Norma Varden was one of the most profilic of character actors in Hollywood films from the early 1940’s up until the late 1960’s. She was born in London in 1898. She began her career on the British stage and was particularily associated with the famous Aldwych farces. Her film debut was in 1922 in “The Glorious Adventure”. Her more famous UK films include “Evergreen” with Jessie Matthews in 1934 and “Shipyard Sally” with Gracie Fields in 1939. Her Hollywood films began with “The Earl of Chicago” in 1940 and included such classics as “Waterloo Bridge”, “Casablanca”, “Random Harvest”, “The White Cliffs of Dover”, “National Velvet”, “Forever Amber”, “The Secret Garden”, “Strangers on a Train”, “Witness for the Prosecution” and “The Sound of Music”. She retired from acting in 1969 and died in Santa Barbara in 1989 at the age of 90.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
The daughter of a retired sea captain and his much-younger wife, actress Norma Varden was born and raised in turn-of-the-century London. A piano prodigy, she studied in Paris and appeared in concert in England during her teenage years. Acting, however, became her career of choice, studying at the Guildhall School of Music. She took her very first stage bow in a production of Peter Pan. In the adult role of Mrs. Darling, she was actually younger than the actors playing her children. In years to come, Norma would play a number of mature, lady-like roles that were much older than she was.
She performed Shakespeare in repertory and was at first cast in dramatic plays such as The Wandering Jew (1920-her West End debut) and Hamlet (1925) as the Player Queen. In various acting companies, she eventually found a flair for comedy and became the resident character comedienne for the famous Aldwych Theatre farce-ers from 1929 to 1933 à la Marx Bros. foil Margaret Dumont. Finding success there in the comedies A Night Like This and Turkey Time, she later recreated both roles on British film a couple of years later. She went on to prove herself a minor but avid scene-stealer in such movies asEvergreen (1934), The Iron Duke (1934), Stormy Weather (1935) and East Meets West(1936), quickly finding an amusing niche as a haughty society maven. She played both benevolent and supercilious with equal ease — her height (5’7-1/2″), elongated oval face, vacant manner, plummy voice and slightly drowsy eyes adding immensely to the look and amusement of her characters.
In the early 1940s, the veteran actress visited California, accompanied by her ailing, widowed mother, for a take on the warmer climate and decided to permanently settle. Again, she found herself in demand as a now silvery-haired duchess, queen or Lady something, albeit in less meaty, sometimes even unbilled parts. Although she could dress down when called upon as a bar maid, nurse and landlady, she usually was asked to provide the requisite atmosphere for glossy, opulent settings. Her more noticeable roles came as lecherous Robert Benchley‘s wealthy, put-upon wife in The Major and the Minor (1942); the vile Lady Abbott in Forever Amber (1947); the giddy socialite nearly strangled by Robert Walker in Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train (1951); the impressively bejeweled wife of Charles Coburn who Marilyn Monroe fawns over inGentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953); and the Von Trapp housekeeper Frau Schmidt in The Sound of Music (1965).
Norma became a steadfast radio and TV comedy foil during the 40s, 50s and 60s, often at the mercy of a Lucille Ball or Jack Benny. Her longest radio part was as Basil Rathbone‘s housekeeper on his Sherlock Holmes radio series. On TV, she appeared in such shows as Mister Ed (1958), The Beverly Hillbillies (1962), Bewitched (1964) andBatman (1966) She had recurring roles as Betty Hutton’s aunt on The Betty Hutton Show(1959) and as Shirley Booth‘s neighbor on Hazel (1961). Never married, Norma’s mother passed away in 1969, and the actress retired shortly after. She died of heart failure in 1989, a day before her 91st birthday.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Stephen Beckett was born in Herne Hill, London in 1967. His best known roles were in “Coronation Street” and “The Bill”. He has also been featured in “Casualty”, “Holby City” and “Doctors”. ,In 1993 he was featured in the film “Enchanted April”.
Beckett won his first professional roles a week after graduating from drama school, appearing in Richard II and Callas at the Oldham Coliseum.[2] He went on to work in regional theatre throughout the UK, and with the National Theatre.[2]
Beckett played the role of PC Mike Jarvis in The Bill for five years. He later played Dr Matt Ramsden in Coronation Street from 2000 to 2002, reprising the role in 2006.[5] Discussing the character and the possibility of a return, Beckett said: “People were really protective of Ashley, and very anti the child-stealing doctor. I don’t know about returning to Corrie again, but as long as Ashley is in the show there is a potential kidnap plot.”[5] But as the character of Ashley has now been written out with the rest of his on-screen family to follow shortly the return of Dr. Ramsden seems unlikely.
Lena Headley was born in 1973 in Bermuda. She made her film debut in Britain in “Waterland” in 1992. Her other movie appearances include “The Remains of the Day”, “The Devil’s Advocate” and “Mrs Dalloway”.
TCM overview:
Having barely begun her career on British television, actress Lena Headey was wooed by American feature directors who were captivated by her emotional realism and timeless beauty. A big fan of British films, Headey maintained a demanding international schedule in more lucrative American fare to finance her love of homegrown period pieces and art house dramas like “Face” (1997) and “Onegin” (1999). But it was her acclaimed performance in the hyper-real historical epic “300” (2007) that propelled the actress into true international stardom and opened the door for higher-profile projects. From there, Headey was tapped to play single mom and cyborg battler Sarah Connor in the popular, but short-lived sci-fi spin-off, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (Fox 2008-09). With each role, Headey reinforced her unique screen presence and ability to embody both the china doll delicacy and the fierce independence that she put on fine display in the medieval series “Game of Thrones” (HBO, 2011- ), which helped underscore her versatility in a wide range of projects.
Lena Headey was born on Oct. 3, 1976 (though some sources cite 1973) in Bermuda, where her father, a British police officer, had recently been transferred for his job. She spent her earliest years in the British territory before she and her parents returned to England, where Headey grew up mainly in Yorkshire. A shy tomboy with one younger brother, Headey began to take an interest in acting through a local youth theater group. While still in high school at Yorkshire’s Shelley College, she was “discovered” during a theatrical performance and offered a role in “Waterland” (1992), making a saucy debut in a supporting role as a sexually precocious schoolgirl. The following year she portrayed a quiet young woman who consents to marriage with a thoroughly unbearable man twice her age (Jeremy Irons) in “The Summer House” (1993), also landing a small role in the Merchant-Ivory period drama “The Remains of the Day” (1993). She moved to London following school completion and set about looking for acting jobs – not with stars in her eyes and dreams of Hollywood, but rather as someone with a sturdy work ethic who saw an opportunity to make a living doing something she enjoyed.
Headey never received any formal dramatic training, but from the beginning it was clear that her talent lay in her natural ability to access emotions in an intense, passionate way. She parlayed that innate sense into immediate acting work, landing on British drama series including “Soldier Soldier” and “Spender.” Her first American production was Disney’s live-action take on “Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” (1994), in which she played the virginal heroine, and following a role in the ABC TV movie, “MacGyver: Trail to Doomsday” (1995) she returned to the U.K. and stayed busy with a run of British TV appearances in “Band of Gold,” and “Ballykissangel,” among others. Her film career received a boost with a co-starring role alongside Sting in the period drama “The Grotesque” (1995) and big screen roles began to outweigh TV ones. In “Face” (1997), Headey starred as a girlfriend trying to persuade her boyfriend (Robert Carlyle) to abandon his life of crime, and in the period drama, “Mrs. Dalloway” (1997), she added a buoyancy and verve as the daring Sally Seton, who not only flirts with Natascha McElhone, but also runs naked through the Edwardian household.
Headey lent her beauty and charm to the role of the bewitching girl whom two guys want to marry in the disappointing time-travel romance “Twice Upon Yesterday/If Only” (1998). She was perfectly cast as Guinevere in the swashbuckling NBC miniseries “Merlin” (1998), which rejoined her with Sam Neill – who had portrayed her father in “Jungle Book” – here, cast as the legendary sorcerer. After enjoying a pivotal role as Liv Tyler’s sister Olga in Martha Fiennes’ feature directorial debut “Onegin” (1999), Headey sank her teeth into the role of a bitchy college student in the dark comedy “Gossip” (2000) – the first film of a two-picture deal with Warner Bros. She additionally starred in the festival-screened “Aberdeen” (2000), earning praise for her turn as a lawyer reconnecting with her estranged parents, an alcoholic father and a domineering mother dying of cancer. Over the next several years, Headey’s reputation as an intelligent, unfussy beauty landed her key supporting appearances in Neil LaBute’s romantic mystery “Possession” (2002); the acclaimed HBO Winston Churchill biopic, “The Gathering Storm” (2002); the adaptation of author Patricia Highsmith’s lesser known Thomas Ripley tale, “Ripley’s Game” (2002); and other British and American productions.
In 2005, Headey turned heads with two wildly different titles. First, came Terry Gilliam’s “The Brothers Grimm” (2005), in which she played the tough-as-nails love interest of the Bavarian fairy tale tellers, in which she impressively held her own opposite Matt Damon and Heath Ledger in the otherwise disappointing film. For her first sci-fi horror thriller, “The Cave” (2005), she played one of a team of explorers who stumble upon a new species of unique and unwelcoming beings dwelling beneath the ruins of a 13th century Romanian abbey. Another dramatic shift in gears saw her as a bohemian London flower shop owner who woos a new bride (Piper Perabo) in the lesbian romantic comedy “Imagine Me & You” (2005). The film opened to predictably less-than-stellar returns, but Headey rebounded from the string of lackluster box office receipts with her next film.
The visually stunning adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel, “300” (2007), was a loose telling of the famed Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan warriors inflicted heavy damage to a massive Persian army led by Xerxes I (Rodrigo Santoro). Headey, who was a stand-out for most film critics, regally portrayed Queen Gorgo, wife of Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), whose valor and sacrifice inspired all of Greece to unite against the Persian army after he and his outnumbered forces fought to the death. Following a co-lead in the Wesley Snipes direct-to-DVD actioner “The Contractor” (2007), the ever-versatile Headey portrayed Miss Dickinson in “St. Trinians” (2007), the sixth installment in the beloved British franchise about an unruly girl’s school.
Later in the year, Headey landed the highest-profile role of her career, when she was asked to portray Sarah Connor in a TV spin-off of the popular “Terminator” film franchise. “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” picked up where “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) left off, with Headey taking on the iconic role made famous by the buff Linda Hamilton. Fans of the franchise were apparently open to the new chapter and its new cast, as 18 million tuned in to the show’s premiere to watch Headey portray the single mom entrusted to protect her 15-year-old son, John, from predatory cyborgs intent on destroying the future savior of mankind. The series was the surprise hit of the season – helped, no doubt, in some part by the writer’s strike – and an overwhelming critical hit, with Headey proving more than able to fill the shoes of the iconic character. Unfortunately audiences proved fickle and the show was canceled in 2009. Meanwhile, Headey took leading roles in horror thrillers like “The Broken” (2008) and “Laid to Rest” (2009), before returning to series television for the medieval epic “Game of Thrones” (HBO, 2011- ). Headey played the paranoid, politically-minded Queen Cersei Lannister, whose facade of self-control masks an inner world where everything is falling apart.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Don Burnett was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1929.His film career was based in the U.S. His movie debut was in 1955 in “Hell’s Horizon”. His other film credits include”Gaby”, “Untamed Youth”, “Tea and Sympathy” and “Jailhouse Rock”. He was married for a time to the lovely actress Gia Scala. Since 1971 he has been married to actress Barbara Anderson of “Ironside” fame.
IMDB entry:
Delivered the eulogy at the 1989 memorial service for his friend and Damon and Pythias(1962) (aka “Damon and Pythias”) co-star, Guy Williams. Married actress Gia Scala (whom he met while filming Don’t Go Near the Water (1957)) in 1957. They divorced in 1970. In 1971, he married actress Barbara Anderson who played the blonde cop on TV’s Ironside (1967) series. After his ex-wife Gia Scala committed suicide with a drug overdose in 1972, he attended the funeral with his parents but left quickly before being spotted by photographers. Later became a successful stockbroker. Appeared in Italian pictures. He starred as the legendary hero in Il trionfo di Robin Hood(1962) [The Triumph of Robin Hood] and later co-starred with actor and good friend Guy Williams in Damon and Pythias (1962) [Damon and Pythias] as Pythias. His actress/wife Gia was originally set for a co-starring role in the film but was replaced.
After several separations and reconciliations, he broke up with actress wife Gia Scala on grounds of incompatibility and divorced her in September of 1970.
Craig Cash is best known for his perfmorance as dozy Dave in the wonderfuly “Royle Family” television series. e was born in 1960. began his show business career as a DJ in a Manchester night club.
Gerald Gilbert’s “Independent” interview with Craig Cash in 2011:
I’ve been trying to interview Craig Cash for years now, but the man behind The Royle Family has proved elusive. His writing partner, Caroline Aherne, has tended – reluctantly and for many of the wrong reasons – to hog the media limelight, but I’ve always been curious to meet Cash, a man I have long thought to be something of a comedy genius on the quiet. So quiet, in fact, that, in a trawl of newspaper cuttings, you’ll find less than a handful of interviews with him, and fewer still in which he talks about himself
“I don’t feel worthy,” the 51-year-old says, when we finally do get together in an otherwise empty viewing theatre in London’s Soho, where his new sitcom, The Café, is later to be shown to journalists. “I know I’m not Stephen Fry – you’re not going to get fantastic answers – so I tend not to do interviews.”
Stephen Fry, my arse, as Jim Royle would almost certainly have said in the circumstances. Cash may talk just like his lugubrious character Dave in The Royle Family, but the conversation is obviously more elevated than Dave’s dozy interest in whatever television programme the family happens to be watching. “I don’t actually see a lot of telly,” says Cash. “I watch Grand Designs and that Boardwalk Empire… it’s a bit slow, but who am I to say anything’s slow.” He watches almost no comedy, although he thought the first series of The Flight of the Conchords was “utterly brilliant”. Now he’s agreed to talk because he’s directing and producing a new sitcom co-written by his Royle Family colleague Ralf Little – even better news, Cash and Aherne hope to write a brand new comedy for the BBC.
Cash is still best known for The Royle Family, which he created with Aherne in 1997. Back then, the hit sitcoms – Men Behaving Badly, The Vicar of Dibley and One Foot in the Grave – all followed the same, traditional format: filmed in front of a studio audience, with a laughter track. The Royle Family had no laughter track, and the sort of realism not seen since the Sixties and shows such as Hancock and Till Death Do Us Part. What it also introduced to the British sitcom was a hyper-realistic setting where not a lot happened. Ricky Tomlinson, Sue Johnston, Little, Aherne, Cash et al sat around on a sofa just talking.
Cash and Aherne met in the 1980s on the south Manchester pirate radio station KFM – until that station went legit in 1990 and they both got the heave-ho. “On the night-time shift it was me and Caroline and Jon Ronson, Terry Christian, Sarah Champion and Geoff Lloyd”, says Cash. “There were loads of us and we all got sacked on the same day. It was our first real job in the media, so it was a bit upsetting at the time.” It was Aherne who came to the rescue, asking Cash to help her develop an Irish nun character called Sister Mary Immaculate. “And then we did Mrs Merton…” he says.
Mrs Merton was Aherne’s mock elderly chat show host, most famous for asking Debbie McGee “So, what was it that first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” The Mrs Merton Show was a clever conceit that often succeeded in getting more out of its guests than bona fide chat shows. Like all the best comedy partnerships, Cash and Aherne laugh at the same things, including their own families, which is where the idea for The Royle Family first came from. “Caroline said we should do a sitcom with just real people talking, because ‘if we find it funny, surely everybody else will’,” says Cash. “I kept saying at the time, ‘Let’s just do another Mrs Merton’because I’d got a mortgage by then.”
The BBC was nonplussed when the couple presented the Royles to them. “I remember having this read-through of the script and Kathy Burke was there – Kathy was originally going to be Cheryl [the greedy neighbour eventually played by Jessica Hynes]. Ricky and Sue were there. We sat in a semi-circle at Granada in front of executives, and they were climbing the walls because nothing was happening. I remember them saying, ‘You need a beginning, middle and end’ – all the conventional things…. We said, would those things make it any funnier? And, to her credit, Caroline dug her heels in and said, ‘If you don’t do this I’m not going to make another Mrs Merton’.”
The rest is television history, including several Baftas and a working relationship that remains as combustible as it is successful. “We both care about stuff,” says Cash. “We have fights on set – ask Ricky or Sue – we both want the same thing in the end, but it’s hard to see that at the time. It’s like any married couple rowing.”
Ten days after I met Cash, The Sun newspaper reported that he and Aherne, after producing Royle Family Christmas specials for the past three years, had not managed to get a script written in time for this Christmas. Via the BBC, Cash and Aherne put out a statement blaming other commitments and apologising to the show’s fans. To which all I can add is what Cash admitted to me about his and Aherne’s approach to scripts: “We do leave it late. It’s like doing homework, and we’d put it off and off.”
Their collaboration on The Royle Family, with Cash and Aherne also playing on-screen husband and wife, eventually took its toll, and the pair had a widely reported falling out in 2000. “She just decided, I think, that she’d had enough,” says Cash. “At the time, she was under an intense media spotlight for anything she did, and I think the pressure became too much. She got on a plane to Australia.”
The media interest centred on her drinking habits. “I was as pissed as Caroline, but women get put under an intense spotlight,” says Cash. “We were naive as well, I guess. Coming to London for dos and awards was a huge thrill for us and we were just overexcited. We’d get on the train at Manchester and be pissed by Macclesfield.”
Before her vanishing act, Aherne had been due to play a barmaid in Early Doors, a sort of British Cheers and Cash’s follow-up solo project to The Royle Family. The sitcom, Cash believes, was badly handled by the BBC when it was broadcast in 2003 and 2004, despite being loved by its viewers. “I had a big row with them over it because I didn’t feel they were pushing it,” he says. “They showed the first episode on the final night of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! They wanted a third series but I said ‘No, you’re not having one’, which they were a bit shocked about.”
Cash’s latest sitcom, The Café, is for Sky and finds Cash behind the scenes, as director and executive producer. Cash says he enjoys “a kind of big brother thing” with the show’s co-writer Ralf Little. “I think we auditioned Ralf when he was about 16 or 17 –and I’ve known him in a weird kind of a family way – in The Royle Family way – for a long time. “Ralf said, ‘I’ve written this thing with Michelle [Terry], my friend. Would you have a look at it? And I thought, ‘Do I have to? How am I going to tell him?’ I kept it in its brown envelope for a couple of months, then I read it one day and I was really pleasantly surprised.”
The Café is a sweet, warm sitcom set in a café in Weston-super-Mare – as such, it marks a big change for Cash. “All these years we’ve been writing and it’s always in bloody Manchester,” he says. “It’s work wherever you go, really, but it was a pleasure to get out of Manchester.”
Cash himself lives in a village on the border of Cheshire and Derbyshire, with his wife, Stephanie, and his two sons, Billy, 13, and 14-year-old Harry, both of whom have now grown out of being embarrassed by their dad’s association with Dave from The Royle Family. Stephanie used to work at KFM – “reading the news very badly. She used to listen to BBC local news and then write a version of it. But it was pirate radio, so fair play.”
The house is close enough to his roots in Stockport, where his father – a former joiner – lives, and Manchester, where Aherne now has a home. Next year is already looking busy: presumably, there will be a prompt start on The Royle Family Christmas special, as well as the planned new sitcom with Aherne (“We don’t know what”).
Whatever it is, it will, like The Café, no doubt, be imbued with the trademark Cash warmth. “The Café is no big deal, it’s just living with these people who work in the café,” he says. “The world’s grim enough as it is. Hopefully, this is a bit of escapism, and you don’t need a thesis in comedy or plots to watch it.”
The above interview from “The Independent” can also be accessed online here.
David Morrissey was born in 1964 in Liverpool. His films include “Hilary and Jackie” in 1998 and “Basic Instinct 2”. He had had many major critically acclaimed appearances on television including “State of Play”, “The Deal”, South Riding”, “Blackpool” and “Red Riding Trilogy”.
When David Morrissey was a teenager, he gave up on school. Not academic, he had discovered acting, and that, as far as he was concerned, was that. “All of us, at some point, find the thing that keeps us ticking. Sometimes it lasts a lifetime and sometimes it lasts a couple of months,” he says, with rather more surety than that sentence deserves. “I sat outside the Everyman [theatre in Liverpool] the first time I went, and I could hear what was going on through the door, and I knew that if I went in, my life would change. And it did. It gave me a life, that’s what it gave me.”
This was Liverpool in the 70s. “The youth theatre had a great creative energy, but the theatre itself … Jonathan Pryce, Bill Nighy, Julie Walters, Antony Sher were there just as I got there. It was all coming at me, this creative force. I never wanted to be anywhere else.”
Morrissey is the kind of actor whose name, when you see it on a cast list, makes you feel reassured you’re settling down to watch something good. He was astonishing as Gordon Brown in The Deal, the drama that told the story of the leadership agreement made between Brown and Blair.State of Play, in which Morrissey played the compromised MP Stephen Collins, is still one of the best dramas the BBC has ever made, and his role as the corrupt detective in the Red Riding trilogy was one of pure menace. Next year comes a film he made with James McAvoy and Mark Strong, Welcome to the Punch – a London-based crime thriller already being talked about as a step up from generic gangster films.
He doesn’t know why he keeps being cast in roles that require the kind of dour inner turmoil or quiet villainy he brings. “You get that box you’re put into. I think it’s being six foot three and a miserable bastard.” Is he that? He’s clearly a man who spends a lot of time in his head, but he smiles a lot, too. “No, I’m not really.”
Still, more darkness calls. Morrissey joins the third series of hit US zombie drama The Walking Dead as the governor, a beast of a man who runs a small town called Woodbury. For anyone who hasn’t caught the first two seasons, based on a comic book series, it’s about a group of survivors living in a post-apocalyptic Atlanta where most of the population have become shuffling, shambling zombies, or “walkers”.
Zombies have long carried weighty cultural significance. If George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead zombies were referencing growing nuclear fears, and 28 Days Later came out at the height of the war on terror in 2002, what do the Walking Dead‘s flesh-eaters say about our time? “The unknown, I think,” he says. “The unknown threat. The idea of being besieged by an uncontrollable populace is very frightening. The idea that there is a non-negotiable enemy out there. There is a sense of the besieged community and that’s an interesting place for me. Woodbury is a community in the heart of a dangerous place that is finding a way of surviving. It has barriers and fences – it lives for its security. What the zombies represent is the instability and slightly crazed enemy.”
And the governor, then, is an authoritarian who uses brutality and fear to control his community. “He has to play this game with the populace, which is about reminding them how dangerous it is, so they stay within his governorship, and feel grateful to him for what he is providing,” says Morrissey. “He has created the world he wants to create in this madness, but as we know, power is a great corrupter.”
We meet in an overheated hotel room in London. Morrissey is home for a week. In the past, when US TV jobs have come up, Morrissey has never been able to commit to them – at the pilot stage, it’s typical for actors to sign up for seven years – because the timing hadn’t been right for his young family (Morrissey and his wife, the novelist Esther Freud, have three children, the oldest 17). Although he has to spend half the year in Atlanta and is signed up for five years, “that’s the great thing about the zombie apocalypse – there’s a way out, I guess. This seemed the right time. It happened really quickly for me. I phoned my wife and said what do you think, and she said: ‘Go for it.'”
His is a career notable for its few missteps, but this means they’re more conspicuous. He played the lead in Basic Instinct 2 opposite Sharon Stone, a film so bad that even when his friends bring it up, he says, they do it with the sort of hushed, disapproving tones “like they’re saying, ‘What about that time you were in the BNP?'” He laughs.
“It was a film that didn’t work, get over it.” The only other smudge I find on his CV is a voiceover for a McDonald’s ad.
“Yeah,” he says, sounding pained. “I felt quite conflicted by that. I did it … It was one of those things I wish hadn’t happened, but I did it, and I justified it to myself at the time. But yes, it was a blip, I absolutely wear that one.”
There has been much talk recently about how only posh kids can afford to become actors now; Julie Walters and Ken Loach have weighed in. “It is sad that so many of the young leading actors are coming from such a narrow social background,” Loach said. “It emphasises the fact that this is a society based on class and that privilege confers status.”
Morrissey, whose father was a cobbler and whose mother worked for Littlewoods, agrees, but adds that acting is not the only profession closed to many young people. “Certainly in politics – interns are mostly from middle and upper classes, because those wages are going, and I presume that’s true in most industries. There’s an age bracket – late teens to early 20s – when, if your parents don’t have the money, you’re not going to be able to do unpaid internships. Acting reflects other industries. You can’t survive on those wages at that level, so they have to be supported by parents, and so that has to be the middle-class kids, and that’s a disgrace.”
He pauses. “I think people are right [to complain], but it’s always been hard for those from a working-class background to get into the arts. It’s not going to stop people, but it will make it harder.”
Morrissey trained at Rada. Would he have gone to drama school if he’d had to pay fees? “No, there was no way I could have done that. But whether that would have stopped me being an actor is a different question. Fees for drama schools are ridiculous, and I know the drama schools feel that as well. At Rada, which I go back to every now and then, I do see a diverse demographic. But they have to struggle to subsidise people; there are bursaries and scholarships. Where the answer lies I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the industry itself putting money back in.”
It’s always difficult, he says, in times of economic crisis, for the arts to champion itself, “when something like the NHS is struggling, but it’s still our job to do that”. He is supporting the campaign to raise money to fund the rebuilding of the Everyman theatre. Has he seen the effects of the cuts on theatre? “You see younger actors working for a good theatre that gets good audiences, but being asked to work for £100 a week. How are they going to live on that, particularly in London? Touring was very important to me as a kid. There were some really strange experimental theatres – it was wonderful to see how diverse theatre could be – and that’s being cut. We’re spoilt in the south. Theatres outside of London can do one show in their season that has a cast over 10, and that’s not a great breadth of work to be doing.”
If Morrissey was wealthy before – he lives in, by all accounts, a very nice house in Hampstead – landing a big US TV show will have catapulted him into a new league. Can money make him feel disconnected from his roots, his siblings? “The great thing about coming from where I come from – Liverpool and my family – is that we’re very close. I have a great relationship with my siblings and their kids. I don’t feel I live in a rarefied world in any way. When I go home, people are very vocal in telling me what they think. I don’t feel disconnected in that way, and also my work tends not to make me rarefied. If you’re doing something like Red Riding, the places we film in, you’re investigating the real world there. I grew up in a great, loving place, and I try to recreate that; the difference, for my kids, is space and stuff like that.”
He says journalists often ask him about his marriage into the Freud dynasty “with the type of tone of ‘that snotty-nosed oik from Liverpool who ended up … ‘”, but anyone who has read Hideous Kinky, Freud’s autobiographical first novel, based on her bohemian and at times impoverished childhood, may make you doubt money has ever been much of a point of difference between them. But I wonder if he spends any time marvelling at the idea of having children who are also descended from two 20th-century giants (Sigmund is their great-great-grandfather, and Lucian, who died last year, was their grandfather) – and whether he thinks it could be a burden. “I don’t think they have a sense of that, really,” he says. “They had a relationship with Lucian, which was great, but I don’t think they see themselves in terms of their ancestry. If they do, they don’t talk to me about it.”
Americans, he says, are more bowled over by Sigmund; to Morrissey, Lucian was more interesting. “I wasn’t very close to him, but whenever I met him, I found him endlessly fascinating. I’ve been in his studio when he was painting. He used to do this thing where, as he painted, he would just put it [surplus paint] on the wall – the wall was that thick with paint.” He holds his hands a foot apart. “I would look at that and think it was amazing.”
Morrissey is a collector of such details. When I ask him what he likes about acting, he says, “I like the fact it gives me the opportunity to examine other lives.” For someone who claims not to have been academic at school, he takes a rigorously academic approach to his work – roles are researched thoroughly, through books and interviews, until he has absorbed not only the personality he thinks they have, but the time and place they were living in.
He has directed a feature film – 2009’s Don’t Worry About Me, set over a day in Liverpool, as well as some short films – and would like to do more, but acting is his first love. “I love telling stories. I like the challenges presented to me on a daily basis. There’s nothing resting about acting. There’s something I must love about the insecurity I profess to hate.” Insecurity about whether the phone is ever going to ring again? “Yes, but mainly about self, of doing something and going: ‘Was that OK?’ All actors have a great level of insecurity, which can be really boring, particularly if you’re on the outside of that – it can seem egotistical. Sometimes you’re going: ‘Why didn’t I do that other job? Why is he doing that job when I’m not?’, and if you’re not careful it can drive you mad. My most creative time is in the car from the set at the end of the day: ‘I could have done that! Why didn’t I do that?'”
Still, he says with a slow guilty smile, he thinks he must secretly enjoy the self-flagellation. “I do give myself a bad time, but I sort of like it. I’m not a perfectionist at all. I find perfectionists boring because the real creative heart is in the mess somewhere.”
The above “Guardian” article can also be accessed online here.
Jamie Bamber was born in 1973 in Hammersmith. He is currently starring on television in “Law & Order UK”. He has also starred on tv in “Battlestar Gallactica”. His films include “Ghost Rig”.
Christopher Eccleston was born in Salford in 1964. In 1991 he played Derek Bentley in “Let Him Have It”. Other film appearances include “Shallow Grave”, “Jude” and “Elizabeth”. In 1996 he starred on television with Daniel Craig, Mark Strong and Gina McKee in “Our Friends in the North” and of course as “Dr Who”.
TCM Overview:
The off-beat, yet oddly handsome, Christopher Eccleston first came to prominence as the mentally-challenged teenage accused murderer Derek Bentley in the based-on-fact “Let Him Have It” (1991) before going on to play an assortment of intense, deeply conflicted characters. He really achieved big screen prominence with his expert portrayals of the dour, almost psychotic accountant in the snarky thriller “Shallow Grave” (1994) and the titular stonemason in “Jude” (1996), directed by Michael Winterbottom, as well as the plotting Duke of Norfolk in the Oscar-nominated Best Picture “Elizabeth” (1998).
A product of the Manchester area, the rangy Eccleston was raised on a council estate and concentrated on playing sports while growing up. At age 16, he worked as a manual laborer and later in a warehouse. On a lark, he enrolled in a drama class at Salford Technical College where he landed a romantic lead in a play. Although he was miscast, the experience fueled his desire to perform and to the surprise of many, Eccleston landed a spot at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. When he graduated, he faced a long stretch of unemployment during which he held done a variety of odd jobs, and, as he told one interviewer, “the rejection fired a determination in me.” Eventually he was cast in the small role of Pablo Gonzales in “A Streetcar Named Desire” in his first professional stage appearance at the Bristol Old Vic in 1988. Eventually he landed parts at the National Theatre in productions of “Bent” and “Abingdon Square” before portraying Bentley in “Let Him Have It”. The latter was a cause celebre in England for years, as many felt Bentley (who had the mental capacity of an 11-year-old) was wrongly put to death for his role in the murder of a police officer. Eccleston earned praise for his skillful, moving turn as the youth.
What followed for the actor were a string of film roles that played on his unusual looks (he once described himself as a “fallen gargoyle”) and his intense demeanor. Before co-starring with Ewen McGregor and Kerry Fox in “Shallow Grave”, Eccleston had spent a season playing a young policeman in “Cracker” (ITV, 1993-94), written by Jimmy McGovern. Although he grew weary of the grind of series work, the actor welcomed the challenge of playing his dramatic exit from the series, stabbed and left to die while communicating via radio. Eccleston also played the leads in two McGovern-scripted TV dramas, the autobiographical “Hearts and Minds” (1995) and the based-on-fact “Hillsborough” (1996). In 1996, he also co-starred in the nine-part “Our Friends in the North”, which traced the relationship of four pals over thirty years (from the mid-60s to the mid-90s).
Back on the big screen, Eccleston turned in an intriguing performance as an Hassidic Jew with sexual designs on his sister-in-law in “A Price Above Rubies” (1998) and then demonstrated his range portraying a transplant recipient in the McGovern-scripted “Heart” (1999). He was particularly effective as a mobster in the remake of “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2000), but perhaps had his best screen role in years in “The Invisible Circus” (2001). He was well-cast as Wolf, a political radical in the 1960s who romances a free-spirited American (Cameron Diaz) who eight years later is forced to confront his past by the woman’s now-grown younger sister (Jordana Brewster).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
The producer-director Otto Preminger had an eye for blue-eyed blondes, casting two complete unknowns, the 19-year-old Jean Seberg in Saint Joan (1957) and the 15-year-old Jill Haworth in Exodus (1960), with mixed results. In Preminger’s rambling, all-things-to-all-people saga about the birth of Israel, Haworth, who has died aged 65, played Karen Hansen, a young Danish-Jewish girl searching for her father, from whom she was separated during the second world war. She falls in love with a radical Zionist (Sal Mineo), but is killed during a raid and buried in the same grave as an Arab, a symbol of reconciliation between the two peoples. Despite a phoney accent and the fact that she had never acted previously, Haworth was cute and touching in the significant role.
She then appeared in two more of Preminger’s overstretched epics on huge subjects: The Cardinal (1963), on the Catholic church; and In Harm’s Way (1965), on the American military in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. In the former, she is a saintly French-Catholic girl (thankfully using her own, well-enunciated English accent) who devotes her life to helping the sick and the dying, and in the latter, she is a nurse who is raped by a naval commander (Kirk Douglas), which leads to her suicide.
Haworth’s rather tragic appearances in these three Hollywood blockbusters, preceding her starring role as Sally Bowles in the hit John Kander-Fred Ebb Broadway musical Cabaret (1966-69), seemed to foretell a long and lustrous career in films and on stage. Somehow, it was not to be.
Valerie Jill Haworth was born into a wealthy family in Sussex, her father being in the textile business. Though the surname was pronounced “Hahworth”, she consented to the Americans calling her Hayworth, “just as long as they don’t spell it H-a-y,” she insisted.
Jill Haworth
As a youngster, she had ambitions to be a ballet dancer like her mother, until Preminger changed all that. During the making of Exodus, there were rumours that she and Mineo had fallen in love. This seemed to be confirmed when she moved into his home in Beverly Hills, California, after the movie was finished, and stayed there for two years, although she soon discovered that Mineo was gay. They remained good friends.
Between the Preminger films, Haworth made three films in France, notably The Mysteries of Paris (1962), the seventh screen version of Eugène Sue’s 19th-century melodramatic serial novel. Haworth was splendid as Fleur de Marie, a prostitute – still retaining her angelic looks – rescued from evil by Jean Marais as the swashbuckling hero, Rodolphe de Sombreuil.
At the same time, she made several appearances in television series such as Burke’s Law and Rawhide, but she is best remembered for an episode of Outer Limits called The Sixth Finger (1963), in which she played the faithful Welsh girlfriend of David McCallum, who is a victim of an experiment to speed up evolution.
Although Haworth had never sung a note professionally, she was chosen out of more than 200 applicants for the role of Sally Bowles, the British expat singer at the Kit Kat Klub in pre-war Berlin, in Cabaret. Despite mixed reviews – including a particularly bad one from the influential Walter Kerr of the New York Times, who noted that “the musical’s one wrong note is Jill Haworth, worth no more to the show than her weight in mascara” – she stayed with the show for almost two years, gaining a following.
Actually, Haworth, wearing a dark wig, was much closer to Christopher Isherwood’s Sally in his Goodbye to Berlin than Liza Minnelli was in the 1972 film version. Minnelli was much too good a singer to be found in such a seamy club. Isherwood described Sally in the book thus: “She had a surprisingly deep, husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides – yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse of what people thought of her.” That was exactly Haworth’s performance, especially in the gutsy title number.
After Cabaret, her career entered another stage, that of a “scream queen” in low-budget horror movies. She had taken the first steps previously in It! (1967), a risible updating of the golem legend, in which Roddy McDowall, as a deranged museum curator, lusts after his assistant, Haworth. He manages to bring a giant ancient Hebrew statue to life, bringing about the “monster carries girl” climax, a cliche of the genre.
Haworth is threatened again in The Haunted House of Horror (1969), in which she is a mini-skirted swinger who goes ghost-hunting with her “groovy” friends in an old, deserted mansion. In Tower of Evil (1972), she is chased around a lighthouse by someone or something with a sharp weapon. In Home for the Holidays (1972) – a television film scripted by Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Psycho – she is killed with a pitchfork, and in Mutations (1974), inexplicably directed by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, she is a student who gets involved with the unspeakable acts of a scientist (Donald Pleasence) who crosses humans with plants.
Haworth, who never married, had lived in New York since 1967, in an apartment bought during her time in Cabaret, which she considered the peak of her career.
• Valerie Jill Haworth, actor, born 15 August 1945; died 3 January 2011
For “The Guardian” Obituary on Jill Haworth, please click here.
Tribute
2014
Petite English actress Jill Haworth had an interesting if unsatisfactory screen career. Like so many other talented young actresses, what began as a promising start in big budget pictures, later settled into mainly low budget horror flicks, certainly unworthy of her natural acting abilities.
Valerie Jill Haworth was born in Hove, Sussex, on August 15th 1945, and as a child had no ambition for acting, preferring ballet instead. During a worldwide talent search though, she was spotted by Otto Preminger who gave Haworth the role of doomed refugee; Karen, in his 1960 epic ‘Exodus’, alongside Paul Newman and future on-off boyfriend Sal Mineo. Signing a three movie contract for the notoriously difficult producer-director, Jill had minor roles in Preminger’s other epics ‘The Cardinal’ (’63), and ‘In Harms Way’ (’65) with John Wayne, of whom she said was the meanest, nastiest man she ever worked with. The following year Jill was lusted after by Roddy McDowell in the silly but enjoyable horror film ‘It!’ (’66). While she hated the movie, Jill loved working with McDowell. That same year Jill won the role of Sally Bowles in the original Broadway run of the smash musical ‘Cabaret’, a part she would play for over two years. Unfortunately, by the time Bob Fosse directed the 1972 movie version; Jill’s short-lived fame had diminished considerably, and she was passed over in favour of the up and coming Liza Minnelli.
Back in the UK Jill looked stunning as a thrill-seeking teen in Michael Armstrong’s directorial debut ‘The Haunted House of Horror’ (’69). A pretty lame ‘old dark house’ fright flick, she at least enjoyed working with co-star Frankie Avalon, but was never keen on being in these cheap horror movies. After appearing in episodes of ‘Mission Impossible’ (’70) and ‘Bonanza’ (’71), Jill played a mini-skirt wearing archaeologist in Jim O’Connolly’s silly but fun horror ‘Tower of Evil’ (’72). A better movie that year, albeit a television one, was the wonderful thriller ‘Home for the Holidays’ (’72) with Eleanor Parker, Jessica Walter and Sally Field. It told the story of four sisters who are reunited one Christmas to visit their dying father, unaware that there’s a murderer in their midst. I think it’s one of the best of the many Seventies TV thrillers, and provided strong roles for both Jill and her female co-stars.
Another horror followed when she played a pig-tailed student terrorised by her mutated boyfriend, in Jack Cardiff’s messy ‘mad scientist’ movie ‘The Mutations’ (’74). By now Haworth’s film career was in a rapid decline, although she would continue acting in regional theatre. After a small role in the 1981 oddity ‘Strong Medicine’, Jill concentrated on doing voice-over work, only coming out of retirement for the 2001 independent film ‘Mergers & Acquisitions’, which would be her final screen appearance.
Never married, Haworth died in her sleep of natural causes, in New York on January 3rd 2011. She was 65 years old. An elegant blonde beauty with a marvellous throaty voice, Jill Haworth had moderate success on both stage and screen, but never found the roles and acclaim she deserved. Instead, Jill will be mostly remembered for her appearances in low-grade British horror, which, while she was never keen to appear in, to her many genre fans, this is no bad thing.
Favourite Movie: The Cardinal Favourite Performance: Home for the Holidays
