Moe Dunford
IMDB Entry:
Moe Dunford is an actor, known for Vikings (2013), Patrick’s Day (2014) and Gridlock(2016). Named as one of European films’ Shooting Stars by European Film Promotion. [2015] In 2015, he received an IFTA in the category of Best Actor in a Lead Role in Film for Patrick’s Day. He grew up in Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland. In 2016, he received an IFTA in the category of Best Actor in a Supporting Role in TV Drama for Vikings.
Patrick Wilson
Tom Glynn-Carney
Glynn-Carney studied at Canon Slade School in Bolton, and went on to study Musical Theatre in Pendleton College of Performing Arts[citation needed] later on he attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he studied acting. While studying, he participated in professional stage adaptations of Peter Panand Macbeth.[3]
His first experience on television was in 2013 when he had a role in two episodes of Casualty. He secured a lead role in the BBC military drama The Last Post, launched as part of the new season Autumn 2017 content on BBC1. He plays Lance Corporal Tony Armstrong.
Since May 2017, Glynn-Carney stars in the Jez Butterworth play The Ferryman at the Royal Court Theatre.[4]
Glynn-Carney’s first film is war drama Dunkirk, which was directed by Christopher Nolan and released in July 2017. He plays Peter, the son of the captain of a civil boat that sailed to rescue British soldiers from the surrounded city Dunkirk.
William Daniels
William Daniels was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irene and David Daniels, although in many of his roles he has spoken with a Boston Brahmin accent, with some transatlantic influence. His father was a bricklayer.[1] He has two sisters, Jacqueline and Carol.[2]
He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1945 and stationed in Italy, where he served as a disc jockey at an Army radio station. At the suggestion of Howard Lindsay, co-author of Life With Father, who recommended he use the GI Bill to attend a college with a good drama department, he enrolled at Northwestern University.[3] He graduated from Northwestern in 1949, and was a member of Sigma Nu fraternity.[
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Christopher Lee
Christopher Lee obituary in “The Guardian” in 2015
Sir Christopher Lee, who has died aged 93, achieved his international following through playing monsters and villains. In his 30s, he was Dracula, the Mummy and Frankenstein’s creature; in his 80s, Count Dooku in Star Wars and the evil wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. Along the way he was Rasputin, Fu Manchu several times and Scaramanga – the man with the golden gun – opposite Roger Moore as a weak 007, whom Lee did something to offset. For the last of these he was paid £40,000 – his highest fee, among hundreds of screen appearances, until the blockbusters of his later years. “The Bonds get the big money, and they save on the heavies,” he said.
Lee became an actor almost by accident. Through birth and education he seemed a more likely candidate for the diplomatic ladder, but he never reached the first rung. His father, Geoffrey, a colonel much decorated in the first world war, wrecked through gambling his marriage to Estelle, the daughter of the Italian Marquis de Sarzano, and a society beauty of the 1920s. Christopher was born in Belgravia, London. His education at Wellington college, Berkshire, ended abruptly at 17, and he had to get along on the pittance of a City clerk.
But the second world war might be said to have rescued him, making him an intelligence officer with an RAF squadron through north Africa and Italy. At the end, he was seconded for a period with a unit investigating war crimes. Though demobbed with the rank of lieutenant, he had suffered a psychological trauma in training and was never a pilot. In his later civilian life he was endlessly required to fly as a passenger, and it was barely a consolation to him having his film contracts stipulate that he travel first class.
Without previous aspirations or natural talent for acting, except a pleasing dark baritone voice that he exercised in song at home and abroad every day of his life, he was pushed towards film by one of his influential Italian relatives, Nicolò Carandini, then president of the Alitalia airline, who backed the suggestion with a chat to the Italian head of Two Cities Films, Filippo del Giudice. Lee was put on a seven-year contract by the Rank entertainment group, with the executive who signed it saying: “Why is Filippo wasting my time with a man who is too tall to be an actor?”
His height – 6ft 4in, kept upright by his lofty temperament and fondness for playing off scratch in pro-am golf tournaments – actually proved helpful in securing him the parts for which he had the most affinity: authority figures. He lent a severe and commanding presence to James I of Aragon in The Disputation (1986), the Comte de Rochefort in The Three Musketeers (1973), Ramses II in Moses (1995), the cardinal in L’Avaro (1990), a high priest in She (1965), the Grand Master of the Knights Templar in Ivanhoe (1958) and the Duc in The Devil Rides Out (1968).
He shared his aptness for sinister material with two friends who lived near his London home in a Chelsea square: the writer of occult thrillers Dennis Wheatley and the actor Boris Karloff. The latter once cheered him up when Lee was overloaded with horror roles, remarking, “Types are continually in work.”
Lee initially studied method acting at Rank’s “charm school”, where he was supposed to spend six months of the year in rep. But floundering at the Connaught in Worthing, and humiliated by audience laughter when he put his hand through a window supposedly made of glass, he recognised that the theatre was not his metier and never went near the stage again. Perhaps the most useful coaching Rank gave him was in swordplay: across his career he fought in more screen duels than opponents such as Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks put together.Play VideoPlayCurrent Time 0:00/Duration Time0:00Loaded: 0%Progress: 0%FullscreenMuteEmbedFacebookTwitterPinterest Sir Christopher Lee, veteran horror film actor, has died at the age of 93 after being hospitalised for respiratory problems and heart failure
Terence Young gave Christopher his first – and minimal – chance before the film cameras in Corridor of Mirrors (1948). Over the next 10 years, he played secondary and anonymous characters in a miscellany of mostly low-budget British films. This had a lasting effect into his later years: he would accept virtually any role. The film that lifted him out of obscurity, and showed him to Times Square as a 50ft-tall vampire, was the Hammer production of Dracula in 1958. It cost £82,000 and earned £26m, of which Christopher’s take was £750. It was the first time he and Peter Cushing worked together, in a pairing that lasted through 22 films.
It was often said in the film business that it was not easy to make friends with Lee. But he always knew his part, and he was always in the right place, so that he was at any rate approved of by the cameramen. Furthermore, three other actors who also enjoyed sinister roles in exploitation movies kept a quartet of friendship with him: Cushing, Karloff and Vincent Price.Advertisement
Lee’s particular difference as Dracula lay in his height and powerful showing, and his terrifying presence even when no words had been written for him. But while admitting that Dracula had been his cornerstone, he eventually left the role to others, and later regretted letting himself in for so many of the vampire’s increasingly absurd adventures.
He took work wherever he could find it, including five times as Fu Manchu. When he could not find roles in Britain, he cast about in France, Italy, Spain and Germany. His ability to say his lines in their languages was a great advantage when it came to dubbing. He became the first actor to play both Sherlock Holmes and, for the director Billy Wilder in 1970, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft. While shooting by Loch Ness in Scotland, Wilder remarked to him, as they walked in the twilight by the spooky stretch of dark water with bats wheeling about: “You must feel quite at home here.”
Supporting roles in action pictures – as a Nazi officer, a western gunman and a pirate – extended not only his portfolio but also the range of lead actors who were his idols. Among them was Burt Lancaster, whose example as his own stunt man Lee strove to emulate. Lancaster once warned him against journalists: “Never let them get too close.” Lee liked to give interviews, but resented the results, since they invariably harped on about Dracula despite his protestations that he had left the “prince of darkness” behind.
Given this attitude, he rather surprisingly gave me, a journalist, the job of ghostwriting his autobiography, which was published in 1977 as Tall, Dark and Gruesome. In 2003, after he had played several roles a year for 25 more years, we updated the story as Lord of Misrule.
Lee had come nearest to producing something lasting for the cinema in 1973, playing the pagan Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. With a marvellous script by Anthony Shaffer, and despite almost no money for production, it was a rare horror film that proved to have a long life. Lee was prevented by injury from taking the role of Sir Lachlan Morrison in a sequel, The Wicker Tree (2011), though he made a cameo appearance as “Old Gentleman”.
After the high-profile part in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), Lee – at the urging of Wilder – left Britain for Hollywood. America delivered some of his hopes. On the downside was the disaster film Airport 77; on the upside, a completely unexpected comic success hosting Saturday Night Live on TV, with such stars as John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. In among the 40 jobs he undertook in the 1970s, Lee’s sword and sorcery, murder and spook movies made way for his roles as a U-boat captain in Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), a Hell’s Angel biker in Serial (1980) and, back in Europe, the studied interpretation of the executioner Charles-Henri Sanson as a dandy, for a 1989 French TV history of the Revolution. Lee was fascinated by public executions. His move to the US allowed him the opportunity to see the electric chair firsthand, in a similarly detached mood of inquiry with which he had previously invited England’s last hangman to come to his house and talk about his own career. One of his favourite pastimes was visiting Scotland Yard’s Black Museum.
He worked on tirelessly, becoming a familiar figure in the studios of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Balkans, the Baltic and Russia; he also made films in Pakistan and New Zealand, and in 2000 he struck a touching figure as the butler Flay in the BBC TV production of Gormenghast.
The 21st century saw a major reinvigoration of his reputation – first in the Star Wars prequels, and then even more significantly as Saruman in Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film sequence of The Lord of the Rings. He was upset when Jackson cut his scenes in the theatrical edition of the trilogy’s final instalment, The Return of the King (2003), but their rift was healed when the scenes were restored in the extended editions on DVD. At last, in his 80s, Lee was earning six figures. He reprised the role in The Hobbit films.
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Nonetheless, one of the roles for which he was most proud was a low-budget assignment: the arduous – and politically precarious – challenge of playing the title role in Jinnah (1998). Though Lee worked with all due seriousness and admiration for the founder of Pakistan (and looked remarkably like him), he had to be constantly under armed guard because of an abusive press campaign against the producers for associating the father of the nation with Dracula; the Pakistan government eventually caved in to the pressure and withdrew its funding for the film. The end product was well reviewed; Lee himself thought it his best achievement, though not everybody would agree.
Still, at home he was becoming the nation’s darling. Tim Burton fitted him into small parts in five films and was on stage to introduce him when Lee won a Bafta fellowship award for lifetime achievement in 2011. A BFI fellowship in 2013 was presented to him by Johnny Depp. In France, he was made a commander of arts and letters; he was likewise honoured in Berlin. He was made CBE in 2001 and knighted in 2009. A prolific schedule of film appearances continued and most recently he had taken the lead role in the comedy Angels in Notting Hill.
He is survived by his wife, Gitte (nee Kroencke), whom he married in 1961, and their daughter, Christina.
• Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, actor, born 27 May 1922; died 7 June 2015Topics
I.S. Johar
Damien Malony
Wikipedia entry:
Damien Molony (born 21 February 1984) is an Irish actor now based in London. He is best known for his television roles as Hal in BBC Three’s Being Human, DC Albert Flight in the BBC’s Ripper Street and DS Jack Weston in Channel 5’sSuspects.
Molony grew up in Johnstown Bridge, County Kildare, Ireland. After graduating from the Drama Centre London in 2011, he co-starred as Giovanni in a production of theJohn Ford play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, directed by Jonathan Munby.
Molony’s casting as vampire Hal in the BBC Three series Being Human[2] brought him his first television credit. In an interview with SFX magazine, Molony revealed that when approaching the role of Hal he did research on drug addicts and alcoholics.[3] He has previously starred in the short film When the Hurlyburly’s Done,[4] filmed in Germany.[5]
After the filming of series 4 of Being Human, Damien played the lead role of Motl Mendl in the National Theatre production of Travelling Light alongside Sir Antony Sher. Following the London run, the play toured England before returning to the National Theatre in late April 2012.[6]He returned to the National Theatre in January 2015 to play Spike in Sir Tom Stoppard‘s The Hard Problem, which ran until 17 May 2015 and was broadcast live to cinemas across the world via NT Live on 16 April 2015. Both plays were directed by the then Artistic Director of the National Theatre, Sir Nicholas Hytner.
The fifth and final series of Being Human was screened in February–March 2013. At the same time Molony starred in the play “If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep” at the Royal Court Theatre.[7]
Damien’s television slate grew when he joined the cast of Victorian BBC show Ripper Street in series 2 as Detective Constable Albert Flight. He appeared in 7 of 8 episodes, airing November-December 2013 on BBC One in the UK and February-April 2014 on BBC America. The crime drama was set in London’s Whitechapel in the period following the Jack the Ripper murders.
Molony has starred alongside William Gaminara in the play The Body of an American by Dan O’Brien in January-February 2014 at the Gate Theatre (London) about the conversation of a war photographer and a struggling playwright. [8] Molony then starred as Detective Sergeant Jack Weston in innovative crime procedural Suspects. The drama is shot in a documentary style, using fly-on-the-wall filming techniques. Series 1, comprising 5 episodes, aired in February-March 2014 on Channel 5 in the UK. Series 4 has been announced for late 2015.
Molony was cast as Ross in the feature film Kill Your Friends, adapted from the novel by John Niven, set in the music industry in the Britpop era. The film is due for a UK and Ireland release in November 2015.
He subsequently went on to film Tiger Raid in the deserts of Jordan, alongside Brian Gleeson and Sofia Boutella. The feature film, a dark thriller about a tiger kidnapping in Iraq, is set to premiere at a film festival in late 2015. Molony’s also been cast as Robert Putnam in an upcoming HBO pilot, The Devil You Know, created by Jenji Kohan and directed by Gus Van Sant. The story is set in 17th century New England and focuses on the Salem witch trials.
In September-October 2015 Molony starred alongside Aidan McArdle and Adam Fergus in the RTÉ One crime drama mini-series Clean Break.
His most recent TV role is as Anthony in the Phoebe Waller-Bridge comedy Crashing on Channel 4.
Hugh O’Conor
TCM Overview:
A young dramatic actor began acting at the age of eight in the TV show “The Irish RM” (RTE). He went on to appear in “Rawhead Rex” and “Fear of the Dark” as well as radio dramas and stage shows like “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” O’Conor was still a relative unknown pre-teen when he co-starred with Liam Neeson in the British-made feature “Lamb” (1985). O’Conor played the ten-year-old Owen, a lonely epileptic boy who is temporarily rescued from a violent and oppressive children’s home by Brother Sebastian (Neeson). It was three years before the actor landed another major film role, that of the youthful version of the Martin Sheen’s narrator (seen in flashbacks) in the 1988 film adaptation of Hugh Leonard’s heartwarming Tony-winning play “Da.”
His next film was his biggest hit to date, the Daniel Day Lewis tour de force “My Left Foot” (1989). Directed by Jim Sheridan, the film told the story of the severely handicapped writer Christy Brown. Once again, O’Conor played the lead as a child, but this was a much more demanding and widely-seen performance. Much lighter in tone was the big-budget remake of “The Three Musketeers” (1993), in which O’Conor played the Boy King Louis, who is protected from assassination by the title characters. The film, which included a bit of updated wisecracking by its stars Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland and Chris O’Donnell, got a mixed reception. O’Conor’s first starring role came with Ben Ross’ dark British comedy “The Young Poisoner’s Handbook” (1995), in which he was an amateur toxicologist unwisely paroled from prison after testing his theories on family and friends, with fatal results. Based on a true story, it was a thoroughly unpleasant bit of work, yet found an appreciative audience. The following year, O’Conor played a teen trying to form a rock band in 1959 Russia in “Red Hot.”
Jaclyn Smith
IMDB Entry:
Jaclyn Smith was born Jaclyn Ellen Smith on October 26, 1945 in Houston, Texas. She graduated from high school and originally aspired to be a famous ballerina. In 1973, she landed a job as a Breck shampoo model. In 1976, she was offered a chance to star in a new pilot for a planned television series, entitled Charlie’s Angels (1976). The pilot was slick and the show was an instant hit when it debuted on September 22, 1976 on ABC. Smith has the distinct honor of being the only Angel *not* to leave the show in its entire five-season run (1976-1981). After Charlie’s Angels (1976), she went the TV-movie route and starred in such TV films as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (1981) for which she received a Golden Globe nomination, and such miniseries as The Bourne Identity (1988), Rage of Angels (1983) and Windmills of the Gods (1988). She has had her own extremely successful clothing line at KMart since 1985, and is often a spokesperson. Her first two marriages to actors Roger Davis and Dennis Cole ended in divorce. She has two children from her third marriage to cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond (they divorced in 1989). Her fourth marriage is to her father’s physician Dr. Brad Allen. She married him in 1997 and they both created a skincare line.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Bill Hatfield <hatfield@stgeorges.edu>
Vince Vaughan
TCM Overview:
Having made his first Hollywood splash playing a cocky retro-hipster in the indie film-turned-cult classic “Swingers” (1996), actor Vince Vaughn subsequently stumbled through a number of bland dramas and several puzzling misses before cashing in on his early promise in a number of mainstream comedies. After “Swingers,” Vaughn appeared in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” (1997) before starring in Gus Van Sant’s widely panned shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1998). After flailing some more with “Return to Paradise” (1998), “The Cell” (2000) and “Domestic Disturbance” (2001), Vaughn again hit his stride as a man trying to recapture his frat house glory in “Old School” (2003). After starring in the surprise hit “Dodgeball” (2004), he had one of his biggest box office successes with “Wedding Crashers” (2005). Often referred to as a member of the so-called “Frat Pack” – which also included Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller and Luke and Owen Wilson – Vaughn enjoyed being a part of the top-grossing comedies of the decade. After another hit opposite off-screen girlfriend Jennifer Aniston in the mean-spirited romantic comedy, “The Break-Up” (2006), he had an unexpected turn in Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” (2007), suggesting that Vaughn was still capable of turning in a quality dramatic turn. Vaughn maintained his comedy bona fides in “Fred Claus” (2007), but stumbled with “Four Christmases” (2008) and “The Dilemma” (2011). Still, Vaughn remained one of the more prolific and endearing performers working in the business.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.