Brittish Actors

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Ewan Solan
Ewan Solan
Ewan Solan

IMDB entry:

Ewen Solon was born on September 7, 1917 in Auckland, New Zealand as Peter Ewen Solon. He was an actor, known for The Revenue Men (1967), The Message (1977) andThe Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). He died on July 7, 1985 in Addlestone, Surrey, England.

Prior to acting, tried his hand at farming, as a dock labourer, a door-to-door salesman, as a timber mill worker and a reporter. Gained his first acting experience, aged 20, with the Napier Repertory Players.
Gravel-voiced New Zealand-born character actor with a distinctive high forehead and dark eyebrows. Trained at RADA in 1947, then worked with various repertory companies in London, Nottingham and Oxford. On British screens from 1948. Got his big break, when cast as Sergeant Lucas in Maigret (1960), filmed on location in Paris. The believability of his character was helped somewhat by the fact that Solon spoke fluent French. He subsequently returned to the stage at the Bristol Old Vic and the West End. From 1971 to 1974, he spent time guest-starring in Australian television series. After his return to England in 1975, he lent gravitas to two instalments of Doctor Who (1963).
 
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed on line here.
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Robert Stephens
Sir Robert Stephens
Sir Robert Stephens

“Independent” obituary by Adam Benedick:

Whether Robert Stephens achieved greatness in the sense of half a century ago when the likes of Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud and Wolfit tackled the heroic parts in a stage tradition traceable to Henry Irving, or whether greatness was thrust upon him by admirers for his courage in returning to the classics in his sixties (as Falstaff and King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company), Stephens’s do-or-die determination to be an actor in the heroic mould was never doubted in his last years.

It was as if he had cast himself among that generation of so-called hell- raising players – Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Nicol Williamson, whose talents burned so bright in the playhouse until the cinema claimed most of them – except that Stephens could never claim great success in films. He would therefore prove that he at least had never turned away from the greatest test of all: the great roles in the theatre.

If he did not convince everyone of his greatness, he reminded a younger generation of playgoers of the guts, gusto, personality and bravado necessary to heroic acting in its heyday.

Nor did he neglect the supposedly romantic element in that tradition of acting, which he vividly chronicles in an autobiography, Knight Errant, published a fortnight ago.

Brimful of swagger and of egocentric fancy, it charts a career divided boldly between artistic ambition and personal indulgence, displaying a restless energy and Don Juan assurance which sometimes leaves the reader breathless with admiration or astonishment at the author’s effrontery. The book was as if he were re-enacting the adventures of the hero of an 18th-century novel; but at the same time it seldom reflects the kind of actor he was on stage during most of his career until its relatively glamorous end.

Kenneth Tynan had acclaimed him as the essence of the red-brick style of acting which puts brains before breeding. George Devine was certainly not looking for classical actors when he was setting up shop for the English Stage Company, at the Royal Court Theatre in the mid-1950s, for new writers for the stage. But in recruiting Stephens from the Library Theatre, Manchester, he found an actor of integrity and grit who created a stir in all sorts of forgotten works as well as in Osborne’s The Entertainer, Wesker’s The Kitchen and, above all, Epitaph for George Dillon.

Here was an anti-hero even nearer to Osborne’s heart than Jimmy Porter and Stephens acted it with all his heart. “The cleverest portrait I have seen of a certain kind of neurotic artist,” declared Tynan. “Quite wonderful,” said Noel Coward; Laurence Olivier made a note to have him as one of the 50 founding members of the forthcoming National Theatre Company.

With his hooded eyes, beaky nose, heavy jowl, cawing voice, and devil- may-care delight in a profession which gave him scope for being larger than life and twice as exuberant, Stephens did not win universal praise as a charmer. Nor was it in his nature to play for sympathy. Stephens was an off-beat actor, and rather heavy-handed with it.

Indeed that was obvious in Coward’s somewhat heavy-handed 1959 version of Feydeau, Look after Lulu, which had rather oddly got into the Royal Court repertoire with Vivien Leigh in the Madeleine Renaud part and Stephens dashing about in his Edwardian combinations.

It was a fault, though, which he was ready enough to correct when a veteran from the pre-war Aldwych farces, Robertson Hare, suggested that he took up daily skipping. Other ungainlinesses of manner were less easy to shed.

Nevertheless, Stephens had intelligence, personality, determination and technique. Even before his George Dillon had won golden opinions in London and New York he had shown himself satisfactorily versatile for the Royal Court in authors as diverse as Arthur Miller, Brecht, Wycherley, Nigel Dennis and Michael Hastings.

But who could have foreseen – except perhaps Olivier – that, within five years of Dillon, Stephens would be a rising star with the National Theatre at the Old Vic in its heyday and even in line for its throne? Would he have risen so rapidly as an actor, without the good fortune of encountering on stage within three months of his arrival at the National one of the most brilliant comediennes of the day – perhaps of any day – the even more versatile Maggie Smith?

Their partnership began purely by chance casting; soon they were cast as a couple whose acting together made one and one add up to three, and in a few seasons they had become the most famous partnership in British theatre.

Although they worked apart well enough in the National’s mainly classical repertoire, they made audiences look forward to seeing them together; and halfway through that glittering decade from 1963 to 1973 Olivier one day touched the dashing, handsome and effervescent Stephens on the shoulder. Would he like to be one of Olivier’s chief lieutenants?

Could it be true? Might he as an associate director and something of a matinee idol be heading even higher up the National ladder? Here he was standing as it were in the wings of what was to be called the Royal National Theatre whose great but ageing artistic director was ailing.

If ever an actor felt greatness being thrust upon him Stephens could be forgiven for so thinking. Married by then to one of the era’s most accomplished and popular actresses – a comedienne and tragedienne who had also become a film star in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (in which he also appeared) – Stephens was thrice blest.

With some accuracy the partnership was compared to other, illustrious couples like the Lunts (Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne), John Clements and Kay Hammond, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh; and playgoers could sense across the Old Vic footlights the mutual exhilaration, verve and delight in their own teamwork.

The couple were together in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1963: Captain Plume and Silvia), Coward’s Hay Fever (1964: Sandy Tyrell and Myra), Much Ado About Nothing (1965: Benedick and Beatrice), Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem (1970: Frances Archer and Mrs Sullen), Hedda Gabler (1970: Eilert Loevborg and Hedda) and – perhaps their most popular and poignant collaboration – John Gielgud’s West End revival of Coward’s Private Lives (1972: Elyot Chase and Amanda Prinn).

By then, alas, Stephens had wrong-footed it with his boss Olivier (“Larry? He’s all dear, darling, lovely boy until opening night, then it’s just him and the audience”); and having resigned from the National realised that his marriage was drawing to a close, though not before Private Lives had been a huge success at the Queen’s and then the Globe, bringing Smith another prize as best actress.

With its story of a divorced couple who meet on their honeymoons and fall in love all over again only to realise that they cannot live apart – or together, it was as if the couple were acting out their private life before the public every night.

When the play crossed the Atlantic, Stephens did not go. He directed a play at the Open Space, in London. He played Trigorin in The Seagull at Chichester and Greenwich, Pastor Manders in Ghosts and Claudius in Hamlet (again at Greenwich) and in the West End, a thriller, Murderer (Garrick, 1975). Meanwhile Peter Hall had taken over at the National; and, the divorce concluded, the spirits of the ebullient Stephens sank deeper than he dared admit.

He went on acting. On Broadway he showed his comic mettle again as Sherlock Holmes in a revival of the William Gillette-Conan Doyle play Sherlock Holmes, offsetting some of the frustration felt after the failure of Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1969) in which he also took the title-role.

Stephens gave his Othello in Regent’s Park, and in 1978 returned to the National Theatre under its new regime in Shakespeare (Oberon), Chekhov (Gayev), Ibsen (the Mayor in Brand), Congreve and as Pontius Pilate. Not a man to let self-pity overrule him, he had however a sociable nature and fell into bouts of dissipation and sustained obscurity.

Towards the end of the 1980s he was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. Its director, Adrian Noble, had, as a schoolboy, revered Stephens’s acting as the half-naked, weird-voiced, chain-clad, god-like sovereign of medieval Peru in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964).

At Stratford-upon-Avon he played, despite spells of serious illness, Julius Caesar and Falstaff. He won the Olivier Award as best actor for 1991 for his highly praised Falstaff, a sadder dog than usual. Two seasons later he came forward, again after serious illness, as a much-admired but younger than usual King Lear.

Neither of them however was so much the performance of a great actor as of a once potentially great actor. Their challenge and the extent of his achievement served as a kind of plucky personal therapy: a belated call to arms, which the actor answered with a stout heart and high courage; and this year he was duly knighted in the New Year’s Honours list.

Whether his racy, name-dropping memoirs, Knight Errant, subtitled “Memoirs of a Vagabond Actor” and written with Michael Coveney, added to any understanding of his art, they drew a zestful, entertaining portrait of a sexual opportunist and promising if not tactful actor in the Permissive Society of 1960s and 1970s London.

They also drew eddies of indignation in certain quarters at their less than courtly manners, for among the actor’s proud and numerous conquests of note was, apparently, the historian Lady Antonia Fraser (“I was her last bad boy,” he wrote); and to the charges of bad taste and lack of chivalry he would languidly reply, “My book is certainly a precedent.”

From, as it were, his death-bed, he would recreate on the page one of those legendary, hell-raising celebrants of venery and alcoholism from the post-war British theatre, and whether the figure he wrote about was truly Robert Stephens or one of his even more illustrious contemporaries, or a mixture of them all, there was something undeniably heroic in his attitude if not his acting.

And defiant. Stephens defied, again and again, all medical augury in his last months, holding court in local pubs whenever he could get away from hospital to chat about his ideas of great acting or great actors; swaggering and (sometimes) swanking to the last, but committed to the notion that in the theatre great acting was ever rooted in the actor’s personality. “If I am indeed a good actor,” he wrote, “it is partly because I am not, I hope, a dull man. It is impossible for a dull man to be a good actor.”

Adam Benedick

Robert Stephens, actor: born Bristol 14 July 1931; Kt 1995; married 1951 Nora Ann Simmonds (one son; marriage dissolved 1956), 1956 Tarn Bassett (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1967), 1967 Maggie Smith (two sons; marriage dissolved 1975), 1995 Patricia Quinn; died London 13 November 1995.

TCM Overview for Robert Stephens:

Tall leading and character player whose long face and crisp demeanor have seen wide exposure in a distinguished stage career. Stephens’s film credits, though fairly regular since the early 1960s, have generally been less exciting, with the actor playing a series of passive suitors, sensitive artistic types and character roles calling on him largely to embody middle-aged, professional Englishmen.

Stephens began acting as a teen in repertory theater and continued after studies at drama school. He joined the Royal Court in London in 1956 for important plays like “Look Back in Anger” and “The Crucible”. Work in features began with parts which laid the grounds for future film roles: He made pirate Henry Morgan a robust Britisher in his US debut in the routine “Pirates of Tortuga”, and he played the colorless, along-for-the-ride boyfriend of the heroine’s domineering mother in the classic “A Taste of Honey” (both 1961). After joining the completely overwhelmed cast of the gargantuan “Cleopatra” (1963), Stephens played the nice, ordinary guy engaged to a woman desperately wanted by her loony ex-husband, the anti-hero protagonist of the landmark anarchic comedy “Morgan” (1966). Stephens and director Karel Reisz admirably refrained from making his role a dull, standardized comic villain, but David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave stole the acting thunder just the same.

Stephens’ third wife (1967-74) was actor Maggie Smith, and the pair teamed for two films in which he played her lover. He was quite good as the sharp, lusty but feckless teacher colleague who witnesses “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969) and was touching as the peripatetic protagonist’s paramour in “Travels With My Aunt” (1972), but in each case Smith’s zany comic elan was practically the whole show. His one major showcase came with his funny, profoundly troubled and yet stalwart sleuth in Billy Wilder’s splendid “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” (1970). Subsequent character roles have been as military men (“The Duelists” 1977), artists (“Testimony” 1987), and titled Englishmen (“Bonfire of the Vanities” 1990). His best parts have came in offbeat fare, from “The Fruit Machine” (1988, as an opera star) to Kenneth Branagh’s “Henry V” (1988, as Pistol).

Stephens’ TV work has been modest but effective with the actor appearing mostly in highly prestigious miniseries such as “QB VII” (1974), “Holocaust” (1978), “War and Remembrance” (1988) and “Adam Bede” (1992). Much of his most important work has remained on the stage, with acting at the Royal Shakespeare Company and practically every other major theater running the gamut from “The Entertainer”, “Saint Joan”, “Royal Hunt of the Sun” and “Apropos of Falling Sleet” (which he also directed) to New York work in “Epitaph for George Dillon” and “Sherlock Holmes”. In the 1990s, Stephens returned to the London stage and earned critical praise and awards for his performances as Falstaff and Lear. Father of actors Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin.

 The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
 
“The Independent” obituary by Adam Benedick:
Whether Robert Stephens achieved greatness in the sense of half a century ago when the likes of Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud and Wolfit tackled the heroic parts in a stage tradition traceable to Henry Irving, or whether greatness was thrust upon him by admirers for his courage in returning to the classics in his sixties (as Falstaff and King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company), Stephens’s do-or-die determination to be an actor in the heroic mould was never doubted in his last years.

It was as if he had cast himself among that generation of so-called hell- raising players – Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Nicol Williamson, whose talents burned so bright in the playhouse until the cinema claimed most of them – except that Stephens could never claim great success in films. He would therefore prove that he at least had never turned away from the greatest test of all: the great roles in the theatre.

If he did not convince everyone of his greatness, he reminded a younger generation of playgoers of the guts, gusto, personality and bravado necessary to heroic acting in its heyday.

Nor did he neglect the supposedly romantic element in that tradition of acting, which he vividly chronicles in an autobiography, Knight Errant, published a fortnight ago.

Brimful of swagger and of egocentric fancy, it charts a career divided boldly between artistic ambition and personal indulgence, displaying a restless energy and Don Juan assurance which sometimes leaves the reader breathless with admiration or astonishment at the author’s effrontery. The book was as if he were re-enacting the adventures of the hero of an 18th-century novel; but at the same time it seldom reflects the kind of actor he was on stage during most of his career until its relatively glamorous end.

Kenneth Tynan had acclaimed him as the essence of the red-brick style of acting which puts brains before breeding. George Devine was certainly not looking for classical actors when he was setting up shop for the English Stage Company, at the Royal Court Theatre in the mid-1950s, for new writers for the stage. But in recruiting Stephens from the Library Theatre, Manchester, he found an actor of integrity and grit who created a stir in all sorts of forgotten works as well as in Osborne’s The Entertainer, Wesker’s The Kitchen and, above all, Epitaph for George Dillon.

Here was an anti-hero even nearer to Osborne’s heart than Jimmy Porter and Stephens acted it with all his heart. “The cleverest portrait I have seen of a certain kind of neurotic artist,” declared Tynan. “Quite wonderful,” said Noel Coward; Laurence Olivier made a note to have him as one of the 50 founding members of the forthcoming National Theatre Company.

With his hooded eyes, beaky nose, heavy jowl, cawing voice, and devil- may-care delight in a profession which gave him scope for being larger than life and twice as exuberant, Stephens did not win universal praise as a charmer. Nor was it in his nature to play for sympathy. Stephens was an off-beat actor, and rather heavy-handed with it.

Indeed that was obvious in Coward’s somewhat heavy-handed 1959 version of Feydeau, Look after Lulu, which had rather oddly got into the Royal Court repertoire with Vivien Leigh in the Madeleine Renaud part and Stephens dashing about in his Edwardian combinations.

It was a fault, though, which he was ready enough to correct when a veteran from the pre-war Aldwych farces, Robertson Hare, suggested that he took up daily skipping. Other ungainlinesses of manner were less easy to shed.

Nevertheless, Stephens had intelligence, personality, determination and technique. Even before his George Dillon had won golden opinions in London and New York he had shown himself satisfactorily versatile for the Royal Court in authors as diverse as Arthur Miller, Brecht, Wycherley, Nigel Dennis and Michael Hastings.

But who could have foreseen – except perhaps Olivier – that, within five years of Dillon, Stephens would be a rising star with the National Theatre at the Old Vic in its heyday and even in line for its throne? Would he have risen so rapidly as an actor, without the good fortune of encountering on stage within three months of his arrival at the National one of the most brilliant comediennes of the day – perhaps of any day – the even more versatile Maggie Smith?

Their partnership began purely by chance casting; soon they were cast as a couple whose acting together made one and one add up to three, and in a few seasons they had become the most famous partnership in British theatre.

Although they worked apart well enough in the National’s mainly classical repertoire, they made audiences look forward to seeing them together; and halfway through that glittering decade from 1963 to 1973 Olivier one day touched the dashing, handsome and effervescent Stephens on the shoulder. Would he like to be one of Olivier’s chief lieutenants?

Could it be true? Might he as an associate director and something of a matinee idol be heading even higher up the National ladder? Here he was standing as it were in the wings of what was to be called the Royal National Theatre whose great but ageing artistic director was ailing.

If ever an actor felt greatness being thrust upon him Stephens could be forgiven for so thinking. Married by then to one of the era’s most accomplished and popular actresses – a comedienne and tragedienne who had also become a film star in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (in which he also appeared) – Stephens was thrice blest.

With some accuracy the partnership was compared to other, illustrious couples like the Lunts (Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne), John Clements and Kay Hammond, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh; and playgoers could sense across the Old Vic footlights the mutual exhilaration, verve and delight in their own teamwork.

The couple were together in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1963: Captain Plume and Silvia), Coward’s Hay Fever (1964: Sandy Tyrell and Myra), Much Ado About Nothing (1965: Benedick and Beatrice), Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem (1970: Frances Archer and Mrs Sullen), Hedda Gabler (1970: Eilert Loevborg and Hedda) and – perhaps their most popular and poignant collaboration – John Gielgud’s West End revival of Coward’s Private Lives (1972: Elyot Chase and Amanda Prinn).

By then, alas, Stephens had wrong-footed it with his boss Olivier (“Larry? He’s all dear, darling, lovely boy until opening night, then it’s just him and the audience”); and having resigned from the National realised that his marriage was drawing to a close, though not before Private Lives had been a huge success at the Queen’s and then the Globe, bringing Smith another prize as best actress.

With its story of a divorced couple who meet on their honeymoons and fall in love all over again only to realise that they cannot live apart – or together, it was as if the couple were acting out their private life before the public every night.

When the play crossed the Atlantic, Stephens did not go. He directed a play at the Open Space, in London. He played Trigorin in The Seagull at Chichester and Greenwich, Pastor Manders in Ghosts and Claudius in Hamlet (again at Greenwich) and in the West End, a thriller, Murderer (Garrick, 1975). Meanwhile Peter Hall had taken over at the National; and, the divorce concluded, the spirits of the ebullient Stephens sank deeper than he dared admit.

He went on acting. On Broadway he showed his comic mettle again as Sherlock Holmes in a revival of the William Gillette-Conan Doyle play Sherlock Holmes, offsetting some of the frustration felt after the failure of Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1969) in which he also took the title-role.

Stephens gave his Othello in Regent’s Park, and in 1978 returned to the National Theatre under its new regime in Shakespeare (Oberon), Chekhov (Gayev), Ibsen (the Mayor in Brand), Congreve and as Pontius Pilate. Not a man to let self-pity overrule him, he had however a sociable nature and fell into bouts of dissipation and sustained obscurity.

Towards the end of the 1980s he was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. Its director, Adrian Noble, had, as a schoolboy, revered Stephens’s acting as the half-naked, weird-voiced, chain-clad, god-like sovereign of medieval Peru in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964).

At Stratford-upon-Avon he played, despite spells of serious illness, Julius Caesar and Falstaff. He won the Olivier Award as best actor for 1991 for his highly praised Falstaff, a sadder dog than usual. Two seasons later he came forward, again after serious illness, as a much-admired but younger than usual King Lear.

Neither of them however was so much the performance of a great actor as of a once potentially great actor. Their challenge and the extent of his achievement served as a kind of plucky personal therapy: a belated call to arms, which the actor answered with a stout heart and high courage; and this year he was duly knighted in the New Year’s Honours list.

Whether his racy, name-dropping memoirs, Knight Errant, subtitled “Memoirs of a Vagabond Actor” and written with Michael Coveney, added to any understanding of his art, they drew a zestful, entertaining portrait of a sexual opportunist and promising if not tactful actor in the Permissive Society of 1960s and 1970s London.

They also drew eddies of indignation in certain quarters at their less than courtly manners, for among the actor’s proud and numerous conquests of note was, apparently, the historian Lady Antonia Fraser (“I was her last bad boy,” he wrote); and to the charges of bad taste and lack of chivalry he would languidly reply, “My book is certainly a precedent.”

From, as it were, his death-bed, he would recreate on the page one of those legendary, hell-raising celebrants of venery and alcoholism from the post-war British theatre, and whether the figure he wrote about was truly Robert Stephens or one of his even more illustrious contemporaries, or a mixture of them all, there was something undeniably heroic in his attitude if not his acting.

And defiant. Stephens defied, again and again, all medical augury in his last months, holding court in local pubs whenever he could get away from hospital to chat about his ideas of great acting or great actors; swaggering and (sometimes) swanking to the last, but committed to the notion that in the theatre great acting was ever rooted in the actor’s personality. “If I am indeed a good actor,” he wrote, “it is partly because I am not, I hope, a dull man. It is impossible for a dull man to be a good actor.”

Adam Benedick

Robert Stephens, actor: born Bristol 14 July 1931; Kt 1995; married 1951 Nora Ann Simmonds (one son; marriage dissolved 1956), 1956 Tarn Bassett (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1967), 1967 Maggie Smith (two sons; marriage dissolved 1975), 1995 Patricia Quinn; died London 13 November 1995.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accesed here.

 

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Tracy Reed
Tracy Reed
Tracy Reed

Obituary from “The Stage” in 2012:

t was inevitable that Tracy Reed, who has died at the age of 69, would follow a career in the performing arts. She was born Clare Tracy Compton Pelissier in London on September 21, 1942, her name honouring her grandmother, the distinguished actress Fay Compton, who was briefly married to the drunken HG Pelissier, founder of the Follies concert party.

Carol Reed, who directed The Third Man, was her stepfather and one of her step-cousins was the hellraising Oliver Reed.

In her early years, Tracy Reed played roles in long-running television series, such as Emergency Ward 10, Dixon of Dock Green and The Avengers. At one point, she was considered a contender to replace The Avengers’ co-star Diana Rigg.

But she really made her mark in Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece, Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a black comedy about nuclear warfare, which owed part of its instant popularity to the Cuban missile crisis, then still fresh in the minds of audiences. Cast as Miss Scott, the mistress of General Buck Turgidson, played by George C Scott, she was the only female member of the cast. Her other big film was the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967).

Reed retired from acting in 1975. She was married four times, first to Edward Fox. Their daughter Lucy, who became Viscountess Gormanston, told The Independent on Sunday: “The marriage was doomed from the start, but they never stopped being close friends. They really loved each other so much.”

Reed’s third husband was Bill Simpson, who played the title role in BBC Television’s Dr Finlay’s Casebook (1962-71), which centred on a general medical practice in the fictional Scottish town of Tannochbrae in the 1920s. Reed herself appeared in the programme from 1967 to 1969.

The above “The Stage” obituary can also be accessed online here.

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John Loder

New York Times obituary in 1989:

John Loder, an actor whose tenure of more than 30 years in British and American movies was credited largely to his good looks and his imposing physique, has died in England. He was 90 years old and had homes in London and Buenos Aires.

Mr. Loder, who died in late December, was born John Muir Lowe, in York, England. He was educated at Eton and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, England, and at Eton College. In World War I, he served with the 15th Hussars in North Africa, France and Gallipoli, Turkey. He was taken prisoner in early 1918. His 1977 autobiography was titled ”Hollywood Hussar.” Started as an Extra

His first film appearance was as an extra in a 1926 German feature, ”Madame Wants No Children,” which starred Marlene Dietrich.

Mr. Loder left Europe for Hollywood and had roles in Paramount’s first talking picture, ”The Doctor’s Secret,” in 1929. He was also in Rin-Tin-Tin’s first sound picture, in 1930.

Among the scores of British and American films he performed in were the 1937 British version of ”King Solomon’s Mines,” with Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Paul Robeson, Roland Young and Anna Lee, Alfred Hitchcock’s ”Sabotage” (1936), ”Eagle Squadron” (1942), ”Passage to Marseilles” (1944) and ”Lorna Doone” (1935), considered his best British movie. His last films included ”Gideon’s Day” (1958), ”Esquiu” (1965) and ”The Firechasers” (1970). Although he had a variety of roles, his specialty seemed to be the jilted husband. Noted Portrayals

Critics considered his best portrayals to be Ianto, the eldest son in ”How Green Was My Valley” (1941), and Elliott Livingston, opposite Bette Davis, in ”Now, Voyager” (1942).

Another significant Loder film was ”Dishonored Lady” (1947), in which he appeared with Hedy Lamarr, who became his third wife in 1943 and from whom he was divorced when they made the movie together. They had a son and daughter.

His other wives were Sophie Kabel, with whom he had a son; Micheline Cheirel, with whom he had a daughter; Evelyn Carolyn Auffmordt, and Alba Julia Lagomarsino, whom he married in 1958

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Phillip Friend

Philip Friend

Philip Friend

 

From “Answers” :

British actor Philip Friend made his stage bow in 1935 and his film debut in 1939, after which he settled into his peculiar niche as the bargain-counter Errol Flynn. The titles of Friend’s English and American films pretty much tell the whole story: Sword in the Desert (1949), Buccaneer’s Girl (1950), The Story of Robin Hood (1958). Friend was cast in the potentially star-making title role in The Highwayman (1951), based on the famed Alfred Noyes narrative poem. Alas, this movie barely moved until the last five minutes–just long enough for Friend and leading lady Wanda Hendrix to get killed off and then reappear as ghosts. Philip Friend was active in movies, TV and Broadway until the ’70s, always one tiny step away from true stardom. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/phillip-friend#ixzz3G1lvdTCY

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Miles Anderson
Miles Anderson
Miles Anderson

IMDB entry:

Born in Rhodesia, Miles’ childhood as the son of Major-General John Anderson and writer Daphne Anderson placed him at the heart of historical change in Africa in the 1950s and 60s. In 1964, his father was removed by the then-Prime Minister, Ian Smith, for his opposition to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence and, two years later, the family left the country. More than forty years on, he continues to support the opposition in what is now Zimbabwe. Miles has been acting for stage and screen for many years, perhaps best known in recent times for his television appearances as “Colonel Aidan Dempsey” in ITV’s Ultimate Force (2002), “Roger O’Neill” in the award-winning House of Cards (1990), “Terry Fox” in BBC’s Holby City (1999) and “Colonel Dan Fortune” in the hit series Soldier Soldier (1991). His stage appearances in the West End and for the Royal Shakespeare Company have won him acclaim with, amongst others, “The Witch of Edmonton”, “The Twin Rivals”, “Macbeth”, “The Weir”, “Oliver!” and “Twelfth Night”. He was also the first ever man to play “Peter Pan” in Trevor Nunn‘s acclaimed production. He was awarded three British Drama Awards in his first season at Stratford and was nominated for aLaurence Olivier Award for “Sigismund” in Calderon de la Barca‘s “Life’s A Dream”. He has worked with such Directors as Richard Attenborough, Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble, Max Stafford-Clark, Sam Mendes, Paul Seed, John Caird, Ian Rickson and Dominic Cooke. He has two sons, the actor Joe Anderson and 2006 and 2009 World Streetboard Champion, Max Anderson. He lives in Los Angeles.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Milos

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

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Jonjo O’Neill
Jonjo O'Neill
Jonjo O’Neill

Jonjo O’Neill (born 11 July 1978) is a Northern Irish actor known for his stage and television work.

O’Neill was born in Belfast. He trained at the Guildford School of Acting. His first television role was in Extremely Dangerous (1999).

A member of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 2009-2011 ensemble, his roles included Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Orlando in As You Like It, and Launcelot in Morte D’Arthur. His performances during the RSC’s six-week residency at Park Avenue Armory in New York were hailed as “forceful”[2] and “irresistible.”[3] At the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon, O’Neill played the title role in Roxana Silbert‘s production of Richard III at the Swan Theatre.[4][5]

In 2012 he won praise for his performance in Lucy Prebble‘s play The Effect at the Royal National Theatre headlining alongside Billie Piper, [6] whom he later starred alongside in the 2013, fiftieth anniversary episode “The Day of the Doctor” of Doctor Who.

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John McGlynn
John McGlynn
John McGlynn
John McGlynn

John McGlynn (born 8 September 1953) is a Scottish actor. His most notable role was that of vet Calum Buchanan in the British television series All Creatures Great and Small between January 1988 and September 1989. He played the part of Dr. Richard Earle in the British Granada TV mystery series Rosemary and Thyme in 2004 in the ‘Swords into Ploughshares’ episode. He played the part of DI Tom Adams in the BBC crime thriller series Silent Witness in series 1, 1996.

He played Balmoral Castle‘s head gillie in the 2006 film The Queen.

McGlynn’s debut as a professional actor was in 1975 at The Young Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a new play, If Ye Died wi’a Face Like That, by Glaswegian writer William Grant. He was already working with the company as a drummer, contributing to the pre-recorded soundtrack for the above production. He remained with the company for the next two years, performing as an actor, drummer and singer in Cry Wolf, The Water Babies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Under Milk Wood. He also worked as a singer/drummer/actor with the Scottish 7:84 Company in My Pal and Me and The Trembling Giant, both written by John McGrath. After 7:84 ceased operations, McGlynn was engaged by the Wildcat Theatre Co., which emerged from it, in His Master’s Voice and The Complete History of Rock’n’Roll.

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ABOUT ME

Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.

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