British Actors Archives - Page 94 of 137

Rosamund John

Rosamund John was born in 1913 in Tottenham, London. Her films include “First of the Few” in 1942, “The Lamp Still Burns”, “The Gentle Sex”, “Green for Dange” and “When the Bough Breaks” with Patricia Roc. She was long marrried to the Labour MP John Silkin. She died in 1998.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

ONE OF Britain’s most popular film actresses of the Forties, Rosamund John was voted second only to Margaret Lockwood as the country’s favourite British female star in 1944. Among her films were two of the finest of the decade, The Way to the Stars and Green for Danger

A grey-eyed honey-blonde, she was one of the most interesting of the well-bred heroines who dominated the British screen of that time. “In those days we were much more ladylike than they are now,” she said recently. “We used to admire ladies in French films because in them actresses were allowed to be real: but English films made us unreal because the audience liked being taken out of the reality of the war.”

Intensely political, she retired into a long and happy marriage to the Labour MP John Silkin and could often be seen attending the House of Commons to hear him speak.

Born Nora Rosamund Jones in Tottenham, north London, in 1913, she was educated at the Tottenham Drapers’ College, then attended the Embassy School of Acting. Her early ambitions were to be an actress or author. After a year in France at the age of 19, she returned to London and was introduced by a former history mistress to the actor-director Milton Rosmer, who cast her in small stage roles and (billed as Rosamund Jones) as a Scots girl in his film The Secret of the Loch (1934), which starred Seymour Hicks as a scientist out to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.

John then worked in repertory, was one of C.B. Cochran’s “young ladies” and at Stratford-upon-Avon did walk-ons and understudied several Shakespearean roles. The actor-producer Robert Donat spotted her there, and cast her as an understudy in his production Red Night (1936). Donat’s biographer Kenneth Barrows recounts that the actor not only had great faith in John’s ability – he was to write in his journals, “One day I shall be proud to say I was one of the first to recognise her great gifts” – but he also fell deeply in love with her and, though he was married, by Christmas 1938 he was writing that John was “the first truly passionate affair of my life”.

When Milton Rosmer directed Donat as Dick Dudgeon in a stage production of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple (1940), they cast John as the minister’s wife Judith, but the actress was not yet ready for such an assignment. Though she received good notices during the pre-London tour (“Rosamund John puts into the quiet little wife of the minister an unexpected emotional intensity,” wrote the Yorkshire Post), the London critics were less kind and Shaw himself, attending a matinee three weeks after the opening, wrote Donat a letter bemoaning his “discovery that the minister seemed to have, in Rosamund John, married an escaped lunatic”.

Donat replied, “For the minister’s wife I must take some of the blame. She is a great friend of mine, and it was on my suggestion that she was allowed to tackle the part. She at first gave an extremely subtle, amusing and moving performance as Judith. I am afraid, however, she lacks the technique to sustain the part night after night.

“On the first night, she was inaudible and her frantic efforts the other afternoon were the unfortunate reaction of having read an unending stream of bad press notices, a pretty depressing situation for a young actress’s first appearance in an important part on the West End stage.”

Donat tried to get John the role of Eleanor Eden, his love interest in Carol Reed’s The Young Mr Pitt (1941), but the part went to Phyllis Calvert, who had just had a success in Reed’s film Kipps. John had by now become noted for her strong political views, and had let it be known that she would like to become an MP, prompting Donat to write: “Rather a good description of Johnny at her most independent: Queen Victoria with a school certificate in one hand and the New Statesman and Nation in the other! But a lovely, generous mind, a heart of pure gold, and a body made for the highest pitch of ecstasy.”

John told the author Brian MacFarlane that her big break came when she was up a tree picking cherries at Donat’s house. “A girl I knew in an agency phoned to say Leslie Howard was looking for someone, and she had suggested me.” After a screen test, Howard gave John a leading role in The First of the Few (1942). As the understanding wife of the Spitfire designer R.J. Mitchell, John projected an extremely English combination of reticence, loyalty and gentle determination, and the film was a big success.

Howard next cast her in another popular wartime piece, The Gentle Sex (1943), as one of seven girls from different walks of life who join the ATS. John wanted to play the cockney girl but was told she “looked all wrong”, despite her pointing out that she grew up in cockney London, and once again she was cast as a Scot (“I used to rush off to John Laurie on another set to help with the dialogue”).

Howard then gave her the starring role in The Lamp Still Burns (1943) as an architect who becomes a nurse and, after initial difficulties adjusting to the discipline, becomes so dedicated that she gives up true love for her vocation. John’s co-star was Stewart Granger, and the pair were so unhappy with the director, Maurice Elvey (“a pompous little man who had made a lot of indifferent films before the war”) that Howard promised to take over the film’s direction when he returned from an urgent trip to Lisbon. The air trip was the fatal one from which Howard never returned.

“Howard taught me everything I knew about film-making,” said John. “He made me realise that the only thing that matters when you are filming is what you are thinking and feeling, because it will show in your eyes.”

In late 1942 John’s relationship with Donat ended bitterly when she told him that she was going to marry Lieutenant Russell Lloyd, but eventually she and Donat made up.

In Bernard Miles’s idiosyncratic comedy Tawny Pipit (1944), filmed in the Cotswolds, John was a nurse who joins a vicar and convalescing pilot to save rare birds nesting near an English village and ensure that they can hatch undisturbed in the middle of a war. “Rank didn’t think they would be able to sell it to America so it was stashed away for a while. When it was shown, it was wildly popular, because it was everything the Americans thought of as being English.”

When the fan magazine Picturegoer polled readers for their Gold Medal Awards in 1944, the winner was Margaret Lockwood, but after several American names the next British star on the list was John and her popularity increased even further with her appearance in the outstanding film about a bomber station, The Way to the Stars (1945), written by Terence Rattigan and directed by Anthony Asquith (“my favourite director”). As “Toddy”, the compassionate pub manageress who loses both the flier she marries and the American airman she later befriends, John was the epitome of patrician common sense and stoicism. In a memorable scene, in which she persuades a young pilot (John Mills) that his determination not to marry his sweetheart during the war is misguided, John conveys a wealth of compressed emotion as she tells him: “If I could go back five years now and choose again whether or not to meet David, whether or not to fall in love with him, to marry him and bear his child, I’d choose again to have things happen exactly the way they did before . . . Any other woman in the world would tell you the same.”

The actress welcomed being cast against type in her next film, Sidney Gilliatt’s delightful comedy thriller Green for Danger (1946), in which her character was given a wayward neuroticism, but the movie also marked the end of John’s reign as a major star.

The Upturned Glass (1947), a taut psychological thriller, was stolen by its star and co-producer James Mason, and, though Roy Boulting’s Fame is the Spur (1947) has a subject close to her heart (a radical politician turns out to have feet of clay), it was not a popular success. As the politician’s idealistic wife who becomes a suffragette, John gave one of her best performances (“I enjoyed that film more than any other”) with an immensely touching death scene. The suffragette Christabel Pankhurst was a technical adviser, but not popular with the crew. “God, what a bitch she was,” related John. “The Boultings couldn’t wait to get her off the set.”

A film about the effect of warring parents on a child, No Place for Jennifer (1949), was a big success for the child star Janette Scott, after which John made only one more major film, Street Corner (1953), in which she and Anne Crawford portrayed rather high-toned lady policemen.

John’s final film was a B movie, Operation Murder (1956), but she had long virtually abandoned her acting career for politics and for marriage. In 1949 she became an Equity representative on the Working Party on Film Production Costs, an appointment made by Harold Wilson, then President of the Board of Trade. “It was a great advantage being a woman on that council. All the men around the table were going on about cutting production costs, cutting down wardrobe budgets and so on. I pointed out that one of the reasons people to go the cinema is to see beautifully dressed women, that the money was not being wasted.”

John also served on a committee which established a minimum rate for chorus workers, and with the increasing emergence of television she helped battle with the BBC, which did not want to pay for repeat screenings and wanted to treat actors as self-employed and thus not pay their National Insurance.

It was through her political work that Johns met a handsome young naval officer, John Silkin, 10 years her junior and an intensely ambitious solicitor who had joined the Labour party when only 16. Silkin admitted later that he was first attracted to the film star’s fame, but they ultimately fell in love and were married in 1950, the year that Silkin first contested (unsuccessfully) a Labour seat. He eventually entered the Commons at a by-election in 1963, became a confidant of Wilson and was appointed Chief Whip in 1966. He and John were both vehemently opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam war, and allegedly influenced Wilson’s decision to accede to Lyndon Johnson’s demands for British involvement with only a token “battalion of bagpipers”.

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

Though Silkin always opposed the party’s “hard left”, he and John regarded themselves as precursors of the “soft left” epitomised by Neil Kinnock. Tam Dalyell, who was Richard Crossman’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, was a friend of the Silkins and fondly recalls John’s charm and elegance. Dalyell organised a memorial meeting at Methodist Hall for Crossman and, since it was not a religious service, arranged for poems by Yeats and Byron to be read by John. No one who attended, he said, will ever forget the clarity and resonance of John’s beautiful readings.

The actress maintained her interest in politics to the end, and just 18 months ago attended a Westminster Labour Party brunch.

Tom Vallance

Nora Rosamund Jones (Rosamund John), actress: born London 19 October 1913; married 1950 John Silkin (died 1987; one son); died London 27 October 1998.

John Clements was born in London in 1910. He made his film debut in 1935 in “The Divine Spark”. He and his wife Kay Hammond had many successful stage ventures. Clement’s other films include “Knight Without Armour”, “South Riding” and “The Four Feathers”. He died in 1988.

IMDB entry:

John Clements hailed from southern England and was educated at St Paul’s School in London and St John’s College, Cambridge. His acting aspiration prompted his first stage appearance at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 1930 in the play “Out of the Blue”. Through the 1930s, he continued to develop his acting skills touring with the Ben Greet Company. It was in late 1935 he founded the Intimate Theatre at Palmer’s Green in North London. There he provided weekly plays in repertory until 1941. During the war, he worked with Entertainments National Service Association (E.N.S.A) and from 1944 worked with the Old Vic Company headed by Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, while the theater group was resident at the New Theatre in London. Already he had broken in to films with the Anthony Kimmins science fiction story Once in a New Moon (1935). He had other small parts in two historically significant films of cinema: the Alexander Kordaproduction Rembrandt (1936) with Charles Laughton and the unfinished I, Claudius(1937) of Josef Von Sternberg with its stellar British cast. Clements had another small but most memorable role in the adaption of the James Hilton novel Knight Without Armor(1937), as a young communist police official helping English spy Robert Donat and beautiful noblewoman Marlene Dietrich escape from the Russian Revolution. Clements finally got star billing with Richardson, being chosen by director Victor Saville for the rather soap opera-tinged South Riding (1938). The next year, again with Richardson, he had the romantic lead in his most recognized role as the principled coward who redeems himself fourfold in the epic The Four Feathers (1939) by the ever enterprising Korda Brothers. Though his films numbered less than 30, and into the 1940s the roles became decidedly ‘B’ in production value, his stage appearances numbered 200. And Clements had found himself drawn to directing as well as acting. He wrote, directed, and produced his film Call of the Blood (1948). Also, he functioned as actor-manager-producer in a number of West End theater productions from the mid-1940s into the early 1950s and others productions to 1957, acting with his second wife actress Kay Hammond to critical success. In 1955, he accepted the appointment as Advisor on Drama to Associated Rediffusion Ltd and also as one of the Board of Directors of the Saville Theatre. He was appointed Director of the Chichester Festival Theatre from 1966 to 1973. He had continued small supporting film and a few TV roles intermittently through the 1960s, his last film appearance being a cameo in the Richard Attenborough biographical flick Gandhi(1982). For his distinguished work as actor, director, and producer John Clements was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the Queen’s Honours List 1956 and awarded Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 1968 Queen’s Honours List for his services to drama.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: William McPeak

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Steve Jackson was born in Doncaster in 1970. He played Trevor Dean in “Coronation Street” and in BBC’s “The Cops”. His films include “Hillsborough”, “Yasmin” and “In Denial of Murder”.

IMDB entry:Grew up in Armthorpe, a mining village around Doncaster, South Yorkshire. He attended Tranmoor Junior School and the Armthorpe Comprehensive School, leaving in 1989. He changed his name for a time to Steven Fury, eventually returning to his original name after a few bit parts in shows like Emmerdale. Currently (1999) he is staring in the second series of The Cops for the BBC.

Margaret Tyzack was born in 1931 in Essex. She joined the Royal Skakespeare Company in 1962. She came to prominence for her role as Winifrid Forsyte in the BBC production of “The Forsyte Saga” in 1967. She also starred on TV in “I, Claudius”. Her films include “2001, A Space Odyssey” in 1968 and in 1971, “A Clockwork Orange”. She won widespread acclaim for her role opposite Maggie Smith on the stage in “Lettice and Lovage” in 1991. Margaret Tyzack died in 2011.

“Guardian” obituary by Carole Woddlis:

Margaret Tyzack, who has died aged 79, was one of Britain’s greatest and most popular actors, working on stage, television and film for more than half a century. Sometimes described as being in the mould of Edith Evans and Flora Robson, she will be remembered particularly for performances in the golden age of BBC TV drama – Winifred in The Forsyte Saga (1967), Antonia in I, Claudius (1976) – as well as for stage performances such as Martha in the National Theatre’s revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1981), for which she won an Olivier award for best actress, and Lottie with Maggie Smith in Lettice and Lovage (1987 and 1990), which earned her both Tony and Variety Club stage actress of the year awards. In 2008, well into her 70s, she scored perhaps one of her finest triumphs on stage as the wily, wittily eccentric Mrs St Maugham in Michael Grandage’s outstanding revival of Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden at the Donmar with Penelope Wilton.

With her open face, broad eyes and generous mouth, there was perhaps always something a little melancholic about her – even pessimistic, a trait she readily admitted to – that found her playing more “mature” roles than her actual years. She once confessed: “I’ve always played older than myself.” It was an asset that served her richly.

Tyzack considered herself first and foremost a character actor, asserting that she “never wanted to be a star”. Immensely versatile, unassuming, modest and largely unrecognisable offstage, she often boasted that she could go shopping without being spotted, and lived quietly with her mathematician husband, Alan Stephenson, in Blackheath, south-east London. She could play kind, benign, a pillar of the empire (such as Lady Bruton in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway) or in the latter years of her career, a show-stealing, fur-clad battleaxe in His Girl Friday, John Guare’s stage adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page (National Theatre, 2003).

While there was something endearingly naive about her role as besotted Winifred, and comically understated as the reactionary matriarch in Mrs Dalloway, her depiction of Martha displayed a ferocity previously unrevealed in earlier roles that tended towards either the respectable, down to earth, or emotionally obsessive, sad or caring. In her later career, she seemed to acquire even greater force and magnetism with a trio of superb roles in Auntie and Me at Wyndham’s (2003), opposite Alan Davies, Southwark Fair at the National (2006) and The Chalk Garden.

Tyzack was born in Essex, brought up in Plaistow, east London, daughter of a Tate & Lyle foreman, and educated at St Angela’s Ursuline convent in Forest Gate. She once said she had become an actor by chance. “Really, I’m a refugee from the typing pool. That would have been the alternative. Or maybe selling something in Harrods.” She once mused on becoming a nurse. “A fortune teller,” she noted, “used to tell me I had healing in my hands.”

She was saved by a “wonderful drama teacher” who came to her school and took an interest in her. She went on to train at Rada, where she won a prize for comedy – forgoing her first choice, speech training, through lack of the required academic qualifications. She then went into repertory in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, where she made her first stage appearance, as a bystander in Shaw’s Pygmalion in 1951. Further work followed at the Royal Court and Nottingham Playhouse.

In 1969 she won her first acting award, a Bafta for her role as Queen Anne in the BBC’s The First Churchills. Two years later she took over from Eileen Atkins as Elizabeth I in Robert Bolt’s Vivat! Vivat Regina! at the Piccadilly. The following year, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, she appeared as Volumnia in Coriolanus, Portia in Julius Caesar and Tamora in Titus Andronicus. As Volumnia, she was towering, a terrifying tigress fighting for her son’s life but also reducing Ian Hogg’s athletic warrior general to shuddering, childhood impotence.

Tyzack was in the US in 1971, winning another award for her performance in the title role of a television version of Balzac’s Cousin Bette. Then in 1976 came the landmark TV drama I, Claudius, followed by three years at Stratford, Ontario, where she took on roles as Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts, Queen Margaret in Richard III and the Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well.

If much of the early 1980s saw her exploiting her TV range, she also came even more into her own on stage. In 1983 she received a Tony nomination for her reprised role as the Countess in Trevor Nunn’s RSC production of All’s Well That Ends Well when it visited Broadway, and two years later was again picked out by New York’s Drama Desk critics for her performance as Rose, Viv’s mother, in Tom and Viv, Michael Hastings’s 1984 play about the tortured marriage between TS Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, when it travelled to Broadway.

Some of Tyzack’s best work, however, was still to come. In 1987, she starred alongside Maggie Smith in Peter Shaffer’s quirky two-hander, Lettice and Lovage, a strange, whimsical tale of two women, one a fantasist, the other, Tyzack, a strict traditionalist, who are at first enemies, but forge an odd kind of friendship. With her dry humour, Tyzack proved the perfect foil to Smith’s high camp. The play ran for two years in London before moving to Broadway, where Tyzack received another Tony. Her partnership with Smith was revived in 1993 when she played Miss Prism to Smith’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Aldwych, a characterisation marked by its originality. For once Prism was no fusty spinster but, in Tyzack’s hands, an attractive and clever woman.

Other major roles at that time included the older sister to Felicity Kendal’s adventure-seeking Fiona, reminiscing about her younger sister’s Indian exploits, in Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink at the Aldwych in 1995, and an imperious Lady Monchensey in Adrian Noble’s much admired revival of TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion, at the RSC (2000), where one critic described her face as “nothing less than a tragic mask when Harry, her pride and joy, relates his ‘unspeakable’ sorrow”. In 1993, she played Sybil Birling in Stephen Daldry’s mould-breaking revival of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls at the Aldwych, and in 1996, scored one of her biggest successes in Alan Bennett’s Soldiering On (Chichester Festival Theatre, then at the Comedy Theatre in the West End). Playing Muriel, she conveyed the infinite distress of a woman whose lifetime code of denial was gradually being stripped away.

As the almost mute aunt to Alan Davies’s garrulous nephew in Auntie and Me, she was required only to lie in bed, but still managed to convey a wealth of meanings, switching between beatific smiles and nods. In between times, her TV and film work continued to flourish. Two particularly heavy years, 1980 and 1981, saw her appear in seven different television productions, including Paulina in Jane Howell’s adaptation of A Winter’s Tale.

In 1987, she appeared as Madame Lambert in Stephen Frears’s film of the ill-fated relationship between Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, in Prick Up Your Ears. She was also Miss Helen Seymour in Paramount’s television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, during the 1990s. Other television series in which she appeared included Miss Marple, Thacker, the dramatisation of Our Mutual Friend, Dalziel & Pascoe and Midsomer Murders. In 2005 she was the narrator’s grandmother in Radio 4’s all-star cast adaptation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Film appearances included The Whisperers (1967), two films for Stanley Kubrick – as Elena in 2001: Space Odyssey (1968) and a conspirator in A Clockwork Orange (1971) – Bright Young Things (2003), directed by Stephen Fry, and Richard Claus’s The Thief Lord (2005).

One lament, expressed early on in her career, was that because of the respectable parts she played, she never seemed to inspire the kind of salacious fan mail some of her peers received, but, she added, prophetically: “If my health and strength keep up, I shall go on until I’m fairly aged.” She went on to do precisely that, her last London stage appearance being as nurse to Helen Mirren’s Phèdre at the National in 2009, and her last anywhere as Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady at the Théâtre du Chatelet, Paris, last Christmas. Illness compelled her to withdraw from a role in the television soap EastEnders in April.

In 1970 she was appointed OBE, and in 2010 CBE. She is survived by Alan and her son Matthew.

• Margaret Maud Tyzack, actor, born 9 September 1931; died 25 June 2011

• This article was amended on 28 June 2011. The original said that Margaret Tyzack’s last stage appearance was as nurse to Helen Mirren’s Phèdre at the National in 2009. This has been corrected.

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

Perlita Neilson was born in 1933 in Bradford, Yorkshire. She made her movie debut in 1949 in “Three Bags Full”. Her other films include “The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan” in 1952 and “She Did’nt Say No” in 1958. She has also featured in several television series in the UK. She died in 2014.

“The Stage” obituary:

After being highly praised for her portrayal of the Jewish heroine in The Diary of Anne Frank (1956-57), Perlita Neilson was invited to star in Hollywood’s film version of the play. But she rejected the offer, saying that a film contract would have kept her away from the theatre for too long.

She was taken aback by her success in the play, which tells the harrowing tale of a Dutch schoolgirl who hid from the Gestapo for two years during the Second World War. She was also surprised to be chosen, as she was not Jewish herself.

But she hugely admired the adaptation from the book and received wise words from Frith Banbury, the director of the production at the Phoenix, who told her: “Never feel sorry for the people you are playing. Otherwise, it will get between you and the acting.”

She made her West End debut at the London Coliseum as one of the children in Irving Berlin’s musical, Annie Get Your Gun (1947-48). The following year, she made the first of two appearances in Peter Pan at the old Scala.

Her talents as an actress did not properly emerge until she appeared in Lace on Her Petticoat (1950-51) at the Ambassadors. The production transferred to Broadway, but Neilson did not enjoy the experience: “I did not think American theatres had the same atmosphere or audience and I missed London.”

From 1954 to 1955, she appeared at the Bristol Old Vic, where she was singled out for special praise for her performance as a servant in the British premiere of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Back in London, she was seen in a new translation of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1956) at the Saville, with Diana Wynyard and Hugh Williams.

She was a devotee of the plays of Shaw and relished her appearances in Heartbreak House (1961) at Wyndham’s and Getting Married (1967) at the Strand. Throughout her life, she was passionate about the theatre and admitted walking out of only one play she saw, Edward Bond’s surreal Early Morning, which alleged a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale – something she found ridiculous.

Perlita Neilson, who was born Margaret Sowden in Bradford on June 11, 1933, died in Hove on April 7, aged 80.

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

Ralph Bates was born in Bristol in 1940. He is best known for his leading roles in a number of Hammer horror films of the early 1970’s including “Taste the Blood of Dracula”, “Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde” and “The Horror of Frankenstein”. He also starred in the very popular television series “Dear John”. Ralph Bates died in 1991. His daughter is the actress Daisy Bates.

IMDB entry:

The great, great nephew of the renowned French scientist Louis Pasteur developed into a strangely handsome dark haired, pale complexioned English actor. Ralph Bates was born in 1940 in Bristol, England and attended the University of Dublin and studied at the Yale Drama School. His dramatic talents first came to audiences attention playing the evil Emperor Caligula in the well received BBC TV series The Caesars (1968). However, the Hammer studios resurrection of the horror genre was then in full stride, and Bates was soon engulfed in the swirling cloak of Hammer’s success as he appeared in several horror films in quick succession. Firstly in a support role as demonic Lord Courtley in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), followed as the lead character Baron Frankenstein in The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), then as Giles Barton in the sexy Lust for a Vampire (1971) and as the well meaning Dr. Jekyll in an unusual spin on the Robert Louis Stevenson story inDr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971), Bates brought a new zest to Hammer and with his stylish dialogue delivery and film acting methods, he quickly won himself quite a few fans in both critics and regular film goers!

Unfortunately, by the early 1970s there had been a downturn in Hammer studios fortunes, and Bates then found himself turning to more traditional character work in other production houses and he appeared in several films before snaring other superb villainous role as George Warleggan in the 18th century period piece Poldark (1975).

After Poldark, Bates himself kept busy in a few forgettable UK made TV shows and television film roles which did not really do justice to his remarkable talents. In the late 1980s his health rapidly deteriorated, and he passed away from cancer aged only 51 on 27th March 1991.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: firehouse44@hotmail.com

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Pater Copley had a long and profilic career as a character actor on British stage, film and television. He was born in 1915 in Hertfordshire. He began his stage career in 1932. Among his many films are “Golden Salamander” in 1950 with Anouk Aimee, “Saadia”, “Time Without Pity”, “Victim” and “The Shoes of the Fisherman”. Peter Copley died in 2008.

“Guardian” obituary:

Paul Unwin
The Guardian, Saturday 11 October 2008

I first met Peter Copley, who has died aged 93, when I directed him as Orgon in a production of Molière’s Tartuffe at the Bristol Old Vic in 1985. We became immediate friends; I found an actor of huge experience but astonishingly open to new ideas. We staged Tartuffe on two levels joined by a steep staircase, and “Coppers” (as he was known to his family and friends), already in his 70s, developed a performance, egged on by me, that had him running up and down the stairs in an increasing frenzy. It was perhaps not surprising that Shosh, his wife, kept an eye on us both from then on. She made it clear that Peter ending The Cherry Orchard as a naked Firs was a concept too far.

By the time I met Peter he was at an age when most people’s careers would be ending. Perhaps he never had the ego to be an Olivier, Gielgud or Guinness – though he had worked with them all – but he had an admirable position as a busy, working actor, widely recognised from his television roles along with numerous films and West End shows.

Born in Bushey, Hertfordshire, he studied acting at the Old Vic school under Harcourt Williams and Murray Macdonald. He made his stage debut as the gaoler in the Old Vic production of The Winter’s Tale in 1932, and his West End debut three years later. His wartime naval service (1940-41) was sandwiched between a wide range of theatrical work, including a tour of south America with Edward Stirling (1936), a season at the Gate, Dublin (1939), wartime touring and a spell as director of the Worthing rep (1945). From 1945 to 1950, he was at the centre of Olivier’s Old Vic Company at the New Theatre, St Martin’s Lane. He would talk about performing in Hamburg immediately after the war – seeing SS men sitting, broken, on the pavement, and finding a copy of Mein Kampf alongside the Bible in a dressing room.

Review after review singled Peter out – as a great swordsman in Cyrano de Bergerac (1945) opposite Ralph Richardson, or as the comic Ananias in the Old Vic’s The Alchemist (1947), years later at the Duke of York Theatre in Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (1980), or for his Teiresias in Katie Mitchell’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Phoenician Women (1995). He loved working at the RSC, in productions including The Cherry Orchard (1997) and Henry IV part II (2000).

He appeared on television hundreds of times, in everything from The Forsyte Saga to The Avengers, The Bill and One Foot in the Grave. His last appearance was as Greyhald Spold in Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic this year.

He was in many movies, including a role as the jeweller alongside the Beatles in Help! (1965), and worked with some of the great directors. Only four years ago, he was in Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist and returned from Poland (where it was shot) with stories of how the director coaxed a the child performers. He was impressed, a little shocked, but was, at 90, thrilled that, watching the children and director work, he still felt he was learning about acting. This, from a man who had worked with Steven Spielberg (on Empire of the Sun, 1987) and appeared in epoch-defining films such as Basil Dearden’s Victim (1962).

It was this openness that made Peter a special actor. He was delicate, subtle and always stimulated. Not necessarily powerful or bombastic, he knew how to listen and to react, holding the audience – in any medium – by drawing them in rather than hitting them hard. He was never tedious about acting. Highly intelligent, well read and knowledgeable, he believed that his craft came first from instinct and observation, and that intellect could get in the way.

Peter had been a Communist party member in the 1940s and early 50s, and while he renounced the Soviet model, he remained a committed socialist. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the Middle Temple bar in 1963, though he never practised. He was actively involved in the actors’ union Equity and, until recently, was a venerable part of the campaign to reopen the Bristol Old Vic. Between 1980 and 1995, he appeared in 25 theatre productions including a heartbreaking John of Gaunt in Richard II (1985) and the ghost and player king in Hamlet (1991).

Shosh – the formidable novelist Margaret Tabor – was Peter’s third wife, and they had a remarkable partnership. They had moved to Bristol in 1981, and when I became artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic in 1988, they gave me a key to their house, saying that whenever, night or day, I needed food and, more likely, a drink, I should help myself.

When my growing family moved to London, Shosh was clear: Peter could work in town if he lived with us. He was irrepressible, and most mornings – with two performances that day – would set off to an exhibition. His love of art came from his parents, the printmaker John Copley and the painter Ethel Gabain. We breathed more easily when he sat in the living room reading. At least we knew where he was.

Peter was married firstly to the actor Pamela Brown, secondly to the actor Ninka Dolega and then to Shosh. He is survived by her, his daughter Fanny and stepchildren Gid and Emma.

• Peter Copley, actor, born May 20 1915; died October 7 2008

Richard E. Grant was born in 1957 in Swaziland. After his education, he moved to the UK to begin a career as an actor. He has starred in the cult “Withnail and I” and after it’s success began appearing in Hollywood and international films. His other films include “L.A. Story” with Steve Martin, “The Player” with Tim Robbins, “The Age of Innocence” with Daniel Day-Lewis and “Gosford Park” among many others.

TCM Overview:

Lanky, British player who has had some success in mainstream Hollywood features. Grant began acting in his native South Africa, where he founded the multi-ethnic Troupe Theater Company. In 1982, he moved to London to stomp the boards in fringe and repertory productions. Grant made his English TV-film debut in Les Blair’s improvisational satire, “Honest, Decent and True” (1985). The next year, he entered films as the star of “Withnail & I” (1986), writer-director Bruce Robinson’s brilliant observation of the eccentricities of English actors in the 1960s. As the acerbic Withnail, Grant conveyed the great likability of a mostly vile character. He reteamed with Robinson for “How to Get Ahead in Advertising” (1988), a scathing comic indictment of the industry’s morals or lack thereof. Here he was Dennis Dimbleby Bagley, an ad exec whose head is taken over by an evil boil.

Grant’s American film credits in the early 90s include some of Hollywood’s more notorious productions. He co-starred as the husband of Anais Nin in “Henry & June” (1990), the first film to receive the NC-17 rating. He also played the mad English villain opposite Bruce Willis in the much-maligned “Hudson Hawk” (1991). Grant had supporting roles in Robert Altman’s “The Player”, as the English filmmaker who initially refuses to compromise his “artistic integrity”, and Francis Ford Coppola’s florid “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (both 1992), as Dr. Seward. He worked with another one of cinema’s titans, Martin Scorsese, in the opulent adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” (1993), as a smug member of turn-of-the-century New York’s high society. He reteamed with Altman for “Ready-to-Wear (Pret-a-Porter)” (1994) as an eccentric homosexual and portrayed a grieving widower coping with a newborn in “Jack and Sarah” (1995). The following year, he played a wealthy suitor to Nicole Kidman’s Isabel Archer in Jane Campion’s “Portrait of a Lady” and appeared as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Trevor Nunn’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”. Also in 1996, Grant published “With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E Grant” in England.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Maria Aitken was born in 1945 in Dublin. She is the sister of politican Jonathan Aitken. She has starred on the stage and on film and television in Britain. Her films include “Doctor Faustus” in 1967, “Half Moon Street”, “A Fish Called Wanda” in 1988 and as Lady Edwina Mountbatten in “Jinnah” in 1998. Her son is the actor Jack Davenport.

Brian McFarlane’s “Encyclopedia of British Film”:

Tall slender comedy actress, granddaughter of Lord Beverbrook, famous on stage for witty performances in such plays as “Private Lives”in 1980 and “The Women” in 1986 and on television. She has so far made only a few films but was memorably funny as John Cleese’s permanently and justifiably bad-tempered wife in “A Fish Called Wanda” in 1988. The sort of sequel “Fierce Creatures”, sadly gave her comic talents little scope.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Rosamund John

John Clements

Steve Jackson

Margaret Tyzack

Perlita Neilson

Ralph Bates

Peter Copley

Richard E. Grant

Maria Aitken

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