Adam Godley

IMDB entry:

Adam Godley is a film, television and theatre actor. He is a Tony Award nominee and has been nominated three times for the Olivier Award. He began his acting career at the age of 9, in a BBC radio production of Hemingway’s My Old Man. His first stage role came at age 11, as Prince Giovanni in The White Devil at The Old Vic. His childhood career also included work at London’s National Theatre, in Lillian Helman’s Watch on the Rhine, and Close of Play, directed by Harold Pinter.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: JANTEE MHORR

Per Wikipedia:

Adam Godley began his acting career at the age of 9, in a BBC radio production of Hemingway’s My Old Man. His first stage role came at age 11, as Prince Giovanni in The White Devil at the Old Vic Theatre. His childhood career also included work at the National Theatre, in Lillian Helman’s Watch on the Rhine, and Close of Play, directed by Harold Pinter.

Joan Plowright was born in Brigg, Lincolnshire on October 28, 1929, she received her training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and made her professional stage debut at Croydon in 1948. Her Londondebut came in 1954, and two years later, she joined George Devine‘s English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, which would change her life just as the drama at the Royal Court revolutionized the English theater.

The Royal Court’s 1956 production of John Osborne‘s _Look Back In Anger’ was a watershed in English theatrical history, ushering in the ‘Angry Young Man” era in British cultural life. In 1957, Plowright first co-starred with her future husband Olivier in the Royal Court’s production of Osborne’s The Entertainer (1960) when she took over the role of Archie Rice’s daughter Jean Rice when the play transferred to a commercial venue in the West End. She recreated the role in Tony Richardson‘s 1960 film of the play.

To escape the notoriety from Olivier’s divorce from Vivien Leigh, Plowright and Olivier went to New York, where they appeared on Broadway, he inBecket (1964) and she in A Taste of Honey (1961). For her performance as Josephine, which Rita Tushingham played in the movie version, she won a 1961 Tony Award as Best Actress in a Play. (She had first appeared on Broadway in a twin bill of Eugène Ionesco‘s “The Chairs” and “The Lesson” in January 1958, a month before she appeared with Olivier in “The Entertainer”.) When his divorce from Leigh came through, they were married in March 1961 in New York with Richard Burton as Larry’s best man.

From 1963 onward, she was a member of the National Theatre, which was headed by Olivier. Plowright created a distinguished stage career and was acclaimed when she began appearing more frequently in movies and television starting in the the 1980s. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the female equivalent of a knighthood, in the 2004 Queen’s New Year Honours.

Plowright divorced her first husband, the actor Roger Gage, to marry Olivier in 1961 and they had three children, Richard Kerr Olivier, Tamsin Olivierand Julie Kate Olivier.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

The times obituary in 2024.

From the time she married Sir Laurence Olivier in 1961 Joan Plowright became, in effect, two people. She was Lady Olivier, wife of the most formidable actor of his time and inevitably in his shadow, but also a promising young actress determined to pursue a career in her own right. “I had my own style and my own individuality. I was swept off my feet emotionally by him: there was no need to be swept off theatrically,” she said. Once asked what it was like to “live with a legend”, she replied deftly: “No one is a legend in their own home. He lives like any member of the human race.”

Her record on stage put her alongside such near-contemporaries as Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. First making her mark in the new British drama of the Fifties, she went on to embrace the classical repertoire with particular success in Chekhov, her favourite playwright, and Bernard Shaw.Her gift for comedy enhanced much of her work and she enjoyed long West End runs in the plays of the Italian writer Eduardo De Filippo. Apart from an effective Portia opposite Olivier’s Shylock she did comparatively little Shakespeare, never attempting the tragic heights of Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra.

The marriage was a success, despite unhelpful omens. Olivier was 22 years her senior, with two failed marriages behind him. To Plowright’s mother, who was against the match, he was little more than a philanderer. Soon after marrying Plowright, seemingly true to form, he embarked on an on-off affair with the even younger Sarah Miles.

Yet his union with “Joanie”, as he called her, was based on deep and genuine love, produced three children and endured until his death in 1989, aged 82. “My relationship with her brought a new kind of headiness in its rapture,” he said. For Plowright, however, the marriage was never easy. “I loved him so much I would have died for him, but there were times when I didn’t know how to live with him,” she reflected in one interview in 2001. Nevertheless, she insisted their commitment to each other was total.

When Olivier became director of the National Theatre and took her with him as a leading player, she was aware that her position in the company could be seen as favouritism. She wanted to break free and do other work; Olivier, however, would not let her go. When she asked for leave of absence to do a play in the West End, he not only opposed it but threatened to resign from the National if she went ahead. Some years later, he even more vehemently opposed her return to the National in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, through a solicitor’s letter, threatened divorce, only to deny all knowledge and offer Plowright a remorseful apology.

By this time Olivier’s recurrent illnesses, including cancer and pneumonia, which had twice brought him near to death, meant that he could no longer take on the amount of work he had been used to. He found it hard to accept that Plowright was the one working and, as she put it, “earning a necessary addition to our income”.

Joan Ann Plowright was born in Brigg, Lincolnshire, in 1929, the second of three children. Her father, William, was the editor of a local newspaper, the Scunthorpe and Frodingham Gazette, but the greater influence was her mother Daisy (née Burton), an aspiring ballerina and keen amateur actress and singer, who produced plays for the local youth club and painted scenery in the garden. Attached to their home was a wooden playhouse built by her father, which was named “Bohemia” and became the centre of family life. Friends gathered there and the children performed concerts and plays. “My mother had a reputation for being an outstanding local actress and she channelled her enthusiasm back to us,” Plowright said. In 2018 she appeared in the playful documentary Nothing Like a Dame with her fellow thespian dames Smith, Dench and Eileen Atkins. In it, Plowright recalled her mother’s words when she told her she was going into acting: “You’re no oil painting, but you’ve got the spark and thank God you have my legs and not your father’s.

While at Scunthorpe Grammar School she played Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal and won a trophy at a local drama festival. “I had a nagging inner compulsion to do well. I wasn’t always near the top although I might have seemed a model schoolgirl; inside I felt out of place. Above all else, I envied my brother [David] his carefree, buoyant attitude — even in failure.” She and David were “tremendous show-offs”, she recalled. “On Saturday nights, when there was a local dance, we would perform some flashy routine together.” David became a director of Granada Television, while their older brother Bob went on to be an organist and taught at Trinity College of Music.

After studying at the Rudolf von Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester, Plowright successfully auditioned for the Old Vic Theatre School in London where she was taught by George Devine, Glen Byam Shaw and Michel Saint-Denis. Devine said she did by instinct what others had to learn. At this time she saw Olivier as Hamlet in the cinema and wrote to her mother that it was “pure, unadulterated ham”.

While her future husband would later declare that “her very name was enough to make me think thoughts of love”, her first acting agent was unconvinced by it. “He thought Joan Plowright sounded like a trade. Like ploughs and agriculture,” she recalled. “He suggested something like Desiree Day. I said there was no way I could live up to that. I didn’t change my name — I changed my agent.

From drama school she went into rep at the Bristol Old Vic and made her London debut in The Duenna, a musical version of Sheridan’s play by Julian Slade. A year later, in 1955, she played Pip, the mad cabin boy, in Orson Welles’s London production of Moby Dick. She was in a Peter Ustinov play at Nottingham when Devine invited her to join his English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Although the company’s aim was to feature work by new writers, and it was put on the map by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Plowright got her first leading role as Margery Pinchwife in Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife. Olivier saw her on stage for the first time and was, as he later wrote, “entranced

In 1957 Olivier, in a bold attempt to embrace the new drama, joined the Court to play the fading music-hall comedian Archie Rice in Osborne’s The Entertainer. When the production moved to the West End Plowright took over the part of Archie’s daughter. Off stage, a relationship soon blossomed, though Plowright was initially wary of committing herself to a man with a reputation for flirting with young actresses. But her heart was “touched by the bleakness in his face when he wasn’t acting or flirting”, she wrote years later.

There were several complications: Plowright had been married since 1953 to a fellow actor, Roger Gage, and Olivier was still married to Vivien Leigh, whose increasingly erratic behaviour, the result of manic depression, was making a break inevitable, though Leigh would not agree to a divorce.

In 1958 Plowright made her New York debut in a double bill by the absurdist writer Eugène Ionesco, playing a 90-year-old in The Chairs and a 17-year-old pupil in The Lesson. She later joined Olivier in the Broadway production of The Entertainer. Back at the Royal Court she repeated the Ionesco plays and starred in Shaw’s Major Barbara. The play that established her, though, was Arnold Wesker’s Roots, in which she created the role of Beatie Bryant, the Norfolk farm girl whose ideas are transformed by a visit to the metropolis. The production opened at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry and transferred to the Royal Court in June 1959. After watching her performance, the critic WA Darlington called her “one of the most accomplished, quite the most interesting and easily the most versatile of our young leading actresses”.

In 1960, while she was appearing with Olivier in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court, Leigh made a statement to the press in New York that Olivier had asked for a divorce in order to marry Plowright. It was the first time the affair had been made public. Fearing the publicity, Plowright left the play and went into hiding for a time, before resurfacing later in the year in New York in another career-defining role, as Jo in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. It won her a Tony award..

Olivier had followed her to New York to play in Anouilh’s Becket and in March 1961, both having secured divorces, they were married in Wilton, Connecticut, in a short and low-key ceremony. Both were anxious not to be recognised, though the registrar perhaps went a little too far.

“Name?” she asked.
“Laurence Olivier.”
“Profession?”
“Actor.”
“Are you?” the registrar said. “How very nice.”.

The couple’s son, Richard, was born later that year: he became a theatre director and writer. They went on to have two daughters, Tamsin and Julie Kate, who both became actresses and keen yoga teachers, giving lessons to their mother and her actress friends. Plowright took two years off from acting after the birth of each child but always found herself pining for the stage. It was a “compulsive obsession”, she said, because acting for her was “as necessary as breathing”.

For many years the family home was a 15th-century malt house near Brighton with a swimming pool, tennis court and cook, where Plowright enjoyed gardening, painting and playing the piano. She and Olivier kept a home in London for entertaining, but wanted to be based outside the city “to have a separate life”. She said: “It was very important to me, and to Larry, that the children should have a childhood that wasn’t simply as an accessory to our lives.” They were sent to board at Bedales and, after revealing their embarrassment at being picked up from school in their father’s Bentley, he swapped the car. “Larry bought a London taxi to pick them up in, a purple one.”

During 1962 Olivier became artistic director of the new Chichester Festival Theatre, in effect (though this was not the original intention) a dry run for the National Theatre, which was launched at the Old Vic in October 1963. The National’s first season included two Chichester transfers, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with Plowright as Sonya, and Shaw’s Saint Joan, in which she made a resilient heroine.

She went on to succeed Maggie Smith as Hilde Wangel in Ibsen’s The Master Builder. Other roles for the National included a touching Masha in Olivier’s production of The Three Sisters and an intelligent Portia to Olivier’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, directed by Jonathan Miller. Her husband took on the part only after Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield declined but it was one of the most successful Olivier-Plowright partnerships.

In 1972 she finally managed to break free of the National and returned to Chichester, where she was a gentle, sympathetic Jennifer in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma and a mischievous Kate in The Taming of the Shrew opposite Anthony Hopkins. The next year at Greenwich Theatre she played Rebecca in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, a study in emotional crescendo with a bitter climax.

As the National passed, in 1973, into Peter Hall’s hands, she gave a fine performance in De Filippo’s Neapolitan comedy Saturday, Sunday, Monday — as Rosa, a house-proud Italian signora, busy with a stew in which the onions were detectable from the stalls. A sell-out success which transferred to the West End, it was the first of several fruitful, if often difficult, collaborations between Plowright and the volatile director Franco Zeffirelli.

Mature women were her meat now. In 1975, with Helen Mirren and others, she formed the Lyric Theatre company under the direction of Lindsay Anderson. She gave a sympathetic Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, then a richly comic performance as a middle-aged woman who belatedly discovers sex in The Bed Before Yesterday by the veteran farceur Ben Travers. Another award came in 1978, from the Society of West End Theatre, for an exquisitely funny performance in De Filippo’s Filumena Marturano, as a retired prostitute with three adult sons and a husband not certainly the father of any of them. Again directed by Zeffirelli, it ran for two years at the Lyric but a New York production, directed by Olivier, lasted only six weeks.

To her collection of fine Shaw performances she added Mrs Warren in Mrs Warren’s Profession at the National, her characteristic humour lurking below the surface. In 1986 she played the housekeeper to Glenda Jackson’s widow in Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba.

The year after Olivier’s death in 1989 she felt an urge to get back to work — “Larry wouldn’t want me to be a widow sitting around in weeds and weeping” — and played Mrs Conway in JB Priestley’s Time and the Conways at the Old Vic. Her fondness for Priestley dated back to her childhood, when she would listen to his popular wartime Postscripts on the wireless. The Old Vic production was a family affair: her daughters were both in the cast and the director was her son, Richard.

Afterwards she did little on stage until 2003 when she teamed up with Zeffirelli again in the West End on Pirandello’s typically teasing Absolutely! (Perhaps). It was a production of style rather than substance but Plowright won praise for her haunting performance as the old woman who may or may not be insane.

Apart from film versions of her stage work, such as The Entertainer and The Three Sisters, she largely ignored the cinema until the late 1970s when she played the mother of the troubled boy in Equus, with Richard Burton. He arrived on the first day of rehearsals wearing a mink-lined raincoat, polished shoes and an entourage to clear the way. “We were in sneakers and jeans,” she recalled. “Richard came that way because it was expected of him on every other film.” She was in Peter Greenaway’s enigmatic Drowning by Numbers, went to Hollywood for the black comedy I Love You to Death and was one of four Englishwomen on holiday in Italy in the 1920s in Enchanted April (1991). Dismissed as handsome to look at but dramatically slight when it was shown on the BBC, it became a surprise success in the United States and won Plowright a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.

Later films were mainly forgettable until she returned to Italy for Tea with Mussolini (1999), directed by Zeffirelli and based on his boyhood in Florence in the 1930s when he was looked after by English expats.

Television was the least important of her outlets but she acted with Olivier in James Bridie’s Daphne Laureola and in a revival of Saturday, Sunday, Mondayduring a season of plays in the 1970s presented by Olivier under the auspices of her TV executive brother, David. She was Meg in Pinter’s The Birthday Party, played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest and won a second Golden Globe for a biopic of Stalin. In the late 1990s she starred as the Italian mother of Nathan Lane’s failed opera singer in Encore! Encore!, an American comedy from the makers of Cheers and Frasier.
Plowright was appointed CBE in 1970 and DBE in 2004 and had a theatre named after her in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, near her birthplace. Her memoir, And That’s Not All, was published in 2001.

After Olivier’s death she and her children gathered every Christmas at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, where his ashes are interred, to sing carols, light candles and tell stories about his life.
Cynics had predicted their marriage would never last, but death alone had parted them. Reflecting on the lead role he had played in her life, she said: “Just being Larry’s Joan would not have been enough. We didn’t meet on those terms. We met on stage as artists and we fell in love.

Anna Lee was born in Kent in 1913. She began her career in 1930’s British movies such as “King Solamon’s Mines” with Paul Robson in 1937 and “Non-Stop New York”. In the late 1930’s she and her husband the film director Robert Stevenson went to Hollywood and she made many movies with John Ford, including “How Green Was My Valley” in 1941, “Ford Apache” in 1948, “The Horse Soldiers” in 1959 and 2Seven Women” in 1965. Her other movies include “Bedlam”, “The Ghost and Mrs Muir”, “The Sound of Music” and “Our Man Flint”. She starred in the long running TV soap “General Hospital” from 1978 until 2004. She died at the age of 91 in 2004.

Richard Chatten’s obituary on Anna Lee in “The Independent”:

Spirited, extremely pretty and a natural blonde, but far too refined and school-marmish for standard Hollywood stardom (the playwright Bertolt Brecht, with characteristic gallantry, dismissed her as “a smooth, characterless doll”), it would be rash to make any great claims on Anna Lee’s behalf as an actress, but it was always a pleasure to see her and she could be very effective when well cast.

Ads by Googleth (Anna Lee), actress: born Ightham, Kent 2 January 1913; MBE 1982; married 1936 Robert Stevenson (died 1986; one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1945 George Stafford (two sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1970 Robert Nathan (died 1985); died Los Angeles 14 May 2004.

In Hollywood (after inventing an Irish grandfather to win his approval) she became one of the few female members of fellow Catholic John Ford’s regular repertory company of actors, appearing in eight of his films between How Green Was My Valley (1941) and7 Women (1966). The parts that he gave her seldom amounted to very much, however, and it perversely fell to two of Hollywood’s most macho, off-beat talents to provide her with two of her best middle-aged roles.

In Sam Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959), she played Mac, the drunken, cigar-smoking Bohemian artist and earth-mother to the heroine (in whom her interest may be more than purely maternal), and in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), she was the breezy neighbour of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, who by her example allayed fears that women of her age inevitably disintegrated into Gorgons like those living next door. After shooting their first scene together, Davis barked, “It’s good to be working with a pro.”

Born Joan Boniface Winnifrith in Ightham, Kent, in 1913, daughter of the village rector, and god-daughter of Sybil Thorndike, her stage name was a composite of Anna Karenina and Robert E. Lee. She made her début on the London stage in 1932 and, a few minor film appearances later, was promoted to Jack Hulbert’s leading lady – an intrepid young aviatrix – in The Camels are Coming (1934).

Her vigorous, try-anything personality also saw service as assistant to mad scientist Boris Karloff in The Man Who Changed His Mind(1936), Allan Quartermain’s daughter in King Solomon’s Mines(1937) and a human cannonball in Young Man’s Fancy (1939), during the filming of which she was actually shot out of the cannon.

All three were directed by her then-husband Robert Stevenson, who directed most of her films at this time, and whom she accompanied to Hollywood in 1939. She was also the second lead, Jessie Matthews’ platinum blonde rival, in First a Girl (1935), a part, alas, that was to prove more characteristic of what was to come her way after transferring to Tinseltown, although she started at the top, co- starring opposite Ronald Colman in My Life With Caroline (1941).

It was a dreary film, however, and after a few undistinguished female leads in quality productions like Commandos Strike at Dawn(1942) and Hangmen Also Die (1943), she was rapidly relegated to supporting roles in “A” features such as Flesh and Fantasy (1943),Summer Storm (1944), The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) and Fort Apache (1948), and leads in “B”s. Ironically, it was one of the latter that gave her her best part (and, after How Green Was My Valley, her own personal favourite) – that of Nell Rowen in Val Lewton’sBedlam (1946), a frivolous young actress whose wilfulness provokes her sugar daddy into having her placed in the care of a leering asylum director played by Boris Karloff.

She returned briefly to the stage in 1950 in a summer stock tour ofMiranda and began increasingly to appear on television, including a three-year stint during the early Fifties as a panellist on It’s News to Me.

At this point, however, her career was abruptly interrupted by the Hollywood blacklist. Although in her own words a “Winston Churchill Conservative”, who saw nothing wrong with the blacklisting of actual Communists, she was confused with another actress and her name appeared in the notorious anti-Communist newsletter Red Channels. She was unable to get acting work for several years and was forced to make her living writing TV scripts under an assumed name.

In 1956 she finally wrote in desperation to Ford, who immediately got on the phone to Washington and cleared the situation up. “If it hadn’t been for Ford, I probably wouldn’t have been working now,” she told the film historian Joseph McBride in 1987, but even so, she still had to add a rider to every contract she subsequently signed declaring that she was not now, and had never been, a Communist.

It was Ford who made her rehabitilition complete by giving Lee her first film role since 1952, as Mrs Jack Hawkins in Gideon’s Day(1958, her only post-war British film), and later film roles included a stagecoach passenger held up by Lee Marvin in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Balance (1962) and a nun with a twinkle in her eye inThe Sound of Music (1965).

Her last substantial film role was in In Like Flint (1967) in which, to quote Variety‘s reviewer, “Anna Lee, ever a charming and gracious screen personality, is part of a triumvirate bent on seizing world power.” (The trouser suit she wore throughout the film concealed the fact that she was black and blue from head to foot and had a broken wrist and 13 stitches in her thigh from a car accident four days before shooting had started).

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties she regularly featured, still as pretty as ever, in the soap opera General Hospital, only retiring from the show last year. A year after she had joined in 1978, taking the part of Lila Quatermaine, she was paralysed from the waist downwards in a car accident, and acted the role in a wheelchair.

She had a narrow escape just before Christmas 1994 when she was hauled to safety as her cottage off Sunset Strip caved in behind her during a fire which also destroyed most of her memorabilia and the only draft of her autobiography.

Richard Chatten

The “Independent” obituary can also be accessed on-line here.

Leonard Whiting.

Leonard Whiting is best known for his performance as ‘Romeo’ in Franco Zefferelli’s 1968 film “Romeo and Juliet” opposite Olivia Hussey. He also starred opposite Jean Simmons in “Say Hello to Yesterday” in 1971. He was born in London in 1950.

IMDB entry:

Leonard Whiting was born and raised in North London, in the Woodgreen-Hampstead area. He is the only son of Arthur Leonard Whiting, who managed a store where exhibition materials were made, and of Peggy Joyce O’Sullivan, who worked in a telephone instrument factory. There are two younger sisters, Linda and Anne.

Whiting attended school at St. Richard of Chichester in Camden. An average scholar, he was graduated just a week or two before beginning work on Romeo and Juliet (1968). An agent who happened to be at a recording studio when Whiting, then 12, was making a record with a pop group, was responsible for the boys’ professional start.

After hearing him sing, the agent suggested he try out for Lionel Bart‘s “Oliver!” which constantly needed replacements for its child performers. Whiting played the Artful Dodger in the long-running London musical for 18 months, and for 13 months appeared in the National Theatre production of Congreve’s “Love for love”, which toured Moscow and Berlin.

Director ‘Zeffirelli’ described his discovery, made from 300 youngsters auditioned during more than three months: “He has a magnificent face, gentle melancholy, sweet, the kind of idealistic young man Romeo ought to be.”

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Humberto Barrer

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Freda Jackson was a British character actress who specialised in playing nasty, spiteful types. She was born in Nottingham in 1907. Among her film credits are the ‘bogus nun’ in “The Lady Vanishes” with Margaret Lockwood in 1939 directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She went on feature in “A Canterbury Tale” in 1944, “The Good Die Young”, “Bhowanai Junction” as Ava Gardner’s mother, “The Brides of Dracula” and “Tom Jones” in 1963. She died in 1990 in Northampton.

IMDB entry:

Freda Jackson was born in Nottingham, England in 1908, the daughter of a railway porter. After studying at High Pavement School and the University College there, she became a schoolteacher but gave up her career to study acting at the Royal College of Art, in London. Her first professional stage appearance was in Northampton, England in 1934, before moving on to London’s West End in 1936. In 1938 she joined the prestigious Old Vic company, touring with them in Europe and Egypt. She played Shakespeare at Stratford on Avon in 1940, but it was in 1945 that she gained fame in ‘No Room at the Inn’ in London. Following this success she went on to play many starring roles. In total Freda Jackson appeared in some sixty two major stage roles in England and overseas.

At the same time she appeared in twenty six films, including Sir Laurence Olivier’s ‘Henry V’, David Lean’s version of Dicken’s ‘Great Expectations’, Tony Richardson’s ‘Tom Jones’, and the Hammer Horror classic ‘Brides of Dracula’. Not content with this she also appeared in several classic British television shows, including Maigret, Adam Adamant Lives, and Blake’s 7, together with a number of more serious dramas.

Freda Jackson, who was married to the painter Henry Bird ARCA, died in 1990.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: David Litchfield davidlitchfield@hotmail.com

Norah Gorsen was Bill Traver’s leading lady in “Geordie” in 1955. She was born in Poole, Dorset in 1933. Her only other film seems to be “Personal Affair” with Gene Tierney and Glynis Johns. She featured on television until 1969. She was married at one time to actor Ronald Lewis.

Jack Hedley was born in 1930 in London. Although his career has been mainly on British television, he has starred in such movies as “Room At the Top” in 1959, “The Secret of Blood Island” and in 1968, “The Anniversary” with Bette Davis. Jack Hedley died in 2022 at the age of 92.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Born in London and educated at Emanuel School, his screen career began in 1950 with a 13-minute drama-documentary about polio called A Life to be Lived. In the 1950s he starred in a number of films and TV appearances, such as Left Right and Centre, Fair Game, and the Alun Owen-scripted No Trams to Lime Street with Billie Whitelaw. He became a TV star in the Francis Durbridge-scripted BBC series The World of Tim Frazer (transmitted from November 1960 to March 1961), the 18 instalments of which comprised three separate serials of six episodes each. He also played Corrigan Blake in Alun Owen’s BBC play You Can’t Win ‘Em All (1962) the role being taken over by John Turner in the series Corrigan Blake that resulted the following year. He was also in Alun Owen’s A Little Winter Love (1965), part of the Theatre 625 series.

He appeared in a number of British films of the 1960s, including Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Scarlet Blade (1963), Witchcraft (1964), Of Human Bondage (1964), The Secret of Blood Island (1964) and The Anniversary(1968). He also had a lead role as Lt Colonel Preston in Colditz (1972–74).

Hedley later appeared in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981) as Sir Timothy Havelock, also voicing Havelock’s parrot. Soon after this, in the autumn of 1981 he played the lead role (cynical investigative cop Fred Williams) in Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper (Lo squartatore di New York, 1982), in which his voice was dubbed^{[citation needed]}. He also starred with Stanley Baker and Jean Seberg in the film of Irwin Shaw‘s In The French Style(1963).

Other TV appearances include: The Saint (1965), Gideon’s Way (“The Alibi Man”, 1965), Softly, Softly (1967), Dixon of Dock Green (1969), The Buccaneers (1957), the ex-serviceman Alan Haldane in Who Pays the Ferryman?(1977), Return of the Saint (1979), One by One (1984), Remington Steele (also 1984), Only Fools and Horses (“A Royal Flush“, 1986), ‘Allo ‘Allo (1992), Dalziel and Pascoe (1998) and the television film version of Brief Encounter (1974).

Veronica Hurst was born in 1931 in Malta. She starred in such British movies as “Laughter in Paradise” and went to Hollywood in 1953 to make “The Maze”. She did not stay in California but returned to the UK and featured in all the major TV drama series in the late 1950’s, the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Telegraph obituary in 2023:

Veronica Hurst obituary

Elegant actress who dated Peter Ustinov and made her film debut alongside Audrey Hepburn

Saturday November 19 2022, 12.01am GMT, The Times

Theatre

Hurst in The Maze (1953), a horror film that gained a cult followingALAMY

When the teenage Veronica Hurst made her debut in the 1951 comedy Laughter in Paradise, the film’s Italian director Mario Zampi described her as “one of the greatest potential screen stars I have ever seen”.

It was some encomium given that Audrey Hepburn, who was also making one of her first professional appearances, did not get a mention in the director’s appraisal of his cast.

If Hurst never quite fulfilled her early promise and was soon overtaken by Hepburn, she enjoyed an enduring career as an elegant leading lady in a spate of film and television roles in the 1950s and 1960s.

Hurst with Rock Hudson at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, London, in 1952

When she won a scholarship to Rada aged 17, it seemed that the theatrical world was at her feet. Within a year she had been spotted by John Redway, casting director for the Associated British Picture Corporation, who curtailed her studies by offering her a seven-year contract at Elstree Studios at £2,500 a year (£100,000 at today’s value).

In many ways Laughter in Paradise now seems like a dated black-and-white period piece, although the film’s central premise, involving four people abjectly humiliating themselves for money, has a peculiarly contemporary resonance in the era of Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!.

Among the quartet required to perform tasks contrary to their natures, in order to collect the money from an elderly relative’s will, were Alastair Sim and George Cole, both of whom became friends for life. Sim, in particular, became a mentor. “I was just a juvenile actress but he was wonderful to me,” Hurst said. “His entire family became great friends.”

Laughter in Paradise was a box-office hit and the fourth biggest-grossing British picture of the year, but Hurst’s own favourite film came the following year when she was cast in Angels One Five as a young woman working in the operations room of an RAF station during the summer of 1940. Starring Jack Hawkins and Michael Denison, the film took its title from an RAF radio call sign for a radar sighting at 15,000ft and was memorable as the first postwar film made about the Battle of Britain.

Hurst with Richard Carlson in The Maze (1953)

A third notable early appearance came in The Maze, a bizarre 1953 horror film that has since attracted a cult following for its pioneering use of 3D, involving two prints of the film being projected simultaneously and viewed by the audience through special glasses.

That same year she met her first husband, the American actor William Sylvester, on the set at Elstree where they were filming The Yellow Balloon. Set in the bomb-ravaged East End of London in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Sylvester played a killer on the run and Hurst an unsuspecting Sunday school teacher duped into helping him.

Sylvester, whose most famous appearance was to come in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), was a decade older and already married to Sheila Sweet, a Rada graduate. He left her for Hurst and they married in 1955.

Although she acknowledged some happy years together, the marriage ended acrimoniously and in later life she came to regret the relationship. “He abandoned his wife to be with me,” she said in a 2019 interview. “Looking back, I think, ‘You should never have done that and upset that girl. You should have turned him down’. But he was so romantic and had such sex appeal.”

Hurst and Rock Hudson meet the Queen at the Royal Film Performance in Leicester Square, London, 1952

They divorced in 1964 and two years later she married Ian Fordyce, a television producer who worked closely with David Frost and went on to direct the 13-part series The Further Adventures of Oliver Twist. They divorced in 1974.

Both her ex-husbands predeceased her. She is survived by two sons from her first marriage, Mio Sylvester, a retired barrister, and Simon Sylvester, who lives in California; and by one son from her second marriage, Darrell Fordyce, a former soldier turned leadership development consultant. Another son, Reed, from her first marriage, died in a car accident at the age of six.

She was born Patricia Veronica Wilmshurst in Malta in 1931, the daughter of Alfred Wilmshurst, a sailor in the Royal Navy, and his wife, Esther. He later ran a pub in London, where Veronica grew up in Tooting. She was evacuated to Devon during the war.

Back in London she took evening classes and joined an amateur drama group. At Rada she was classmates with Joan Collins and for a while was Peter Ustinov’s girlfriend. She also made a pass at Rock Hudson when they shared a limousine to a screening on his first visit to Britain. It was only years later that she realised why she had been rebuffed.

Hurst in the 1970s TV series The Flaxton Boys

After time off while she started a family, her later films included the 1963 rock’n’roll cult picture Live It Up! in which she appeared alongside David Hemmings and the soon-to-be music stars Steve Marriott, co-founder of Small Faces, and Dave Clark, leader and drummer of the Dave Clark Five.

Two years later came the James Bond imitation film Licensed to Kill. Retitled The 2nd Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World on its release in America, Hurst starred as the love interest of the surrogate 007, played by Tom Adams.

As the 1960s went on, television came to provide most of her work, including appearances in The Troubleshooters, Coronation Street and Dixon of Dock Green. Into the 1970s she played the widowed Lady Jane Flaxton in Yorkshire Television’s historical drama The Flaxton Boys and appeared in the British version of General Hospital.

When film and TV work dried up in the 1980s she took to the stage, often appearing at the Wimbledon Theatre, and touring Canada with Leslie Phillips (obituary, November 8, 2022) and Andrew Sachs in a Ray Cooney farce.

An enthusiastic bridge player and a fine golfer who scored a hole in one at Roehampton and captained the ladies team of The Stage Golfing Society, Hurst spent her final years in the actors’ retirement home Denville Hall.

Veronica Hurst, actress, was born on November 11, 1931. She died on November 15, 2022, aged 91

Finola Hughes was born in 1959 in London. She has carved out a niche in long running television series in the U.S. such as “All My Children” and “General Hospital”. She starred opposite Joan Collins and Carol White in “Nutcracker” and John Travolta in the movie “Staying Alive” in 1983.

TCM overview:

Starting as a dancer, the British-born Finola Hughes originated the role of Victoria in “Cats” and then made the leap to Hollywood as Laura, the icy Broadway dance diva opposite John Travolta in the sequel “Stayin’ Alive” (1983). She achieved her greatest fame on “General Hospital” (ABC, 1963- ) as superspy Anna Devane, who became a longtime fan favorite and earned the actress a Daytime Emmy as well as a fun cameo in “Soapdish” (1991). Although she notched many non-soap credits, including notable stints as the English stepmother of “Blossom” (NBC, 1990-95) and the spirit of the dead mother of the witchy sisters of “Charmed” (The WB, 1998-2006), Hughes grabbed her biggest headlines when she jumped to “All My Children” (ABC, 1970-2011) as Dr. Alex Devane Marick, twin sister to the beloved Anna Devane, whom she subsequently reprised. She briefly hosted the makeover show “How Do I Look?” (Style Network, 2004- ), wrote a juicy novel about soap operas, and returned repeatedly for a series of guest spots as Anna on “General Hospital.” Although she was most widely known for her soap stardom, Finola Hughes managed to maintain a loyal fanbase and to carve out an interesting and enviable career.

Born Oct. 29, 1959 in London, England, Finola Hughes began her dance training from an early age, joining the Northern Ballet Company after winning the Markova award. After a few small dancing appearances in films, Hughes’s talents caught the eye of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who cast her as the original Victoria the White Cat in the London production of the global smash musical “Cats.” Hollywood took notice, and Hughes booked the female lead in the Sylvester Stallone-helmed “Stayin’ Alive” (1983), the sequel to the blockbuster “Saturday Night Fever” (1977). As Laura, the haughty star dancer in the Broadway musical “Satan’s Alley,” Hughes sparred with star John Travolta as Tony Manero, memorably dismissing him after a one-night stand with an icy “Everybody uses everybody.” Although critics hated nearly every aspect of the film and she herself earned two Razzie nominations, Hughes emerged relatively unscathed and was rewarded with a juicy role on the most popular daytime soap in the history of the genre.

As the glamorous spy Anna Devane, Hughes created a sensation day one of her arrival on “General Hospital” (ABC, 1963- ). Viewers adored the character’s complicated love affairs and intrigue Anna coolly navigated, including tumultuous marriages to fellow spy Robert Scorpio (Tristan Rogers) and mobster Duke Lavery (Ian Buchanan). A soap superstar, Hughes also found time to film guest spots on “L.A. Law” (NBC, 1986-1994) and to parody her overly dramatic persona in a juicy “Soapdish” (1991) cameo. That same year, Hughes won a Daytime Emmy for her “General Hospital” work, and she would also collect several Soap Opera Digest Awards and nominations. Surprisingly, Hughes was fired by the soap’s producer Gloria Monty in 1991, and briefly replaced by another actress. But fans would have none of it and the stage was set for a return by popular demand.

In the meantime, Hughes played a waitress on “Jack’s Place” (ABC, 1992-93) and continued to lens a steady stream of guest spots and supporting roles, including a lengthy stint as a sympathetic stepmother to “Blossom” (NBC, 1990-95) and an appearance as the evil comic book psychic Emma Frost, the White Queen, on “Generation X” (Fox, 1996). She played a seemingly perfect wife on the verge of collapse on the short-lived series “Pacific Palisades” (Fox, 1997) and contributed voices to “Superman: The Animated Series” (The WB, 1996-2000), “Life with Louie” (Fox, 1994-98) and “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World” (1998). Her soap opera roots came calling, however, and strangely, she joined “All My Children” (ABC, 1970-2011) as neurologist Dr. Alexandra “Alex” Devane Marick, who was revealed to be the twin sister of Anna Devane of the network’s “General Hospital.” Thankfully for “GH” fans, Alex located and rescued her sister, then conveniently left Pine Valley to return to Port Charles so Hughes could solely focus on breathing life back into Anna, who quickly reclaimed her fan favorite mantle, embarking on a slew of new adventures.

Hughes kept her other options open, however, making a string of guest appearances as Patty Halliwell, the deceased matriarch of the Halliwell clan on “Charmed” (The WB, 1998-2006), appearing to provide support, advice and love to her witch daughters (Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs, Alyssa Milano and eventually Rose McGowan). Hughes proved quite the popular figure despite the inherent limitations of playing a spirit, and recurred throughout the hit show’s run. After briefly hosting the makeover show “How Do I Look?” (Style Network, 2004- ), she was eventually replaced. Her fans remained loyal however, and Hughes’ much trumpeted return to “General Hospital” as part of the 2006 May sweeps earned excellent ratings, opening the door for Hughes to continue to make special appearances over the next few years and to pop up on “General Hospital: Night Shift” (SOAPnet, 2007-08). She branched out into writing when, along with Digby Diehl, Hughes penned a successful soap opera-themed novel Soapsuds, which offered up enough bitchy bon mots and over-the-top events to delight readers. The actress continued to earn credits on a variety of projects as varied as the procedural “CSI: NY” (CBS, 2004- ), the gymnastics teen drama “Make It or Break It” (ABC Family, 2009- ) and the well-reviewed romance “Like Crazy” (2011) which also featured Jennifer Lawrence.

By Jonathan Riggs

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

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