about me
Anyone who knows me is aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been building an autograph collection of my favourite actors’ signed photographs. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I enjoy. I have collected the photographs from the actors themselves, through contacts in the studios and through auctions. I now have over 2,000 photographs in the collection.
My Autograph Collection
I have separated my autograph collection into different categories, which you can see below. Feel free to browse whichever section interests you. Inside, I share not only the autographed photo in my possession, but also information about the actor, including their biography, photos and posters of their movies, and sometimes videos dedicated to them.
Whether you’re drawn to classic Hollywood icons, contemporary superstars, or character actors with a cult following, there’s something in my autograph collection for every movie enthusiast. If you enjoy my blog, don’t hesitate to leave a comment on one of my entries.
Actors Autograph Collections
Blog Categories
BRITISH ACTORS
Collection of Classic Brittish Actors
IRISH ACTORS
Collection of Classic Irish Actors
HOLLYWOOD ACTORS
Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors
EUROPEAN ACTORS
Collection of Classic European Actors
CONTEMPORARY ACTORS
Collection of Classic Contemporary Actors
RECENT POSTS
Denise Gough is an Irish actress. She has received a number of accolades for her work in theatre, including two Laurence Olivier Awards as well as a nomination for a Tony Award.
Born in Wexford and grew up in Ennis, Co. Clare, daughter of an electrician, Gough is the seventh of eleven siblings. One of her younger sisters is the actress Kelly Gough. She trained as a soprano before leaving Ireland for London at 15. She was awarded a grant to study at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA) in Wandsworth aged 18, and graduated from ALRA in 2003.
In 2012, she was nominated for the Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her performances in Eugene O’Neill‘s Desire Under the Elms at the Lyric Hammersmith and Nancy Harris‘s Our New Girl at the Bush Theatre. In January 2014 she was Julia in The Duchess of Malfi, the inaugural production at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London.[6] At the National Theatre, London, in September 2015 she presented an “electrifying” performance as a recovering substance user in Duncan Macmillan‘s People, Places and Things, directed by Jeremy Herrin. She reprised the role when the production transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre in March 2016, and subsequently won the Olivier Award for Best Actress. She returned to the National Theatre in April 2017 playing the role of Harper in Marianne Elliot‘s revival of Tony Kushner‘s play Angels in America, for which she won the 2018 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Gough then returned to People, Places & Things for its New York transfer. In February 2018, Gough returned to the role of Harper in the Broadway transfer of the National Theatre’s production of Angels in America, alongside the majority of the London cast.
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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
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Inder Sen Johar (16 February 1920 – 10 March 1984),[2] better known as I. S. Johar, was an Indian actor, writer, producer and director, who excelled in comedic roles.
Inderjeet Singh Johar was born on 16th February, 1920 in Talagang City, Talagang Tehsil, Jhelum District, Punjab Province, British India (now within modern-day Chakwal District, Punjab, Pakistan). He did an MA degree in Economics and Politics before completing his LLB. In August 1947, during the Partition of India, Johar was visiting Patiala with his family for a wedding when serious rioting broke out in Lahore, resulting in the Shah Alami Bazaar, once the largely Hindu quarter of the Walled City, being entirely burnt down.
Johar never returned to Lahore. For a period he worked in Jalandhar while his family remained in Delhi, before he eventually moved to Bombay, where he made his acting debut in the 1949 Hindi comedy action film Ek Thi Ladki.
Johar acted in numerous Hindi films from the 1950s through to the early 1980s and appeared in international films such as Harry Black (1958), North West Frontier (1959), Lawrence of Arabia (1962)[6] and Death on the Nile (1978), besides acting in Maya (1967), a US TV series. He also appeared in Punjabi films, including Chaddian Di Doli (1966), Nanak Nam Jahaz Hai(1969) with Prithviraj Kapoor, and Yamla Jatt with Helen.
I. S. Johar also wrote and directed films, including the partition-based Hindi movie Nastik (1954), Johar Mehmood in Goa and Johar Mehmood in Hong Kong, in which he co-starred with comedian Mehmood. These were inspired by comedy films of the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby style Road to… series.[8] Johar was a unique and idiosyncratic individual, a lifelong liberal who poked fun at institutionalised self-satisfied smugness – an attitude which did not endear him to the essentially hierarchical and conservative Indian establishment, and led to difficulties finding finance for his unconventional screenplays. In many of his films, both those he directed and those he acted in, Sonia Sahni was the leading lady, most notably in Johar Mehmood in Goa, 1964.
He also starred in films with his own surname in the title such as Mera Naam Johar,[9] Johar in Kashmir and Johar in Bombay, which is a testament both to his immense egotism, as well as his popularity with the common masses – for whom a movie with the Johar name was a guarantee of easy laughs, as well as subtle ironic or frankly sarcastic jibes at Indian customs, mores, superstitions and institutions. His film Nasbandi (Vasectomy) was a spoof on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi‘s failed policy of population control by coerced vasectomies during the period of Emergency and was “banned” when it was first released. In the plays written by him too, Johar attacks those in power. In a play on Bhutto, he writes about Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as well as Gen Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq.[10] Yash Chopra started his film career as an assistant director with I. S. Johar.[11]
In 1963 he starred as “Gopal” in two Italian films directed by Mario Camerini: Kali Yug, la dea della vendetta (Kali Yug, Goddess of vengeance) and Il Mistero del tempio indiano (The secret of the Hindu temple).
He died in Bombay, on 10 March 1984.
I
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Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself
Mickey Spillane obituary in The Guardian in 2006.
Pulp writer whose tales of tough guys and cute broads made him the bestselling novelist of the 20th century
‘Women,” he claimed in later life, “liked the name Mickey.” Other accounts suggest that Michael was the middle name his Catholic father had him baptised under; Morrison was the name his Protestant mother put on his birth certificate. Few at his fraught christening would have foreseen the arrival of the 20th century’s bestselling novelist, Mickey Spillane, who has died aged 88.
His father, John Joseph Spillane, was an Irish-American bartender. Young Frank was brought up in the “very tough” neighbourhood of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Under the superintendence of his mother, Catherine, the Spillane home was less tough. He claimed to have read all Melville and Dumas before he was 11. After Erasmus Hall high school, Brooklyn, he went to Kansas State College (now Fort Hays State University), starred briefly on the football field and dropped out. In the de rigueur way, he kicked around in the depression 1930s, working for a while as a Long Island lifeguard – “women” liked that too.
In 1935 he began submitting work to “slick” (ie illustrated) magazines, “working my way down”, as he later recalled, “to the comic books: Captain Marvel, Captain America, Superman, Batman – you name it, I did them all.” It was, he thought, “a great training ground for writers. You couldn’t beat it.” Fast-order work would be Spillane’s speciality. I, the Jury (1947) was written in nine days. When the car containing his manuscript of The Body Lovers was stolen two decades later, he claimed to be only concerned about the loss of his wheels: “the missing manuscript just means another three days’ work.”
Spillane served in the US army airforce during the second world war, enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941. By his own account, he flew fighter missions and taught cadets how to fly. In interviews he claimed two bullet wounds and a civilian knife scar sustained while working undercover with the FBI to break up a narcotics ring. On demobilisation he worked in Barnum and Bailey’s circus as a trampoline artist (the setting is used in his 1962 novel, The Girl Hunters) and claimed a professional proficiency with throwing knives. More profitably, he returned to writing.
Story-magazines were losing ground to paperback originals – pulp novels selling to the masses at 25 cents. Spillane duly turned out I, the Jury. It drew on the hard-boiled, private investigator tradition pioneered by Black Mask magazine in the 1930s, although the most famous product of that coterie, Raymond Chandler, disdained Spillane as a writing gorilla: “pulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this stuff”.
Spillane himself acknowledged the influence of only one crime writer, the now-obscure John Carroll Daly, creator of the private eye Race Williams. He flaunted his lack of authorial polish, claiming (mischievously) never to introduce characters with moustaches or who drank cognac because he could not spell the words. I, the Jury introduced the series hero Mike Hammer, whose tough-talking, woman-beating, whisky-swilling machismo answered the needs of the postwar “male action” market.
Estimates suggest global sales of around 200 million. By 1980, seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction titles in America were by Spillane. “People like them,” he blandly explained.
Hammer is less a detective than an ultra-violent vigilante. I, the Jury lays down the formula. Mike’s marine “buddy” Jack, who lost an arm saving Hammer’s life in the Pacific, is sadistically murdered. Hammer sets out to avenge him, skirting the niceties of the law, vowing to his friend’s corpse: “I’m going to get the louse that killed you. He won’t sit in the [electric] chair. He won’t hang. He will die exactly as you died, with a .45 slug in the gut, just a little below the belly button.” So it goes – even though “he” turns out to be a gorgeous “she”. Spillane astutely exploited the market he had created with Hammer with Vengeance Is Mine (1950), My Gun Is Quick (1950), The Big Kill (1951) and Kiss Me, Deadly (1952). All hit the mark.
It is never clear how Spillane’s hero supports himself – or how he pays Velda, his faithful secretary with the “million-dollar legs”. Prodigious cocksman though he is, Hammer respects Velda too much to take sexual advantage of her, although she loves him madly. “Broads” and “hoods” are never in short supply. Hammer is always outnumbered by the criminal enemy: “There are ten thousand mugs that hate me … they hate me because if they mess with me I shoot their damn heads off.”
The climax of a Mike Hammer narrative invariably features sadistic execution. The most hilarious is in Vengeance is Mine, which ends with the line (just before she/he gets it in the gut) “Juno was a Man!”. The link was often made between Spillane and Joe McCarthy, and over the years Hammer’s victims were as likely to be “reds” as “hoods”. In One Lonely Night (1951), the hero mows down 40 communists with a machine-gun (originally there were 80, but the publishers “thought that was too gory”).
Spillane regarded himself as a super-patriot, and was so regarded by others. John Wayne gave him a Jaguar XK140 for his anti-communism and Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) commended his prose style to her disciples. Spillane’s patriotism was, however, always tinged with a pessimistic, quasi-religious sense of doom, and in the early 1960s he predicted a race war in America.
The Hammer novels are written as spoken monologue and are stylistically direct. Spillane had great faith in the slam-bang opening, believing that “the first page sells the book”. He claimed never to read galleys or rewrite. He had, however, an odd compulsiveness about punctuation, and once insisted that 50,000 copies of Kiss Me, Deadly be pulped after the comma was left out of the title.
The Hammer novels enjoyed new leases of life in film, radio, comic-strip and television adaptation. I, the Jury was filmed twice (1953, 1982), as were other Hammer books. The only film that has any distinction is Robert Aldrich’s exaggeratedly noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Spillane disliked it – not least because of the missing comma. Possessed of ruggedly good looks, he himself played Hammer in the film of The Girl Hunters (1963), turning in a commendable performance. He also played cameo roles in other films.
There were two successful television series based on Mike Hammer, the first in the late 1950s and the second, 1984-87, starring Stacy Keach in a semi-noir, 1950s setting, with Spillane’s sex and violence carefully bleached out.
As an author of pulp, Spillane’s guiding principle was that “violence will outsell sex every time”, but combined they will outsell everything. As part of the promotion for his novels he adopted a Hammeresque persona, which was transparently an act. He once told a British interviewer, “I always say never hit a woman when you can kick her.” When asked, “Is that the treatment you give Mrs Spillane?”, he primly replied, “We’re talking about fiction.”
There were three Mrs Spillanes. With the first, Mary Ann Pearce, whom he married in 1945, he had two sons and two daughters. Then, in 1964, he divorced her and married Sherri Malinou, a model 24 years his junior, who had caught his eye when she featured on the cover of one of his books. He called the agency and asked them to send over the blonde with the beautiful butt: “they sent her over, and I never sent her back.” He used her (nude) on the cover of The Erection Set (1972).
But the marriage broke up and, in 1983, he married Jane Rodgers Johnson; he had two stepchildren, Britt and Lisa. From 1954 he lived with his successive families at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he sailed, fished and resolutely did not play golf. He always dressed in black and white; as in the novels, he liked to keep things simple.
There were two long gaps in Spillane’s career. The first followed his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1952, which led to a 10-year hiatus in novel writing (although he was earning substantially from subsidiary rights over this period). He returned to form in 1961 with what is reckoned to be the best of the Hammer novels, The Deep.
From then until 1972 the novels came out with the old facility, and Spillane created a new series hero for the decade, Tiger Mann – launched with Day of the Guns (1964). Mann is a “secret agent” and witnesses to Spillane’s sense that his thunder had been stolen by James Bond. He claimed not to be worried by Ian Fleming – “he’s a gourmet” – but the reading public, fickle as ever, never returned in their once record-breaking droves. The non-series books, The Erection Set and The Last Cop Out (1973), were heavily hyped but comparative failures, as were the second-generation Hammer books, The Twisted Thing (1966), The Body Lovers (1967) and Survival Zero (1970). Post-Lady Chatterley and post-Last Exit to Brooklyn, Spillane had lost the power to shock.
There was another gap, between 1973 and 1989, during which Spillane again wrote no full-length fiction, though he did try his hand (as a dare with his publisher) at two, well-received children’s books, The Day the Sea Rolled Back (1979) and The Ship That Never Was (1982). During this period he was famous to the American television-watching public for his appearance in Miller Lite beer commercials (though he was reported not to be a heavy drinker).
By the time he returned to Hammer fiction with The Killing Man (1989), Spillane was in his 70s, as were what remained of his faithful readers. A suspicious number of reprints of the early novels were in large-type; the Guardian reviewer of The Killing Man (1990) was kind but dismissive.
Spillane hammered on with Black Alley (1996), although by now his bolt was clearly shot. He reportedly suffered a stroke in his later years. Over the last decades (to his disgust, one suspects) he received increasing critical respect for his contributions to the idiom of crime fiction, and for having played a pioneer’s role in the postwar paperback revolution. His wife and children survive him.
· Frank Morrison ‘Mickey’ Spillane, writer, born March 9 1918; died July 17 2006
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Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary from 2000:
But the film also gave Marquand’s career a boost. Vadim’s debut movie tells of how Bardot, shortly after her marriage to a wimpish Jean-Louis Trintignant, finds she is more attractive to her dour but handsome brother-in-law, Marquand. Coincidentally in real life, Trintignant was to marry Marquand’s sister, Nadine, a few years later. But back on the beach, Bardot teases Marquand into ripping off her clothes and taking her.
The film created a scandal in France. This was mainly because of the discreet nudity of the beach scene, but Vadim complained that the censors forced him to cut the sequence.
Marquand himself was no stranger to scandal. The previous year he had a role in Marc Allègret’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which had starred Danielle Darrieux as the erring English aristocrat. In his private life, he married Tina, the daughter of Jean-Pierre Aumont and Maria Montez, in 1963, then had a son by the actress Dominique Sanda in the early 1970s. Thus he seemed to reflect his adulterous film persona.
One of his best pictures was Alexandre Astruc’s Une Vie (1958), based on a Guy de Maupassant story. In it, Marquand was the womanising husband of a young, innocent aristocrat, played by a cloying Maria Schell.
His affair with a friend’s wife (beautiful Antonella Lualdi) leads to his death. The main strength of the film, apart from Claude Renoir’s wonderful impressionistic Technicolor photography, was the way in which Marquand managed to find many nuances in the unsympathetic character he played.
Marquand was born in Marseilles, the son of a Spanish father and an Arab mother; the fact that he spoke Spanish, Arabic, French, English and Italian – all learned as a child – aided his international career. At the age of 21, his dark good looks got him a bit part in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast (1946), and he was soon getting slightly bigger roles, such as the Bohemian officer friend of the caddish soldier hero (Farley Granger) in Luchino Visconti’s lush melodrama, Senso (1954).
In the 1960s, he moved with ease between films made in France and those coming out of Hollywood. Among the uninspiring latter were the D-Day epic, The Longest Day (1962), in which Marquand enlisted as part of the French contingent; Fred Zinnemann’s post-Spanish civil war film, Behold A Pale Horse (1964), in which he played a Spaniard; and, as the French doctor among the aircrash survivors, in Robert Aldrich’s The Flight Of The Phoenix (1966).
Marquand was better served by Claude Chabrol in The Road To Corinth (1967), in which he portrayed an American Nato security officer investigating mysterious boxes jamming US radar installations in Greece. In 1962, he made Of Flesh and Blood, a competent thriller featuring Anouk Aimée, and the first of two films he directed.
Marquand’s succès de scandale was Candy (1968), about the conquests of a nymphet, played by Ewa Aulin, and adapted by Buck Henry and Terry Southern from the latter’s novel. In the movie, a large international cast, including Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, John Huston, Walter Mathau, James Coburn, Charles Aznavour, Elsa Martinelli, Ringo Starr, and even the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, did a series of star turns.
The result, according to the Monthly Film Bulletin, was that “hippy psychedelics are laid on with the self-destroying effect of an overdose of garlic”. Disappointed by this mainly negative reception, amidst the era of the love generation, Marquand returned to acting.
Tragically, in the early 1980s, however, he was struck by Alzeimer’s disease and retired from the world. He spent many of his last years in hospital, not knowing anybody who visited him. His sister, the director Nadine Trintignant, wrote a moving book about his plight, Ton Chapeau au Vestiaire (His Hat in The Cloakroom).
She survives him, as do his actor brother Serge Marquand, his former wife Tina Aumont, and his son.
Christian Marquand, actor; born March 15 1927; died November 22 2000
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Wikipedia entry:
Norman Wooland (16 March 1910 – 3 April 1989) was a British character actor who appeared in many major films, including several Shakespearean adaptations.
During World War II he was a junior radio announcer, reporting the news for the BBC. His acting break came when he played Horatio in Laurence Olivier‘s Hamlet (1948), and in which his “fine work” was noted by The New York Times. Then came Catesby in Olivier’s film of Richard III, and Paris in Romeo and Juliet (1954). He also had supporting roles in Quo Vadis (1951), Ivanhoe (1952), Background (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), Life for Ruth (1962) and International Velvet (1978).
IMDB:
A classical stage actor who enjoyed modest film stardom in the late 1940s and 1950s, the good-looking, somewhat unassuming British actor Norman Wooland also worked extensively on radio and television in a career that spanned six decades. Born to British parents in Dusseldorf, Germany on March 16, 1910, he was educated in England and started out in local theatre during his teen years. He went on to earn strong notice in repertory as a regular performer in Stratford-on-Avon Shakespearean productions. Appearing in “The Merchant of Venice” by the age of 16, he graced a number of pre-WWII plays including “When We Are Married” (1937), “Time and the Conways” (1938) and “What They Say” (1939). He joined the BBC in 1939 and spent six years as a radio commentator.
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James Greene was born on May 19, 1931 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is an actor and writer, known for Sherlock Holmes (2009), RocknRolla (2008) and Albert Nobbs (2011).
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Wikipedia entry:
He was born in Rome, the son of actor Cesare Fantoni (1905–1963). In films from the late 1940s, he has worked mainly in his own country but made several appearances in American films in the 1960s, most notably opposite Frank Sinatra in the war film Von Ryan’s Express, made in 1965. In 1960 he played the villainous Haman in Esther and the King, starring Joan Collins and Richard Egan in the title roles. Among his TV roles, he appeared alongside Anglo-Italian actress Cherie Lunghi in the Channel 4 series The Manageress.
Obituary:
Sergio Fantoni – actor, dubbing actor, and director – would have turned 90 in August. He worked with the greatest directors, from Luchino Visconti to Blake Edwards, played in Hollywood, and got his fame from popular TV shows in the 1970s and 1980s like Anna Karenina, The Octopus and La coscienza di Zeno. His latest role was in TV series Il commissario Montalbano, in the episode “The Violin’s Voice.”
Born in Rome on 7 August 1930 from a family of artists, Fantoni first thought to become an engineer or an architect, but his passion for theatre was stronger. He started with some experimental theatre companies and in the 1970s, together with Luca Ronconi and his wife Valentina Fortunato, he founded one of the first independent theatre companies. On the big screen, he worked with directors such as Luchino Visconti (Senso), Francesco Maselli (The Dolphins with Claudia Cardinale), Giuliano Montaldo (Tiro al piccione and Sacco and Vanzetti).
He worked in Hollywood in the early 1960s in film such as Mark Robson’s The Prize, Von Ryan’s Express with Frank Sinatra, and Blake Edward’s What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? He also played in Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect.
His full-frontal nudity in Delitto di Stato, aired on Rai 2 in 1982, caused a scandal.
As a dubbing actor, he was the voice of American stars such as Marlon Brando (Apocalypse Now), Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson, and Ben Kingsley.
After an operation to the larynx in 1997, he dedicated himself to theatre direction. With playwright and director Ivo Chiesa and colleague Bianca Toccafondi in 2022 he won the Lifetime Achievement Award entitled to Ennio Flaiano
Sergio Fantoni died in Rome in 2020 at the age of 89.
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Aoife McMahon was born in 1973 in Clare, Ireland. She is known for her work on Random Passage (2002), Assassin’s Creed III (2012) and Xenoblade Chronicles (2010).
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Sites of Interest
These are some of my favourite film websites. They are a fantastic resource for any film buff.