Michel Ray

Michel Ray was born in 1944 in England to an English mother and a Brazilian father. He made his film debut in “The Divided Heart” in 1954. In 1956 he went to America to make “The Brave One” and “The Tin Star” amongst others. In 1962 he was featured in “Lawrence of Arabia”. He ceased acting in 1964 and became a stockbroker.

His IMDB entry:

He was born into a wealthy family having an English mother and a Brazilian father. He was educated in Switzerland where he learnt to ski. His parents were friends of producerMichael Balcon who was looking for a boy who could ski for his 1954 film The Divided Heart (1954). Young Michel fitted the part perfectly and started a film career which culminated in the role of Faraj in Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

This project took eighteen months and caused Michel to look at the affect film work was having on his education. He decided to quit acting. He subsequently attended Harvard where he read business studies. After university he joined White Weld & Co moving on to NM Rothschild and Credit Suisse First Boston. In his London city career in investment banking he made his first millions.

In 1995 he joined Nikko Securities and in 1998 became the first non-Japanese member of the main board. Meantime he had continued his passion for winter sports and was a member of the British Olympic ski team at the 1968 Winter games in Grenoble, France

He was in the team again in ’72 and ’76 competing on these occasions in the luge. He had also married a childhood friend Charlene, daughter of Alfred “Freddie” Heineken. Her mother was Lucille Cummins daughter of a Kentucky Bourbon maker.

Her father Freddie died in January 2002 and left his controlling interest, 50.05%, in the Heineken brewing empire to the couple. It is estimated at three billion pounds sterling or four point two billion dollars. Michel’s life story is more glamorous than many a Hollywood fiction.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Crombie

MailOnline” article on Michel Ray in 2012:

As a teenager, Michel de Carvalho was living every boy’s fantasy. While his friends sat in school, 17-year-old Michel was a movie star, with a coveted role in Sir David Lean’s epic, Lawrence Of Arabia.

Between breaks in filming, he caroused through the fleshpots of Beirut with Hollywood stars Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, pursued by hordes of adoring females. The film won seven Oscars and would go down in cinema history. Michel, using the stage name Michel Ray, seemed destined for fame.

Many child actors would let the experience go to their heads and veer off the rails, eventually disappearing from view. But Buckinghamshire-born Michel has continued to thrive and enjoy life to the full.

Now aged 68, he is still living out a male fantasy – as a financier with a £5.5 billion fortune and limitless supplies of beer. He did it by deciding to abandon acting on the set of the classic film so that he could enrol at Harvard University.

He also went on to compete in two Winter Olympics as a skier and tobogganer. And he married the love of his life, Charlene Heineken, now 58, the daughter of the late brewery magnate Freddie Heineken. In 2002, the couple inherited the £4 billion controlling stake in the Heineken empire.

The shares have surged and with the recent acquisition of the Tiger beer brand the group’s value has increased by more than £1 billion.

Now chairman of Citi Private Bank’s business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Michel commutes between London, Washington and Holland. ‘I’ve always believed work hard, play hard,’ he says. ‘Life has never been boring – luckily.’

Approaching their 30th wedding anniversary, the couple undoubtedly lead an enviable life, but their lifestyle has never been ostentatious.

Their wealth eclipses that of Sir Philip Green and his wife Tina, as well as the Bransons and the Rausings, but the couple have never appeared in glossy photo spreads or hosted lavish public parties.’I partied in Beirut with the greatest actors of the age’

Instead, they concentrated on raising their five children in England, away from the glare of publicity. But later this month they may be tempted out for a rare appearance – to celebrate the re-release of the film that could so easily have launched Michel into a Hollywood career 50 years ago.

In the biopic of T. E. Lawrence, Michel played Farraj, one of the First World War hero’s two teenage followers. ‘They offered me the choice of the two roles – one dies in quicksand, the other is blown up,’ Michel recalls, speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday about his extraordinary life.

‘I said, ‘‘Which one lasts longer?’’ And they said the one that gets blown up by a detonator near the railway line. So I took that one, because it paid more.

‘Now whenever I tell anyone I was in Lawrence Of Arabia they say, “Oh, were you the one who went down in the quicksand?” And no one can ever remember the other one.’

Sands of time: As a child actor, Michel de Carvalho played the role of Arab boy Farraj opposite Peter O’Toole in the classic film Lawrence Of Arabia in 1962

In fact, Michel appears in one of the film’s most iconic scenes – as he and Lawrence stride into the officers’ mess in Cairo to announce the audacious capture of Aqaba. ‘We’re thirsty,’ Lawrence announces, dusty and dishevelled. ‘We want two large glasses of lemonade . . . there’s been a lot of killing, one way or another.’

During the 18-month shoot in 1961 and 1962 Michel became acquainted with some of the most talented actors of his age – as well as the countless women who pursued them. ‘The parties happened on rest and relaxation days in Beirut. Quite often I went with Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif – and that was super fun,’ he says.’At school I got so much fan mail’

Camel-riding proved more of a challenge. ‘In the beginning it wasn’t pleasant,’ Michel says. ‘You are sitting mostly side-saddle, with the hump coming up in the middle and you’re not really supposed to grip it. On one occasion I was on a camel which suddenly saw its stable – and it bolted for home, which was terrifying.

‘Years later, friends of mine had a 50th birthday party in Egypt. We went up and down the Nile. On one day they organised a camel race. Needless to say, I won.’

‘We couldn’t possibly discuss the fun in an elegant Sunday newspaper… they were the superstars and I was the bag carrier. But even superstars can only handle so much. And then the bag carrier…’

Looking back, Michel appears incredulous at his teenage decision to give up acting on the set of one of the greatest movies. ‘I said – using a huge swear word – ‘‘What am I doing here in the Arabian desert with all these funny people, superstars, Anthony Quinn, Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Jack Hawkins and the rest?’’ Where are my friends? This is a weird life. And then, almost simultaneously I became self- conscious about acting. And I just couldn’t get over my self-consciousness. It was the worst decision I ever made.

Multi-talented: Michel de Carvalho was part of the British Olympic luge team. Here he is pictured at Heathrow Airport before a flight to Japan, where he took part in the Winter Olympics at Sapporo

‘I never usually talk about Lawrence Of Arabia, but I was discussing it with someone last night and they said it wasn’t the worst decision because where would I be today? Some ageing B actor, looking for TV adverts.

‘But I should have stretched out the acting career a bit – maybe until 30.’ Born to a Brazilian diplomat father and an English mother in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, in 1944, Michel fell into acting at the age of ten. His father had died when he was very young and his mother married again, to a wealthy leather merchant.

The family entertained many illustrious figures to dinner in their London home – one was the famous producer Sir Michael Balcon, who needed a young boy who could ski, to star in his film, The Divided Heart. Initially Michel’s mother, Annie, was opposed to the idea of her son appearing on screen. He recalls: ‘But Sir Michael said it was only three months and who knows what will happen – this door has opened, why would you close it?’

Michel was a hit and film offers flooded in. Using his two Christian names as a stage name, Michel Ray was the Daniel Radcliffe of his day – going on to great acclaim in films such as The Brave One and The Tin Star.

Between films, Michel attended a boarding school in Switzerland, honing a gift for languages and developing his passion for skiing.

Rich lives: Michel de Carvalho with his wife Charlene, the Heineken heiress

Aged 17, his star reached a peak with Lawrence Of Arabia. ‘I had massive attention at school,’ he says. ‘I got so much fan mail. I never get that any more – as a banker, you get hate mail.’

Five years after he walked away from acting, just as he was about to take up a graduate place at Harvard Business School, his life took another twist when he was offered the chance to become a member of the British ski team at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France.

‘It wasn’t so much for my skill as for my ability to pay the plane fare,’ says Michel modestly.

His mother was not keen on the idea. She had been relieved when he gave up acting and wanted him to get serious about making a living. ‘I wish I had kept the telegram she sent,’ he says. ‘Every second word was “bum”. It said, “From film bum to ski bum – if you make this totally stupid decision, you will be completely cut off.” So I made the completely stupid decision.’

He delayed taking up his place at Harvard to compete. ‘I told a huge porkie pie to Harvard – I can’t tell you what it was in case they take away my diploma.’

His mother need not have worried. He duly graduated from Harvard and embarked on a career in banking. But he had just begun his second job, at NM Rothschild, when he was asked to join the 1972 GB Olympic team once again – this time in the luge, the fastest and most dangerous style of tobogganing. Nervously, he asked his new boss for time off to compete in Japan. ‘I was sitting at my desk and the internal phone rang. A voice said, “Will you pop up?’’ It was Eddie Rothschild, the chairman of the bank.

‘I went upstairs and Eddie rummaged in his pockets, pulled out £200 – which was my weekly salary – and said, “Let me remind you, young man, in this bank, England comes first.” ’

Michel competed in the luge with his best friend Jeremy Palmer-Tomkinson – the uncle of socialite Tara Palmer- Tomkinson. ‘In the first week of training, my entire body was dark blue,’ he said. ‘When you are in the double luge you really are just fodder – I was the little guy and Jeremy was the big heavy guy on top. In the Japan Olympics, we were really just clowns.’

In 1983, when he was in his late 30s, Michel married Charlene Heineken. ‘Our families both had houses in St Moritz,’ he says. ‘I was ten years older than her so it wasn’t what you would call love at first sight – certainly not on her side.’I met the girl of my dreams, complete with free beer’

‘I always drank Heineken. But the problem was Heineken was the most expensive beer. So when I met my wife I thought, “This is fantastic, I’ll have free beer.” I didn’t realise then that marriage is not just about free beer.’

The couple honeymooned in the Caribbean but suffered a shock on their return. In November 1983, Charlene’s father was kidnapped in Amsterdam and held for ransom for three weeks.

‘It was a baptism of fire,’ says Michel. ‘I was just not prepared for something like that. My father-in-law had no other family but my mother-in-law, my wife and me. Luckily, it all ended well. The ransom was paid and the kidnappers all went to jail.’

In 2002, Freddie Heineken died and Charlene inherited her father’s stake in the family business – which transformed her and Michel, overnight, into one of Britain’s wealthiest couples. Today, Charlene and Michel still play a key role in the business.

Sitting in the desert with Peter O’Toole, Michel could little have dreamt how his life would turn out. ‘I never planned my life,’ he says. ‘The good lord has been kind. If you have a bit of luck, you can do quite a lot. But looking back, it was probably a mistake quitting acting.

‘ Looking back, someone should have said to me, “No, stay with that.” ’

The 50th Anniversary 4K Restoration of Lawrence Of Arabia is in cinemas across the UK from November 23. The Empire Leicester Square will have special preview screenings from next Saturday

YOKO TANI (WIKIPEDIA)

Diminutive, graceful, porcelain pretty Japanese actress Yoko Tani was born and raised in France and was making a living as a Parisienne dancer when opportunities for film came her way in the mid-1950s.

Appearing in a number of minor Eurasian parts in such French films as Women Without Shame (1954) [Nights of Shame], Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1954) [Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves], and Mannequins of Paris (1956) [Mannequins of Paris], she was also featured in a couple of Japanese productions before branching out internationally.

The cameras displayed a lovely, quiet beauty in the 1950s and she was absolutely beguiling opposite Dirk Bogarde in the “Sayonara”-like WW2 film The Wind Cannot Read(1958) with Bogarde portraying a British POW in a Japanese camp who flees in order to locate his ill wife [Ms. Tani] who initially was his language teacher.

She also was quite appealing in another film that dealt with turbulent ethnic themes. The Italian/French/British co-production of The Savage Innocents (1960) co-starred Tani as the wife of Eskimo Anthony Quinn in a culture clash between Eskimos and Canadians that leads to murder. While fetching to the eye, the actress was rather modest in talent and was soon relegated to “B” and “C” level movies.

In the 1960s she became a customary player of meek princess-in-distress types in such costumed adventures as Marco Polo(1962), Maciste at the Court of the Great Khan (1961) [Maciste at the Court of the Great Khan] and Tartar Invasion (1961) [The Tartar Invasion], which co-starred her one-time husband, French actor Roland Lesaffre.

She was under-utilized in Hollywood as well in her few attempts. Minor supporting roles in My Geisha (1962) and Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963) left her deep in the shadows of leading ladies Shirley MacLaine and Elizabeth Montgomery, respectively.

Left to playing a dribbling of femme leads in such lowgrade spy intrigue and sci-fi, she was little seen after the late 1960s. W

In later years she enjoyed painting and was devoted to her religion and her dog that she named “Toto”. Yoko Tani died in her native Paris of cancer at the age of 67.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Lee Patterson

Lee Patterson was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1929. He came to Britain and in the 1950’s was featured in many B movies usually as an American gangster,

Towards the end of the decade he went to Hollywood and he was featured in the television series “Surfside Six” with Troy Donahue and Van Williams.

He was also a guest on other television shows such as “Magnum PI”. He died in 2007.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Manly actor Lee Patterson will always be remembered by American audiences as the hunky detective alongside equally hunky detectives Van Williams and Troy Donahue onSurfside 6 (1960) from the early 1960s. But, prior to that, he had a solid second-string career in British films playing Americanized parts.

Born in British Columbia, he went to a college in Ontario before crossing the ocean and settling in England.

A former stage manager and theatre publicist in his salad days, he was a rock-solid presence in such “B” films as Terror Street (1953) (aka Terror Street),The Good Die Young (1954), Reach for the Sky (1956), The Mailbag Robbery (1957) (aka The Mailbag Robbery) and Jack the Ripper (1959)

. The monumental success of the private eye series 77 Sunset Strip (1958) and the hair-combing Edd Byrnes “Kookie” craze instigated a number of imitations with Surfside 6 (1960) being just one of them.

It lasted a rather short two seasons but it did establish Lee here in America. As good looking as the exotic locales behind him on the show, his own good looks carried him much further, going on to star in a number of guest spots and earning a slew of soap opera roles along the way, most notably on One Life to Live (1968) as Erika Slezak‘s one-time husband. He grew into a reliable character actor and was also seen on the stage in later years.

Out of the limelight for quite some time, Lee remained quite private, and his death on Valentine’s Day in 2007 at a Galveston Island, Texas hospital of congestive heart failure (complicated by lung cancer and emphysema) was not reported until nearly a year later.

A sizable portion of his estate went to charitable organizations such as the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which was founded by his good friend Danny Thomas.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Gary Raymond

Gary Raymond was born in 1935 in London. His first film was the swashbuckler “The Moonraker” with George Baker and Sylvia Syms in 1958. He went on to star with Richard Burton in “Look Back in AAnger” and with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in “Suddenly Last Summer”. He played the title role in “The Playboy of the Western World” in 1962 with Siobhan McKenna as Pegeen Mike. In 1965 he went to Hollywood to play St. Peter in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and stayed to make the cult television series “The Rat Patrol”. By the late 1960’s he was back in England again where he has had a long career on the stage and in movies and television.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Born in Brixton, England in 1935, robust and good-looking Gary Raymond came from an acting family. Born Gary Barrymore Raymond, the youngest of three sons (one brother is a twin), his parents were music hall entertainers. Gary won a scholarship at the age of 11 to Gateway School in Leicaster, then graduated five years later and took on assorted odd jobs as a furrier and clerk while studying drama through the auspices of the London County Council.

He was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and trained there until he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-50s. Amid the wealth of his Shakespearean repertoire include the roles of “Horatio”, “Claudius”, “Macbeth”, “Oberon”, “Benedick”, “Orlando” and “Antonio

BFI Obituary in 2024

Glynis Johns obituary: veteran British star of Mary Poppins and Miranda

Johns, who has died aged 100, had a long-running career in film, TV and theatre, playing the mermaid in Miranda and the suffragette mother in Disney’s Mary Poppins.

8 January 2024

By Josephine Botting

Publicity portrait of Glynis Johns for Mad About Men (1954) © Group Film Productions. Preserved by the BFI National Archive

Interviewed in March 1973, Glynis Johns reflected on the advice her father, actor Mervyn Johns, had given her early in her acting career at the age of 12. “He said ‘Always listen for your cue,’” she recalled. “That is good advice both on stage and in life. Listen for your cue and then act on it.”

By this time, Johns’ cues had taken her in many different directions. She had appeared in over 50 films, had survived cancer, and her fourth and final marriage, to American author Elliott Arnold, was nearing divorce. She summed up her marital history wryly: “For me, most relationships with men have been like pregnancies. They last about nine months.”

Yet on a professional level, she had hit a new peak, having just won a Tony Award for her performance on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Sondheim, who described her voice as like “an unmade bed”, famously wrote the show-stopping song ‘Send in the Clowns’ especially for her, and she included it in her Desert Island Discs in 1976.

Johns was born on 5 October 1923 in South Africa, apparently on a train transporting her theatrical family as they toured the country. She was the fourth generation of performers on her father’s side, while her mother was an accomplished pianist, and she made her stage debut at three weeks’ old.

Johns (right) with Deborah Kerr in Perfect Strangers (1945)

Dance was an early passion, and her first professional performance was in a children’s Christmas show at the Garrick Theatre in December 1935. This brought her to the attention of actor Leo Genn who encouraged her to audition for the part of Napoleon’s daughter in the play St Helena. After seeing her in The Children’s Hour, Alexander Korda snapped her up for London Films, and her first screen role was in South Riding in 1938 as Ralph Richardson’s daughter.

Film roles dried up when war broke out, and she considered learning secretarial skills as a fall-back; luckily Michael Powell intervened and she replaced Elisabeth Bergner in his 1941 war drama 49th Parallel, kickstarting her film career.

The British film industry was not quite sure where to place the 5 foot 4 inch husky-voiced actor, but she eventually graduated from minor roles. Ealing Studios and Alexander Korda respectively gave her excellent supporting parts in The Halfway House (1944) and Perfect Strangers (1945), two very different but equally powerful reflections on the British wartime experience.

Her first top billing came in 1948 in Miranda, as a mermaid who inadvertently captivates every man she meets. The film was a huge hit, and its success hinged firmly on her performance, which skilfully balanced childlike innocence with a heavily suggestive flirtatiousness that raised a few eyebrows at the time.

As the eponymous mermaid in Miranda (1948)

Her stature and youthful looks meant that femme fatale roles rarely came her way, and she tended towards fun-loving or practical types. Yet her talent and versatility saw her move between drama, comedy and musicals, and between film, television and theatre during the seven decades of her career.

As suffragette Winifred Banks in Mary Poppins (1964)

High points included a move to Hollywood in the mid-50s, appearing in The Court Jester (1955) with Danny Kaye, a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for The Sundowners in 1961, and her much-loved performance as Winifred Banks in Disney’s 1964 film Mary Poppins. Throughout the 1970s, her theatrical career burgeoned, her performance in Terence Rattigan’s Cause Célébre winning her the Variety Club actress of the year award in 1978.

Among the lows were the closure of Enid Bagnold’s play Gertie on Broadway after just four nights in 1952, mounting debts over back taxes in the early 60s, the break up of four marriages and two engagements, and a battle with alcoholism. Her first marriage, to Anthony Forwood, produced her only child, Gareth, who predeceased her in 2007.

Yet Johns remained resilient, turning to Christian Science and yoga and espousing a healthy lifestyle based on a macrobiotic diet. As she approached middle age, screen roles cultivated her endearing, slightly eccentric qualities. She even got her own US sitcom entitled Glynis, a screwball precursor of Murder She Wrote, with Johns as a sleuthing would-be writer. In 1983, she appeared in Cheers as the upper-class mother of Shelley Long’s character Diane.

Johns approached every role with energy and focus, and her irrepressible humour and vivacity ensured her popularity. While the peaks of her screen career are memorable, a film industry that fully appreciated her talents would have given her many more of them, and it was the theatre that brought her the genuine celebrity she deserved.

Her spirit and determination got her to her 100th birthday, celebrated last year at a Hollywood retirement home. “I do sometimes feel very disappointed that I’ve achieved more as an actress than as a person,” she once confessed. Yet the outpouring of affection that greeted the news of her passing has sparked a well-deserved celebration of those achievements, which continue to bring joy to audiences of all generations.

Glynis Johns, 5 October 1923 to 4 January 2024

Daily telegraph obituary

Glynis Johns, the actress, who has died aged 100, rose to fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a series of film comedies; she became best-known for playing the suffragette mother Mrs Banks in the Walt Disney classic Mary Poppins, while on stage her distinctive, husky voice – described by one critic as sounding like “a princess who is turning into a frog” – was perfect for Send in the Clowns in A Little Night Music, the Broadway hit for which she won a Best Musical Actress Tony award.

She had mistakenly formed the impression that she was up for the title role in Mary Poppins, and was placated by Walt Disney, who told her that the songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman had written a big number for her that they would play for her after lunch. The brothers rapidly set to work and produced in short order the rousing Sister Suffragette.

There was no such confusion in A Little Night Music: Stephen Sondheim wrote Send in the Clowns especially for her, playing the role of the courtesan Desiree in a complicated tale of emotional The show had gone into rehearsal with both book and score unfinished, she recalled, and its director Hal Prince suggested that she and her co-star Len Cariou improvise a couple of scenes to give the book writer Hugh Wheeler a few ideas.

“Hal said: ‘Why don’t you just say what you feel?’ When Len and I did that, he got on the phone to Steve Sondheim and said, ‘I think you’d better get in a cab and get round here and watch what they’re doing because you are going to get the idea for Glynis’s solo.’”

Suitably inspired, Sondheim employed shorter phrasing to suit her smoky voice and her inability to sustain long notes. She described it as “the greatest gift I’ve ever been given in the theatre”.

Throughout her long career Glynis Johns, who was billed at first as “the girl with the upside-down eyes”, was most often cast in comic roles; she played Deborah Kerr’s jaunty military chum in Alexander Korda’s Perfect Strangers (1945), a sophisticated mermaid in Miranda (1948) – which she said was her own favourite film – and its sequel Mad About Men (1954); she also appeared opposite Danny Kaye in The Court Jester”. Although she always presented a witty, vivacious public image, Glynis Johns was described by acquaintances as “shy, wary and insecure”. She claimed that she was “the most intolerant, impatient person in the world” and surprised her fans by her intense and highly disciplined approach to her profession.

Latterly she was better known in the US than in Britain. She appeared in a considerable number of network television series and for a time had her own show, Glynis. Continuing ill health stopped her from performing as often as she would have liked, and by the end of her career Glynis Johns was spending a great deal of her time meditating and resting. “I have to have a lot of rest and be alone a lot of the time” she said. “If I can be alone, doing my exercises and puttering about, I’m fine.”

She admitted to a growing interest in Christian Science and metaphysics. “I couldn’t have got through my illness without metaphysics,” she said. “I firmly believe that what happens to the body is a manifestation of your thoughts.” No doubt wanting to keep all options open, she also claimed that she believed in what she called “little people”, and insisted that she would take a firm stand on their existence until someone positively proved her wrong.

But her dedication to her craft was firmly rooted in the material world. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in playing the role on only one level,” she said in 1990. “The whole point of first-class acting is to make a reality of it. To be real. And I have to make sense of it in my own mind in order to be real.”Glynis Margaret Payne Johns was born on October 5 1923 in South Africa while her parents, the actor Mervyn Johns and the pianist Alys Steele-Payne, were touring in a musical review, and she made her theatrical debut when three weeks old, appearing as “the baby”. Her maternal grandparents, members of a well-known Australian bell-ringing act, were devout Christian Scientists, as was her mother, and young Glynis was brought up to believe in the healing power of prayer.

The family moved back to London when Glynis was five. She attended South Hampstead High School, where she was a contemporary of Angela Lansbury. She studied ballet and became a child prodigy, gaining her teaching certificates aged 10 and making her professional debut two years later. “I never had enough time to be silly as a child,” she recalled. “Mistakes on stage are too serious to make so I didn’t make any.” In 1935, aged 12, she appeared as the principal ballerina in the pantomime Buckie’s Bears; the child originally cast as the lead was taken ill and she stepped into the role with no rehearsal.

Glynis rapidly made a reputation for herself as a reliable child actress, appearing in a variety of plays including the lead in A Kiss for Cinderella (1937) and Miranda in Quiet Wedding (1938). She made her film debut in South Riding in 1938 after being given a contract by Alexander Korda and subsequently appeared in a series of British films including Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel (1942) and The Adventures of Tartu. Glynis Johns gained “film star” status in 1945 when she played Deborah Kerr’s tomboy friend in Perfect Strangers. In 1948 she starred in Miranda as the mermaid who tires of the sea and comes ashore. The film was a hit and led to offers of other lead roles.

Glynis Johns was divorced for the first time in 1948; she had married Anthony Forwood in 1942 and had a son, Gareth. Anthony Forwood would go on to become Dirk Bogarde’s partner and manager. In 1952 she was married for a second time, to David Foster, a Second World War hero who became the chairman of Colgate Palmolive International; that year she starred as a Channel Islander who helps to smuggle a prize cow out of Nazi hands in Appointment with Venus, opposite David Niven.

She also co-starred with Alec Guinness in The Card (1952), in which she played an ingenuous dance teacher. The following year she made an inauspicious Broadway debut in Gertie, which closed after only five performances.

She returned to Britain and made a sequel to Miranda: in Mad About Men (1954) she resumed the role of sophisticated mermaid, starring opposite . When Glynis Johns moved to Hollywood in 1955, her combination of tomboy good-looks and husky, seductive voice confused casting agents. They cast her first as the virtuous Maid Jean opposite Danny Kaye in The Court Jester (1955) and then in a cameo role as “Sporting Lady’s Companion” in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

By then she had begun to suffer from ill health; she was admitted to hospital for a stomach operation and returned to hospital for numerous operations throughout her career. The following year she was divorced for the second time and remained in Hollywood, taking leading roles in films for Universal, United Artists and Paramount.

In 1960 she appeared, again with Deborah Kerr, in the excellent The Sundowners, which starred Robert Mitchum; she was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a blowsy Australian innkeeper. In a quirk of casting, her suitor in the film was played by her own father. (Following the death of Olivia de Havilland in 2020, she became the oldest surviving actor to have received an Oscar nomination.)

For the remainder of the decade Glynis Johns stayed in the US, where she appeared regularly on television in shows such as The Naked City and General Electric Theatre. After her third divorce in 1962 (she had married Cecil Henderson in 1960) she underwent another operation for cancer of the stomach. “Not living in harmony makes me ill,” she recalled, “I’m sure these terrible worries have contributed to my cancer.” But she made a remarkable recovery after her operation and three weeks later appeared in an episode of Dr Kildare.

In 1963 she starred in her own series, Glynis, playing a murder mystery writer who solves real murders. The series flopped badly and was taken off the air after 13 weeks, and she returned to making films, turning in good performances in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1962) and Mary Poppins two years later. She was married for the last time in 1964, to the writer Elliot Arnold.

In the late 1960s Glynis Johns retired from film and theatre work in order to devote herself to family life. Her health remained poor and she underwent several more operations for cancer. But she eventually decided that she preferred performing to domesticity and after 16 years in the US she returned to the theatre in Britain, starring in a 1966 run of the Anita Loos comedy The King’s Mare, but was forced to leave the show when she found the nightly two-hour performance too taxing.

For Mary Poppins her role was made into a suffragette to explain her absences and the need for a nanny. There was some criticism of the fact that, although she was a proto-feminist out of the house, at home she was conventionally subservient to Mr Banks (David Tomlison); this, however, was not a decision made by her.

In 1970 she starred in John Mortimer’s Come As You Are. “I used to suffer terribly from stage fright before that show,” she recalled, “but after having to do four little plays every night on a revolving stage with different characters, different accents and different costumes for each, I feel I’ve conquered it.”

Her performance in A Little Night Music in 1973 prompted one critic to praise her as “adorable”, while another described her as “fitting her role as snugly as a Gibson Girl’s girdle”, but her success was marred by another bout of illness which resulted in her leaving the show for some time.

In 1976 she returned to London for a production of Terence Rattigan’s Cause Célèbre. Cast against type as an accessory to a murder, she received standing ovations. The production was extremely successful, but as in the past she had to pull out of the show because of ill health. She underwent another operation for cancer in 1977.

During the remainder of the 1970s and 1980s Glynis Johns appeared in very few productions. “The fact is I’m hardly ever offered anything I consider good,” she said. “If I was I’d do more.”

In 1978 she did appear in the ITV production Across a Crowded Room and followed it with a UK tour of Hay Fever opposite Christopher Plummer. After nearly a decade she returned to television in 1982 to play Lady Fitzpatrick Morgan in the mini-series Little Gloria… Happy at Last. That year she also appeared in the American sitcom Cheers, as an eccentric dowager. Two years later, in 1984, she toured Canada in The Boyfriend and in 1985 co-starred with Plummer again, in Peccadillo.

She returned to A Little Night Music in 1991, playing Desiree’s mother Madame Armfeldt, and for the rest of the decade she had a few cameo roles, including the 1995 romcom starring Sandra Bullock, While You Were Sleeping. Her final appearance was in the 1999 comedy Superstar.

When not acting Glynis Johns spent most of her time at her home. “I do a lot” she recalled, “painting, dancing, playing the flute, writing poetry, doing my exercises, but I do it all slowly.”

She was married and divorced four times and suffered from ill health for much of her career.

Glynis Johns’s four marriages all ended in divorce. Her son Gareth Forwood predeceased her in 2007.

Glynis Johns, born October 5 1923, died January 4 2024

Sally Ann Howes

Although she never starred in any original productions of his shows on Broadway, Richard Rodgers described Sally Ann Howes, who has died aged 91, as “the greatest singer who ever sang on the American musical stage”. Best known for playing Truly Scrumptious opposite Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Howes was a classic instance of the star who never really was, despite her talent and impeccable pedigree.

She had dual nationality in Britain and the US, like Julie Andrews, in whose track she followed, first as a child star in British films before and after the second world war, then as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady in 1958. The show marked her Broadway debut, and she played in it for a year, and for a higher salary than her predecessor. When Andrews declined the role of Truly Scrumptious, in she stepped.

Sally Ann Howes and Dick Van Dyke perform the famous music-box scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

In 1973 the hills were alive again, not with the sound of Julie, but of Sally, as she led a US tour of The Sound of Music. The upside of this nearly star status was that Howes could make surprising and adventurous choices in her work, such as appearing in a West End thriller, Lover (also 1973) by Brian Clemens, with Max Wall, or a musical version of James Joyce’s The Dead (2000), with Blair Brown and Christopher Walken, off-Broadway and, briefly, on.

Although she was six years older than Andrews, the parallel career landmarks of both were uncanny. Three years before Andrews made her name in New York in Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend (1954), Howes made her stage debut in a show for which Wilson had written the lyrics, Caprice (1951), a musical comedy of domestic confusion in the south of France, at the Alhambra theatre in Glasgow.

Unfortunately, on her very first number on any stage, the conductor fumbled the score to the floor and Howes had to sing unaccompanied while the music sheets were noisily gathered, the instruments picked up their places one by one and, following them tentatively, she modulated gradually back into the correct key. The show never reached the West End.

Howes did, however, get there later in 1951, in a revue, Fancy Free (not the Jerome Robbins ballet) at the Prince of Wales theatre in London. In 1953 she established herself fully in the West End when she played Jennifer Rumson in Paint Your Wagon (featuring the songs Wand’rin’ Star, and I Talk to the Trees) for 18 months at Her Majesty’s theatre. In playing opposite her father, the musical comedy star Bobby Howes (the original Mr Cinders), she was at least, and at last, fulfilling her destiny.

Howes was the second child of Bobby and his wife, the actor and singer Patricia Malone. Her older brother, Peter, became a musician. Born in St John’s Wood, she grew up in London and Hertfordshire surrounded by her parents’ show-business friends (Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert were neighbours), and was educated at Queenswood school in Hatfield.

Sally Ann Howes in the 1947 film The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Her first film was the title role in Thursday’s Child (1942), written by Rodney Ackland, co-starring Wilfrid Lawson and Stewart Granger. Her prodigious juvenile output in the subsequent decade included Dead of Night (1945), an anthology horror film with Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers and Frederick Valk, the first sound screen adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby (1947; she was Kate), Anna Karenina (1948) with Vivien Leigh, The History of Mr Polly (1949), with John Mills, and Honeymoon Deferred (1951) with Kieron Moore and Griffith Jones.

She later said how unhappy she was with some of these films and she eventually managed to break a seven-year contract with Rank so that she could move on to the stage. She married the actor Maxwell Coker, who had been in the first London production of Oklahoma!, in 1950 (they divorced in 1953) and then Richard Adler, the lyricist of the Broadway hits The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, in 1958.

Adler wrote Kwamina (1961) for her, a Broadway musical set in a village in west Africa which, despite choreography by Agnes de Mille, proved a misfire in a heated time of civil rights protest. “Almost liked the play, loved the loincloths,” wrote one critic, and the show closed after just 32 performances.

Still on Broadway, she had a popular success in a 1963 revival of Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon and broadened her appeal on television on both sides of the Atlantic, making appearances on game shows and variety specials, including six Sally Ann Howes shows for British television in 1960. Having become a US citizen, she was invited to sing at the White House by three US presidents, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Sally Ann Howes on her 21st birthday in 1951. Photograph: Ernest Jones/ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

After Lover closed early in 1973, she played opposite Denis Quilley in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford, and at the Adelphi theatre, London, opposite Peter Wyngarde in a sumptuous revival of The King and I, also at the Adelphi. In 1977 she joined Tommy Steele for 10 weeks in Hans Andersen at the Palladium and later played Gertrude in a touring production of Hamlet (Hilton McRae as the prince, Donald Pickering as Claudius) in 1983.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was undoubtedly her major movie, although she was appreciably noted vying with Diane Cilento for the affections of Kenneth More’s well-mannered butler in Lewis Gilbert’s The Admirable Crichton (1957), with Cecil Parker and Martita Hunt. She also acquired a minor cult following for her part in Alvin Rakoff’s Death Ship (1980), a grisly horror movie in which she co-starred with Richard Crenna, George Kennedy and Kate Reid.

Sally Ann Howes reunited with Dick Van Dyke in 2004. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

By the time she appeared in the television miniseries of Judith Krantz’s Secrets in 1992, she was more often seen on stage in one-off concert appearances, such as A Little Night Music with New York City Opera in 1990, or in a Sunday charity performance such as the rarely seen Semi-Monde by Noël Coward at the Royalty theatre, London, in 1989. In 1990 she took a solo show, From This Moment On, for just three performances to the Edinburgh festival.

In 1997 she sang Alice Blue Gown from the musical Irene at the Palladium in a memorial show for the critic Jack Tinker. That bizarre celebration – Tinker’s surviving critical colleagues danced chaotically through Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat from Guys and Dolls – was produced by Cameron Mackintosh, who in 2007 persuaded her to return to My Fair Lady, this time as Mrs Higgins, on yet another US tour.

After divorcing Adler in 1966, Howes married Andrew Maree in 1969. They divorced in 1970 and she married Douglas Rae in 1972. Rae died in September 2021. She is survived by Andrew, a son from her marriage to Adler.

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Guardian Obituary in 2003

Patricia Roc, who died yesterday aged 88, was the home-grown glamour girl of the British screen, whose sex appeal was nevertheless curiously unerotic; unlike her contemporaries, Margaret Lockwood and Jean Kent, it was impossible to imagine her in a wicked role.

“I was the bouncy, sexy girl next door that mothers would like their sons to marry,” she reckoned, “and the sons wouldn’t have minded, either.”

Whether they would have known what to do with her is more debatable; she once received a fan letter from a teenager who wanted to invite her down to Devon for the weekend. “If it’s fine,” he wrote, “we could cycle into Exeter on Saturday afternoon. It’s only 15 miles.”

She was born to play costume parts and looked so fetching in decollete in such films as The Wicked Lady (1945) and Jassy (1947) that the US censor called for retakes to de-emphasise her cleavage. Not that she exploited it. She was always cast in virginal roles, leaving Lockwood to get on with the seduction scenes.

Patricia Roc played working girls, loyal wives and “bright young things” and was unfailingly “nice” in every film.

She seldom landed big parts, settling instead for second leads. Neither she nor J Arthur Rank, to whom she was under contract at the height of her career, showed any inclination to extend her range. It limited her as an actress, which may be why her career was relatively short.

She first caught the public eye in 1943 with Millions Like Us but by 1952, with Something Money Can’t Buy, her British career was practically over.

Married to a Frenchman, she became a virtual exile, continuing to appear infrequently in Continental films, which achieved only limited distribution in Britain.

Patricia Roc was born Felicia Miriam Ursula Herold, the daughter of a paper merchant. While still an infant, however, she was adopted by a Dutch-Belgian stockbroker, Andre Riese, and grew up believing him to be her real father.

Publicity material gave her date of birth as June 7 1918, but in 1995, as she prepared to celebrate her 80th birthday, she admitted that her agent had trimmed three years off her age and that she had actually been born in 1915.

She attended Francis Holland School at Regent’s Park and then Bartram Gables School at Broadstairs. After briefly attending Rada, she went to France for a test at the Joinville studios. Though she spoke fluent French, the film was shelved and she returned to England crestfallen.

But her luck changed after a chance meeting with the impresario Sydney Carroll led to a West End role in the play Nuts in May, where she was spotted by one of Alexander Korda’s casting directors. It was to be her only stage experience.

Her screen career was launched in 1938 in The Rebel Son, based on Taras Bulba, and then in The Gaunt Stranger, from Edgar Wallace’s story The Ringer.

After a brief marriage to a doctor, Murray Laing, in 1939, Patricia Roc embarked on her career in earnest and between 1939 and 1943 she churned out more than a dozen films, including a version of Eden Philpotts’s play The Farmer’s Wife (1941) and We’ll Meet Again (1943), with Vera Lynn.

The breakthrough came with Millions Like Us (1943), written and directed by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat and widely regarded as the best film made during the war about the home front.

Patricia Roc played one of the many young women who contributed to the war effort by working on factory lines. Married to a young airman (Gordon Jackson) who is killed in action, she had the most sympathetic role in the picture and it made her a star overnight.

It was an ensemble piece, with a large cast of popular players of the time, including Anne Crawford and Joy Shelton. Director Frank Launder followed it with another all-star picture, Two Thousand Women (1944), about an attempt to rescue British women from a concentration camp in France. Patricia Roc shared the acting honours with Phyllis Calvert, Flora Robson, Renee Houston, Anne Crawford and Jean Kent.

Love Story (1944) was the first of several pictures in which she played second fiddle to Margaret Lockwood. Roc was cast as the fiancee of Stewart Granger, a pilot losing his sight, who is stolen from under her nose by the terminally-ill Lockwood. The film, featuring the popular Cornish Rhapsody, was a big hit, but Lockwood had the plum part.

This was also true of The Wicked Lady (1945), with Lockwood as a highway robber and Roc cast as a ninny whose fiance she steals, and of Jassy (1947), where Lockwood again had the juiciest role as a gypsy girl suspected of murder.

It was becoming a pattern, with Roc relegated to supporting roles. In Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944), it was Phyllis Calvert rather than Lockwood who stole her thunder as a sober young woman whose gypsy blood drives her to acts of frantic abandon with Stewart Granger.

Patricia Roc was loaned to Ealing studios for Johnny Frenchman (1945), a tale of the rivalry between Cornish and Breton fishermen, and to Hollywood for Canyon Passage (1946), neither of which was a critical or popular success.

While in Hollywood she was romanced by Ronald Reagan, and they had a brief affair. But Patricia Roc was beginning to suspect that her Rank contract was holding her back and turned down Cardboard Cavalier realising that she would simply have been a stooge to the comedian Sid Field.

In 1947, she played an orphan girl in The Brothers, a melodramatic tale of superstition, jealousy and heavy breathing among Skye fisherfolk at the turn of the century, and a North country lass in So Well Remembered.

In 1948, there were thankless roles in When the Bough Breaks as a London shop girl and in One Night with You. The following year she appeared in The Perfect Woman, a leaden farce in which her uncle invents a robotic woman modelled on her and, through a chapter of accidents, she takes its place.

It was a year of retrenchment in the British film industry and her contract with Rank, which still had three years to run, was terminated by mutual consent. She had just married the French cameraman Andre Thomas and moved with him to France, where she attempted to forge a new career.

She had a small role in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), one of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret thrillers, starring Charles Laughton and shot in Paris, and she played opposite Louis Jouvet in an episode of the portmanteau picture Retour a la Vie (also 1949).

Captain Black Jack (1952) was a feeble smuggling yarn in which Patricia Roc had fourth billing behind George Sanders, Agnes Moorehead and Herbert Marshall. In Italy, she appeared in The Widow in 1955, but it was never released in Britain.

She made three trips back to England: for the indifferent thriller Circle of Danger (1951), with Ray Milland; for Something Money Can’t Buy (1952) opposite Anthony Steel, a comedy about a couple who start a catering and secretarial agency; and for Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons (1960), about the mass-murderer Landru (George Sanders), who throws her under a train.

It was Patricia Roc’s last film (though she ventured out of retirement in 1980 for the stage presentation Night of 100 Stars, at which she received a standing ovation).

After her marriage to Andre Thomas, it transpired that her husband was unable to have children and during the making of Something Money Can’t Buy Patricia Roc embarked on an affair with her co-star, Antony Steel (the Rank Organisation’s “Mr Beefcake”) which resulted in the birth of a son, Michael.

Thomas, though aware of the truth, accepted paternity, but collapsed and died of a stroke when the boy was only two.

In 1964 she married Walter Reif, a Viennese businessman, and the couple moved to the Swiss resort of Minusio, overlooking Lake Maggiore, in 1976. Reif died in 1986.

Patricia Roc is survived by her son.

Sylvia Syms

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It was her portrayal of a Second World War nurse in Ice Cold in Alex (1958) that elevated Sylvia Syms to the top rank of British actresses.

Starring John Mills and Anthony Quayle and shot in the Libyan desert, she recalled it as the toughest assignment of her career. “There were holes in the ground instead of proper lavatories and we used DDT fly repellent as hairspray. I’m amazed we didn’t all die,” she recalled. “But my co-stars were all proper grown-up men who had served in the war and they were like uncles to me.”

At the time she was on a studio contract that paid £30 a week and she noted wryly that she made more money when a scene was later turned into a Carlsberg advert than from the picture itself.

A more recent notable role was as the Queen Mother in Stephen Frears’s film The Queen (2006)

A more recent notable role was as the Queen Mother in Stephen Frears’s film The Queen (2006)

ALAMY

Formidable women became her stock-in trade, from playing the Queen Mother to portraying Margaret Thatcher. Yet in a long career encompassing 50 feature films and even more television appearances, the role that gave her the greatest satisfaction was that of a long-suffering middle-class housewife in the 1961 film Victim. It was a part which nobody else would touch.

The film told the sympathetic tale of a closeted homosexual London barrister, played by Dirk Bogarde, and the problems his sexuality caused for his wife, played by Syms. She was 27 and one of British cinema’s rising young stars but bravely chose to ignore those who advised her that the film could wreck her burgeoning career.

At the time homosexuality was illegal in Britain and Basil Dearden, the film’s director, conceived “ Victim” as “an open protest”…Syms shared his mission. A friend had committed suicide after being outed and she had seen first-hand how theatrical friends such as Sir John Gielgud feared the law as a blackmailer’s charter. “I knew that many much more famous actresses than me had turned the part down,” she said. “But I wanted to do it because I wanted the law changed.” The British Board of Film Censors, which had declared that “to the great majority of cinemagoers, homo- sexuality is something which is shocking, distasteful and disgusting”, demanded multiple cuts to the film before eventually agreeing to its release with an “X” certificate.

She starred opposite Dirk Bogarde as the wife of a closeted gay man in the landmark film Victim (1961)

She starred opposite Dirk Bogarde as the wife of a closeted gay man in the landmark film Victim (1961)

In the event Victim was both a critical and a box office success and a review in The Times opined that the film made a case which was “reasoned and just” and invited “compassionate consideration”.

Although it took another six years before the law was changed, the film was a landmark in destigmatising attitudes and helped to pave the way to the cautious liberalisation of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which exempted from prosecution men who were 21 or older who had consensual sex in private.

Syms remained inordinately proud of the film and recalled how she had begun her career in a pre-emancipated age in other ways. As a young actress who required a method of birth control so she could continue to work, she had been forced to take her marriage certificate with her to the Marie Stopes clinic. Victim helped to mark out Syms as a trailblazer for what the British Film Institute called “a new breed of female actor”, which also included the likes of Julie Christie and Lynn Redgrave, intelligent and outspoken women who, as Syms put it, were determined not to be “pretty, available and treated like shit” and who rejected the “assumption that because you were blonde and an actress, you were available”. A committed socialist who once quoted Karl Marx at a press conference, it was perhaps ironic that her famous role in later life came when she took the lead in Thatcher: The Final Days, ITV’s 1991 drama about the events leading up to the Conservative prime minister’s defenestration.

Perhaps it was the feminist spur of being the only woman in a 28-strong cast, but Syms played the part with a wonderful empathy and later reprised the role on the stage. “I wasn’t a great fan when she was in office, but it’s no good taking your prejudices with you if you’re going to get inside a character’s head,” she said. “Playing Thatcher made me realise what terrible disloyalty her cabinet showed to her. I did feel rather sorry for her, not in a sentimental way, but because I was shocked at what happened to her.”

By then Syms was on her way to become a grande dame of British acting, although she was swift to dismiss the notion. “I haven’t done the great things,” she insisted in old age. Still she is remembered as one of the most loved of British actors.

As Margaret Thatcher in 1991

ITV/SHUTTERSTOCK

“I’ve only been to the National [Theatre] once. I’ve never felt that I had the respect that some people have had. I’m not dame material, really.”

While Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren became dames, Syms had to settle for an OBE and even that she pointed out, was “for charity work and nothing to do with my career”. She was a patron of Age UK, worked with cerebral palsy charities and was an ambassador for Intermission Youth Theatre, an arts project for troubled young people from deprived areas.

At her investiture at Buckingham Palace in 2007, she wanted to ask the Queen if she had seen her portrayal of the Queen Mother a year earlier in Stephen Frears’s film The Queen.

In the end she bit her tongue, concluding that it was not the done thing “to embarrass Her Majesty by saying, ‘What did you think of me in that?’ ” Throughout her career she exuded a strange mix of feistiness and self-doubt. The offer of a substantial advance to write her autobiography was turned down on the grounds that she was “not interesting enough”. If she had written it she suggested that she would have titled it “Who The F*** Is Sylvia”

Yet she was still acting into her late 80s, although she complained that she was only invited to play mother-in-law types or gaga old ladies.“I wouldn’t mind having a part where I could be as I am — sharp, intelligent, wicked,” she said. “But I’m horrified when I look at pictures now and see a fat old lady with a bulging face. I was extraordinarily beautiful back then but I didn’t know it.” For many years she was treated for acute depression, partly arising from difficult personal circumstances. She lost her mother when she was 12 and at 22 she married her teenage sweetheart Alan Edney. “He was the first person that really made me feel like he loved me. It was the first time I felt really safe,” she said.

After her wedding in June 1956

ALAMY

After their first child was stillborn and a second, Jessica, died at two days old, Syms was convinced that she was unable to have children and the couple adopted a son, Ben Edney, a teacher.

To her surprise, a year later she fell pregnant and gave birth to a daughter Beatie Edney, an actress, best known for Highlander and the TV remake of Poldark.. Her two children survive her but her marriage to Edney ended in divorce in 1989 after he admitted to having a child by another woman. Sylvia May Laura Syms was born in Woolwich, south London, in 1934, the youngest of five children to Daisy (née Hale) and Edwin Syms, a civil servant and trade union activist. She grew up in nearby Eltham and was briefly evacuated to Wales when the war broke out. Back in London she was educated at a convent school but her mother, an auxiliary nurse, was injured in an air raid and was never the same again, taking her own life in 1946. Her father remarried and her stepmother, whom she called Aunt Dorothy, nursed her through a breakdown, sending her on a residential art therapy course, which was almost unheard of at the time, and which Syms credited with saving her own life.

After studying at Rada, the actress Anna Neagle took Syms under her wing and got her a part as her troubled offspring in the film My Teenage Daughter (1956). The pair worked together again a year later in No Time for Tears and she received a Bafta nomination for best actress for her performance in Ted Willis’s kitchen-sink drama Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957).

Although she was routinely described in the tabloid press as a “blonde bombshell”, she suffered from low esteem and never thought of herself as beautiful. “Film directors told me, but I just thought they wanted to get into my knickers,” she said.

She resisted the casting couch and when a film producer pursued her to her hotel room while shooting on location the 6ft 3in frame of Jack Palance stepped in to defend her.

Despite a career résumé in which she played melodrama, adventure and comedy with equal aplomb and starred alongside everyone from Orson Welles and Michael Caine to Tony Hancock and Cliff Richard, she remained modest to the end.

“I don’t think anyone sits in a casting and says, ‘Sylvia Syms, my God!’ I’m too ordinary,” she said. “They just think, ‘She’ll do’.” As she did for much of her life, she was yet again underselling herself

The Times obituary in 2023

The irish times obituary in 2011.

Elegant actor and writer of great talent

DANA WYNTER: DANA WYNTER, who has died in Ojai, California, aged 79, was an actor whose screen roles included one of the leads…

Sat May 28 2011 – 01:00

DANA WYNTER:DANA WYNTER, who has died in Ojai, California, aged 79, was an actor whose screen roles included one of the leads in the iconic Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

For the happy few, she was also and mostly a writer. A very good writer. Her memoirs, Other People, Other Places, published in 2005, and her extensive correspondence are a testimony to it. As are her letters to so many different people in so many different places in life. These ranged from Comdt Jacques Cousteau to former US president Richard Nixon, from priests all over the world to shepherds and neighbours in her narrow valley of Glenmacnass, Co Wicklow. They also included directors and actors in Hollywood to animal rights activists and from dedicated artists to charming dilettantes – all exhibit a tremendous natural talent, a perfect ear and a sharp eye, qualities that she brought to full fruition as she became a contributor for publications as diverse as the Guardian, Country Living, the National Reviewor The Irish Times, among others.

Here is her terse description of how George Sanders told Zsa-Zsa Gabor that their marriage (her third at that stage; there are nine to date) was over. “The hum of the hair dryer indicated human presence in the dressing room, and he approached his quarry who was sitting under the machine reading about herself in a glossy fan magazine. Vain attempts at attracting attention ended in a firm rap on the hood of the dryer and she did, briefly, look up, he claimed, but without lifting the hood. Sanders then raised his voice. ‘Zsa-Zsa – I’m leaving you. Forever. Sorry about the marriage. I’ll write’. Obviously not having heard any of this, Zsa-Zsa nodded, flashed a bright smile, waggled her fingers at him and returned to her reading.”

Fast, precise, pitiless. This is how stars used to divorce and it was how Dana Wynter wrote.

Her style might have been influenced by her one and only marriage to Gregson Bautzer, the most famous divorce lawyer of Los Angeles. But her irony, her impeccable sense of humour, her taste and distaste had deeper roots.

Dana Wynter was born Dagmar Winter in Berlin, the daughter of a British surgeon father and a Hungarian mother. She was raised in Scotland, England, Rhodesia and South Africa, on stage in London, on air with Orson Welles and on screen in Hollywood. She learned, at an early age, how small the outside world was. This compelled her to draw on the ground an even smaller circle around her feet with the rule, known only to her, to never cross it.

She divorced her only husband, celebrity attorney Greg Bautzer, in 1981. She and Bautzer had one child – Mark Ragan Bautzer, born in 1960.

In Hollywood, she was described as an oasis of elegance. The film Shake Hands with the Devil (starring James Cagney) brought her to Ireland, where she made a deal with herself that it would be her home for the next 30 years. A sign hung on her gate that said: “You would be more welcome if you had called first.” She often sat in her beautiful library to read Irish poets and Russian novelists.

To a visiting friend, she might say: “Tonight, we’ll have a nice dinner together and tomorrow you will be on your merry way.” The less, the merrier.

Dana Wynter had found her place and her style, and each of her sentences, spoken or written, showed that she was ready to defend them at all costs.

Her newspaper columns and letters illustrated her writing skill. A sample, in which she described an incident at her cottage in Wicklow.

“Why the pheasant chose this particular house is still not clear. Maybe he understood that we were dog-less and firm in our resolve to be free of the domination of any pet, perhaps our thatched roof reminded him of his origins. Or the answer could be more simple – that it was less of an effort to come here than to the neighbouring farmhouse under the great waterfall, an uphill march even when aided by hops, flutters and arching swoops.”

This limpid style brings forth in a flawless metaphor the simplicity of a beautiful life, where hopping and swooping are no longer considered necessary. It was one of her many lives. In an article titled St Patrick’s Angels, she wrote: “When their time as choristers is over and the voice must rest, most of the boys go on to take up another instrument . . . ”

She died from congestive heart failure having suffered from heart disease in later years. Her son Mark said she “stepped off the bus very peacefully”.

Dana Wynter: born June 8th, 1931; died May 5th, 2011

The Telegraph obituary

A dark-haired, pale-skinned beauty, Dana Wynter (playing Becky Driscoll) was more than qualified to scream and clutch the arm of her love interest, Dr Miles Bennell, as they fled (unsuccessfully, in her case) the extraterrestrial scourge. Filming got under way in 1955, at the height of Joseph McCarthy-inspired hysteria about Reds under the bed.

“It was just supposed to be a plain, thrilling kind of picture,” Dana Wynter recalled in 1999. “That was what Allied Artists thought they were making.” But after its release in 1956 it soon became clear that the plot, in which a small-town doctor learns that the population of America is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates grown in pods, was being credited with a double meaning.

Both the director, Don Siegel, and the scriptwriter, Dan Mainwaring, denied any such subtext. But Dana Wynter insisted that the cast “realised that we were making an anti-ism picture. Anti-fascism, anti-communism, all that kind of thing.” Certainly it is hard to avoid the hint of a political message when the leading man, desperately seeking to alert his fellow Americans to the looming menace, turns to camera and shouts: “They’re here already. You’re next.” Either way, the film was an instant box-office hit.

Dagmar Winter was born in Berlin on June 8 1931, the daughter of a surgeon, Peter Winter. Her family soon moved to England. A few years later her parents divorced and she moved with her father to Southern Rhodesia. Following graduation from a private school she trained in Medicine at Rhodes University in South Africa. She also tried her hand at amateur theatre there, and returned to England in the early 1950s to take up acting seriously.

During a performance at the Hammersmith Apollo she was spotted by an American agent and a few bit parts followed, including in Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), co-starring Diana Dors, and The Crimson Pirate (1952), with Burt Lancaster as the swashbuckling hero. In November 1953, having changed her name to Dana Wynter, she set out to try her luck in Hollywood.

There, despite initial disappointment in film, she stayed to carve out a career for herself in television. In March 1955 she won a Golden Globe Award for “Most Promising Newcomer”, and was placed under contract with Twentieth Century Fox, making her debut in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Despite excellent reviews Dana Wynter was unable to replicate her success, appearing mostly in war movies – such as D-Day the Sixth of June (1956) – and on television. She appeared in series including Hart to Hart, The Rockford Files and Magnum P.I., returning to the big screen for two cameo roles: in Airport, which reunited her with Burt Lancaster, and in Triangle (both 1970).

From 1978 to1980 she played Jill Daly in the soap opera Bracken, with Gabriel Byrne. It began her love affair with Ireland, where she bought a house in Co Wicklow. Her final role was as Raymond Burr’s wife in The Return of Ironside (1993).

Dana Wynter was married to the Hollywood lawyer Greg Bautzer. She is survived by her son

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Michel Ray

Yoko Tani

YOKO TANI (WIKIPEDIA)

Lee Patterson

Gary Raymond

Glynis Johns

BFI Obituary in 2024

Glynis Johns obituary: veteran British star of Mary Poppins and Miranda

Daily telegraph obituary

Sally Ann Howes

Patricia Roc

Guardian Obituary in 2003

Sylvia Syms

Dana Wynter

The irish times obituary in 2011.

Elegant actor and writer of great talent

DANA WYNTER: DANA WYNTER, who has died in Ojai, California, aged 79, was an actor whose screen roles included one of the leads…

The Telegraph obituary

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