Tristan Gemmill was born in 1967 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. He is an actor, known for The Jacket (2005), The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John (2003) and Meadowlands (2007). He has been married to Emily Hamilton since September 2001.
Brittish Actors
Collection of Classic Brittish Actors
Shayne Ward
Shayne Ward was born on October 15, 1984 in Manchester, England as Shayne Thomas Ward. He is an actor, known for Coronation Street (1960), You AreBeautiful (2009) and Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway (2002).
Donald Houston
IMDB:
Sandy-haired Welsh actor who served in the RAF during World War II and hit paydirt and stardom with his first two British films, The Blue Lagoon (1949) with Jean Simmons, and A Run for Your Money (1949) with Sir Alec Guinness, maintaining his career with lesser distinction in bawdy comedies and melodramas. His characters were authority figures, often military in war movies like Battle Hell (1957), The Longest Day (1962) and Where Eagles Dare (1968) (the latters with Richard Burton).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Angelo Bellino
Nicola Paggett
Nicola Pagett was born on June 15, 1945 in Cairo, Egypt as Nicola Scott. She is an actress, known for An Awfully Big Adventure (1995), There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970) and Operation: Daybreak (1975). She was previously married to Graham Swannell.
Nicola Pagett obituary
Actress known for Upstairs, Downstairs whose career was cut short by mental health issues
Friday March 05 2021, 5.00pm GMT, The Times
As a young actress Nicola Pagett’s dream was to appear in the West End “and have men with cloaks take me out to dinner”. It was an ambition she achieved with some style, working on the London stage for more than 20 years including opposite Alec Guinness in Ronald Eyre’s production of Voyage Round My Father at the Haymarket Theatre in 1971.
On television she came to attention in the early 1970s in the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs as Elizabeth, the headstrong daughter of Richard Bellamy and his wife Lady Marjorie. Later, following Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh, she played the title role in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1977) with a thrilling death scene at the railway station. By then she was being recognised in the street. “There’s nothing more gratifying than bursting into people’s homes,” she recalled of her television success.
Yet Pagett’s career came to an abrupt halt in 1995 when she suffered a breakdown during a National Theatre production of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, a farce that features infidelity, nymphomania and a psychiatrist. She accused her husband of having an incestuous affair with their teenage daughter; danced all night in black underwear while smeared in lipstick; and developed a romantic obsession with Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s press secretary, referring to him as “the Stranger” and sending him hundreds of long rambling love letters, signing herself “Moi”.
Over several months her mania spiralled into psychosis. “Everything began to feel strange,” she recalled of one episode. “My skin seemed so dirty and I was burning up again. My eyes were scratchy all the time and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop destroying things.” These included an old 45 record that had been a present from her husband. She also tore up pictures from their summer holiday, burning them on the terrace. She was sectioned, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium, a drug used to control mood disorders.
As she began to recover Pagett recounted her troubles in disturbing detail in Diamonds Behind My Eyes (1997), a book described as a “lyrical memoir of everyday madness” that includes a heart-wrenching addendum by her husband. Eventually she came to recognise that she would only get better if she accepted that she would never be well.
She was born Nicola Mary Scott in Cairo in 1945, the elder daughter of Herbert Scott, an oil executive with Shell, and his wife Barbara (née Black). It was an unsettled childhood, with her father’s work taking the family to Hong Kong, Cyprus and Japan, where she was educated at St Maur’s, a Catholic school in Yokohama.
Her stage career began in Snow White. “A whole lot of people in the room actually kept quiet and listened to what I was saying, and that seemed a marvellous arrangement and I wanted it to last for ever,” she told The Times in 1980. At 12 she was packed off to the Beehive, a boarding school in Bexhill, East Sussex. Homesick, she would sob in the cloakroom among the damp boots and in adult life the smell of wet rubber still brought tears to her eyes.
Pagett with David Jason in the comedy A Bit of a Do (1989)
Her parents wanted her to attend a Swiss finishing school, but “I didn’t want to be finished off”, she said. With her school’s encouragement she auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada). “They said I’d have to wait a year until I was 17,” she recalled. “So I went off and learnt to be a shorthand typist.” On arriving at Rada the elfin-faced actress with big eyes “didn’t know anything about men or anything else . . . that’s where I found out”.
She adopted the stage name Pagett and joined a repertory company in Worthing, “because my agent sent all his clients there”. They kept her busy with Agatha Christie shows performed on minimal rehearsal: “One week I cut an entire act by mistake and the policeman had to come on and start looking for a body that hadn’t even been murdered yet.”
Reaching the West End in 1968, she gave a fine performance as a Lolita-esque character in A Boston Story at the Duchess Theatre, based on Henry James’s The Bostonians. She met Graham Swannell, a playwright and actor, while appearing again with Guinness in A Family and a Fortune at the Apollo Theatre in 1975. They were married two years later but the marriage was dissolved in 1999. She is survived by their daughter, Eve, who has worked in the film industry.
Meanwhile, Pagett’s career continued as Lieutenant Sylvia Morgan, the only female character, in Privates on Parade (1983). There were also stage appearances in Shakespeare, Molière, Pinter and Rattigan, “great minds that rub off into your everyday life”, she said, as well as a Jonathan Miller season at Greenwich Theatre.
An interviewer in 1987 described her frequent use of a tar-resistant cigarette-holder. She also confessed to a passion for order in a life that was led “between the freezer and Sainsbury’s”, adding: “I am forever moving the bread to the bin and back and wishing I were not like that.” That order in her house was mirrored by hard-won perfection in the garden, but insecurity was never far away. She would claim to quote Sybil Thorndike, saying: “When you have finished one part you don’t think you might never work again, you know you will never work again.”
She did work again, alongside David Jason in the award-winning comedy drama A Bit of a Do (1989), but then came her breakdown.
Once Pagett’s illness was under control she tried to resume her career, using rare appearances such as in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Nottingham Playhouse in 1998 to publicise awareness of mental health. Latterly she lived quietly in East Sheen, southwest London, with a pair of Persian cats. and enjoyed relaxing holidays in Biarritz, the French coastal town that she had visited since 1971.
Madness, she explained when her book appeared, is not “all flapping arms and dribbling. It is an altered state and, in a funny way, I wouldn’t have missed it no matter how terrible it was.”
Nicola Pagett, actress, was born on June 15, 1945. She died from a brain tumour on March 3, 2021, aged 75
Lance Percival
“Guardian” obituary by Dennis Barker:
In the 1960s, Lance Percival, who has died aged 81, was a member of the team fronting That Was the Week That Was, the groundbreaking Saturday night BBC television programme that brought satire to the masses. Percival was the one who impersonated and lampooned the aristocratic demeanour of the Conservative prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home. If the programme’s caustic wit did not bring to an end the dominance of the wealthy elite, it did mark the start of lesser mortals claiming the right to openly poke fun at them.
Harold Macmillan, as portrayed by Willie Rushton, had been the original target of the show when it began in 1962. Percival was very good casting for Home: both were lean and sharp-featured, and Percival also managed to introduce into his impersonation an air of bemused insecurity.
He also played other parts on the show, including spontaneously improvising calypsos on subjects suggested by the live studio audience. Someone in the studio might shout out “sex before marriage” or “the chancellor of the exchequer” or “bowler hats”, and Percival, after seeking out the introductory melody on his guitar, would start singing on the chosen subject. In October 1965, he had a minor pop hit, reaching No 37 with a calypso-style song entitled Shame and Scandal in the Family.
That Was the Week That Was (known as TW3) was attacked vociferously by many MPs for its irreverence. After 38 episodes and two seasons, the BBC pulled the plug. Its brilliant writers, who included Keith Waterhouse, Malcolm Bradbury, John Cleese, Dennis Potter, Peter Cook and Gerald Kaufman, were set adrift, in common with the cast. Of all those who had become celebrities, Percival probably had the most erratic career in later years, ending up as a speechwriter for captains of industry.
Immediately after TW3 folded, Percival switched to a summer show at the Winter Gardens, Bournemouth. Millicent Martin, another of the cast, joined him on the bill. In a bizarre twist, the show was promoted by the impresario Harold Fielding, who was at the time suing TW3 for allegedly offensive references to himself.
Percival was born in Sevenoaks, Kent, where his father was an engineer. He had little idea of what he wanted to do when he left Sherborne public school. After national service with the Seaforth Highlanders in Egypt, he emigrated to Canada in 1955 and made a living in Montreal by writing advertising jingles for radio. He formed a calypso group and, as Lord Lance, toured Canada and the US.
Within a few years, the demand for calypsos had dried up. Percival returned to Britain and sang in clubs, got spots in revue and small roles in films, including some of the Carry Ons, and the rather more elegant The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964). Then the TW3 production team wanted musical elements for the new show, and his calypsos once more came into their own, but this time as a political weapon. After TW3 ended, Percival earned most of his income from cabaret turns. He acquired his own TV programme, The Lance Percival Show, in 1965 – but two years later temporarily turned his back on the box to spend three months with Birmingham repertory theatre “learning how to be an actor”. His earnings dropped dramatically. He played the SS colonel Kurt Gerstein, the Nazi who turned against Hitler, in Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Representative, in which the pope and the Catholic church were controversially shown as deliberately ignoring the plight of the Jews to secure their own interests.
His versatility enabled him to play both Paul and Ringo in a US TV animation series, The Beatles (1965-67), and in the Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968) he was the voice of Old Fred. He appeared in the films Up Pompeii and Up the Chastity Belt (both 1971) and The Water Babies (1978), and continued to take small roles and make guest appearances in film and TV throughout the 1980s.
After a serious car crash in 1970, Percival had shifted away from performing towards writing. In 1973 he came up with the idea for the television show called Up the Workers. Nancy Banks-Smith of the Guardian said: “The only explanation of Up the Workers is that it is a desperate attempt to cheer up an afflicted audience.” Percival himself played a labour relations officer, “a twit-in-the-middle between management and men”.
Soon he chose to concentrate on a career as a speechwriter for business leaders and as an after-dinner speaker. “I came up through TV satire performances,” he said, “ and here I am writing speeches in which the one thing you can’t do is satire.” He also wrote two books of verse, Well-Versed Dogs (1985) and Well-Versed Cats (1986).
He is survived by a son, Jamie.
• John Lancelot Blades Percival, actor and writer, born 26 July 1933; died 6 January 2015
Christopher Fairbank
Christopher Fairbank was born on October 4, 1953 in Hertfordshire, England as Christopher E. Fairbank. He is an actor, known for Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Batman (1989) and Jack the Giant Slayer (2013).
Jessie Buckley
IMDB:
Jessie Buckley is an Irish singer and actress, who came in second place in the BBC talent show-themed television series I’d Do Anything, and subsequently played Anne Egermann in the West End revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Most recently, Buckley appeared on three BBC television series, as Marya Bolkonskaya in BBC’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, as Lorna Bow in Taboo and as Honor Martin in The Last Post.
Buckley was born in Killarney, County Kerry, the eldest of five children. Her mother, Marina Cassidy, encouraged her to sing and coached her. She has a brother and three sisters. Buckley went to Ursuline Secondary School, an all-girls convent school in Thurles, County Tipperary, where her mother works as a vocal coach and where she performed in school productions. She played a number of male roles at school, including the male lead role of Jets gang founder Tony in the musical West Side Story and Freddie Trumper in Chess.
She has achieved Grade eight in piano, clarinet and harp with the Royal Irish Academy of Music. She is also a member of the Tipperary Millennium Orchestra. Buckley also attended The Association of Irish Musical Societies (AIMS) workshops during the summer, to help improve her singing and acting; it was where she was then recognised as a talented actress and was encouraged to apply for Drama School in London. Just before she auditioned for I’d Do Anything, she was turned down by two drama schools, including one the day before her first audition for the show. In 2008, Buckley won the AIMS Best Actress award for her portrayal of Julie Jordan in the Killarney Musical Society production of Carousel.
Buckley competed in I’d Do Anything, a search for a new, unknown lead to play Nancy in a London West End stage revival of the British musical Oliver. Buckley reached the final on 31 May 2008, finishing in second place behind Jodie Prenger. Before the final vote was announced in Show two of the final, Graham Norton asked the panel who they each thought was Nancy. Three of the panel said Buckley and two Prenger. John Barrowman and Denise van Outen said “Jodie”, while Barry Humphries, Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber said “Jessie”. However, the public voted for Jodie.
uckley performed at the Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Birthday in the Park show in Hyde Park, London on 14 September 2008, singing “I Don’t Know How To Love Him” as a solo and “Light at the End of the Tunnel” from Starlight Express with fellow I’d Do Anything finalists Keisha Amponsa-Banson, Niamh Perry, Rachel Tucker as well as Any Dream Will Do finalists Daniel Boys, Lewis Bradley, Ben James-Ellis and Keith Jack. On 18 September she and Aoife Mulholland performed with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at an Andrew Lloyd Webber evening at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. On 26 August 2008 Buckley performed on Denny Street in Tralee, Co. Kerry where the first ever Millionaire raffle was broadcast live on RTÉ Radio 1. After this, Jessie performed at a charity concert in Tipperary, where she announced that she would be starting rehearals for A Little Night Music in London the following Monday.
Buckley was offered the opportunity to understudy Nancy, but turned it down in favour of another production: on 10 October 2008 it was announced that Buckley would be appearing in a revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music, in the role of Anne Egerman, at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a fringe Studio Theatre, in London from 22 November 2008 to 8 March 2009. She appeared alongside Maureen Lipman and Hannah Waddingham in the production, which was directed by Trevor Nunn. A Little Night Music transferred from the Menier Chocolate Factory to the Garrick Theatre in London’s West End on 7 April 2009 (previews from 28 March – 6 April). A Little Night Music was Buckley’s West End debut. The show closed on 25 July 2009. Since then, she has appeared in a number of concerts nationally, including a Christmas concert alongside Maria Friedman, Cantabile – the London Quartet and Tim Rice, and in February 2010 appeared alongside Daniel Boys (and Night Music co-star Kelly Price) in a series of Valentine musical concerts.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: ahmetkozan
Darren Day
Darren Day was born on July 17, 1968 in Colchester, Essex, England as Darren Graham. He is an actor, known for Rough Cut (2015), The Krays: Dead Man Walking (2018) and Dangerous Game (2017). He has been married to Stephanie Dooley since May 21, 2007. They have two children.
Peter Barkworth
Wendy Trewin’s “Guardian” obituary from 2003:
The actor and director, Peter Barkworth who has died aged 77 claimed to have felt “the sheer sensual pleasure of acting” when he first appeared on a stage. He was five years old, in the Wolf Cubs and appearing as Simple Simon in a church hall in Margate.
What followed was a notable stage career but he became known to a wider public on television. His presence was established by his role as Kenneth Bligh in the boardroom drama The Power Game (1965) and confirmed in Brian Clark’s Telford’s Change (1979) opposite Hannah Gordon. In that 10-part series, he played a high-flying banker who opts for the quiet life in Dover.
In the intervening years his small screen roles had taken in such productions as Dr Who, The Avengers (from 1961 to 1969), Paul Temple (1971) and Colditz (1972). At the the Haymarket – his favourite theatre – in 1972 he had his first stage leading part in London as Edward VIII in Royce Ryton’s abdication drama, Crown Matrimonial – at a rare emotional moment speaks to his mother of his love for Wallis Simpson with complete naturalness. He repeated the role on TV two years later.
In 1977 Peter was cast as a British academic adrift in Stalinist Czechoslovakia in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul Repeated earlier this month on BBC4, the play won Peter the Royal Television Society and Bafta’s best actor awards. Later TV included the part of Stanley Baldwin in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981) and the kidnap serial The Price (1985) with Harriet Walter, written by Peter Ransley.
His film work began in 1959 with A Touch of Larceny. It took in No Love for Johnnie (1963), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Patton (1970) and concluded with Stephen Fry’s Wilde (1997).
Peter was born in Margate, and when his father – who worked in the motor trade – was promoted to a sales managership in Manchester the family moved to Bramhall, Cheshire. Peter was educated at Stockport school and as an 11-year-old in 1940 began taking part in concerts for the war effort – and enjoying the applause. Good at work, hopeless at games, after he played the role of Macbeth the producer rewarded the cast with a trip to see John Gielgud’s Hamlet at the Opera House, Manchester. Peter was duly impressed.
While still at school he appeared with the Frank H Fortescue weekly repertory company at the Hippodrome, Stockport in For What We Are in 1942, and had some parts with the BBC drama repertory company which was based in Manchester during the war. His headmaster wanted Peter to go to university but, having played Hamlet at school, Peter applied for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and gained the Michelhill scholarship – but this only covered his Rada tuition fees. His father, earning £8 a week, gave up tobacco and alcohol and provided him with £2.15s (£2.75). a week.
His Rada contemporaries from 1946 to 1948 included John Neville, Barbara Jefford, and Robert Shaw – with whom he shared a flat for some months. Having been awarded the judges’ special medal at Rada’s public show, in 1948 he was offered a part in The Guinea Pig with the Arthur Brough Players at the Folkestone repertory company. His first taste of television was that year too, live at Alexandra Palace in a tiny part. He enjoyed it chiefly because he could speak in a whisper.
National Service proved better than he had feared, especially after he had been commissioned, but he was glad to return to weekly rep in Folkestone and the Brough Players. But when he moved to fortnightly rep in Sheffield Brough, furiously accused him of disloyalty, and vowed he would never have him back at Folkestone.
Peter did not need to make the return. He appeared at the Q theatre in Palmers Green in London, and, in Sheffield was given some good parts in a company that included his Rada contemporary Peter Sallis. Peter also wrote the songs and incidental music for the Christmas play.
Spotted by HM Tennent’s scout, and given a contract, Peter’s first London appearance was in Dodie Smith’s adaptation of Henry James’s Letter from Paris in 1952 at the Aldwych which was roundly booed and came off after three weeks. His next part, Gerald Arbuthnot in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance (1954) gave him another kind of shock. There were rows in the company, the lead, Clive Brook quarrelled explosively and Peter was so depressed that he was on the brink of giving up the stage. Athene Seyler persuaded him to carry on.
He found more backstage trouble with Christopher Fry’s The Dark is Light Enough (1955) directed by Peter Brook. Barkworth played Stefan, the young son of the Countess (Edith Evans). Arguments continued during rehearsals and on the long tour which made Barkworth consider seriously giving up once more; however, the atmosphere improved and he enjoyed the rest of the seven months’ run.
“Of all the jobs I have ever had, teaching at Rada is the one I should least like to have missed, ‘ Peter wrote in First Houses (1983) and from the mid-1950s into the early 1960s he taught acting technique. His pupils included Anthomny Hopkins, Simon Ward and Diana Rigg while Richard Wilson found that Peter was the first Rada teacher to give him real confidence. Peter had attended Fabia Drake’s classes as a student and had learnt, he said, more from her than from any other teacher.
Back on stage his roles included that of Captain Christopher Mortlock in Noel Coward’s South Sea Bubble (1956) with Vivien Leigh, and, from September 1957 Bernard Taggart-Stuart in Lesley Storm’s Roar Like a Dove. One of his favourite parts, he got more laughs than anyone else in the cast for his horrified reactions, as a town dweller, to country life. He enjoyed it so much he remained in the play for its entire three year run at the Phoenix.
At the Haymarket he was the cynical Sir Benjamin Backbite in Gielgud’s production of The School for Scandal (1962) which went to New York in 1963. It was his first appearance there.
His other stage work included The Chinese Prime Minister (1965), while at the Globe in 1976 in Michael Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years he was one of the former undergraduates who returned to their Oxford college for a reunion with their old flame (Penelope Keith). He wrote an erudite script for his one man Siegfried Sassoon (1987) which he gave at the Hampstead theatre, in the West End and on tour.
Peter conscientiously researched the technicalities of his performances; once when about to play a clergyman he consulted his local vicar. He wrote an erudite script for his one man Siegfried Sassoon which he gave at the Hampstead Theatre, in the West End and on tour.
Peter’s other books included About Acting (1980), More About Acting (1944) The Complete About Acting (1991) and For All Occasions (1997). In November 1999 a new theatre in Stockport opened, named after him.
One of his hobbies was gardening; he received an award for his small garden at Hampstead where he lived for 40 years.
· Peter Wynn Barkworth, actor and director, born January 14, 1929; died October 21 2006