.
Todd next performed in a stage version of The Seventh Veil, which was not successful, and starred in Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952) as the wife of the test pilot Nigel Patrick.
The theatre again began to dominate her acting life: a period with the Old Vic Company (1954-55) featured her as Lady Macbeth, Katharine and other Shakespeare heroines, and was followed by a revival of The Doctor’s Dilemma (1956) and her debut on Broadway in The Four Winds (1957)
. The following year she took over from Claire Bloom in the London production of Duel of Angels. Her sporadic films, The Green Scarf (1954), Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity (1957), Taste of Fear (1961), The Son of Captain Blood (1962), 90 Degrees in the Shade (1965), The Fiend (1971),
The Human Factor (1979, a dull thriller despite being a Grahame Greene story, adapted by Tom Stoppard and directed by Otto Preminger) and The McGuffin (1985) were not impressive.
Divorced from Lean in 1957, Todd became a film-maker herself with two well-regarded documentaries Thunder of the Gods (1966) and Thunder of the Kings (1967).
She also wrote her autobiography The Eighth Veil (1980), and continued to make occasional television appearances. Last year she was featured on television (looking extremely frail) in an episode of Maigret.
Her obituary in “The Independent” can be accessed here.
Judy Geeson’s first major film role was as the young teenager in Sidney Poitier’s class in the East End of London in “To Sir With Love”. The film was a huge hit in the mid 1960’s helped somewhat by the No 1 hit of the title song sung by Lulu. Judy Geeson went on to star in several British films and then was Hollywood bound. She was featured in the hit U.S. television series “Mad About You” with Helen Hunt. A mini-biography on IMDB can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
Frequently called “fresh faced” during her ingenue period, and still sweet-smiled in middle age, Judy Geeson made her stage debut at age nine, and began appearing on British TV by age 12. Her screen debut as Pamela Dare, a thoughtful and awakening schoolgirl with a crush on Sidney Poitier’s upright schoolteacher, in “To Sir With Love” (1967) brought her notice and acclaim. She went on to play provocative leads in a number of British and other films, including “Prudence and the Pill” (1968), “Brannigan” (1975), the thriller “Dominique” (1977) and “Horror Planet” (1980). She seemed to have a predilection for screen pregnancies: in “Prudence and the Pill,” she played David Niven’s sexually-active niece who finds herself with child while in “Horror Planet,” she was impregnated by a monster and becomes a killer. Geeson spent much of the 80s concentrating on stage and film roles. She returned to features in 1991 to co-star in “Young Goodman Brown,” based on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, but it went unreleased for almost six years.
The attractive blonde found a better range of roles on the small screen. While still in her ingenue stage, Geeson spent two years (1965-67) as the teenaged daughter in a family that moved from London to the countryside in the British drama series “The Newcomers” and essayed the role of Lucy Honeychurch in a BBC 1973 adaptation of “A Room with a View.” As she matured, Geeson performed in a range of comic and dramatic roles, including a role as a leader on a planet ruled by women where men were slaves in “Star Maidens” (syndicated, 1977-78). She was Emmy-nominated for a guest appearance on “Archie Bunker’s Place” (CBS, 1981), and often guest-starred on primetime series, including “Murder, She Wrote,” “The A-Team” (NBC, 1986), “MacGyver (ABC, 1988) and “Star Trek: Voyager” (UPN, 1995), the latter in the recurring role of Sandrine. Geeson achieved a more lasting recurring role on the highly regarded and popular Helen Hunt-Paul Reiser comedy series “Mad About You” (NBC, 1992- ), playing their snooty British neighbor Helen. Other notable credits include “Poldark II” and “Danger U.X.B.,” both seen in the USA on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theatre.” She came full-circle in 1996 when she reprised the role of Pamela in the CBS TV-movie “To Sir With Love II,” making a cameo appearance in a scene in which a retiring Sidney Poitier is being honored.
Geeson, whose younger sister Sally is also an actress, was formerly married actor-director Kristoffer Tabori, with whom she appeared in the Off-Broadway play “The Common Pursuit.”
Although Julia Arnall was born in Vienna, Austria, her film making career was based totally in the United Kingdom. Her first major role was in the film “Lost” in 1956. This suspense film is worth seeking out for the amazine number of actors it has in supporting roles. It is a virtual who’s who of British 50’s cinema. Her other films include “Chain of Events” and “The Trunk”. She retired from acting in the late 60’s. Julia Arnall died in 2018 in Brighton.
Cathleen Nesbitt hailed from Belfast where she attended Queen’s University. In 1911 she joined the Irish Players and performed with them in the U.S. in Synge’s “The Well of the Saints” and “The Playboy of the Western World”. She was the love of the poet Rupert Brooke who was to die in World War One. An interesting article on their releationship can be sourced on the Telegraph website here.
Over the next thirty years she made many British theatre and film appearances. In 1951 she was on Broadway with Audrey Hepburn in “Gigi” and made her first American film in 1953 which was “Three Coins in the Fountain”. In 1956 she was back on Broadway again in “My Fair Lady”.Her last film was in 1980 when she made “The Never Never Land” at the age of 92. She died two years later.
IMDB entry:
The Calendar by Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), 1929. Lady Panniford, played by Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982), left, and Garry Anson, played bu Owen Nares (1888-1943), right. The Play, vol. 55, no. 331, (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***Family Plot, lobbycard, (aka LA TRAMA), left top to bottom: Karen Black, Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, Alfred Hitchcock, center from left: Cathleen Nesbitt, Barbara Harris, 1976. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Diminutive, genteel Cathleen Nesbitt was a grand dame of the theatre on both sides of the Atlantic in a career spanning seven decades. Among almost 300 roles on stage, she excelled at comic portrayals of sophisticated socialites and elegant mothers. Hollywood used her, whenever a gentler, sweeter version of Gladys Cooper was needed, yet someone still possessed of a subtly sarcastic wit and turn of phrase. Cathleen attended Queen’s University in Belfast and the Sorbonne in Paris. Encouraged by a friend of her father – none other than the legendary Sarah Bernhardt – to enter the acting profession, she was taken on by Victorian actress and drama teacher Rosina Filippi (1866-1930). Cathleen’s first appearance on stage was in 1910 at the Royalty Theatre in London. This was followed in November 1911 by her Broadway debut with the touring Abbey Theatre Players in ‘The Well of the Saints’.
From here on, and for the rest of her long life, she was never out of a job, demonstrating her range and versatility by playing anything from villainesses to being a much acclaimed Kate in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Perdita in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Audrey Hepburn‘s grandaunt in ‘Gigi’, the Dowager Empress in ‘Anastasia’ and the gossipy ‘humorously animated’ Julia Shuttlethwaite of T.S. Eliot‘s ‘The Cocktail Party’. Her Mrs. Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’, Brooks Atkinson described as played with ‘grace and elegance’, which also pretty much sums up Cathleen’s career in films.
Her first motion picture role was a lead in the drama The Faithful Heart (1922), adapted from an Irish play. She then absented herself from the screen for the next decade, resurfacing in supporting roles in British films, though rarely cast in worthy parts, possible exceptions being Man of Evil (1944) and Jassy (1947). Her strengths were rather better showcased during her sojourn in Hollywood, which began in 1952. In addition to prolific appearances in anthology television, she also appeared in several big budget films, most memorably as Cary Grant‘s perspicacous grandmother in An Affair to Remember (1957) and as gossipy Lady Matheson (alongside Gladys Cooper) in Separate Tables (1958). One of her last roles of note was as Julia Rainbird, who instigates the mystery in Alfred Hitchcock‘s final film, Family Plot (1976).
On the instigation of her friend Anita Loos, author of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, Cathleen wrote her memoirs, ‘A Little Love and Good Company’ in 1977. For her extraordinarily long career in the acting profession, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Honours List the following year. She retired just two years prior to her death in 1983 at the age of 93.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Her obituary in “The Los Angeles Times” can be accessed here.
Fiery lead of the London stage, in occasional films. Ure’s first husband was playwright John Osborne, for whom she starred in both the stage (1956) and screen (1960) versions of “Look Back in Anger”; she received her widest acclaim for her sensual performance as Clara in “Sons and Lovers” (1960). Her second husband was Robert Shaw, whom she later divorced. Ure died of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates at age 42.
An article in “Helensburgh Heroes”:
Eileen Mary Ure was born on February 18, 1933 in Glasgow, Scotland to civil engineer Colin McGregor Ure and his wife Edith Swinburne. Colin’s father, and Eileen’s grandfather, was the prosperous flour merchant John Ure, who lived in the magnificent Leiper designed Cairndhu House in Helensburgh, and served for three years as the Lord Provost of Glasgow and was also the City’s first chairman of the Health Committee. Mary, as she was became universally known, spent her early years at her home with her parents in Kilcreggan before being sent away to school in York, attending the Mount, the UK’s only Quaker Day and Boarding School for girls. It was during the lead up to the Festival of Britain in 1951, that Mary was to find her calling. She was chosen to play the Virgin Mary in a major revival of the York Mystery Plays after a nationwide search. The play’s producers, impressed with her performance sent her to study at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art in London.
Despite her first aspiration of wanting to return to Glasgow to teach drama, she was discovered by the impresario Hugh Beaumont whilst performing in Central School productions and in 1954 she made her professional stage debut in Manchester. Her London stage debut was to follow later that year when Mary was to star in Jean Anouilh’s ‘Time Remembered’.
It was in 1955 that Mary’s star was to reach new heights. Whilst playing Ophelia, alongside Paul Scofield, in Hamlet at Stratford, her natural beauty and talent captured the attention of the Hungarian film making brothers the Kordas.
Scofield revealed that he detected an underlying frailty in Mary, stating ‘She was completely enchanting and, on the surface so easy to get along with, but there was elusiveness about her, something unrevealed and dormant.’ Mary was offered a lead supporting role in the 1955 remake of Zoltan Korda’s 1939 ‘Four Feathers’, renamed ‘Storm over the Nile’ and directed by Terence Young, with the publicity posters featuring the credit “Introducing Mary Ure”. In 1956, Mary was offered a lead role that would make her name, and for a period lead to her becoming the new face of British Theatre. The role was Alison Porter, a reserved impassive wife, in the play ‘Look Back in Anger’ by the playwright John Osborne.
Mary had met Osborne earlier during a production of “A View from the Bridge”. At first Osborne, was sceptical that Mary could play the part, but was persuaded by director, Tony Richаrdson, who believed that Mary’s experience of Glasgow would suit the role. Richardson’s instincts proved sound and Mary made the role her own. Mary began an affair with Osborne, with the playwright leaving his first wife, Pamela Lane, shortly before the opening of the play. She married Osborne in 1957 and they set up home in a house in Woodfall Street just off London’s Kings Road, a few hundred yards from The Royal Court Theatre, where the play had been staged. In 1958, the play transferred to Broadway and Mary received rave reviews and a Best Actress Tony nomination, with one critic writing: “As the tormented wife, Mary Ure succeeds in retaining the pride of an intelligent young woman by filling her silences with unspoken vitality, by being alive and by glowing with youth in every sequence.”
The marriage between Mary and John would only last five years with his extremely complicated love life, womanising, abusive behaviour and their differences of opinion on starting a family contributing greatly to the breakdown. It was also noted at this time that Osborne was beginning to resent Mary’s growing dependence on alcohol. Osbornе’s cruelty was observed by the writer Doris Lessing, who watched as Mary was reduced to tears in a bistro by one of John’s verbal attacks: ‘I was there with somebody else and we attempted to defuse the situation, but he never let up for a second. He flayed her, quite like Jimmy Porter.’ The impending breakdown in her marriage, led Mary into an affair with the upcoming steely blue eyed actor Robert Shaw, who she had met in 1959. It is stated that whilst John was at least making some attempt to keep his affairs hidden, Mary was positively indiscreet with hers, going out of her way to leave correspondence from Shaw lying round the marital home for Osborne to discover. It was also in 1959 that Mary transferred her portrayal of Alison to the big screen in the film version of ‘Look back in Anger’ starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom. It was later suggested by Burton in his autobiography, that he and Mary had had a brief affair during filming.
In 1960, Mary Ure starred as Clara Dawes in the screen adaptation of DH Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’ and was nominated for both a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. As an interesting aside, Mary remains one of only two Scottish born women to receive and Acting Academy award nomination – the other being Helensburgh’s Deborah Kerr Despite her success, her personal life was still an extraordinarily tangled web, as evidenced by the fact that whilst John was on holiday in the South of France with his mistress Jocelyn Rickard in 1961, Mary was giving birth to a son. The child was Mary’s son Colin Murray Osborne, named after her Scottish Father, and born on the 31st August 1961. Even though Osborne was named as the Father on the birth certificate, it was widely believed thought the child was Shaw’s, and 24 months later he by formally adopted the young child. Osborne and Mary finally divorced in 1962 and she wedded Shaw on April 13th 1963 in secret in Buckinghamshire. Their honeymoon was spent in Istanbul where Robert was playing the vicious assassin Red Grant in the 1963 Bond film ‘From Russia with Love.’ At the time, and away from a pretty volatile, and at times violent, home life, Mary’s professional career had also started to settle down. Mary continued to star in a few plays in London during the 1960’s, including Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’ and ‘Duel of Angels’ with Vivien Leigh.
Mary and Shaw would have four children together (eight in total including four from Robert’s previous marriage to Jennifer Bourke) and everything appeared well, with Mary quoted as saying, “they enjoyed a gloriously loving, combative, thoroughly agreeable relationship.” In 1963, and after an absence of three years, Mary returned to cinema screens with a role in the Sci-Fi drama ‘The Mind Benders’ with Dirk Bogarde, followed by two films with her husband, 1964’s ‘The Luck of Ginger Coffey’ and 1967’s ‘Custer of the West’. This film was then followed by the role for which Mary is perhaps most associated with by the majority of cinema going audience. In 1968, Mary played a beautiful and gutsy allied agent in the block buster adaptation of Alastair MacLean’s ‘Where Eagles Dare’ opposite Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton (apparently Elizabeth Taylor insisted on being on set to prevent Burton re-igniting his feelings for Mary) It was a box office smash but it was also to be Mary’s last big screen role for five years. Robert Shaw was fiercely protective, and some say jealous, of Mary, and he insisted that take a step back and concentrate on being a full time mother and wife. Mary didn’t give up her career entirely but the demands of motherhood, she bore three children during this period, and her growing dependence on alcohol meant her career lapsed. Shaw’s agent, John French, would later state bluntly: ‘Shaw had taken all her cash, demolished her job, made her into a housekeeper.’
As her alcohol dependence increased, Mary tried to resurrect her career in 1973 appearing in what was eventually her final film ‘A Reflection of Fear’ with Shaw. Mary appeared dissipated and it was evident that she was unwell. She attempted a return to Broadway in 1974 in The Phoenix Theatre’s production of Congrieve’s “Love for Love” but she was unceremoniously released after a disastrous Saturday matinee performance, being replaced by her understudy the then unknown Glenn Close. It is reported that whilst residing in New York, Mary was found naked in Central Park. According to Shaw’s agent John French, Mary’s reaction to liquor was very different to that of her husband’s. It launched her into turbulent rages and she became very abusive, feeling compelled to rid herself of her clothing. The couple had by now moved to Ireland for tax reasons, but the cracks in their marriage continued, with Shaw having an affair with his secretary and Mary continuing to seek solace in alcohol.
In 1975 Mary took a leading role with Honor Blackman and Brian Blessed in the Don Taylor stage-play production The Exorcism, adapted from the 1972 BBC TV film production of the same name – a sinister tale of a group of friends trapped in a cottage at Christmas, it was to be Mary’s last role in life. A few hours after it had opened on the London stage Mary Ure was dead. ragically, Mary died on Thursday 3rd April 1975. The circumstances of Mary’s death led the sensational press to talk of a ‘curse’ on the production in which she was appearing. It was her husband Robert Shaw, returning home from a break in filming, who discovered his wife dead in their Curzon Street home. At the time, there was much speculation that Mary had committed suicide. Later, at the inquest the actual cause of her death was revealed as accidental death – a tragic combination of prescription drugs and alcohol.
Since the birth of her daughter, Hannah, six years earlier, and at the start of her break from the limelight, Mary had been on prescription medication for depression and often became careless with the dosage. On the night of her death, Mary had indulged in a few drinks at the play’s opening night party and had arrived home to take some her prescription drugs – a combination that proved fatal. Mary who had once been described as ‘The Scottish Marilyn’, who had ventured from the West Coast of Scotland to the world’s greatest stages, was dead at just 42 years of age. Of Mary’s fairly brief and tragic life, John Osborne wrote poignantly: “Mary, whose destiny dragged her so pointlessly from a life better contained by the softly lapping waters of the Clyde”. Robert Shaw died three years later on 28 August, 1978 on a country road in Ireland of a heart attack.
Eileen Mary Ure is buried in London Road Cemetery, Coventry, Warwickshire, England
This article can also be accessed online at the “Helensburgh Heroes” website here.
19th March 1955: Scottish stage and film actress Mary Ure (1933 – 1975) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 66 No 12 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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.
