Actor, father, motorbike fanatic: Charley Boorman is the epitome of the modern adventurer in pursuit of fresh challenges away from the success of his personal life. Choosing two wheels as his preferred mode of transport, Charley harnessed the challenges of a ’round the World trip with Ewan McGregor. Now his sights are set on the unyielding sands of the desert.
Charley Boorman has been riding motorcycles since he was seven years old. The son of renowned film director John Boorman, he grew up on a farm in Ireland and used to ride through the fields on his first motorbike and took part in schoolboy motor cross and Enduro races. The bike bug remained with Charley and, for four years, he ran a motorcycle race team and spent the years riding with David Jeffries and Matt Llewelyn.
In 2004, Charley and his best mate Ewan McGregor came up with the madcap idea of circumnavigating the globe on motorbikes. After months of intense preparations when at times, it looked like the project would not get off the ground, the pair set off from London in April 2004.
Over the next three grueling months, they traveled through three continents and fifteen countries. Long Way Round (2004) was the realisation of a dream born out of two friends’ love of motorbikes, the freedom of the open road, and the adrenaline rush of an extreme challenge. Their entire journey was filmed for Long Way Round (2004), a unique television series that was broadcast on Sky One in the UK and Bravo (USA) and spawned a best-selling DVD, book and CD soundtrack. It has now sold the world over into many territories including Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Spain, and Italy.
Following the overwhelming success of Long Way Round (2004), Charley has become an icon in the motorcycling world. On the Long Way Round (2004), UK Tour Charley visited motorcycle and adventure exhibitions plus BMW dealerships across the UK to talk about his adventures. Each event was a sell-out as crowds flocked to catch a glimpse of Charley and have their book or DVD signed. A similar tour of the southern hemisphere is to take place this winter.
Next up, Charley is taking on the desert with one of the World’s harshest challenges: the Lisbon-Dakar Rally. This is not just a race out of Europe via the Iberian Peninsula and down through West Africa. This is one of the most physically and emotionally demanding battles across inhospitable terrain, alone, to achieve the impossible. But for Charley, it is, as for many others, one of the most romantic and dangerous races known to man.
It remains the only race open to both amateur and professional bikers and for a first time participant like Charley, finishing the race in Dakar will be the ultimate goal.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Marcus Agar Communications
The above IMB entry can also be accessed online here.
Harold Warrender was born on November 15, 1903 in London, England as Harold John Warrender. He was an actor, known for Scott of the Antarctic (1948), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and Ivanhoe (1952). He was married to Constance Elizabeth Fowles. He died on May 6, 1953 in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England.
Virginia Stride was born in Yokohama, Japan as Virginia Thomas. She is an actress, known for Champion House (1967), A Touch of Spice (1989) and I Want What I Want(1972). Was married to actor John Stride.
The talented and accomplished actor Rosemary Leach, who has died aged 81, reminded an interviewer in 2012 that she had never been invited to appear with either the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company. “I’m as good as Judi Dench, I’m sure I am,” she added, before saying how lucky she had been to have had such an extensive and all-consuming career on television.
Viewers had warmed to her expansive features, beautifully modulated voice and emotionally truthful acting on screen since the mid-1960s. She appeared in such notable series as The Power Game (1965-69), as the lover of a ruthless building tycoon, John Wilder (Patrick Wymark), The Jewel in the Crown (1984), as Aunt Fenny in the hit adaptation of Paul Scott’s twilight-of-the-Raj quartet and as the victimised widow who falls for a murderous conman and total cad (Nigel Havers) in The Charmer (1987), an acrid 30s drama based on a Patrick Hamilton novel.s
She moved effortlessly across the class and social divide, playing royalty – a starchy, porcelain-voiced Queen Victoria in Claude Whatham’s fine four-part Disraeli (1978) and arguably the best of all Queen Elizabeth IIs, in three separate BBC dramas, Prince William (2002), Tea With Betty (2006) and Margaret (2009) – as well as “ordinary” mums: she was luminous as Laurie Lee’s mother in Cider With Rosie (1971) and heartily earthy as David Essex’s in That’ll Be the Day (1973).
Her true valour was rarely seen on stage, though when it was she was unforgettable. In 1982, she won the Olivier best actress award for her performance as Helene Hanff, the eccentric Manhattan bibliophile, in 84 Charing Cross Road, an enchanting two-hander, adapted and directed by James Roose-Evans, based on the transatlantic correspondence of Hanff and an antiquarian bookshop manager, who never met each other. On the first night, Hanff – small intense, bird-like – appeared on the stage of the Ambassadors theatre alongside her counterpart. Leach looked nothing like her, but had brilliantly distilled the very essence of her charm and character, and made her story profoundly moving.
Born in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, Rosemary was the second daughter of teachers, Sidney and Mary (nee Parker). Her father was headteacher (as well as organist and choirmaster) at the village school in Diddlebury, near Ludlow. Rosemary was educated at Oswestry girls high school, where she excelled in plays. After a brief spell selling shoes in the Reading branch of John Lewis, she went to London, aged 18, to train at Rada.
She graduated in 1955 and immediately plunged into the dying days of small regional repertory companies in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, then Coventry, for two years. Her roles grew bigger at the larger reps in Liverpool and Birmingham, where she worked with Bernard Hepton (a lifelong friend and colleague) and Derek Jacobi. But while the National and the RSC were getting under way in the early 60s, Leach was establishing herself as a permanent member of what she described as “a sort of television rep”, making her debut in two episodes of the police series Z Cars in 1962.
The TV die was cast – and she would be nominated, in all, five times for a Bafta award, never winning one – when she signed up for The Plane Makers in 1963 with Wymark and Barbara Murray. It was a prequel to The Power Game, set in a fictional aircraft factory with trade union struggles, an infighting management and political and personal chicanery at every turn. These were significant TV dramas, and the six years of them ended only because Wymark died in 1970.
From this point, Leach was in demand. She was Laura, the amenable wife to pint-sized (“male chauvinist piglet”) Ronnie Corbett in No, That’s Me Over There (1967), Now Look Here … (1971) and The Prince of Denmark (1974), with scripts by Barry Cryer, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle. She figured prominently, as lover and mistress, respectively, in Zola’s Germinal (1970), which charted the brutal suppression of a miners’ strike in northern France, and Sartre’s Roads to Freedom (also 1970), an utterly gripping 13-part series set in the period around the start of the second world war.
She returned to the stage in the mid-70s, playing a (then) fashionably bedenimed journalist, a hilariously unlikely amalgam of Jilly Cooper and Jill Tweedie, in Don Taylor’s Chekhovian Out on the Lawn at the Watford Palace (with marvellous performances, too, from TP McKenna, Dinah Sheridan and Edward Hardwicke). She joined the founding company in 1976 at George Murcell’s St George’s theatre, Tufnell Park, which stuttered on for a decade, with a programme devoted to Shakespeare; the opening season comprised Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet and Richard III.
Her next (and last) brush with Shakespeare came as Emilia in Jonathan Miller’s richly textured BBC television Othello in 1981, with Anthony Hopkins “blacking up” in the lead, just about before it became impossible to do so, Bob Hoskins as her husband, Iago, and Penelope Wilton as Desdemona.
Although she had been prominent in television films of The Adventures of Don Quixote (1973), with Rex Harrison and Frank Finlay, and Brief Encounter (1974) which gloriously miscast Richard Burton and Sophia Loren in the Trevor Howard/Celia Johnson roles, her most “prestigious” film was Merchant Ivory’s star-laden A Room With a View (1985), in which she ticked off another notable mum, Mrs Honeychurch. She appeared in two television adaptations of Edith Wharton novels, The Children (1990), scripted by Timberlake Wertenbaker and directed by Tony Palmer, and The Buccaneers (1995) directed by Philip Saville, in which she made a marvellous meal of Selina Marable, snobbish Marchioness of Brightlingsea.
In between the Whartons, she materialised in Stuart Urban’s An Ungentlemanly Act (1992) as Mavis Hunt, holding the fort in the Falklands during the invasion alongside her husband, the governor, Rex Hunt (later knighted), played by Ian Richardson. There was more quality work in Jack Rosenthal’s scripts for an early suburban sitcom with Hepton, Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975); his adaptation of Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes (1976) for Laurence Olivier – the only television show Olivier ever directed; and Day to Remember (1986), on Channel 4, in which she struggled through Christmas with George Cole as her husband with dementia. Hepton was alongside, too, in The Charmer, as her “white knight” admirer.
A full decade after 84 Charing Cross Road, she returned to the West End in a superb revival by Peter Hall of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables at the Albery, stretching the critical thesaurus to fully appreciate her magnificent Mrs Railton-Bell, righteous defender of public morality shading into bigotry. The Rattigan revival was safe in her hands, and those of Peter Bowles, Patricia Hodge, Ernest Clark and Miriam Karlin. She toured in some creaky revivals of Emlyn Williams and William Douglas-Home before joining one of the longest-running sitcoms of the new millennium, My Family, starring Robert Lindsay and Zoë Wanamaker, dropping in between 2003 and 2007 as Wanamaker’s “difficult” alcoholic mother. Her last movie was Stuart Urban’s may i kill u? (2012), a low-budget black comedy in which a policeman is transformed into a vigilante killer on the night of the Tottenham riots of 2011.
Leach lived quietly with her husband, the actor Colin Starkey, whom she married in 1981, in Kew and, later, in Teddington. After making The Jewel in the Crown without ever having visited India, she became a devoted traveller to that subcontinent thereafter.
Gwen Taylor was born on February 19, 1939 in Derby, England. She is an actress, known for Life of Brian (1979), Heartbeat (1992) and Barbara (1995). She is married to Graham Reid.
She was stubborn, sullen, tiny (5ft 3in) and resilient. With a mink thrust over her shoulder-pads and an orchid in her hair, Ida Lupino made it clear – in a silky, querulous voice – that she resented living in a man’s world. Like Joan Crawford, she was glamorous in different ways at different times in her career: she too had a strong, mesmerising personality but with a wider range. She was the archetypal Hollywood star, always surging back after a setback.
She was born into a family of Italian origin which had entertained the British for generations in circuses and variety theatres. Her father was Stanley Lupino, star of film and stage musicals. Ida was only 15 when she made her first film, Her First Affaire (1933), cast as a teenage vamp, so there was some surprise when Paramount signed her to play Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Once in Hollywood, Paramount changed its collective mind about her, and for the next four years she was shuttled between roles of her own age, ingenues and glamourpants parts for which she was much too young.
In 1938 she married the actor Louis Hayward. Hayward had also been getting nowhere fast in Hollywood, but at this time the producer Edward Small decided that he had star potential, which in turn made Lupino more aggressive towards her own career. She convinced the director William A. Wellman that only she could play the cockney whore who inspires Helder (Ronald Colman) in The Light That Failed (1939), based on Kipling’s first novel.
Her emotive handling of a difficult role convinced Warner Bros that they had found someone to fill Bette Davis’s old shoes, for they were planning a partial remake of Bordertown called They Drive By Night (1940). It was a showy role, lasciviously pursuing trucker George Raft while showing only contempt for her fond, much older husband, Alan Hale, who is (of course) his boss and best friend; furthermore, it required her to go spectacularly mad on the witness stand at the climax. Jack Warner was so impressed by the first few days’ rushes that he signed Lupino to a seven-year contract, whereupon she stayed off work on the advice of her astrologer. Warner devotes almost a chapter to this in his memoirs, but he seems to have persuaded himself that this was how real stars behave, for he gave her billing over Bogart in her next film, Walsh’s High Sierra (1941), despite the fact that she has the lesser role (as Bogart’s moll).
Warner had had trouble with Davis, whose temperament (in the cause of better material) was equalled only by her talent and her popularity. Lupino accordingly had value to Warner beyond the unexpected maturing of her abilities: she was a “threat” to Davis, at worst replacing her as his leading female star – or appearing in the many properties purchased for Davis in the first place.
Lupino held her own against such heavyweights as Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield in the best screen version of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (also 1941) despite this interpolation – an ex-con picked up at sea to inflame the all-male crew. She staked her claim to be the first of the decade’s many wicked ladies at Columbia, in Ladies in Retirement (1941), as the housekeeper who conspires with her “nephew”, Hayward, to murder the blowsy ex-actress who is her boss.
She was a “Lady Macbeth of the slums” (Picturegoer) in The Hard Way (1943), stopping only at murder to ensure her daughter’s stardom – with Joan Leslie in the role. The New York critics voted Lupino’s performance the year’s best, setting the seal on her stardom.
In Devotion (1945), she was Emily Bronte, Olivia de Havilland was Charlotte and Nancy Coleman Anne, with the Italian-born Viennese-accented Paul Henried as the Irish Mr Nicholls. The critic Richard Winnington found the film “painless. It never got nearer to the subject than the names and consequently didn’t hurt.”
Lupino – and audiences – were better served by Walsh’s noir-ish The Man I Love (1946), in which she proved how effortlessly she inhabited those tough, world-weary dames, in this case a night-club singer, preparing herself for damnation to prevent her sister from throwing herself at the heel who runs the joint, Robert Alda. Even more splendid is the not dissimilar Road House (1948), with Lupino greedily suggesting the small-time ambition and essential seediness of a B-girl who has spent too many nights in an atmosphere of stale cigarette smoke and beer-guzzling – and she got to croon the torch song for which this film was famous, “Again (it mustn’t happen again)”. “She does more without a voice than anyone I’ve ever heard,” says the cashier, Celeste Holm.
It was directed at 20th Century-Fox by Jean Negulesco, invited there by Zanuck after his work with Lupino in Deep Valley (1947) which featured one of her first wholly admirable or pitiable heroines, a timid farmgirl whose life is changed by an encounter with a convict, Dane Clark. There were more to come (at various studios): a frightened bride in A Woman in Hiding (1950) – frightened of Stephen McNally, though the cast included Howard Duff, whom Lupino later married.
A little later she turned to directing – the only female director of consequence between Dorothy Arzner and Joan Micklin Silver – and chiefly for the Filmakers, a company she had founded with her then husband, Collier Young. As early as 1949 she had turned to television, writing and producing, before carrying out these same chores on a low-budget movie concerning the problems of an unwed mother, Not Wanted (1949), and she took over the direction when Elmer Clifton became ill. With the determination which characterised her work before the cameras, she went on to handle other subjects in the same serious low-key vein, including The Hitch-Hiker (1952), about a paranoid killer (William Talman) who forces two businessmen (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) to travel with him at gunpoint. This is regarded as her best film as a director. They managed to get a higher budget for another sympathetic study of a social problem, The Bigamist (1953). He was Edmond O’Brien, with Lupino and Joan Fontaine as his two wives – with a screenplay by Young, now divorced from the first lady and married to the second.
Lupino continued to act and direct in television until the Seventies, including a series with Duff, Mr Adams and Eve. In her later years she found time for a new hobby, motor-cycling.
David Shipman
Ida Lupino, actress, producer, director and writer: born London 4 February 1918; married 1938 Louis Hayward (marriage dissolved 1945), 1948 Collier Young (marriage dissolved 1951), 1951 Howard Duff (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1972): died Burbank, California 3 August 1995.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
She was stubborn, sullen, tiny (5ft 3in) and resilient. With a mink thrust over her shoulder-pads and an orchid in her hair, Ida Lupino made it clear – in a silky, querulous voice – that she resented living in a man’s world. Like Joan Crawford, she was glamorous in different ways at different times in her career: she too had a strong, mesmerising personality but with a wider range. She was the archetypal Hollywood star, always surging back after a setback.
She was born into a family of Italian origin which had entertained the British for generations in circuses and variety theatres. Her father was Stanley Lupino, star of film and stage musicals. Ida was only 15 when she made her first film, Her First Affaire (1933), cast as a teenage vamp, so there was some surprise when Paramount signed her to play Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Once in Hollywood, Paramount changed its collective mind about her, and for the next four years she was shuttled between roles of her own age, ingenues and glamourpants parts for which she was much too young.
In 1938 she married the actor Louis Hayward. Hayward had also been getting nowhere fast in Hollywood, but at this time the producer Edward Small decided that he had star potential, which in turn made Lupino more aggressive towards her own career. She convinced the director William A. Wellman that only she could play the cockney whore who inspires Helder (Ronald Colman) in The Light That Failed (1939), based on Kipling’s first novel.
Her emotive handling of a difficult role convinced Warner Bros that they had found someone to fill Bette Davis’s old shoes, for they were planning a partial remake of Bordertown called They Drive By Night (1940). It was a showy role, lasciviously pursuing trucker George Raft while showing only contempt for her fond, much older husband, Alan Hale, who is (of course) his boss and best friend; furthermore, it required her to go spectacularly mad on the witness stand at the climax. Jack Warner was so impressed by the first few days’ rushes that he signed Lupino to a seven-year contract, whereupon she stayed off work on the advice of her astrologer. Warner devotes almost a chapter to this in his memoirs, but he seems to have persuaded himself that this was how real stars behave, for he gave her billing over Bogart in her next film, Walsh’s High Sierra (1941), despite the fact that she has the lesser role (as Bogart’s moll).
Warner had had trouble with Davis, whose temperament (in the cause of better material) was equalled only by her talent and her popularity. Lupino accordingly had value to Warner beyond the unexpected maturing of her abilities: she was a “threat” to Davis, at worst replacing her as his leading female star – or appearing in the many properties purchased for Davis in the first place.
Lupino held her own against such heavyweights as Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield in the best screen version of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (also 1941) despite this interpolation – an ex-con picked up at sea to inflame the all-male crew. She staked her claim to be the first of the decade’s many wicked ladies at Columbia, in Ladies in Retirement (1941), as the housekeeper who conspires with her “nephew”, Hayward, to murder the blowsy ex-actress who is her boss.
She was a “Lady Macbeth of the slums” (Picturegoer) in The Hard Way (1943), stopping only at murder to ensure her daughter’s stardom – with Joan Leslie in the role. The New York critics voted Lupino’s performance the year’s best, setting the seal on her stardom.
In Devotion (1945), she was Emily Bronte, Olivia de Havilland was Charlotte and Nancy Coleman Anne, with the Italian-born Viennese-accented Paul Henried as the Irish Mr Nicholls. The critic Richard Winnington found the film “painless. It never got nearer to the subject than the names and consequently didn’t hurt.”
Lupino – and audiences – were better served by Walsh’s noir-ish The Man I Love (1946), in which she proved how effortlessly she inhabited those tough, world-weary dames, in this case a night-club singer, preparing herself for damnation to prevent her sister from throwing herself at the heel who runs the joint, Robert Alda. Even more splendid is the not dissimilar Road House (1948), with Lupino greedily suggesting the small-time ambition and essential seediness of a B-girl who has spent too many nights in an atmosphere of stale cigarette smoke and beer-guzzling – and she got to croon the torch song for which this film was famous, “Again (it mustn’t happen again)”. “She does more without a voice than anyone I’ve ever heard,” says the cashier, Celeste Holm.
It was directed at 20th Century-Fox by Jean Negulesco, invited there by Zanuck after his work with Lupino in Deep Valley (1947) which featured one of her first wholly admirable or pitiable heroines, a timid farmgirl whose life is changed by an encounter with a convict, Dane Clark. There were more to come (at various studios): a frightened bride in A Woman in Hiding (1950) – frightened of Stephen McNally, though the cast included Howard Duff, whom Lupino later married.
A little later she turned to directing – the only female director of consequence between Dorothy Arzner and Joan Micklin Silver – and chiefly for the Filmakers, a company she had founded with her then husband, Collier Young. As early as 1949 she had turned to television, writing and producing, before carrying out these same chores on a low-budget movie concerning the problems of an unwed mother, Not Wanted (1949), and she took over the direction when Elmer Clifton became ill. With the determination which characterised her work before the cameras, she went on to handle other subjects in the same serious low-key vein, including The Hitch-Hiker (1952), about a paranoid killer (William Talman) who forces two businessmen (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) to travel with him at gunpoint. This is regarded as her best film as a director. They managed to get a higher budget for another sympathetic study of a social problem, The Bigamist (1953). He was Edmond O’Brien, with Lupino and Joan Fontaine as his two wives – with a screenplay by Young, now divorced from the first lady and married to the second.
Lupino continued to act and direct in television until the Seventies, including a series with Duff, Mr Adams and Eve. In her later years she found time for a new hobby, motor-cycling.
David Shipman
Ida Lupino, actress, producer, director and writer: born London 4 February 1918; married 1938 Louis Hayward (marriage dissolved 1945), 1948 Collier Young (marriage dissolved 1951), 1951 Howard Duff (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1972): died Burbank, California 3 August 1995.
The above “Indepednent” obituary can also be accessed here.
Roger Tonge was born on January 30, 1946 in Birmingham, England. He was an actor, known for Crossroads (1964), Crossroads: A Celebration (1971) and Nearest and Dearest(1968). He died on February 26, 1981 in London, England.
Performed the spoken words on “Kites” by Simon Dupree And The Big Sound. This was a Top 10 UK hit for the group, peaking at number 9. She had a bit of a problem with this as she didn’t speak Chinese. She was born and raised in Trinidad. A local restaurateur was quickly brought in to to write a few lines for her to recite. She took these lines to her grandmother, who taught her to recite them phonetically.
Diffring was born as Alfred Pollack in Koblenz. His father Solomon Pollack was a Jewish shop-owner who managed to avoid internment by the Nazi authorities and survived the war. His mother Bertha Diffring was Christian. He studied acting in Berlin and Vienna but there is some conjecture about when he left Germany prior to World War II. The audio commentary for the Doctor Who series Silver Nemesis mentions that he left Germany in 1936, . Other accounts point to him leaving Germany in 1939 and heading for Canada where he was interned in 1940. However this is unlikely as he appears in the 1940 Ealing Studios film Convoy released in the July as the U-37 German officer, although uncredited. His sister Jacqueline Diffring moved to England to become a famous sculptor. Though he made two fleeting, unaccredited appearances in films in 1940, it was not until 1950 that his acting career began to take off.
He played an important part in the TV mini-series Flambards, being the aeronautical pioneer who assists the young son, William Russell (Alan Parnaby), second in line of inheritance to the Flambards Estate, but also obsessed with flying. Diffring’s character was a German, living in England, shortly before the beginning of the Great War.
His final performance was again as a Nazi, for the BBC in the 1988 Doctor Who serial Silver Nemesis, in which he agreed to appear because the recording coincided with the Wimbledon Championships which he wanted to watch. He died in his home at Châteauneuf-Grasse in the south of France in 1989. His sister was reported to live there in 2008.
