Lloyd’s Of London, poster, (aka LLOYDS OF LONDON), Freddie Bartholomew, Tyrone Power, Madeleine Carroll, 1936. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Freddie Bartholomew was one of the most popular child stars in U.S. films of the 1930’s. He was born in 1924 in Lodon. He was raised in England and made two films there before going to Hollywood in 1934, He played the young David in the wonderful 1934 “David Copperfield” which was directed by George Cukor. His other films included “Anna Karenina” with Greta Garbo, “Little Lord Fauntleroy” with Mickey Rooney and “Captains Courageous” with Spencer Tracy. He served in the Airforce during World War Two and did not pursue a film career but became an asvertising executive in New York. He died at the age of 67 in Floria in 1992.
TCM Overview:
Curly-haired Hollywood child star whose earnest presence, refined British diction and angelic looks established him as a boxoffice favorite in the 1930s and 40s. After a few minor roles in British films, the ten-year-old was signed by MGM to star as Dickens’s hero in David O. Selznick’s production of “David Copperfield” (1935). He went on to play Greta Garbo’s son in “Anna Karenina” (1935) and followed up with his two most popular roles: as the American boy who learns he is the heir to a dukedom in “Little Lord Fauntleroy” (1936) and as a pampered rich brat who is rescued and educated by rough fishermen in Rudyard Kipling’s adventure yarn, “Captains Courageous” (1937).
With a salary eclipsed only by that of child superstar Shirley Temple, Bartholomew was earning $2,500 a week by the late 30s, though his career began to wane after numerous court battles between his guardian-aunt and his parents over his earnings. After service in WWII he made a stab at a career in vaudeville and nightclubs before turning to TV, where he hosted a daytime program in the 1950s and then became associate director of a New York TV station. In the mid-1950s he again switched careers, this time joining New York’s Benton and Bowles agency as an advertising executive.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Michael Sheen was born in 1969 in Newport, Wales. He gave a brilliant performance as Tony Blair opposite Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth in “The Queen”. He has also starred in a repeat of his Broadway performance as David Forst in “Frost/Nixon” with Frank Langella as Richard Nixon.
TCM Overview:
1999) unleashed one of the U.K.’s best kept secrets on international audiences. The West End continued to be his anchor, with acclaimed roles in “Look Back in Anger” and “Caligula,” but Sheen grew increasingly more familiar to filmg rs with supporting roles in the gothic horror film series “Underworld” (2003) and the romantic comedy “Laws of Attraction” (2004). His collaborations with writer Peter Morgan were among his best-known, including his memorable portrayal of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Morgan’s “The Queen” (2006), and as political interviewer David Frost in “Frost/Nixon.” The resounding success of the latter Morgan work led to a run on Broadway and a Hollywood film adaptation by Ron Howard (2008), both of which co-starred Sheen and Frank Langella. From there his career skyrocketed, as he starred in “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans” (2009), “Twilight: New Moon” (2009) and “Alice in Wonderland” (2010). For the third time in his career, he played Tony Blair, this time in “The Special Relationship” (HBO, 2010), before co-starring with Jeff Bridges in “Tron: Legacy” (2010) and opposite Rachel McAdams in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (2011). Whether he was appearing in historical dramas, big budget fantasies or small indies, Michael Sheen was an intense and passionate performer who was one of the few Welsh exports to make it big in America.
Sheen was born Feb. 5, 1969, and grew up a middle-class boy in the working class town of Port Talbot, Wales. Although his parents worked in personnel, they shared with their two children a deep appreciation for acting, with his father enjoying some success later in life as a Jack Nicholson impersonator. As a young man, Sheen turned down the opportunity to pursue a possible professional football career, opting to follow in the footsteps of fellow Port Talbot natives Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins by attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. During his second year, he won the coveted Laurence Olivier Bursary for consistently outstanding performances. While Sheen was still studying, he landed a pivotal role opposite stage legend Vanessa Redgrave in Martin Sherman’s “When She Danced” (1991). In 1993, Sheen joined the theater troupe Cheek By Jowl and was critically acclaimed for his performance in “Don’t Fool with Love.” That same year, he played opposite Ian Holm onstage in Harold Pinter’s “Moonlight” and excelled in his role as a mentally unstable man who becomes enmeshed in a kidnapping plot in “Gallowglass,” a three-part BBC serial.
In Yukio Ninagawa’s 1994 international tour of “Peer Gynt,” a critic from The London Times panned the multimedia production, but singled out Sheen for his ability to express “astonishing vitality despite lifeless direction.” The actor nabbed his first feature film role in 1994, playing Dr. Jekyll’s footman in “Mary Reilly” opposite John Malkovich and Julia Roberts. The film did not make it into theaters until 1996, a year after Sheen’s second movie, “Othello” (1995), starring Kenneth Branagh, was filmed and released. Sheen appeared onstage twice in 1995, opposite Kate Beckinsale in a staging of “The Seagull” and as star and director of “The Dresser.” In the first of his major big screen roles, he was memorable as Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde’s erstwhile lover, in the 1997 biopic “Wilde.” Sheen also managed to set critics’ tongues wagging with a deft stage performance in the role of “Henry V;” not a part traditionally given to a slight, boyish-looking actor. One writer raved “Sheen, volatile and responsive in an excellent performance, showed us the exhilaration of power and conquest.”
Sheen next tackled one of history’s more colorful artists, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in the West End production of “Amadeus” and followed the production’s success to Broadway the following year. His reputation soared, with the addition of his role as Jimmy Porter in a London revival of “Look Back in Anger.” For his performance, Susannah Clapp of The Observer hailed his “luminous quality” and ability to be goaded, fiery and defensive all at the same time. Hot off the success of “Amadeus,” Sheen began racking up more film credits, including in the British road film “Heartlands” (2002) opposite Mark Addy and in the 19th century military drama “The Four Feathers” (2002), starring Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley and Kate Hudson. Sheen enjoyed a supporting role in Stephen Fry’s directorial debut, “Bright Young Things” (2003), and from that satirical British production, landed a major role opposite Beckinsale again in the gothic horror actioner, “Underworld” (2003). His film career barreled ahead in 2003 with a supporting role in Richard Donner’s tanker “Timeline” (2003) and an impressive portrayal of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in director Stephen Frears’ telepic, “The Deal” (2003).
Next, he grabbed positive notices for playing a divorce-embattled rock star, stealing scenes from Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore, in the romantic comedy “Laws of Attraction” (2004). Back on the London stage, Sheen earned raves for his performance in “Caligula,” winning the Evening Standard Award and Critics Circle Award for Best Actor, along with a nomination for the prestigious Olivier Award. More critical recognition was forthcoming for Sheen’s supporting role in “The Queen” (2006) where his tested and true take on Tony Blair practically guaranteed a BAFTA supporting actor nomination. Sheen reprised his “Underworld” role in the sequel “Underworld: Evolution” (2006) before essaying Roman emperor Nero in the BBC miniseries “Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire” (2006). He followed up with another heady TV offering, “H.G. Wells: War With the World” (2006), in which he starred as the iconic science fiction author. Sheen set the West End buzzing again in the summer of 2006 in Peter Morgan’s “Frost/Nixon,” based on a series of televised interviews that British television presenter David Frost conducted with impeached American president Richard Nixon in 1976. Sheen played Frost and fellow stage vet Frank Langella essayed Nixon. The pair’s glowing reviews led to a six-month run on Broadway, as well as a nomination for Distinguished Performance from the Drama League Awards for Sheen.
Sheen appeared onscreen twice during his stage runs: in a supporting role in the acclaimed drama “Blood Diamonds” (2006) and a co-starring role as a wheelchair-bound genius in the solid indie character study “The Music Within” (2006). In 2008, he and Langella re-teamed to reprise their stunning portrayals in Ron Howard’s screen adaptation of “Frost/Nixon,” which overwhelmingly impressed film critics. The following year, Sheen starred in the “Underworld” prequel, “Rise of the Lycans,” and headed up the cast of the fact-based British football drama, “The Damned United” (2009), appearing in the role of Leeds team manager, Brian Clough. He received the vast majority of attention that year, however, for his portrayal of the vampire Aro in the second installment of the “Twilight” film series, “New Moon” (2009). Many Twi-hard teens obsessed with the film and novels were discovering Sheen’s brilliance for the first time, so with this extremely lucrative film – it made over $200 million in a matter of days – he reached an audience he might not have otherwise. Sheen also joined the cast of Tim Burton’s fantastical “Alice in Wonderland” (2010) in the role of the Cheshire Cat, alongside Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter. Meanwhile, Sheen maintained his lock on playing Tony Blair with “The Special Relationship” (HBO, 2010), a look at the British prime minister’s intimate relationship with President Bill Clinton (Randy Quaid), for which he was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. After reprising Aro for “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1” (2011), he was a boorish pseudo-intellectual friend who is friends with the fiancé (Rachel McAdams) of a successful, but dissatisfied Hollywood screenwriter (Owen Wilson) in Woody Allen’s successful surrealist romantic comedy “Midnight in Paris” (2011). During the production, Sheen began an off-camera romance with McAdams in July 2010.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Fenella Fielding obituary in “The Guardian” in 2018.
There was always something exotic and possibly louche about Fenella Fielding. You never felt that she had skimped on mascara, eyeshadow or lipstick, or that her hair was necessarily all her own in its chaotic and often strangely unkempt manifestation. At the same time, she might appear in public, and occasionally on television, on a chat show, or the popular word game Call My Bluff, dressed in clothes of a distinctly severe line, with white collars back and front, clasped with big jewellery, which gave her the appearance of an unlikely modern nun on the run. No one ever had such a laughing drawl, or haughtier, naughtier intonations.
And then she would be spied scuttling around the stacks in the LondonLibrary, researching and reading, writing up her diary; as an intellectual, she was no slouch. She was as clever as she was funny, the emphatic articulation a sign of both the musical value she attached to words and the precise weight and emphasis of their meaning. A lot of gurgling and swooping went on, but years at the coal face of cabaret and intimate revue ensured that Fielding’s timing was never out, her meaning never insecure, her indecision always final.
Her defining performance was that of Lady Parvula de Panzoust, an outrageous, high-fashion maneater, in Sandy Wilson’s Valmouth (1958), a brilliant musical version of Ronald Firbank’s orchidaceous 1919 novelette. When the piece was revived by the director John Dexter at the Chichester festival theatre in 1982, Fielding returned to the role, as did her fellow original cast members, Bertice Reading and Doris Hare, to theirs.
By then, Fielding’s stage career was virtually over. Her utterly distinctive performance persona was both her chief calling card and her greatest handicap. The world of entertainment treasured a talent it found increasingly hard to accommodate.
In 1979, she opened the restored Lyric Hammersmith’s studio space with a solo show (with piano trio) that included poems by WH Auden, Fran Landesman and AP Herbert, as well as Broadway songs and an erotic sketch during which you heard her orgasmic moanings offstage before she marched on smartly to shoot the lover boy dead. With her flounced auburn locks arrayed in startling bunches on either side of her face, and dressed in a chic rust trouser suit, she resembled a whacked-out Theda Bara with just enough juice to last the evening. She was gloriously funny and uncompromising.
Later in her career, certainly as Madame Arcati, the eccentric medium, in Noël Coward’sBlithe Spirit at the Salisbury Playhouse in 1999, her magnificent weirdness was scuppered by a weakened technical assurance; nor could you imagine such a creature pedalling herself home for seven miles on a bicycle. Fielding’s Arcati would only have contemplated a sedan chair fitted out with an abundance of cushions and custards, borne by two well-built local lads with a penchant for show tunes.
Fenella grew up in a mansion flat in Clapton, east London, with her parents, Philip and Tilly Feldman (both Jewish, he an immigrant Lithuanian, she originally Romanian), an elder brother, Basil (later Lord Feldman, a Tory peer), and a “sort of nanny person” who took Fenella to dance classes on the Holloway Road. Philip was a cinema manager and boss of a ladies underwear factory, a prominent freemason and, according to his daughter, abusively violent towards her.
The family moved to Edgware in 1940 when Fenella was 13 and a pupil at the North London collegiate school. She won a scholarship to Rada, but left after one year, pressured by her parents to “get a proper job”. She took a secretarial course while studying at Saint Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins) and worked for the actors’ agent Al Parker, and in a beautician’s parlour.
But she was determined to go on the stage. After a grounding in concert halls and club theatres around London, she left home, took a flat in Clarges Street, Mayfair, which she shared with a prostitute, and started making cameo appearances on the night club scene of the 1950s: at Churchill’s in Bond Street, the Don Juan in Brook Street and in the Washington Mayfair hotel.
She was talent-spotted while appearing at the London School of Economics in a revue written by Ron Moody, and this led to her first West End professional engagement, in a 1954 revue, Cockles and Champagne, at the Saville. So she was a comparatively late starter, but she made up for lost time as an exotic vamp, Luba Tradjejka, in Jubilee Girl (1956) at the Victoria Palace.
She was acquiring a following, and the producer Michael Codron cast her first in Valmouth and then in a revue, Pieces of Eight (1959), at the Apollo co-starring Williams – with whom she soon fell out, noting that he wanted her to be good, but not too good – which featured sketches written by Peter Cookand Harold Pinter.
Her earliest films included Doctor in Distress (1963), with Bogarde at his smoothest and sprightliest as Simon Sparrow, and Ken Hughes’s Drop Dead Darling (1966) in which, as a wealthy object of Tony Curtis’s attentions, she was treated to a ride out in the country, where she jumped over a hedge Curtis had artfully placed on the edge of a cliff.
Fielding played Valeria the vampire in Carry on Screaming (1966), a very funny spoof of the Hammer horror films, in which she curled up on a sofa and exhaled the line, “Do you mind if I smoke?” after which vapour billowed out from beneath her body; the phrase served as the title of her chatty 2017 autobiography, written with Simon McKay.
She could be perfect in Feydeau farces, and was just that in Sardou’s Let’s Get a Divorce at the Mermaid in 1966 and as the aptly named Lady Eager in another Mermaid classic, Lock Up Your Daughters (1969), an updated musical version by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, with music by Laurie Johnson, of both Henry Fielding’s Rape Upon Rape and Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, with Christopher Plummer as Lord Foppington leading a cast including Georgia Brown, Glynis Johns and Roy Kinnear.
The Chichester festival theatre was another regular haunt; she was Mrs Sullen in The Beaux’ Stratagem there in 1967, and an imperious duchess in Look After Lulu, adapted by Coward from Feydeau, in 1978. Even Ibsen held no fear for her, and there were glowing reports of her Hedda Gabler in Leicester in 1969 and her Nora in A Doll’s House at the Gardner Centre in Brighton in 1970.
She moved in 1966 into a top-floor flat in Connaught Mews, near Marble Arch, which cost her just £13 a week. She had a knack for landing on her feet in her personal life that perhaps evaded her professionally later on. She did not marry, but said that for 20 years she kept two lovers on the go, one of them married, without either knowing of the other’s existence, as befits a Feydeau specialist.
In her memoir she described the men who had behaved badly in the workplace: Tony Hancock was “drunk”, Warren Mitchell simply “horrible” and Norman Wisdom (with whom she filmed Follow a Star in 1959) prone to on-set lechery: “His hand up your skirt first thing in the morning was not a lovely way to start a day’s filming,” she said.
Critics loved her and hated most of the things she was in. When she played Kaa the rock snake in The Jungle Book at the Adelphi in 1984, she wrapped herself around a pole in a manner that reminded Michael Billington of Hermione Gingold in a Medea parody clinging to a phallic pillar with a cry of “This is my personal column!”, while another scribe said of her Lady Fidget in a vile production of The Country Wife at the Mermaid in 1990 that she “pouts like a tulip in a field of potatoes”.
Fielding continued working past her 90th birthday, making radio programmes, recording poetry and voiceovers and rarely going anywhere without her spider-like eyelashes, eyelashes Dusty Springfield once acknowledged as the model for her own. She was not immune to the appeal of drink, drugs and psychotherapy, but survived all these brushes to come out fighting, and as huskily cheerful and optimistic as ever. She was appointed OBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in June.
She is survived by her brother.
• Fenella Marion Fielding (Feldman), actor, born 17 November 1927; died 11 September 2018
Estelle Winwood was born in 1883 in Kent and died in Los Angeles in 1984 at the age of 101. She was still acting at 96, some record. She had made her movie debut in the British “House of Trent” in 1933. In 1937 she was in Hollywood making “Quality Street” with Katharine Hepburn but did not make another film until “The Glass Slipper” in 1955. She then began a busy career as a character actress. Among her films are “The Swan”, “This Happy Ending”, “Alice and Kicking”, “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” and “Murder by Death” where she was hilarious as the wheelchaird bound nurse of Elsa Lanchester.
IMDB entry:
When Estelle saw the girl on a white horse at the circus, she then decided that she wanted to be an actress. And she was from the age of 5, to the disapproval of her father. Her mother had her train with the Liverpool Repertory Company, and Estelle performed in many plays and many roles in the West End. In 1916, she made her debut on Broadway and worked with a number of acclaimed stage actors. Estelle spent the rest of the ‘teens and ’20s working in plays on both sides of the Atlantic. Being an actor in the theater, Estelle was not about to be one of those who acted in flicks and held out for a very long time. In fact, besides a small role in a few English films in the early 1930s, her real debut was Quality Street (1937), a picture that she undertook when she was in her 50s. Anyway, that was enough as it would be almost two decades before she would return to the big screen. She appeared on the stage in the plays “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” “Ten Little Indians,” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.” But, in 1955, Estelle did return to the movies as Leslie Caron‘s “fairy godmother” in The Glass Slipper (1955). Estelle would spend the next 10 years appearing in films, often cast as eccentric, frail old ladies, some of whom could be deadly. Not to be left out, Estelle also would work on Television, doing guest spots in a number of shows. At 84, Estelle played a woman who was enamored by crooked Zero Mostel in the comedy The Producers (1967). Her last film would be the detective spoof Murder by Death (1976). When Estelle was asked, on the occasion of her 100th birthday, how she felt to have lived so long, she replied, “How rude of you to remind me!”.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tony Fontana <tony.fontana@spacebbs.com>
The bove IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Article on Estelle Winwood on “Tina Aumont’sEyes” website:
A wonderful stage actress and later character performer who specialized in dotty busybodies, Estelle Winwood’s first love was the stage, where she would spend the first twenty years of her career before gaining her first movie appearance.
Born in Kent, England, on January 24th 1883, Estelle was acting in London’s West End before moving to New York in 1916 where she made her Broadway debut. The next two decades were spent commuting between London and New York where Estelle excelled in theatre, appearing in many popular productions including ‘Moliere’ (1919), ‘The Tyranny of Love’ (1921), ‘ The Taming of the Shrew’ (1925), ‘Fallen Angels’ (1927), and ‘The Admirable Crighton’ (1931).
After a handful of minor roles, Winwood’s first part of note was in the George Stevens romancer ‘Quality Street’ (’37) starring Katherine Hepburn and Franchot Tone. Estelle was very good as a suspicious neighbour and helped liven up this rather dull production. After a few television roles (which included playing the medium Madame Arcati in a 1946 version of ‘Blithe Spirit’) Winwood’s next movie would not be until 1955, when she played Leslie Caron’s Fairy Godmother in the Cinderella story ‘The Glass Slipper’. The following year she was a jovial barmaid in the terrific suspenser ‘23 Paces to Baker Street’ (’56), and then had a wonderfully eccentric role as Grace Kelly’s great-aunt Symphorosa in Charles Vidor’s lush romantic comedy ‘The Swan’ (’56).
One of Winwood’s most memorable roles came a couple of years later when she played Curd Jürgens’ alcoholic housekeeper in the charming Blake Edwards romp ‘This Happy Feeling’ (’58), which also starred Debbie Reynolds and a young John Saxon. Estelle was great fun and stole the show as a cocktail loving lush. Estelle was then a sort of Disney villain in the early Sean Connery adventure ‘Darby O’Gill and the Little People’ (‘59), playing the interfering mother to Kieron Moore’s local bully. Her best role at this time though was in the enjoyable retirement-home comedy ‘Alive and Kicking’ (’59), playing a bored resident seeking adventure in old-age, alongside the excellent Kathleen Harrison and Sybil Thorndike.
Winwood’s next movie role was in the bar scene in John Huston’s ‘The Misfits’ (’61), playing a kindly old lady collecting money for the church. After playing Kim Novak’s neighbour in the Jack Lemmon caper ‘The Notorious Landlady’, Winwood had a fun part as a witch in Bert I. Gordon’s enjoyable spoof ‘The Magic Sword’ (both ’62). Back among the A-list, Estelle was then Bette Davis’s aunt in the exciting evil-twin thriller ‘Dead Ringer’ (’64), directed by Davis’ ‘Now, Voyager’ co-star Paul Henreid.
After guest spots on ‘Perry Mason’ and ‘Bewitched’, Estelle found 1967 to be a very diverse year. First she was Vanessa Redgrave’s lady-in-waiting in Joshua Logan’s overlong but lavish musical ‘Camelot’, and then a neighbour with a missing cat, in Curtis Harrington’s watchable thriller ‘Games’. Finally she was memorable in Mel Brooks’ cult comedy ‘The Producers’, playing an amorous old lady backing Zero Mostel’s certain-to-flop musical. After more television work Winwood’s final movie was the very funny spoof ‘Murder by Death’ (’76), playing the aged nurse to Elsa Lanchester’s Miss Marbles. She was a joy to watch and once again stole the show from a fantastic cast that included Oscar winners Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith and David Niven. Estelle’s final screen appearance was in a 1980 episode of ‘Quincy’ which, at 96 years of age, made her the oldest actor working in America.
Married four times, Estelle Winwood died in her sleep in California, on June 20th 1984, aged 101. In an acting career of over 80 years, she was the oldest member of the Screen Actors Guild at the time of her death. A wonderful scene-stealer and vastly talented actress, the shrewd Estelle Winwood was a perfectionist who didn’t suffer fools and always called the shots on her career path. And what a diverse career it was!
Favourite Movie: 23 Paces to Baker Street Favourite Performance: Alive and Kicking
The above article can also be accessed online here.
Fiona Shaw is one of Ireland’s greatest actresses who has a leading reputation on the British stage. She was born in Cork in 1958. She trained at RADA in London. Her films include “My Left Foot” in 1989, “Mountains of the Moon”, “Jane Eyre”, “Persuasion” and in the U.S. in “The Black Dahlia” and of course Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter movies.
TCM Overview:
inroads onscreen as well since the late 1980s. Intense and fiercely intellectual off-stage and on, this statuesque brunette with a great aquiline profile graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1982 and promptly made her debut in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”. Since then, she has turned in one powerful–sometimes controversial–stage performance after another, including Celia in “As You Like It” (1985), Erika in “Mephisto” (1986), a near-psychotic Katherine in “The Taming of the Shrew” (1987-1988) and “Mary Stuart” (1988 and 1996), earning a reputation as a superb classical actress/daredevil. Shaw’s most hotly-debated role was as “Richard II”, which she played in 1995 and which marked her sixth collaboration (since 1988) with her longtime friend, director Deborah Warner. The two made their NYC debut in 1996 with a hit staging of “The Waste Land”, T. S. Eliot’s 433-line poem about death and resurrection. Critics praised Shaw for her brilliant performance in the tour de force which had the actress standing alone on a bare stage, conjuring up a bleak gallery of characters lost in a realm of spiritual blight.
Shaw’s best-known film role to date was as the sympathetic therapist with whom the cerebral palsy-afflicted Christy Brown (Daniel Day-Lewis) falls unrequitedly in love in “My Left Foot” (1988). The actress has easily moved between comedy and tragedy onstage and her film performances have also captured her facility with these shifts. Shaw made her debut as a nun caring for children during World War II in “Sacred Hearts” (1984) and following her “My Left Foot” success, has shown her versatility in diverse role ranging from the free-spirited wife of explorer Sir Richard Burton (Patrick Bergin) in “Mountains on the Moon” (1990) to her scene-stealing turn as the sex-starved head of Pileforth Academy in the comedy sequel, “Three Men and a Little Lady” (1990) to a lascivious liberal in “London Kills Me” (1991).
She played over-the-top villainesses in the unworthy comedies “Super Mario Bros.” and “Undercover Blues” (both 1993) before essaying fine supporting turns in “Persuasion” (1995), as the sister of the heroine’s true love, and “Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre'” (1996), as the dreadful aunt. Under Warner’s watchful eye, she recreated her stage triumphs as “Hedda Gabler” (1993, with Stephen Rea) and “The Waste Land” (1995). Shaw once again appeared onscreen alongside Rea and newcomer Eamonn Owens as Mrs. Nugent, the bane of existence for Owens’ “The Butcher Boy” (1997) in Neil Jordan’s acclaimed dark comedy about a serial killer. She was wasted in support of Sean Bean and Sophie Marceau in Bernard Rose’s remake of “Anna Karenina” (also 1997) and Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman as a senior intelligence officer in the disastrous big screen version of “The Avengers” (1998).
Shaw lent her intelligence to the role of Hedda Hopper in the acclaimed HBO movie “RKO 281” (1999), which traced the behind the scenes machinations during the making of “Citizen Kane” in 1940-41. In 2000, she appeared in the popular BBC miniseries “Gormenghast” as Irma Prunesquallor and was prominently featured in Warner’s big-screen debut “The Last September” as a sophisticated Anglo-Irish woman caught up in the decline of a great house. Co-starring stage legends Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon and executive produced by Jordan, “The Last September” was well-received by critics and art-house audiences, with Shaw singled out for praise for her virtuoso performance. Just weeks after the film hit American screens the actress returned to the stage at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre as the tragic heroine in another Warner-helmed project, “Medea”.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Debra Stephenson was born in 1972 in Kingston upon Hull. She first appeared on television at the age of fourteen in “Opportunity Knocks”. In 1999 she played Shell Dockley in TV’s “Bad Girls”. Between 2004 and 2006 she was Frankie Baldwin in “Coronation Street”. She has also featured in “Midsomer Murders” and “Where the Heart Is”.
Angela Baddeley will forever be remembered as Mrs Bridges the cook in the television series “Upstairs, Downstairs which ran from 1971 until 1975 and is still popular to-day. She had a very distinguished stage career with occasional forays into film and television. She was born in 1904 and was the older sister of actress Hermione Baddeley. Her film debut in 1931 was in “The Speckled Band” and other films included “The Ghost Train”, “Quartet” in 1948 and “No Time For Tears” in 1957. She was due to make a series on Mrs Bridges when she died suddenly in 1976 at the age of 71.
Angela Baddeley & Emlyn WilliamsEnglish stage actress Angela Baddeley. Original Publication: People Disc – HS0047 (Photo by Sasha/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Celia Lipton was born in 1923 in Edinburgh. Her film debut was “Calling Paul Temple” in 1948 and “The Tall Headlines”. By 1954 she was in the U.S. mainly appearing on television. She died in 2011 at the age of 87.
“MailOnline” article on Celia Lipton:
On a summer night in 1955, an attractive young British actress, finding the lift out of order in a Manhattan apartment building, arrived panting at her friend’s front door on the top floor. It was like a scene straight out of the Hollywood classic, How To Marry A Millionaire.
She remembers: ‘I was breathing heavily and almost banged straight into a ladder standing right outside.
‘Looking up, I saw a man with black curly hair and the most expressive, brooding brown eyes that seemed to momentarily flash a sign of recognition, while he stood on top of the ladder.
A life less ordinary: Celia Lipton as a young music star
‘He was in the midst of repairing the skylight, and, noting his rolled up shirtsleeves and open shirt, I thought to myself, “What a good-looking plumber”‘.
But to her surprise, the ‘good-looking plumber’ followed her into her friend’s apartment, and was introduced as Victor Farris, a name that meant nothing to Celia Lipton, the 31-year-old West End musical star, singer, actress and daughter of Mayfair’s celebrated Grosvenor House Hotel bandleader, Sydney Lipton.
After hesitantly accepting his offer to drive her home, in ‘the most awful-looking pale blue Cadillac I’d ever seen – it bore the scars, dents and scrapes of endless battles for limited parking space on Manhattan’s streets’ – he took her for coffee.
They sat at a table facing the men’s room. ‘Every time a man came out, Victor pretended he was knocking them off with a machine gun. He had me in convulsions. Our one cup of coffee seemed to last for hours, with much laughter. We both found a new camaraderie.’
By the time Farris, divorced and 12 years her senior, dropped her off at her apartment, she was convinced he was a Mafia Don.
She never dreamed that he owned 17 companies, was a millionaire many times over and the inventor of things the world came to take for granted, including the paper milk carton, the paper clip and Farris safety and relief valves.
Celia Lipton had felt an instantaneous attraction to this ‘macho man whose toughness co-existed with humour and sweetness’.
When she had reeled off her acting credits, he had silenced her, declaring that ‘anyone can act’, a statement that outraged her.
‘All night long,’ she writes, ‘my heart pounded, and I thought, “I’m falling for a gangster! What would my father say?”
‘All these thoughts were running through my mind when the phone rang at 3am. It was Victor “Mafia Don” Farris, solicitously enquiring how I was. He called me “Puppy”. I tried to be nonchalant and said: “I’m fine.”
There was a long pause while I wrestled with my head, which told me to slam the receiver down and never talk to this gangster again. But my heart melted at the very sound of his voice.
‘A chastened-sounding Victor told me softly that he was pulling my leg. He wasn’t a gangster at all. Victor wanted to prove to me that “anybody can act”. He certainly convinced me that he could act!’
Six months later, they were married. Lipton gave up her glittering stage and screen career to become his wife – and the acknowledged Queen of Palm Beach society.
The story of their 29 turbulent, volatile, but deeply happy years together is engagingly told by Celia Lipton Farris, now one of the richest women in the world, in her new autobiography, My Three Lives.
It has to rank as one of the most extraordinary books that has ever come my way.
Lavishly produced in coffee-table format, in almost blinding Technicolor, its 344 pages feature no fewer than 408 photographs, 232 of them of herself.
We have Celia with the Queen, with Prince Philip, with the Prince of Wales, with Princess Diana, with Prince Edward, with Rose Kennedy (the mother of JFK), with Clint Eastwood, with Bob Hope, with a decidedly icy-looking Bette Davis – of whom Farris says: ‘I had the distinct impression that she was wishing I wasn’t with her on stage at all,’ – and of a legion of lesser luminaries who make up the candyfloss world of Palm Beach society.
The New York Post has described the book as ‘an ego trip that counts’. Others might describe it as an ego trip in which you count the pictures.
Yet nowhere in this strange book will you find the date on which its author was born, a matter she declines to countenance, claiming that in America, ‘if you are over 40, you are dead’.
This statement is bound to interest President Barack Obama, who is 47, not to mention Hillary Clinton, 61, and a whole roster of older star ladies such as Lauren Bacall, Dame Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley MacLaine and Debbie Reynolds.
The reality is that on Christmas Day, Celia Lipton Farris was 85, a fact that readers of her book will find impossible to believe after studying the hundreds of photographs in which she appears gleaming, glowing, dressed to the nines, magnificently coiffured and loaded down with jewels that look as if they might have come from the collection of Marie Antoinette.
Celia May Lipton, in fact, was born on December 25, 1923, in Edinburgh, the only child of an English violinist, Sidney John Lipton – as Sydney Lipton he would become one of Britain’s top bandleaders – and of a noted Scottish beauty, May Johnston Parker.
When Celia was eight, her father formed his own band and took it to London’s Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, where he was to remain for 35 years.
Every week, millions of radio listeners tuned in to hear the words: ‘You are listening to Sydney Lipton’s Orchestra broadcasting from the Silver Room at the Grosvenor House Hotel.’
On one occasion in the Fifties, when Lipton and his orchestra played for the Queen at Buckingham Palace, Celia’s mother danced with Group Captain Peter Townsend, the lover of Princess Margaret.
Deeply happy: With Victor Farris on their wedding day in 1956
Both parents attempted to veto Celia’s ambitions to be a performer. But unknown to them, she auditioned for another bandleader, Jack Harris.
When her father heard, he said: ‘I thought, to hell with it. If she’s going to sing with a band, she’ll sing with my band and I can keep an eye on her.’
So, in 1939, at the age of 15, she made her debut at the London Palladium with her father’s orchestra.
At 17, she was back at the Palladium in the revue, Apple Sauce, and four months later, she won her first raves in the West End revue, Get A Load Of This, in which, dressed by the royal couturier Norman Hartnell, she stopped the show every night, singing You’re In My Arms (And A Million Miles Away).
At 20, she played the title role in Peter Pan. The turning-point for Celia came in 1944, when superstar Jessie Matthews walked out of the leading role in the West End revival of The Quaker Girl.
Lipton stepped in at only ten days’ notice, and when the production reached the West End, she took 16 curtain calls and one critic hailed her as ‘the brightest of new stars’.
On the French Riviera, she rubbed shoulders with the young Prince Philip of Greece, before his marriage. ‘He said he’d like to give me a lift to the casino in Cannes,’ she said.
‘I asked him how we were going to get there and he said he’d borrowed a man’s bike and he put me on the back of it. My dress kept catching in the back of the bike – it was really a scream. I got lucky as I danced with him. He was a very good dancer.’
After several more leading roles on the West End stage, and appearances in a number of films, Celia Lipton left Britain in 1952 to try her luck in New York. And there, after two appearances on the Broadway stage, two American TV roles, and some success in cabaret, she met Victor Farris.
They were married at his home in Tenafly, New Jersey. ‘Even though Victor never once suggested that I give up my career, I knew our marriage wouldn’t work if I continued.
‘He wanted a traditional wife, actually the kind my mother was. I wanted to be that for him.’
But their first child, a girl, lived only a day. Their second, a son, was premature and died after a few hours. She suffered, in all, ten miscarriages.
‘My heart was broken,’ she writes. ‘This was a time in my life where I felt useless and inadequate’.
Fortune: Farris left her more than £100million
When, at last, she succeeded in giving birth to two daughters, Marian and Cecile (‘Ce Ce’ for short), Farris was ‘not that enamoured’, and she ‘soon learned that it’s the attention that a child requires that can make a husband irritable. Victor liked to be the centre of attention at all times’.
Although it is clear that their 29-year marriage was not always easy, her account of it, and of Farris’s death in 1985, when she fought desperately to get the paramedics to their Palm Beach mansion, is the one section where her book blazes vividly into authentic literary life.
‘I walked out of the hospital, got into my car, put my head on the steering wheel and sobbed. Finally, after what seemed like hours, I started the car and drove into the bleak, dark night across the Intracoastal Bridge, back to Palm Beach. That five-minute drive home seemed like 500 miles.’
Farris left her a fortune in excess of £100 million. By shrewd investment, she has doubled it, making her one of the wealthiest women on the planet. In widowhood, she started to display her formidable organising abilities.
She became Executive Producer of the American Cinema Awards in Hollywood, sang before the Queen at the 50th anniversary of V.E. Day in Hyde Park, made a brief screen comeback with Burt Reynolds in B.L. Stryker, and released a series of her own, self-financed, nostalgic CDs.
In 2003, she was delighted to learn that her recording of Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner was being played to the troops in Iraq. However, the song’s composer, Hubert Gregg, was less delighted.
‘Hers is the worst version of my song I have ever heard,’ he told me, ‘and that includes the Omsk-Siberian Choir – in Russian!’
Her philanthropy has become legendary. She has funded two hospital wings in her husband’s name, has worked devotedly for Aids sufferers, spearheaded a Salvation Army appeal that raised $10 million, and has given huge sums to numerous causes, sometimes with money raised from exhibitions of her own brilliantly coloured impressionist oil paintings.
The American Cancer Society has named a lifetime achievement award after her in honour of her 30 years of charitable work.
Occasionally, her judgment has failed her. Towards the end of her book, she relates that she was ‘honoured to receive a letter informing me that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth had appointed me a Dame’.
This conveys the impression that she had been created a Dame of the British Empire. Not so. In 2004, she was named a Dame of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, which entitles her to place the letters, D. St. J, after her name.
Yet she now heads her personal notepaper, Dame Celia Lipton Farris, and is announced by that style on all social occasions. But then, in the neverland kingdom of Florida’s Palm Beach, such distinctions are apt to become blurred.
Is Farris’s book the story of ‘an incredible woman who has led an inspiring life’, as one of its more gushing reviews insists?
Sadly, it could have been, had it not been written with one eye on the calendar, and the other on her socialite neighbours.
Despite that, one feels this is one genuine gutsy dame who doesn’t need a cardboard title from some venerable order of which most people have never even heard.
Nor does she need to fib about her age or assume a status she does not possess merely to impress the rich bitches of Palm Beach.
If her book proves anything at all, it is that Celia Lipton Farris is a real-life heroine who has built her own pedestal.
The above “Mail Online” article can also be accessed here.
The Telegraph obituary in 2011.
Celia Lipton, who died on March 11 aged 87, was a child star, known as the “British Judy Garland”, who went on to become a Forces sweetheart in the Second World War; later she gave up a successful stage career to marry the American inventor and industrialist Victor Farris and became the acknowledged ‘Queen of Palm Beach society’.
22 April 2011 • 6:17pm
Celia Lipton CREDIT: Photo: BRUNO
Like any society hostess and former actress Celia Lipton was always vague about her age and was furious when a magazine obtained a copy of her birth certificate, showing that Celia May Lipton was born on Christmas Day 1923, at 73 Leamington Terrace, Edinburgh. Her father was an English violinist, Sidney John Lipton — as Sydney Lipton he would become one of Britain’s top bandleaders; her mother was May Johnston Parker, a dancer, singer and noted Scottish beauty.
When Celia was eight, her father formed his own band and took it to the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, where he was to remain for 35 years. Enthralled by watching the singers and chorus girls at the hotel putting on their make-up and diamonds to go on stage, Celia determined to go into showbusiness. Her chance came when, aged about 10, she spotted an advertisement asking for a Judy Garland sound-alike to play the lead in a BBC radio production of Babes In the Wood. Determined to get the part, she perfected Garland’s lisp and breathy singing style. When her parents refused to let her audition, she set off on her own and secured the part.
She went on to record more radio plays and albums and, aged only 15, appeared at the London Palladium. “My father was leading the orchestra,” she recalled. “He didn’t tell the audience who I was, he just said: ‘There’s a little girl coming out, her name is Celia.’ I sang I’m Just In Between. It didn’t faze me. Everyone cheered, and then my father said: ‘That was my daughter.’ It was thrilling.”
When the Second World War broke out, her father joined up as a private and was away from the family for seven years. As a result Celia became the family breadwinner. She sang to 2,000 troops at the Albert Hall, to severely disfigured men at the burns unit in East Grinstead, to the forces on the European front and at RAF hangars across the country, becoming known for Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner and You’ve Got Your Own Life To Live. With her mother as chaperone she toured Britain.
Her greatest triumphs, though, were her appearances as Peter Pan at the Scala Theatre, Tottenham Court Road, in 1943 and 1944 (the “best ever seen in a London theatre” according to one critic), and in Lionel Monckton’s 1944 revival of the light opera, The Quaker Girl, when she stepped in for Jessie Matthews at the last moment and received a dozen curtain calls on opening night at the Coliseum.
After the war Celia Lipton travelled to Paris and then the French Riviera where, on one occasion, she met the young Prince Philip of Greece, who offered to escort her to the casino in Cannes. “I asked him how we were going to get there and he said he’d borrowed a man’s bike and he put me on the back of it,” she recalled in 2004. “My dress kept catching in the back of the bike. I was lucky since I got to dance with him. He was an exceptionally good dancer.”
She also launched herself on a film career. After making her debut supporting John Bentley and Dinah Sheridan in Calling Paul Temple (1948), she appeared opposite Sonia Dresdel and Walter Fitzgerald in the adaptation of Joan Morgan’s novel, This Was A Woman (1948) and played Sandra in Terrence Young’s melodrama The Frightened Bride (1952).
In 1952 Celia Lipton moved to New York, where she joined the all-star revue, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac (1953-54) at the Imperial Theatre, Broadway, and appeared as Esmeralda to Robert Ellenstein’s Quasimodo in a television version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1954).
While in New York, she met Victor Farris. “I was returning some books to a friend and there was a man up on a ladder fixing a fan – my future husband,” she recalled. At first she thought he was a plumber and then, maybe, a member of the Mafia. In fact he owned 17 companies, was the inventor of the paper milk carton, the paper clip and the Farris Safety and Relief Valve, still used in shipping, oil and chemical industries. He was also a millionaire many times over. The couple wed in 1956, with Celia giving up showbusiness to devote herself to married life in New Jersey and, later, Florida.
Although the marriage was not without its difficulties — her relationship with her husband was sometimes volatile and Celia suffered ten miscarriages and gave birth prematurely to two babies who both died within a week — it was a happy one. At their sumptuous mansion in Palm Beach, once owned by the Vanderbilts, Celia became a leading society hostess.
When Victor Farris died of a heart attack in 1985, closely followed by her parents, Celia’s life altered dramatically again. Her husband had left her his £100 million fortune (an amount she more than doubled through shrewd investments over subsequent years), and she embarked on a new phase of her life as a philanthropist and charity fundraiser. “There are a lot of silly, socially competitive, frivolous women in this town who gossip, go out to lunch every day and dinner every night and that’s it,” she observed. “I’m delighted that I know what hard work is and proud of my Scottish mother and the good Scottish common sense she taught me.”
A convert to Catholicism, she raised large sums for the Salvation Army, the American Heart Association and cancer research charities. At a time when the disease was taboo she was one of the first big private benefactors of Aids research. Other beneficiaries included the National Trust for Scotland, the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, the American Red Cross, the Prince’s Trust and the Duke of Edinburgh Trust.
In addition she became Executive Producer of the American Cinema Awards in Hollywood (which raises funds for actors who have fallen on hard times); sang before the Queen at the 50th anniversary of VE Day in Hyde Park, made a brief screen comeback with Burt Reynolds in BL Stryker (1989-1990), and released a series of her own, self-financed, CDs. In 2008, she published her autobiography My Three Lives.
With her big stack of silvery-blonde hair, pillar-box red lipstick and tailored white suits, Celia Lipton retained the looks of a 1940s star. She lived surrounded by framed — often signed — thank you letters and photographs featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Bob Hope, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, Pope John Paul II, Diana, Princess of Wales, and even John Major.
In her autobiography Celia Lipton related that she was “honoured to receive a letter informing me that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth had appointed me a Dame”, conveying the impression that she had been created DBE. In fact, in 2004 she was named a Dame of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, entitling her to place the letters D St J after her name. Nonetheless she headed her personal notepaper, Dame Celia Lipton Farris, and, in America, was announced by that style on social occasions.
Simon Williams is best remembered for his role as James Bellamy in the popular television series “Upstaris, Downstairs” which ran from 1971 until 1975. He was born in 1946 in Windsor and is the son of the actor and playwright Hugh Williams.Hil film debut was in 1968 in “The Touchables”. His other movies include “Blood on Satan’s Claw”, “The Incredible Sarah” with Glenda Jackson and “The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu”.
Simon WilliamsBelinda Carroll & Simon WilliamsSimon Williams
