Brittish Actors
Veronica Roberts is a British actress, best known for playing Dorothy Bennett in the BBC drama “Tenko” and Laura Elliott in the ITV series “Peak Practice“. She has also made short-term appearances in “EastEnders“, “Casualty“, “The Bill“, “Holby City“, “Heartbeat” and “New Tricks“..
Stuart Wilson was born in Guilford, Surrey in 1946. He made his film debut with a major role in “Dulcima” with John Mills and Carol White in 1971. Other movies include “Wetherby” and in Hollywood “Lethal Weapon 3”, “The Age of Innocence” and “he Mask of Zorro”.
TCM overview:
A handsome, dark-haired, often mustachioed, actor, Stuart Wilson became more familiar to American moviegoers as the corrupt cop in “Lethal Weapon 3” (1992). Discerning TV viewers might remember the performer from a string of prestige British shows, many of which aired in the USA on PBS. The stage-trained Wilson has a prominent supporting role in “The Pallisers” (1977) and cut a dashing figure as Vronsky to Nicola Pagett’s “Anna Karenina” (1978). In the syndicated “Running Blind” (1981), he was cast an undercover British agent while in the multi-part “The Jewel in the Crown” (1984), he played a British army major. After a turn as a policeman investigating a murder in David Hare’s superb “Wetherby” (1985), Wilson was cast as a titled Hungarian with mixed feelings about the treatment of Jews under the Nazis in the NBC miniseries “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story” (also 1985).
Once his profile in American films was enhanced with his villainous turn in “Lethal Weapon 3”, Wilson found more or less steady work in the States for a couple of years. He offered another villain, this time a gun-running mercenary, in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III”, then turned more genteel but retaining an air of mystery as a suitor to the Countess (Michelle Pfeiffer) in “The Age of Innocence” (both 1993). The following year, the actor was tapped to play the leader of an anarchic band of rebels in the muddled sci-fi actioner “No Escape”, cast as a diamond smuggler who seeks refuge in a sex retreat in the uneven comedy “Exit to Eden” and portrayed Sigourney Weaver’s husband in Roman Polanski’s film version of Ariel Dorfman’s play “Death and the Maiden”. Wilson went on play Helen Mirren’s lover in two installments of “Prime Suspect” in 1995 and 1996 before etching another nefarious character, the Spanish governor, in “The Mark of Zorro” (1998), opposite Antonio Banderas and Anthony Hopkins
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Nicholas Ball was born in 1946 in Royal Lemington Spa. He is best known for his iconic performance in the classic British TV series of the late 1970’s “Hazell”. He has also starred in “Eastenders” and “Footballer’s Wives”. “Red Dwarf” interview here.
He portrayed the vicious gang lord Terry Bates in EastEnders between 2007 and 2009. He played Garry Ryan in series five of Footballers’ Wives and both series of its spin-off programme Footballers’ Wives: Extra Time. The voice of Nicholas Ball can be heard as well on various audio books offered via the internet; he has narrated books from such authors as Christopher Hitchens and James Maybrick. He was, in 2019, in an advert for Premier Inn, playing the part of Lenny Henry‘s manager.
Nicholas Ball died in June 2024 aged 78.
The actor Nicholas Ball, who has died aged 78, landed his biggest television role when he starred as a down-at-heel cockney private eye in the ITV series Hazell in 1978.
James Hazell starts his own detective agency after being invalided out of the police and turning to the bottle, triggering the end of his marriage. He soon becomes embroiled in violence as he tackles London low life, with the gritty reality extending to the crime-buster taking beatings himself.
“It would have been impossible to make a series like this without violence,” said Ball. “We have tried to show that violence hurts. It’s important to make violence look as repulsive as possible. If a bloke takes a kicking, he doesn’t jump up and run politely down the road.”
Hazell was based on novels written by the journalist Gordon Williams and the footballer-turned-manager Terry Venables under the joint pen name PB Yuill. “He’s new, he’s tough, he’s Hazell,” proclaimed publicity from the production company, Thames Television, whose controller of drama, Verity Lambert, enthused about the books’ “cockney sense of humour” and the potential for showing “the underbelly of London”.
That included seedy scenes shot in Acton, the East End and Clapton greyhound stadium, alongside stylish location filming in Soho, but nothing could stop ratings falling from a peak of 17m after the BBC scheduled a season of Robert Redford films against Hazell in 1979 during its second series.
The programme ended and Ball struggled to bounce back – at the same time as his personal life was falling apart. In 1978, he married Pamela Stephenson, the New Zealand-born actor about to find fame in Britain in the satirical sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News. The marriage was over after 18 months and television offers were thin on the ground for Ball, who struggled financially.
He continued to pop up in character parts on television, but failed to scale the heights he might have expected. Nevertheless, he had a leading role as Detective Chief Inspector Nick Hall of the Flying Squad in the third series of Thief Takers (1995), then played Garry Ryan, the rock star-turned-chair of Earls Park FC who is responsible for the death of its manager, in the final series of Footballers’ Wives (2006) – a part he first took in the spin-off Footballers’ Wive$: Extra Time (2005-06). “He was a complete rat, firing people and sleeping with other men’s wives,” said Ball.
Shortly afterwards, he played another screen villain, Terry Bates, leader of a gang of football hooligans, in EastEnders on and off between 2007 and 2009. Most memorably, while storming the Queen Vic to look for his reformed former accomplice Jase Dyer (Stephen Lord), the gang smashed the pub up and took Peggy Mitchell (Barbara Windsor) and others hostage. Later, Terry fatally stabbed Jase and was jailed for life. His death in 2019, off screen, gave the soap the storyline of his funeral taking place in the fictional Walford.
Ball was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, to Dorothy (nee Frith, known as Maggie), a teacher, and Robert Ball, an electrical engineer, and grew up in Hastings, East Sussex. On leaving school at 15, he acted with the amateur group at the Stables theatre, Hastings, for five years while working by day as a lorry driver, labourer and deckchair attendant.
When a friend applied to train at Bristol Old Vic theatre school, he did the same and both were accepted. While there, Ball took a small role as a despatch rider in a 1968 episode of the famous TV series Z Cars.
In 1969, he joined the repertory company at Hull Arts Centre for its opening play, Don’t Build a Bridge, Drain the River, by Alan Plater. Then, he was an early member of the Portable theatre company, a co-operative – founded by the writer David Hare and the director Tony Bicât – that toured Britain and Europe. This was followed by a stint at the Royal Court theatre, London, in 1975.
A year later, he made an impression on screen with a run as Mr Minter in Thames Television’s afternoon marriage-guidance serial Couples. It included a 10-minute monologue – “a husband telling his side of the marriage story,” Ball recalled.
This led him to be cast in Thames’s 1976 peak-time series The Crezz as Colin Pitman, an East Ender who makes it to the top of the advertising tree, then has to deal with a drink problem. Unfortunately for Ball, the programme – set in a west London crescent, with each episode focusing on a different household – failed to capture viewers’ imaginations, but Hazell followed shortly afterwards, with Ball beating John Nettles and others to the starring role.
Then, apart from other dramas, he made appearances in sitcoms: as a professor in The Young Ones in 1982; a film producer in Colin’s Sandwich in 1990; a simulant (“a kind of terminator,” he explained) in Red Dwarf in 1991; and a client of David (Robert Bathurst) in Cold Feet in 2000 who takes a liking to Karen’s mother (Mel Martin).
Ball’s later film roles included a gangster in Out of Depth (2000), the contract killer Harry Webster in The Krays: Dead Man Walking (2018) and Charlie Kray in A New Breed of Criminal (2023).
Ball and Stephenson divorced in 1984. In 2019 he married the actor Ayda Kay after they had been together for more than 20 years, and she survives him.
Benita Humewas born in 1906 in London. She made her film debut in the U.K. in 1925 in “The Happy Ending”. By the mid 1930’s she was in Hollywood and made such movies as “Tarzan Escapes” and “Rainbow On the River”. She was married to the actors Ropnald Colman and George Sanders. She died in 1967.
IMDB entry:
Benita Hume was born on October 14, 1906 in London, England as Benita Humm. She was an actress, known for Tarzan Escapes (1936), The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) and Suzy (1936). She died on November 1, 1967 in Egerton, England. Her first Broadway play was Ivor Novello’s “Symphony in Two Flats” in 1930She started out as a pianist but pursued acting because she wanted “excitement”Portrayed Victoria Hall on NBC Radio’s “The Halls of Ivy” (1950-1952) with her husband Ronald Colman. Daughter, Juliet, born 1944 Trained at RADA; first stage appearance in 1924. With Ronald Colman was part owner of the San Ysidro resort in Santa Barbara, California. Brunette leading lady, on stage in London from the age of seventeen. On the other side of the Atlantic, she played a series of well-coiffed English ladies in RKO and MGM films of the 1930’s, but never quite made the grade as a star. She eventually quit acting for the role of a leading socialite, as wife first to Ronald Colman then George Sanders.
Adrienne Corri
Adrienne Corri was born in 1931 Glasgow. Despite having significant roles in many films, Adrienne Corri is likely to be remembered for one of her smaller parts, that of Mrs. Alexander, the wife of the writer Frank Alexander, in the 1971 A Clockwork Orange. . Though the scene lasts barely three minutes Corri appeared in many excellent films, notably as Valerie in Jean Renoir‘s The River (1951), as Lara’s mother in David Lean‘s Dr. Zhivago (1965) and in the Otto Preminger thriller Bunny Lake is Missing. She also appeared in a number of horror and suspense films from the 1950s until the 1970s including Devil Girl from Mars, The Tell-Tale Heart, A Study in Terror and Vampire Circus. She also appeared as Therese Duval in Revenge of the Pink Panther. The range and versatility of her acting is shown by appearances in such diverse productions as the 1969 science fiction movie Moon Zero Two where she played opposite the ever dependable character actor Sam Kyd (Len the barman), and again in 1969, in Twelfth Night, directed by John Sichel, as the Countess Olivia, where she played opposite Alec Guinness (Malvolio).
Her numerous television credits include Angelica in Sword of Freedom (1958), Yolanda in The Invisible Man episode “Crisis in the Desert”, a regular role in A Family at War and You’re Only Young Twice, a 1971 television play by Jack Trevor Story, as Mena in the Doctor Who story “The Leisure Hive” and guest starred as the mariticidal Liz Newton in the UFO episode “The Square Triangle”. She also was in two episodes of “Danger Man,” the first being the well-known surreal “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove,” (1965) as assistant to Mr. Alexander, Elaine, as well as “Whatever Happened To George Foster,” (1965) in which she played Pauline, a journalist acquaintance of “John Drake.” In 1979 she returned to Shakespeare when she appeared in the BBC Shakespeare production of Measure for Measure, as the earthy, cheroot-smoking keeper of a bawdy house, Mistress Overdone.
She had a major stage career, appearing regularly both in London and in the provincial theaters. There is a story that, when the audience booed on the first night of John Osborne‘s The World of Paul Slickey, Corri responded with her own abuse: she raised two fingers to the audience and shouted “Go fuck yourselves”.[3] Note that Billington only repeats the story, without confirming or providing any evidence of its truth. During the making of Moon Zero Two, she poured a glass of iced water inside James Olson’s rubber space suit, in which uncomfortable state he was obliged to wear it for the remained of the day’s shooting.[4] (as per Wikipedia)
She died in March 2016.
“Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan in March 2016:
Adrienne Corri, who has died aged 85, was an actor of considerable range and versatility whose career ranged from the high – with Shakespearean roles alongside Ralph Richardson and Alec Guinness – to the decidedly low, including appearances in many quota quickies and low-budget horror movies that showcased her striking red-haired beauty. Although seen regularly on big and small screens in the 1950s and 60s, Corri is mainly remembered for her participation in the short but notorious gang rape scene from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Despite complaining to Kubrick about the multitude of takes, Corri retained a friendship with the director for a short while afterwards. One Christmas she gave him a pair of bright red socks, a reference to the scene, in which she is left naked but for such garments.
She was born Adrienne Riccoboni, with an Italian father, in Edinburgh and while still in her teens attended Rada. She made her first appearance as a sexy schoolgirl in The Romantic Age (1949), a blend of prurience and prudery typical of certain British comedies of the time. After a walk-on role as a young Christian girl in Quo Vadis (1951), shot in Rome, she was off to India to appear in her best film, Jean Renoir’s The River (1951), a poetic evocation of life among the British in post-second world war Bengal. Corri, her red hair standing out in splendid Technicolor, is the most mature, voluptuous and spoiled of three teenage girls, all suffering adolescent pangs for a young war hero. In 1953 Picturegoer magazine described Corri as having “no nice-little-girl-next-door nonsense about her”.
The first of her three-and-a-half Hammer movies (the half being the second part of Journey into Darkness, 1968), was The Viking Queen (1967), a silly sword-and-sandal epic, in which Corri was an anti-Roman pro-druid princess who snaps and snarls and goes to war with relish. In Moon Zero Two (1969), a lunar western, she plays a sheriff on the moon, with holsters built into her thigh-length plastic boots. Vampire Circus (1972) sees Corri as a fiery gypsy with evil intent who runs the supernatural circus playing in a 19th century European town. Hammer, the “House of Horror”, influenced other British productions, some of which featured Corri. In Devil Girl from Mars (1954), she played a spunky Scottish barmaid who tries to keep her man from being whisked away to Mars by the eponymous alien for breeding purposes. Corridors of Blood (1958) shows Corri as a despicable lowlife character getting Boris Karloff to write false death certificates for the people she and her partner have killed.
In The Tell-Tale Heart (1960), adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s story, a timid librarian is obsessed by Corri, the flower seller who lives across the street and who, like many horror-movie heroines, has a tendency to undress by a window without closing the curtains. There were two films in which Corri bravely disguised her beauty: she played a disfigured prostitute in A Study in Terror (1965), which pitted Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper, and in Madhouse (1974), she was bald and wore a mask to hide her face, mutilated in a car accident. Her character also talks to spiders as if they were her babies.
More prestigious, but less interesting, were her minor roles in three of her friend Otto Preminger’s movies, Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), Rosebud (1975) and The Human Factor (1979), and as the mother of Lara (Julie Christie) in David Lean’s Dr Zhivago (1965). Among her dozens of television parts were Milady de Winter in the BBC series of The Three Musketeers (1954) and various appearances in episodes of ABC’s Armchair Theatre (1956-60).
She featured in several BBC Plays of the Month, in one of which she was Violet in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1968), alongside Maggie Smith, and she played Olivia in ITV’s Twelfth Night (1969), in a cast that included Richardson (Toby Belch), Guinness (Malvolio), Joan Plowright (Viola) and Tommy Steele (Feste). In Measure for Measure (1979) she was the cheroot-smoking bawdy-house keeper Mistress Overdone, and she was last seen in two episodes of Lovejoy (1992). Corri also gained acclaim on stage – she was part of the Old Vic company (1962-63), and appeared on Broadway in Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal (1963). In 1959, she had a leading role in John Osborne’s The World of Paul Slickey, a bitter musical satire on the tabloid press, which received the ire of critics and public alike. On the first night, Corri is reported to have given the booing audience a two-fingered salute.
In addition to her acting, Corri wrote The Search for Gainsborough (1984), an excellent art “whodunit” in diary form in which she set out to prove that an unattributed portrait of David Garrick that she came across in a run-down theatre in Birmingham was an early work by the young Thomas Gainsborough.
She had an almost decade-long, tempestuous marriage to the actor Daniel Massey, which ended in 1968. “We were agonisingly incompatible, but we had an extraordinary physical attraction,” claimed Massey.
Corri is survived by a son, Patrick, and a daughter, Sarah, from a relationship in the mid-50s with the film producer Patrick Filmer-Sankey.
• Adrienne Corri (Adrienne Riccoboni), actor, born 13 November 1930; died 13 March 2016
Carol Marsh is best known for her poignant performance as the waitress Rose in 1949’s classic British film noir “Brighton Rock” opposite Richard Attenborough’s sinister Pinky.
“Telegraph” obituary:
She was only 20 when she read for the part with the producer John Boulting and the star of the film, Richard Attenborough. As the impressionable young woman who falls for and marries the vicious small-time gangster Pinkie Brown (played by Attenborough), Carol Marsh turned in a performance of powerful pathos.
The close of Graham Greene’s novel, in which Rose returns home looking forward to listening to Pinkie’s recorded “love letter”, has been called one of the great harrowing finales of 20th-century English literature.
Before Pinkie is killed falling from the pier, he records a message for the doting, oblivious Rose in a “make-your-own-record” booth: “You wanted a recording of my voice, well here it is. What you want me to say is, ‘I love you’. Well, I don’t. I hate you, you little slut… “
But the film differs from the book in that, when Rose plays the record, the needle “sticks” – and she hears only “I love you”, repeated over and over again.
Carol Marsh was born Norma Lilian Simpson on May 10 1926 in Southgate, north London, the daughter of an architect and surveyor. She was educated at a convent school in Hammersmith where she often performed in school plays. Her first desire was to sing, and she won a £7-a-year scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied speech and drama, with singing as a second subject.
She went on to the Rank Charm School before joining Rank’s repertory company
at Worthing, where her performances in As You Like It and White Heather won high praise.
After Brighton Rock (for which she changed her name to Carol Marsh) she dyed her hair platinum for the title role in Alice in Wonderland (1949). In the same year she was in three comedies: Marry Me, Helter Skelter, and The Romantic Age, in which she appeared with Mai Zetterling and Petula Clark.
She was the fragile, delicate yet ghoulishly determined Lucy, Christopher Lee’s ill-fated victim, in the 1958 Hammer production of Dracula, the first colour version of Bram Stoker’s classic. In the 1951 film of Scrooge, with Alistair Sim in the title role, Carol Marsh played the old skinflint’s sister Fan, who dies giving birth to his nephew, Fred.
Her career continued into the 1960s with films such as Man Accused and parts in television dramas, among them The Adventures of Sir Lancelotand Dixon of Dock Green. In the 1970s she appeared in the record-breaking West End play The Mousetrap.
She had made her television debut in 1950 in The Lady’s Not For Burning, starring Richard Burton and Alec Clunes. She was Miranda in a children’s version of The Tempest, and Alexandra in Little Foxes (both 1951). She featured in the 1959 Trollope serial The Eustace Diamonds, playing Augusta Fawn, and was Mrs Blacklow in the Arnold Bennett serialLord Raingo of 1966.
She was busier on radio, and was a member of the BBC Drama Rep at intervals between 1966 and 1979.
Later in life, Carol Marsh shunned publicity. But when she was in her sixties, the journalist Nigel Richardson traced and interviewed her for his travel book Breakfast in Brighton (1996).
“People kept telling me, ‘When the next film comes out you’ll be a star forever’,” she told him. “But it never happened.”
By then she was living a reclusive life in Bloomsbury, “with no one to please and no one to hurt me”. When Richardson praised her luminous performance in Brighton Rock, she replied that the thought of how good she might have been “crucified” her: “I’ve never seen the film and I couldn’t bear to.”
Carol Marsh died on March 6; she was unmarried.
The above “Telegraph” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Stevan Rimkus hade his acting debut in the British series “The Chinese Detective” in 1982. Two years later he had a major role in “Cal”.
Sam Claflin was born in 1986 in Ipswich. He featured as ‘Philip Swift’ in “Pirates of the Caribbean”. He also starred on television in “White Heat”.
IMDB entry:
English actor Sam Claflin is the son of a finance officer father and a classroom assistant mother. As a child he was football mad often going to see his local team Norwich City and he was a talented footballer, playing for Norwich schools at city level and Norfolk county level. However, he suffered 2 broken ankles and at 16 gave up thinking about a footballing career. He took up performing arts and a teacher from Costessey High School was impressed with his performance in a school play, and encouraged him to take up drama. He joined the local youth group at Norwich’s Theatre Royal and went on to gain entry to LAMDA drama school in 2006 graduating with a 3 year acting degree in 2009. He is the 3rd eldest of 4 boys, his older brothers Dan and Ben are not involved in drama but his younger brother Joe Claflin commenced at the same drama school in 2009 also doing a 3 year acting degree.
In 2010, Clafin made his debut screen performances in two award-winning series, The Pillars of the Earth (2010) and Any Human Heart (2010). His film debut came playing footballer Duncan Edwards, one of the ‘Busby Babes’, in United (2011). Clafin then came to the attention of cinemagoers across the world when he was cast as Philip in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011). Various roles followed, including Jack in White Heat (2012) and Prince William in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). He has been cast as Finnick Odair in the sequel The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymou
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Donald Pleasence was one of the great character actors of film. He was born in 1919 in Nottinghamshire. After an extensive stage career he began making films in 1954 in the U.K. in “The Beachcomber”. His film highlights include “The Wind Cannot Read” in 1958, “The Great Escape” in 1963 and as the villian ‘Blofeld’ in the James Bond, “You Only Live Twice” in 1967. He made several movies in Hollywood including the thriller “Halloween” in 1978. He died in France in 1995.
Adam Benedick & Anthony Hayward’s “Independent” obituary:
The odd man out: master of low cunning and of sinister poise, a threat to anyone’s peace of mind, his own as often as not. He specialised in conspicuous self-effacement. And if his roles happened not to be sinister or self-effacing he made them so. His acting was decisive, distinct, disconcerting and dreadful in the sense that he filled with fascinated fear those who watched him. Both on stage, and off.
He was odd the first time I ever saw him nearly half a century ago in the golden days of the Arts Theatre. It was a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos, done into English as Vicious Circle and acted by Alec Guinness. Beatrix Lehmann, Betty Ann Davies. Peter Brook, in his twenties, directed. Pleasence was the watcher, the bell-hop, a sort of Buttons. A tiny part and supposedly self-effacing but of course unforgettable, like most of his theatrical acting. The knack of being glaringly off-centre rarely failed to catch the imagination even if the knackgrew a touch predictable.
Pleasence could be pleasant. After spells in rep at Birmingham and Bristol he was charming for example as the timorous North Country shoemaker Willie Mossop in Hobson’s Choice (1952) – again at the then invaluable Arts – and after tiny parts in London and New York with Olivier’s company in Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra had a play of his own, Ebb Tide (1952), acted at the Edinburgh Festival which was judged good enough to go to the Royal Court.
Pleasence went to Stratford-upon-Avon and turned up as Lepidus in the Redgrave-Ashcroft Antony and Cleopatra. He was the Dauphin to Dorothy Tutin’s Joan of Arc in another Brook production, Anouilh’s The Lark (1956); but the part that made him famous was the tramp in Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960), again at the Arts.
No one who saw him is likely to forget the cringing, whining wheedling, fearful and fearsome ambiguity of that tramp with his dreams of getting down to Sidcup. The cunning way in which he dealt with those two strange brothers in those seedy premises, andhis beady-eyed resolve to have things his way brought the play into sinister but comic focus.
Pleasence’s voice, at once incisive, rasping, calculated, cold, sounded like iron filings. When the play went to the West End and thence to Broadway he went with it. He had been perfect. He had made the oily, wily, anxious little character his own; and when the play was revived in 1990 there was no question that the actor who created the part should play it again. He did so superbly.
He loomed impressively in other West End plays. As Anouilh’s Poor Bitos (1967), solitary, self-pitying, eery, he sent shivers down most spines and as the Eichmann-type character in Robert Shaw’s The Man in The Glass Booth (1967, directed by Pinter) he went back to Broadway and won the London Variety Award for Stage Actor of the Year (1968).
Variety? Pleasence’s talents as an actor “did not that way tend”; but so what? His line was unrivalled in its nervy disclosure of fearful imaginings and private suffering, unrelieved solitude and sweaty suspicion. Small wonder if Pinter chose him againfor a double bill of his plays, The Basement and Tea Party in 1970 at the Duchess, where The Caretaker had thrived a decade earlier.
When however Pleasence had the misfortune to experience in Simon Gray’s Wise Child the kind of swift failure in which Broadway specialises – he played the transvestite role of Mrs Artminster created in London by Alec Guinness – he turned more and more totelevision and the cinema. He always dreaded being out of work.
Having settled for the screen, big or small, he might not have got the kicks which the theatre brought him (and us) but his nightmare of unemployment receded. His love of the stage had once or twice cost him dear. Had he not turned down a fortune from a film offer to play the title role in The Caretaker? Had he not gone on to film it for nothing when more Hollywood gold had beckoned?
Still, his re-creation of his original role on stage five years ago in a revival of The Caretaker showed that at 70 he had lost none of that indefinably eery power to give us the shivers with a blue-eyed stare. Had it come from art alone or from his wartime experiences?
Having registered as a conscientious objector, he joined the RAF when he saw how fellow-pacifists regarded without apparent emotion or guilt the Nazi bombing of London; and as a member of a bomber’s crew he flew 60 missions over Germany before being shotdown and imprisoned.
Adam Benedick Well-known as a star of the cinema screen, giving menacing performances in the title role of Dr Crippen (1962) and as the psychiatrist Sam Loomis in the Halloween series of supernatural chillers, Donald Pleasance also brought his sinister looks to television in a variety of productions, from a controversial Fifties version of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to appearances in Armchair Mystery Theatre and The Falklands Factor, writes Anthony Hayward. His piercing, psychotic stare, hushed voiceand bald head were his trademarks, in almost 200 films and as many television programmes over half a century.
Born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, the son of a station master, Pleasance followed his father into the railways on leaving school by becoming clerk-in-charge at Swinton station, in south Yorkshire, but his ambition was to be an actor. When the chance came, with Jersey Rep in 1939, he started as an assistant stage manager, before making his debut as Hareton in Wuthering Heights. His first London stage appearance was as Valentine in Twelfth Night, three years later.
Shortly afterwards, he joined the RAF for war service as a radio operator and, after being shot down, was a prisoner-of-war from 1944 until 1946, when he returned to the theatre. After his successful stage work with Laurence Olivier in New York and at the Royal Court, London, and Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Pleasence made his name as a film actor.
He made his big-screen debut as Tromp in the 1954 picture The Beachcomber and followed it with such notable films as Look Back in Anger (1959), The Flesh and the Fiends (1960, as a 19th-century grave-robber), Spare the Rod (1961, as an embittered headmaster with a penchant for corporal punishment), Dr Crippen (which established him as a brilliant player of evil roles), The Great Escape (1963, as Blythe, the forger of visas and other documents) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
However, his prolific screen appearances – which in some years meant he starred in half-a-dozen pictures – were not all successful. “I make films for money,” he once said. “I never, ever watch them.” In the James Bond feature You Only Live Twice (1967),he played the badly scarred, wonky-eyed arch-villain Ernest Blofeld, the evil boss of SPECTRE, although he was subsequently considered not ideal for the role and replace by Telly Savalas and Charles Gray, who dispensed with the facial disfigurement.
Pleasence was back on top form in Henry VIII and his Six Wives (1972), in the role of Thomas Cromwell, gleefully weeding out opponents to the King’s divorce. He appeared alongside Michael Caine in both Kidnapped (1971, playing the niggardly Uncle Ebenezer in the Robert Louis Stevenson classic) and the spy thriller The Black Windmill (1974, as the twitchy paymaster). Pleasence was given a new lease of life as Dr Sam Loomis, the psychiatrist haunted by evil, in the Halloween series of supernatural horror films, starting in 1978, and later appeared in Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog (1991).
Although his television appearances were infrequent after he gained film stardom, they were many and usually made their mark. He made his debut as early as 1946, in I Want to Be A Doctor, and eight years later won acclaim for his performances in the BBC’s 1984, alongside Peter Cushing. The adaptation, by Nigel Kneale, author of the Quatermass Experiment, caused an outcry among viewers because it was screened on a Sunday evening, a time when they were used to enjoying more sedate dramas.
Later Pleasence became known as the presenter and producer of Armchair Mystery Theatre for several years (starting in 1960), also acting in some episodes. He went on to perform on American and Canadian television. appearing in episodes of The Twilight Zone, Orson Welles’s Great Mysteries and Columbo. He also appeared in Centennial (1978-79), as Samuel Purchase in the series based on James Michener’s epic novel, Dennis Potter’s Blade on the Feather (1980), as an ageing Establishment figure suddenly exposed as a homosexual and Soviet spy – in the wake of the Anthony Blunt scandal – The Barchester Chronicles (1982), in which he gave a touching performance as the Rev Septimus Harding in a seven-part adaptation of Trollope, The Falkland s Factor (1983), DonShaw’s controversial Play for Today that featured him as Dr Samuel Johnson, who opposed a Falklands war in 1770 when the Spanish attempted to invade the islands and oust the British.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
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.