Brittish Actors
Patricia Driscoll was born in 1927 in Cork. She replaced another Irish actress Bernadette O’Farrell in the popular British television series “The Adventures of Robin Hood” as Maid Marian. Her film debut was in 1955 in “Timeslip”. Ms Driscoll was married to actor Duncan Lamont. Other films include “Charley Moon” and “The Wackiest Ship in the Army”. Patricia Driscoll died in 2020 aged 92.
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Diane Clare was born in 1938 in London. She made her film debut in 1958 in a small part in “Indiscreet”. In the same year she had strong supporting roles in “The Reluctant Debutante” and “Ice Cold in Alex”. Her other films include “The Naked Edge”, “Go to Blazes” and Mrs Gibbon’s Boy’s”.Her final film was “The Hand of Night” in 1968. She died at 74 in 2013.
“Hollywood.com” entry:
Bebe Daniels was born in 1901 in Dallas, Texas. At the age of 10 she starred in the silent film “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. In the 1920’s she was under contract to Paramount Studios. Her talkie pictures included “My Past” in 1931 and “42nd Street” in 1933. In 1935 she moved to London and rebuilt her career there with her husband Ben Lyon with considerable success. They had a very popular BBC radio series “Life With the Lyons” which later made the transition to television. She died in 1971. Ben Lyon was born in 1901 in Atlanta, Georgia. “Flaming Youth” in 1923 bright him to fame. “Hell’s Angels” in 1930 is his most popularly remembered role.
Ben Lyon’s IMDB entry:
Ben Lyon was your average boyish, easy-going, highly appealing film personality of the Depression-era 1930s. Although he never rose above second-tier stardom, he would enjoy enduring success both here and in England. Born Ben Lyon, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, the future singer/actor was the son of a pianist-turned-businessman and youngest of four. Raised in Baltimore, he started performing in amateur productions as a teen before earning marquee value on Broadway opposite such stars as Jeanne Eagels.
Hollywood took notice of the baby-faced charmer and soon Ben was ingratiating filmgoers opposite silent film’s most honored leading ladies. He appeared with Pola Negri in Lily of the Dust (1924), Gloria Swanson in Wages of Virtue (1924), Barbara La Marr in The White Moth (1924), Mary Astor in The Pace That Thrills (1925) and Claudette Colbert, in her only silent feature, in For the Love of Mike (1927). He advanced easily into talkies and was particularly noteworthy as the dashing hero in Howard Hughes‘ Hell’s Angels (1930), in which Ben actually piloted his own plane (Ben had trained as a pilot during WWI) and filmed some of the airborne scenes for Hughes himself. That same year was also a banner year for him in his personal life after marrying Paramount Pictures film star Bebe Daniels, with whom he had appeared in Alias French Gertie (1930).
As both of their movie careers started to decline, the talented twosome decided to work up a husband-and-wife music hall and vaudeville act. They took their show to England and became a hit at the London Palladium. At one point he served in the U.S. Army Air Force and rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel in charge of Special Services for the U.S. Air Corps in England. Soldiers, sailors and airmen (from 1939) listened to Ben and Bebe weekly on the air waves with their popular, long-running BBC broadcast “Hi, Gang!” The couple remained in England throughout WWII performing on stage and doing their valid part to entertain and honor the troops.
After a brief postwar stay in Hollywood in 1946, where Ben had taken an executive position with Fox, the couple returned to England and headlined another popular 1950s radio show, “Life with the Lyons,” which spawned two family-styled films that included children Barbara Lyon and Richard Lyon. In the early 1960s Bebe suffered multiple strokes and left the limelight, passing away in 1971. Ben remarried (to former actressMarian Nixon) and settled in the US, where he died in 1979 of a heart attack while on vacation.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Bebe Daniels’s IMDB entry:
Bebe Daniels already had toured as an actor by the age of four in a stage production of Richard III the US, she had her first leading role at the age of seven and started her film career shortly after this in movies for Imperial, Pathe and others. At 14 she was already a film veteran, and was enlisted by Hal Roach to star as Harold Lloyd‘s leading lady in his “Lonesome Luke” shorts distributed by Pathe. Lloyd fell hard for Bebe and seriously considered marrying her— but her drive to pursue a film career along with her sense of independence clashed with HL’s Victorian definition of a wife. The two eventually broke up but would remain lifelong friends. Bebe was sought out for stardom by Cecil B. DeMille, who literally pestered her into signing with Paramount. Unlike many actors, the arrival of sound posed no problem for her; she had a beautiful singing voice and became a major musical star, with such hits like Rio Rita (1929) and 42nd Street (1933). In 1930 she married Ben Lyon, with whom she went to England in the mid-30s, where she became a successful Westend stage star and with her husband, a famous radio team. Her movie career drifted away after the mid-30s.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Stephan Eichenberg <eichenbe@fak-cbg.tu-muenchen.de>
Diana Churchill was born in 1913 in London. Her first film was in 1932 and was called “Service for Ladies”. She also made “School for Husbands”, “Scott of the Antartic”, “The History of Mr Polly” and “The Winter’s Tale”. She died in Mississipi in 1994. Barry K. Barnes was born in 1906 in London. Some years after the death of her husband Barry K. Barnes she married Melvyn Johns, the father of Glynis Johns. “Dodging the Dole” in 1936 was his first film. Other films include “This Man Is News”, “Bedelia” with Margaret Lockwood in 1946. He died in 1965.
IMDB Entry:
Barry K. Barnes was born on December 27, 1906 in London, England as Nelson Barry Mackintosh Barnes. He was an actor, known for Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1937),This Man Is News (1938) and Law and Disorder (1940). He was married to Diana Churchill. He died on January 12, 1965 in London.
Diana Churchill’s obituary in “The Independent”:
IF EVER there was an actress for all theatrical seasons it was surely Diana Churchill. As brilliant and acerbic in satirical review with Max Adrian or Ian Carmichael (Oranges and Lemons, High Spirits), as she was authoritative in Shakespeare (Gertrude to Alan Badel’s Hamlet, Paulina to Laurence Harvey’s Leontes in The Winter’s Tale) or effervescent in restoration comedy – The Country Wife being, as George Devine put it, the classical revival which in 1956 ‘saved’ the contemporary theatre at the Royal Court Theatre from bankruptcy – she cast a spell on both sides of the footlights for nearly 40 years.
With her large blue eyes, blonde hair, good looks, striking personality and demure charm, she was something of an enchantress from the start, which was at one of those Canterbury Cricket Weeks where the Old Stagers put on light- hearted stuff to while away the evenings, and the 18-year-old Churchill, pretty as a picture, found favour in Coward’s Hay Fever.
Thereafter, though she spent years in fluffy West End comedies and farces before taking her art more seriously, she was never out of work. What made the work so remarkable however, was not only its consistency but its variety.
People may have talked about the Diana Churchill part as if it were definable after her first big hit in the mid-1930s as the uppity young wife in The Dominant Sex, but as time went on and musicals and thrillers and Chekhov and revues came and went it soon became a job to say what the Churchill part was.
What seemed so refreshing about her work was its way of not inciting contempt from her colleagues as might have been expected for such a popular young player. Indeed she was one of the least selfish of her calling and was as much admired for the help she gave to others as for the disciplines she brought to her own performances.
These ranged from hoydens to matrons and heart-broken heroines in scores of forgotten comedies, but what gave her career its unfading quality – until multiple sclerosis struck her down in late middle-age – was her determination to avoid typecasting and her skill at never seeming to be miscast.
Whether as the empty-headed Natasha in The Three Sisters (1951), the eccentric and spectacularly costumed Queen Ant in Under the Sycamore Tree (1952) to Alec Guinness’s Scientist, the dying heroine of Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent, prancing wittily and elegantly about at the London Hippodrome in the revue High Spirits (1953), or remonstrating as Emilia with Harry Andrews’s Othello at Stratford, Diana Churchill never seemed to get a hostile notice.
Was her heart more in revue and restoration comedy than classical tragedy? Well, they tend to go together with many players and she was a supremely accomplished comedienne: the glint of mischief in her bright-blue gaze, the warmth of personality, the bubbling high spirits. Yet she could change her tone to the tragic even from sketch to sketch as anyone will avouch who saw her monologue in the 1948 revue Oranges and Lemons as the despairing school marm. With a smile which, as Harold Hobson once put it, was all the sadder for being so serene.
Then there was her partnership in the Forties and Fifties with her actor-husband, the incredibly handsome Barry K. Barnes (who died in 1965), which until his illness looked as if it might develop into one of those famous partnerships which the British theatre makes so much of.
They took West End revivals of The Admirable Crichton and On Approval on profitable tours; and then there was her stint at the Old Vic in Moliere, Turgenev and Goldsmith, only a season or two after its great era under Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson; and a Gertrude at Stratford which Ivor Brown called ‘original and exciting’. ‘She did not provide us with the familiar picture of a complacent bundle of sensuality: here was a woman who realised what she had done and what was stirring in Hamlet’s mind.’
Who could ever forget either her melting into life again as the statue Paulina at the end of Frank Dunlop’s revival of The Winter’s Tale at the Edinburgh Festival? Such stillness, such beauty, such poise almost rivalled the memory of Diana Wynyard’s great performance 14 years earlier. She partnered Badel again in 1961 in Anouilh’s The Rehearsal; and at Chichester in the 1960s she turned again to Shaw as Lady Utterword in Heartbreak House and as Araminta Dench in The Farmer’s Wife.
You need a longish memory to have appreciated Diana Churchill’s range of theatrical magic, which if not cut off in its prime might have given us great pleasure in more recent years.
Even multiple sclerosis though, could not damped her spirits utterly as her colleagues at Denville Hall, the theatrical retirement home, in Northwood, Middlesex, became well aware in the last years.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.
Exotic Merle Oberon was born in 1911 in Bombay, India. In 1928 she travelled to England and began her film career there in the early 1930’s. She starred as Anne Boylen oppositie Charles Laughton in 1933 in “The Private Life of Henry the Eight”. By 1937 she was in Hollywood where she made “Wuthering Heights”, “These Three” with Joel McCrea, “Lydia” with Joseph Cotten”, “A Song to Remember”, “Berlin Express” and as Empress Josephine in “Desiree” with Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons. She died in 1979 in Malibu, California. Her husband was Dutch actor Robert Wolders
TCM Overview:
The exotic and glamorous Merle Oberon ranked among the most striking performers during the early years of sound cinema in Britain. Beginning with her first notable turn in “The Private Life of Henry VIII” (1933), Oberon’s popularity grew via additional hits like “The Scarlet Pimpernel” (1934), and her Academy Award-nominated performance in “The Dark Angel” (1936) established her as a star in America as well. Well cast as sophisticated, upper-class women, her look and deportment worked nicely in both period costume outings and contemporary drama. However, in what could have been a career-ending disaster, Oberon’s face was damaged in a car accident during the making of “I, Claudius” (1937). Careful lighting and make-up helped to hide the imperfections and it was not long before she appeared in her most famous role as heroine Cathy in “Wuthering Heights” (1939). American films made up the lion’s share of the actress’ schedule during the 1940s, but aside from occasional artistic triumphs like “The Lodger” (1944), they were fairly unremarkable and caused Oberon’s popularity to diminish. Her career proceeded by fits and starts from the late ’40s onward and never entirely recovered, despite laudable work from her in quality productions like “Berlin Express” (1948) and Désirée (1954). Oberon did not have the range of the finest actresses from that period, but she could be very effective in the right part and consistently dazzled the eye as one of Golden Age Hollywood’s great beauties.
Merle Oberon was born Estelle Marie Thompson on Feb. 19, 1911, but the story of her origins ranked among the most convoluted and uncertain for a Golden Age performer of her stature. When Oberon’s star was on the rise, she claimed be a native of Tasmania, who just grew up in India. However, she was actually born in Mumbai to Constance Selby, a Eurasian girl who was only 15 years old at the time, and British engineer Arthur Thompson. Selby’s mother, Charlotte, raised Oberon and pretended to be her birth mother in later years, when in actuality, she was the child’s grandmother. As a result of this deception, facts about Oberon’s childhood were difficult to ascertain, though it was known that those early years were marked by poverty and racial prejudice stemming from her mixed heritage. At some point, Oberon was known under the name Queenie Thompson and began to act on stage as part of a Calcutta drama society. An actor who had a romantic interest in her suggested that she move to France, where he promised to recommend Oberon to director Rex Ingram, who ended up giving the teenager a small part in his film, “The Three Passions” (1929). Oberon – accompanied by her grandmother, whom she passed off as a maid – then travelled to England and was featured in several other movies over the next few years, but her roles were mostly unremarkable and uncredited.
That anonymity finally changed when she caught the eye of producer-director Alexander Korda, who put Oberon under contract with his new company and cast her in his historical biopic “The Private Life of Henry VIII” (1933). In the picture, she played the murderous monarch’s second wife, Ann Boleyn, and while the part was secondary in nature (understandably, given Boleyn’s fate), her unique and highly photogenic beauty left an impression. A comparatively modest venture in terms of its production, “The Private Life of Henry VIII” was nonetheless a very important undertaking in the early days of British sound films and its success prompted Korda to launch a series of similar historical dramas. “The Private Life of Don Juan” (1934) placed Oberon opposite Douglas Fairbanks as an aging version of the famous libertine, while in “The Scarlet Pimpernel” (1934), Oberon displayed fine chemistry with Leslie Howard and made the most of a somewhat limiting role as heroine Lady Blakeney. Their connection extended off-screen and prompted Howard to have an affair with Oberon, cheating on his wife of almost 20 years.
On the basis of these successes, Oberon was invited overseas to make her first American movie, the musical comedy “Folies Bergère” (1935) and her strong performance as the romantic interest of Fredric March and Herbert Marshall in “The Dark Angel” (1936) earned Oberon a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. However, her follow-up project was a far less happy experience. During the shooting of “I, Claudius” (1937), Oberon was involved in a car accident from which she sustained some facial scars. Not enough footage had been shot for the film to be completed, so a decision had to be made about whether to continue. Star Charles Laughton, who felt that he had been unable to do justice to the title character, was reportedly the primary factor in the decision to close the production down and leave it unfinished. Surgeons were unable to correct the damage Oberon sustained, but careful lighting and make-up application sufficiently masked the flaws and she soon returned to the screen in her first Technicolor production, “The Divorce of Lady X” (1938).
Oberon returned to England for her most famous screen assignment as Cathy Earnshaw in William Wyler’s lush adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” (1939) – the most beloved film adaptation of the tragic novel. But while the finished film went over very well with critics and the public, the production was a less than happy experience. Co-star Laurence Olivier’s relationship with the actress on-set was soured by his disappointment over Oberon being chosen for the part instead of his off-screen paramour, Vivien Leigh. The pettiness and pointless bad behavior that ensued from Olivier, fortunately, did not come across in the leads’ performances and they display wonderful romantic chemistry, making “Wuthering Heights” the penultimate romantic tragedy.
Oberon married Korda in 1939 and she soon concentrated her efforts on the American market in solid but somewhat unremarkable features like “‘Til We Meet Again” (1940), “That Uncertain Feeling” (1941), and “Affectionately Yours” (1941). She was one of more than 80 stars to make up the once-in-a-lifetime cast of “Forever and a Day” (1943), a historical drama created to raise money for the British war effort, and Oberon’s distinctive beauty was showcased to excellent effect as an actress menaced by a Jack the Ripper-style killer in “The Lodger” (1944), a stylish and thrilling remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent thriller. Although cameramen had effectively compensated for Oberon’s scars in previous films, cinematographer Lucien Ballard and his expert lighting placement – which included a light actually attached to the camera, later known as an “Obie” – made her face look especially luminous. The pair fell in love during production and married the next year, following Oberon’s divorce from mentor Korda.
However, Oberon’s new relationship coincided with a gradual fading in her popularity, which was not helped by middling fare like the melodramatic Chopin biopic “A Song to Remember” (1945) and the soapy misfire “Night Song” (1947), though the well-realized film noir thriller “Berlin Express” (1948) ranked among the best movies she made in the U.S. Her marriage to Ballard ended in 1949 and Oberon tried to revitalize her career by heading to France for the little seen farce “Pardon My French” (1951). She remained there for the comedy “Dans la vie tout s’arrange” (“In Life Everything Works”) (1952) before heading to England for “Affair in Monte Carlo” (1952) and Spain for the light-hearted fantasy “Todo es posible en Granada” (“Everything is Possible in Granada”) (1954). None of those pictures did much to raise her profile, but Oberon managed a notable return to Hollywood with a moving supporting turn as Empress Josephine in Désirée (1954).
“Deep in My Heart” (1954), Stanley Donen’s colorful MGM musical about the life of composer Sigmund Romberg, cast her as his lovelorn collaborator, Dorothy Donnelly, and Oberon received top billing in the film noir outing “The Price of Fear” (1956), where she played a hit-and-run killer seeking to avoid the law by framing unsuspecting dupe Lex Barker. However, offers again became scarce and she accepted an unusual outing as host of “Assignment Foreign Legion” (CBS, 1956-57), a British dramatic television series featuring guest players like Christopher Lee, Lionel Jeffries, and Anton Diffring. During that time, she wed her third husband, Bruno Pagliai, and the couple had two children. Pagliai was her first mate to not be associated with the motion picture business and it ended up being the actress’ longest-lasting relationship.
In 1960, Oberon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her film work, but she remained away from movie screens until “Of Love and Desire” (1963), a mediocre drama shot in various locations in Mexico, including Oberon’s own extravagant home. Her next credit was something of a surprise to fans. “The Epic That Never Was” (BBC, 1965) covered the making of “I, Claudius” and the factors that caused it to be shut down. Some of the surviving footage was showcased (with the general consensus that Laughton’s interpretation of the role was actually more than sufficient), along with new interviews featuring Oberon, director Josef Von Sternberg and other personnel involved with the picture. She was also part of the all-star cast that checked into “Hotel” (1967), an unexceptional adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s best seller.
After an absence of six years, Oberon had her final film appearance in the drama “Interval” (1973), an American/Mexican co-production that she also produced. The story of an aging, but still lovely woman who falls for a young artist (Robert Wolders), the thoroughly minor, little-seen production turned out to be somewhat prophetic as Oberon proceeded to divorce Pagliai and wed Wolders, then almost 25 years her junior. Oberon settled into retirement thereafter and in 1978, she and Wolders journeyed to Tasmania for what was described as a welcome home reception. However, while attending a function held in her honor, Oberon denied having been born in the country. A year later, she died of a stroke on Nov. 23, 1979. In 1985, Oberon’s nephew, author Michael Korda, published Queenie, a novel based loosely on the actress’ life, which was followed by a like-named ABC miniseries in 1987. With Mia Sara in the title role, and veterans like Kirk Douglas (as a character based on Alexander Korda) and Martin Balsam in support, the production benefitted from location shooting in India, England and Sri Lanka and was generally deemed to be trashy, but sufficiently diverting. It certainly made clear the lengths to which Oberon was forced to hide her biracial ethnicity in order to become a Hollywood movie star.
By John Charles
Megs Jenkins was born in 1917 in Birkenhead near Liverpool. She came to prominence in Britain for her role with Patricia Roc in “Millions Like Us” in 1943. Other films include “Green for Danger”, “The Brothers”, “Tiger Bay”, “The History of Mr Polly”, “Conspiracy of Hearts” and “David Copperfield” in 1970 appropriately as Peggoty, David’s nurse. Megs Jenkins died in 1998.
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:The personification of plump cheer and kindliness, Megs Jenkins had a long career as an actress on stage, film and television and was one of the most popular of British character actresses. Though her versatility extended to tougher roles (she was an effectively vicious mother on stage in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke) and she displayed complex levels of ambiguity in such films as Green for Danger and The Innocents, the round-faced actress will be best remembered for the many warm-hearted dependable housekeepers and cooks she portrayed, and was perfectly cast in this vein as the homely “Plump Woman” in John Mills’s production of H.G. Wells’s The History of Mr Polly.She was born Muguette Mary Jenkins in Birkenhead, Cheshire, in 1917, and studied for the stage at the School of Dancing and Dramatic Art in Liverpool. Her initial ambition was to be a ballet dancer, but in her early teens her figure began to grow plumper and she had to discard her early dream.
“It was sad, really,” she commented 30 years later. “I was this same un-sylphlike shape when I was 17. I had fancied I might call myself my real name, Muguette, once I became a ballerina, but I had to face the fact that I was quite definitely a Megs.”
As Megs Jenkins, she made her stage debut at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1933 playing the German Hausfrau in The Lift That Failed, and was a member of the Liverpool Repertory Company until 1937. She made her London stage debut in the first edition of Late Joys (1937) at the Players Theatre and the following year played Fanny Norman in the play Heaven and Charing Cross at the same theatre.
She entered films with a small role in Herbert Mason’s exciting thriller set on the Orient Express, The Silent Battle (1939), the first of over 50 films in which she was featured. Next year she won acclaim on the London stage with her portrayal of Fan in Emlyn Williams’s The Light of Heart. “A joint creation by author and actress which touches greatness,” wrote the critic W.A. Darlington.
She became a favourite of filmgoers when cast by Launder and Gilliatt in their splendid tribute to wartime factory workers Millions Like Us (1942). She was a member of the nursing profession in The Lamp Still Burns (1943) and in 1945 recreated on screen the role of Shirley the unfortunate maid in the Gordon Harker vehicle 29 Acacia Avenue, a part she had played successfully during the play’s long run on the London stage. The theatre was always her first love, and in 1945 she had another personal triumph in an Emlyn Williams play, portraying the humble mother of a supposed second Messiah in The Wind of Heaven.
Launder and Gilliatt’s excellent thriller Green for Danger (1946) gave her one of her best film roles as an outwardly dedicated nurse who just might have a hidden secret in her past, and she followed this with roles in the grim drama The Brothers (1947) and a chilling B-movie based on W.W. Jacobs and L.N. Parker’s The Monkey’s Paw, in which Jenkins poignantly played a mother desperate to have her dead son restored to her.
John Mills then cast her as the Plump Woman in his own film production The History of Mr Polly (1948). “We took enormous trouble casting the picture,” the actor later wrote, “and all the parts were beautifully played.” As the placid innkeeper with whom the beleaguered Mr Polly eventually finds contentment as handyman and companion, the actress was the epitome of warmth and decency, and the final image, as she sits darning in the garden by the river with Polly ruminating on his happy fate before they go indoors for supper, was very touching.
Jenkins’s own private life was not as cosy as the image she generally presented professionally. A wartime marriage (in 1943) was unsuccessful despite a fairy-tale start. When George Routledge, a commando, was on leave in London he saw Jenkins’s name in a play review, remembered her as a girl he had attended kindergarten with in Cheshire, and looked her up. A few months later they married, but in 1959 Jenkins won a divorce on grounds of desertion. She also lost her only child shortly after its birth. But she declared that she would not allow herself to feel bitter. “The past is finished.” She said, “I like to look forward.”
When her father died in 1956, she asked her mother to move in with her, and together they bought a 23-room hotel in Felixstowe, in Suffolk, but when the business, which she called “my sideline”, began to affect her acting availability, she sold it.
The Fifties were a particularly successful and rewarding decade for the actress. In 1950 she played opposite Alastair Sim in Mr Gillie (Jenkins was Mrs Gillie), and the following year played her villainous role in Summer and Smoke. In N.C. Hunter’s hit Chekhovian drama the starrily cast A Day by the Sea (1953) she was the kindly Scots governess Mr Mathieson trying to help a doctor (Ralph Richardson) overcome alcoholism, and in 1955 she made her Broadway debut in the same role.
Her performance as the Longshoreman’s wife desperately trying not to acknowledge her husband’s incestuous feelings for his niece in the London production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge (1956) was immensely moving and deservedly won the Clarence Derwent Award for the Best Supporting Performance of the year. The following year she was the wife of a murderer (Paul Scofield) in Rodney Ackland’s Dead Secret.
Jenkins’s films during this decade included such box-office hits as No Place for Jennifer (1950), Ivanhoe (1952), Trouble in Store (1953), The Cruel Sea (1953), Indiscreet (1958), in which Jenkins and David Kossoff added to the fun as housekeeper and butler to Ingrid Bergman, and Tiger Bay (1959), which reunited her with John Mills.
She had another fine housekeeper role in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), a masterly version of The Turn of the Screw in which she subtly conveyed the woman’s growing concern about the safety of her employers’ children and the anxieties of their governess. In Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968), she was the quintessence of comfortable cosiness as the housekeeper in the home of Oliver’s grandfather. On stage, she appeared with Ralph Richardson again in a revival of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of the Author (1963), and starred with Michael Hordern in Tom Stoppard’s Enter a Free Man (1968).
In 1966, Jenkins starred in a twice-weekly television series, Weavers Green, about a pair of country vets, and concurrently she found a long- running niche as star of a tea-bag commercial. She also appeared on such series as All Creatures Great and Small and Worzel Gummidge, the mini- series A Woman of Substance (1984), about the work of the Samaritans, and a 1974 adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. In 1980 Jenkins again acted with John Mills, the couple portraying two pensioners in the series Young at Heart.
Jenkins once described herself as “very lucky” to have always been in work, but she had a unique ability to play sincere, kindly and guileless women with total conviction and without sentimentality. “Of course, one can never be sure,” she said some years ago, “but it is possible that I have done better as an all-round straight actress than I would have done had I been equipped to compete in the glamour stakes.”
Muguette Mary Jenkins, actress: born Birkenhead, Cheshire 21 April 1917; married 1943 George Routledge (one child deceased; marriage dissolved 1959); died 5 October 1998.
For “The Independent” obituary of Megs Jenkin’s long career, please also click here:
Joe McFadden was born in 1975 in Glasgow. He appeared in such TV dramas as “Take the High Road” and “Taggert” as a child actor. Films inclide “Beginer’s Luck” in 2001. Best known for his role as PC Joe Mason in “Heartbeat” which he played from 2007 until 2009.
“Daily Record” article:
FOR 26 years, his boyish good looks and doe eyes have made Joe McFadden a TV favourite in shows such as Heartbeat and Cranford.
But the Scot, who will turn 39 in October, has admitted those attributes have been something of a mixed blessing.
And Holby City’s new hunky doc confessed that he’s glad his face has finally caught up with his age.
Joe said: “I’m lucky, I suppose, that I can still look quite young. I don’t moisturise or drink lots of water.
“But, in a way, it’s a curse as well because for years I wasn’t playing my age and was playing people younger.
“Eventually, I’ve caught up with myself.”
He’s laughing and this isn’t a moan. The face has kept him on our telly screens since a role in Taggart in 1988.
After high-profile roles including Scots soap High Road, The Crow Road and film Small Faces, Joe this week joined Holby City as Raffaello “Raf” di Lucca – a highly driven registrar who specialises in cutting-edge resuscitation techniques. Not the kind of role you could give to someone if they looked 12.
Joe is glad but he is still slightly apprehensive about approaching 40.
He said: “I kind of feel like there’s no getting away from it, so I’ve just got to accept it. I’m kind of OK with it.
“Someone said, ‘You should be happy you are the age you are because some people don’t get to that age and some die before they get to 40’, which puts a whole new slant on it.
“I’m quite happy in my life and where I am. I really wouldn’t want to go back 10 years.”
For a start, Joe now has grown-up responsibilities. He has a seven-month-old at home.
That’s a seven-month-old cockapoo puppy, Douglas.
He laughed: “He’s Doug the Dug – although they don’t appreciate that where I live as much as you would in Scotland.”
Doug the Dug is just back from the vet to sort out an ear infection. And, while Joe likes to keep his private life just that, he’s bursting with pride at Douglas. He said: “He’s lovely. Cockapoos are good because they don’t shed and have loads of energy. They are tireless and are always wanting walks, which gets you out of the house.
“But I didn’t realise there were so many around north London, where I live.”
An added bonus of his new job on Holby City is that it’s only half an hour to Elstree, where it’s filmed, from the home he now shares with Douglas.
He said: “If I’m filming all day, he goes to a nursery daycare near Elstree. He loves it because he loves all the other dogs.
Although Joe appeared as Raf on screen for the first time last week, he has been filming since October last year.
He has a year’s contract and is looking forward to the response of viewers but he is hoping none of them asks him for medical help if he’s around when something goes wrong.
Laughing, he said: “I’ll end up killing people.
“I suppose there’s a lot of common sense, although I wouldn’t know what to do with a pregnant woman. After hot water and towels, it would be, ‘Call the midwife’.
He added: “You’re making me want to do a first aid course in case someone sees me in Holby and calls on my services.”
Joe has had experience on the other side of the fence. Sadly, his mum died of cancer six years ago and, dealing with his real grief, he then had to act it, too, as his Heartbeat character PC Joe Mason’s mum also died.
Time heals but it doesn’t make you forget. Being in a hospital hasn’t made him think about his own loss.
He said: “It’s not a real hospital. Nothing feels that real. It’s not real blood and you are usually dealing with a prosthetic person. I don’t have any flashbacks.” He thinks for a moment. “I suppose what is clear is you are meeting people on the worst days of their lives in many occasions and people are so vulnerable.
“My character is supposed to be very sensitive and tries to reassure people.”
And Joe has needed medical assistance himself.
Back in his 20s, while doing a play in Wales, he ended up with a kettle of boiling water going all over his feet.
He said: “Luckily, there was a first-aider there who knew to get my feet into water and get clingfilm on.
“I’ve got no scarring. It’s amazing how it’s healed.”
Working on Holby City has given Joe a new-found respect for the NHS and what they can do.
He said: “I was lucky to get to watch some open-heart surgery and it was just incredible to see this amazing stitching the surgeon was doing.
“He was putting a valve into this person’s heart and I was just thinking, ‘We are so lucky we are alive today that they can do these amazing things’.
“They can stop your heart and put you on bypass and get a machine to breathe for you and something to make the blood pump.
“We should treasure the NHS and hold on to it.”
His character also has to do some surgery and Joe revealed he had been “stitching someone’s bowel this week”.
As well as sitting in on an operation, Joe has been getting pointers on his new screen career as a doctor, watching lots of 24 Hours in A&E, Nurse Jackie and Grey’s Anatomy.
It’s not the first doctor Joe has played. He was Dr Dan Pemberton in Zig Zag Love, alongside Robert Carlyle. And it’s not the first Italian called Raf he’s played, having starred in Raphael: A Mortal God, a drama about painter Raphael Santi.
His latest Raf is a Scots Italian and, while he hasn’t based him on anyone, Joe has taken something of his brother-in-law.
He said: “My sister is married to an Italian guy.
“It’s not based on him but they are quite serious people. They don’t say a lot and what they do is quite considered and well thought out.
“They have a real passion.”
With Joe joining the show, it’s taking on a tartan hue, with John Michie and Michael Thomson already part of the cast.
Although Joe has been working on the show since October, he admitted he had been keen to make his first screen appearance this week.
He said: “You never feel like you’ve actually joined the show until you’ve been on screen.
“I went out with some of the cast on a Christmas night out and I hadn’t realised how popular the show was. People were coming up to the other cast members all the time.”
His last long-term telly job was Heartbeat, which was axed in 2010. Since then, he’s been treading the boards with the National Theatre of Scotland and touring the Alan Ayckbourn play Haunting Julia.
He has a year’s contract for Holby City and is looking forward to being a telly face again.
He said: “I’ve had offers since Heartbeat but there was nothing that I was right for or particularly wanted to do.
“I was getting such great theatre roles, so I did them instead.
“But Holby is great. Every week is different. There’s a new ailment or new medical jargon and medicines to try to get your tongue around.”
I’m going to say it – Holby City really is just what the doctor ordered.
The above “Daily Record” article can also be accessed online here.
Julia McKenzie was born in 1938 in Enfield, Essex. She made her London stage debut in 1966 in “Maggie May” by Lionel Bart. Her film roles include “Hotel du Lac” and “Shirley Valentine”. She recently succeeded Joan Hickson and geraldine McEwan as the new Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s genteel sleuth on television. She is married to actor Jerry Harte.
“MailOnline” article on Julia McKenzie from 2008:
From the olde worlde tea rooms to the chintzy front parlours in Miss Marple’s picturesque village of St Mary Mead, there is talk of little else.
It’s not about the latest body found in the library, nor the grim discovery of a blonde in the bushes, nor even the scandal of the jealous lover who poisoned his rival.
No, this time the gossip is about Miss Marple herself. And, as usual, it’s a mystery only she can solve.
Why has she stepped back even further in time with a retro makeover? Whatever has happened to the slightly dotty Aunt Jane that we had grown to know and love over the last five years?
And whatever would Agatha Christie have to say about it?
Miss Marple would, of course, put down her knitting, purse her lips, peer over her spectacles and answer all these questions with perception and logic to achieve a clear-up rate that would put Scotland Yard’s finest sleuths to shame.
You can almost hear her saying: ‘Well, of course, I’m only an old lady, but it seems to me that one or two important clues have been missed.’
Julia McKenzie laughs as she imagines what the shocked residents of Christie’s fictitious village deep in Middle England would think of her portrayal of Miss Marple.
When ITV1 screens the first of a new big-budget Marple series, beginning on Sunday, she has the unenviable task of following both Geraldine McEwan and the late Joan Hickson in the role.
‘I fully expect a rough ride,’ she admits. ‘There is a special ownership of these iconic figures. People will have formed their own idea of which one was best, and now I come along and they have to get used to a different interpretation.
‘You will either like me or loathe me.’
When Christie wrote her first Miss Marple novel 78 years ago, she envisaged her as tall, delicate and thin, with a pink wrinkled face, twinkling blue eyes and white hair piled high.
She modelled her on her grandmother, of whom she said: ‘She expected the worst of everyone and everything and, with almost frightening accuracy, was usually proved right.’
That was the way Geraldine McEwan played her in the last three series until she decided it was time to hand over to someone else.
Christie took a ten-year break from writing Marple stories, but when she picked up her pen again, depicted her as a small, tweedy, robust, taciturn old maid – which is how Joan Hickson played her between 1984 and 1994.
Now, the mantle has been passed to McKenzie, who admits that picking up Miss Marple’s ever-present knitting and voluminous leather handbag has been ‘beyond daunting and scary.’
She says: ‘I am the seventh actress to take on Miss Marple, and although Joan and Geraldine were the best known, I felt as if everyone was looking to me to be different – even though I’d be crucified if I changed her too much.
‘I took the decision to go for the middle course. I’m wearing lots of tweed suits, my hair has been dyed grey and is tied in a bun with a wave, going back to the Thirties and beyond, and it’s a very traditional look.
‘My Miss Marple can be flirty, and there’s a good sense of humour below the surface. I see her as a shy, reserved woman with an analytical brain and an astute sense of justice.
‘I love that whole era, when people kept their distance from each other and everyone was so polite and genteel.
‘If I lean towards anyone, it is to Joan, whom I regard as the definitive Miss Marple.’
Her debut as Miss Marple will be in the thriller A Pocket Full Of Rye, in which businessman Rex Fortescue (Ken Cranham) dies after his breakfast is poisoned.
Miss Marple is called in, but not before Rex’s widow Adele (Anna Madeley) is also poisoned and the housemaid Gladys is found strangled with a peg on her nose.
Christie’s spinster sleuth heads off a clash with the investigating officer, Inspector Neele, played by Matthew Macfadyen, with flattery, comparing him to a great screen lover of the time.
‘You remind me of a young Errol Flynn,’ she tells him archly.
Between murders, there are two steamy sex scenes. Julia admits that she was surprised at how much sex there is in the story. ‘I thought they’d slipped another script into it,’ she says, with a twinkle in her large blue eyes as she smiles.
‘My reaction? I said: “What?! What is this?!” I was more than surprised! I suppose as long as it doesn’t involve Marple, it’s all right. I only hope it won’t upset true Christie fans, because she would never have written anything like that.
‘I like her relationships with the detectives. She does what she feels she has to do to get information and to make sure that information is passed on. This guy, Inspector Neele, she probably thinks is a bit of all right, so she flirts with him.
Miss Marple enjoys the fact that she is able to put the clues together. But she knows she can’t do anything without the police.
‘I don’t think there were any women police at that time. So she’s got to wrap that up some way, the male ego. That’s what’s interesting and different.’
A veteran star of TV sitcoms – Fresh Fields and French Fields – and of the West End musical stage, she had begun to feel the demands of theatre too tiring.
‘I was doing eight shows a week, then collapsing into bed for the whole of Sunday in order to get ready for the Monday. It was no life, even though I loved it.’
She was already toying with the idea of giving up her musical career when she landed the Miss Marple role. She and her husband, actor/director Jerry Harte, were on holiday in New Zealand when the phone rang to tell her she had landed the part.
‘My agent said: “You are the next Miss Marple.” My legs went hollow and all I could do was to repeat what he said. I had to hand the phone to Jerry.
‘I had ten days to read myself into the role, meet producers, costume designers and a make-up team. I wanted to make most of the decisions, so that as much of my own personality as possible was in the part.
‘I felt she should be dressed the same as when she was in school. Like she had a blazer and skirt. I wanted this in tweed. I’ve only got two or three suits, but quite a lot of blouses. I quite like that look.’
At the costumier’s, she tried on Dame Peggy Ashcroft’s jacket from The Jewel In The Crown, and felt it was perfect for Miss Marple. So she ordered several copies in light tweeds.
Her hair colour was changed to blue-grey and part of it was dressed up with a wig.
She then chose a dark blue brimless hat which she felt Miss Marple would wear.
‘I like that hat but the producers don’t,’ she says. Although she wears it in A Pocket Full Of Rye, she lost the battle on that and is given different headwear – a severe brimmed hat – in later productions.
Swept up in the excitement of a new challenge, she discussed her future with Jerry – they have no children – and decided to give up her musical career. ‘It is time to move on,’ she says. ‘I am 68 and I don’t want the stress of eight shows a week.’
Even so, each Miss Marple episode takes five weeks of 12-hour days to film. Then there is the public interest that a major TV role brings.
‘It will seem strange not being able to go anywhere without being recognised. Someone once stopped me and said: “We did enjoy you on the telly – they made you up to look like a right old hag, didn’t they?”
I said: “No – that was me.” I’ve never been booked for my looks. But the ageing process is hard. I practically need psychiatric help to get my picture taken.’
The first day of filming was an ordeal. ‘I was feeling unsure. When it was my turn in front of the cameras, I was very nervous.’
Producer Karen Thrussell says in spite of Julia’s modest self-doubt, she has given Miss Marple her own distinctive edge.
‘Joan Hickson was very schoolteacherly. Geraldine was more fun and eccentric. She liked to dance around the edge of every story, but Julia’s much more traditional Miss Marple is right there in the centre. I think Agatha Christie would have approved because she is so close to the way she envisaged her character.’
Did Julia imagine she could make a good sleuth?
‘I’d be useless – I lose my glasses all the time. You wouldn’t catch Miss Marple being so disorganised. I can be a bit nosey. I like a bit of gossip.’
Julia has one big fan. David Suchet, the well-loved detective Hercule Poirot, said he couldn’t think of anybody he would like more than Julia McKenzie to play Miss Marple.
Julia is thrilled. Everything is falling into place for her, like the denouement in Miss Marple’s story.
‘I’m having the most marvellous Indian summer,’ she says.
The above “MailOnline” article can be accessed online here.
John Howard Davies is best known for his performance in the title role of David Lean’s “Oliver Twist” in 1948. He went on to make “The Rocking Horse Winner”, “The Magic Box” and “Ton Brown’s Schoolday’s” before retiring as a child actor. He returned to the entertainment industry as an adult as an award winning producer of British television series such as “The Good Life”, “Fawlty Towers” and “Mr Bean”. He died in 2011.
Matthew Sweet’s “Guardian” obituary of John Howard Davies:
Please, sir – I want some more.” Rationing was still in force when, under the eye of David Lean’s camera, a thin, pale eight-year-old boy named John Howard Davies raised his gruel bowl and dared to request a second serving. That image of Davies in Oliver Twist (1948) spoke to the mood of the moment – suggesting the sort of deprivation that postwar Britain was attempting to legislate out of existence. One scene called for Davies, who has died of cancer aged 72, and his fellow child actors to look on enviously as the bigwigs of the workhouse devoured a great pile of pastries, hams and chicken. The astonished expressions are genuine. None of these boys had ever seen food like it.
The film’s production company, Cineguild, had launched a national campaign to secure a talented unknown for the title role. (Cinemagoers were invited to submit the names of boys of their acquaintance who possessed “a natural flair for acting”.) In the event, the producer, Ronald Neame, found the successful candidate closer to home. Davies was the son of a childhood friend. Neame and Lean did not burden their young star with much dialogue, preferring to capture the haunted eloquence of his features. Sometimes Lean would let the camera roll and whisper a mournful story to produce the tears or anxious looks that he required.
JHD – as his friends knew him – would confess in later years that he thought himself insufficiently gifted to be a character actor, and insufficiently good-looking to be a star. Briefly, however, this is exactly what he was. He gave his best performance as the tormented hero of The Rocking Horse Winner (1949), punched above his weight in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1951), and made a cameo appearance alongside Robert Donat in The Magic Box (1951) – but by the time the Festival of Britain had marked the nation’s emergence from postwar austerity, his acting career was over and he was sitting in a classroom at Haileybury school, Hertford. More than a decade later, however, Davies would receive a spectacular second helping – in the form of a new career as a producer, director and commissioner of epoch-making television comedy.
Davies was born in Paddington, west London, the son of Jack Davies, a film critic and prolific screenwriter at Gainsborough and Elstree studios, and the novelist Dorothy Davies. After national service in the Royal Navy, he pursued a variety of short-lived careers from clerk to salesman. He even made a brief return to acting, in the ITC series The Adventures of William Tell (1958) and in an Australian production of The Sound of Music, on which he met his first wife, Leonie.
In 1966 he joined the BBC as a production assistant and was promoted to the producer’s chair two years later. His credit appeared on episodes of the ecclesiastical sitcom All Gas and Gaiters, the legal satire Misleading Cases, Spike Milligan’s The World of Beachcomber and As Good Cooks Go, an ill-fated vehicle for the comedian Tessie O’Shea.
But it was his trust in a coalition of young performers and their idea for a stream-of-consciousness sketch show with the provisional title of Bun, Whackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot that inaugurated his golden period and allowed Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-74) to take wing over the BBC2 schedules. He produced and directed the first four episodes and defended the programme from its detractors within the BBC – though not all of its stars took to him. Graham Chapman recalled Davies as “not a very human person … if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster”.
This instinct for discipline, however, gave Davies common ground with John Cleese, who, once he had left Python, sent his former producer a script he had co-written with his wife, Connie Booth. Davies read the first draft of Fawlty Towers (1975, 1979) in bed, and laughed so much that he fell out.
His creative influence over the series was considerable. He chose the hotel used in the exterior shots (for its smell of rancid beer and convenient location halfway between TV Centre and his home). He cast Prunella Scales as Sybil Fawlty (and claimed that her character was an amalgam of his first two wives). It was his idea that the letters on the hotel’s sign should be in a permanent state of flux – sometimes reading “flowery twats”, sometimes “farty towels”. His natural taste was for the comedy of violence and schadenfreude, and he took pride in having devised the moment in which Cleese gives Andrew Sachs’s Manuel a sharp blow to the forehead with a dessert spoon.
Less cruel humour also thrived under his guidance. Davies produced the entire run of The Good Life (1975-78), the 1972 series of Steptoe and Son, Frankie Howerd’s Whoops Baghdad (1973) and the first two series of The Goodies (1970-72), a role that obliged him to balance the cost of elaborate visual effects against the size of the laugh they were likely to yield. In 1972 an episode emerged from the typewriter of Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie that asked for a giant kitten to demolish the Post Office Tower before being sedated by the principals, dressed as mice, riding a three-wheeled cycle borne aloft by hot air balloons. Davies said yes. Kitten Kong won the Silver Rose of Montreux.
Promoted to BBC head of comedy in 1978, and then head of light entertainment in 1982, Davies was involved in the production or commissioning of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), Yes, Minister (1980-84), Only Fools and Horses (1981-96) and Not the Nine O’Clock News (1979-82). There were also forays into commercial television. In 1973 he was briefly managing director of EMI Productions, and in 1985 moved to Thames where he launched Mr Bean (1990-95), oversaw the television transfer of Simon Brett’s genteel radio sitcom After Henry (1988-92), and became a hate figure for Benny Hill fans when he was credited with terminating the comedian’s television career. His direction of the 1996 Easter special of The Vicar of Dibley proved to be his lap of honour for the BBC.
In later years, as sitcoms waned, he was often asked for the secret of how to formulate a successful series. “All the best sitcom characters,” he said, “are relentlessly horrible.”
He is survived by his third wife, Linda, two children and two stepchildren.
• John Howard Davies, actor, director, producer and television executive, born 9 March 1939; died 22 August 2011The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
