By Steve Vertlieb: Yvonne Monlaur was the young, fabulously lovely, sweetly innocent French actress who co-starred with Peter Cushing in Hammer Films’ classic vampire thriller Brides Of Dracula (1960), directed by Terence Fisher, and appeared opposite Christopher Lee in Hammer’s Terror of the Tongs (1961).
She was a sweet, gentle lady who cherished her fans, and was ever grateful for the opportunities that she’d been given. Yvonne, and dear friend Veronica Carlson introduced me from the stage when I presented the posthumous “Laemmle” life achievement award to Bernard Herrmann (accepted by his daughter, Dorothy) at the wonderful Fanex monster film convention in Crystal City, Virginia in 2000.
She was always the most gracious, kind, and humble actress that you’d ever wish to meet. Yvonne passed away, sadly, this past week on Tuesday, April 18th, at age 77.
Her gentle presence will be missed by all of us who frequented these events, but her radiant beauty and generosity of spirit will live on in her many screen appearances, as well as in the joyful memories of those of us fortunate enough to have met, and known her. May God rest her tender soul.
Elton Hayes was a British guitarist/singer and actor. He was born in 1915 in Bletchley. He served in India during World War Two. After the War he began a career on radio principally on “Children’s Hour”. Two of his best-loved songs are Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” and”The Gypsy Rover”. His films include Walt Disney’s “The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men” in 1952 where he played Alan-a-Dale and “The Black Knight” which also starred Alan Ladd and Patricia Medina. Elton Hayes retired from performing at an early age and took up farming. He died in 2001.
Good article on Elton Hayes in “Films of the Fifties” can be accessed here.
Amanda Barrie has had a long and distinguished career in British theatre, cinema and television. She was born in Ashton-Under -Lyne in 1935. She trained at the Old Bristol Theatre School. Her first film was “Operation Bullshine” in 1959. She starred in many comedies in the early 1960’s and had the leading role in “Carry On Cleo” in 1964. She starred with Billy Fury in “I’ve Gotta Horse”. In 1988 she began her recurring role in “Coronation Street” as Alma Baldwin. She left the series in 2001 and went on to star in TV’s “Bad Girls”.
Her IMDB entry:
This feisty and very funny British comedienne and musical revue vet with the trademark 60s brunet page-boy haircut, pronounced jaw, and arguably the largest, Bette Davis-like eyes in London was born Shirley Anne Broadbent in Ashton-under-Lyne, Cheshire on September 14, 1935. The daughter of Hubert Howath Broadbent, an accountant, and wife Connie (Pyke) Broadbent, who greatly prodded her young daughter into becoming a performer, Amanda was named after the Depression-era child star Shirley Temple. Her grandfather was a theatre owner in Ashton-under-Lyne, and young Shirley made her very first appearance there at the age of 3 as a Christmas Tree Fairy.
Not long after this she began training earnestly in singing and in dance, particularly ballet. As a youngster she won a talent-judging contest singing “I’m Just a Little Girl Who’s Looking for a Little Boy”. She then went on to attend school at St. Anne’s College in St. Anne’s-on-Sea and later studied acting at the Cone-Ripman School.
After her parents’ divorce, the teenager ran away from home and off to London where she lived at the Theatre Girls Club and subsequently found work as a chorus girl. By 1958 she had changed her marquee name to “Amanda Barrie” and made her TV debut with the comedy team of Morecambe and Wise in which her skirt accidentally fell off on live TV. She then took her first West End curtain call in a 1961 production of “Babes in the Wood”. Eventually Amanada decided to set her sights beyond a dancing career, and moved more into musical revue work in the hopes for good comedy parts. Finding work as a dancer in cabaret shows and the revue “On the Brighter Side”, she also trained at the Bristol Old Vic but did not perform in repertory.
Throughout the 1960s Amanda focused on her musical talents in the West End, and sparkled in a number of comedy shows. In the early part of the decade she hit solid notices with the revues “Six of One” (1963) with Dora Bryan and “See You Inside (1963)”. Other stage work (which included occasional drama) came in the form of “Cabaret” (as Sally Bowles), “Private Lives”, “Hobson’s Choice, “Any Wednesday”, “A Public Mischief”, “She Loves Me” (replacing Rita Moreno in London), and “Little by Little”. She also worked as the TV hostess on “Double Your Money” with Hughie Green and appeared in a number of comedy films: Operation Bullshine (1959), her debut in an unbilled bit, A Pair of Briefs(1962), Doctor in Distress (1963)and I’ve Gotta Horse (1966). She appeared to very good advantage in two of the slapstick “Carry On…” film series. She played a female cabbie in the Carry on Cabby (1963) and Cleopatra herself (with a sexy lisp) in Carry on Cleo(1964).
After her film peak Amanda continued to show resiliency on stage and TV. Theatre endeavors included “Absurd Person Singular”, the musical “Stepping Out” with Julia McKenzie, “The Mating Game”, “Blithe Spirit (as Elvira) and “Twelfth Night”. Occasional movie work came in, including the addled comedy One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975) with Helen Hayes. Of the countless sitcoms Amanda has been involved in, she became a soap opera favorite beginning in 1981 with her participation as Alma Sedgewick inCoronation Street (1960). Her appearances were infrequent until the character became a regular in 1989. She retired the role after 11 years in 2001 in an effort to spread her wings once again and seek other work. The producers actually killed off her popular character in quick fashion with a rapid case of cervical cancer.
In 1967 Amanda married actor and theatre director Robin Hunter and the twosome appeared occasionally on stage together, including the pantomime “Aladdin” in late 1967 and 1968 in which Amanda had the title role. The couple separated in the 1980s, however, but remained good friends and never divorced. Hunter died in 2004. In 1997 Amanda battled a serious optic disease in which she eventually lost the sight of her left eye. She has continued to perform, however, and more recent work has included the pantomimes “Jack and the Beanstalk” (2006) and “Cinderella” (2007), in which she played the Fairy Godmother. In her popular and highly candid autobiography “It’s Not a Rehearsal,” a best seller published in 2003, Amanda opened up for the first time about her bisexuality.
Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film Poster
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Craig Kelly is best known for two television series “Queer As Folk” and “Coronation Street”. He was born in 1970 in Lythams St Annes. His films include “When Saturday Comes” and “Titanic”.
Diane Cilento was born in 1933 in Queensland, Australia. Her parents were both distinguished medical doctors. She trained for the theatre in New York but made her acting career breakthrough in the U.K. Her first major film was “Passage Home” in 1955 with Peter Finch and Michael Craig. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Tom Jones” with Albert Finney. In the U.S. she made “Hombre” with Paul Newman. Diane Cilento returned back living in Australia, where she died in 2012. Jason Connery is her son from her marriage to Sean Connery.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary of Diane Cilento in “The Guardian”:
Such is the superficial nature of fame that the Australian-born actor Diane Cilento, who has died of cancer aged 78, was best remembered as the wife of Sean Connery from 1962 to 1973, during the height of his fame as James Bond. The attractive, blonde, husky-voiced Cilento would be more fittingly recalled for her roles in a dozen or so British films in the 1950s and 60s, to which she brought a dose of much-needed sexuality. However, her best-known part was in the cultish The Wicker Man (1973), her last British picture before returning to her homeland.
Born in Brisbane, she was the daughter of Sir Raphael and Lady Phyllis Cilento, both physicians. Much to their initial disappointment, Diane decided against following them into the medical profession. After winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, at the age of 17, she started to get film, theatre and television parts.
Cilento disliked the majority of her early films, which were quite anaemic, apart from the passion she injected into her roles, something she put down to her Italian ancestry. Her first leading part was in Roy Ward Baker’s murky J Arthur Rank drama Passage Home (1955), as the only woman on a cargo ship from South America to London. Her sultry presence naturally gets the crew all steamed up, especially the captain Peter Finch and first mate Anthony Steele. She again causes sexual tension in The Woman for Joe (also 1955), this time between a fairground owner (George Baker) and a dwarf working as one of his attractions. In the same year, Cilento married an Italian aristocrat, Andrea Volpe, with whom she had a daughter, Giovanna.
Her allure was almost enough to sustain the whimsical The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp (1956), in which she played the title role – she is sent on a goodwill mission to Earth, landing in the Angel, Islington. Much classier was Lewis Gilbert’s adaptation of the JM Barrie play The Admirable Crichton (1957), in which Cilento is winsome and poignant as the maidservant Eliza Tweeny, in love with the perfect butler (Kenneth More), who takes over his master’s role when his employer’s family are shipwrecked and marooned on a desert island.
It was back to morbid melodramas with The Full Treatment (1960), in which Cilento was the French wife of a disturbed racing driver (Ronald Lewis), and I Thank a Fool (1962), in which she pulls all the stops out as the mentally unstable wife of a barrister. Thankfully, the role of Molly Seagrim came along in Tom Jones (1963), for which she was Oscar-nominated (along with Edith Evans and Joyce Redman in the same picture). Cilento, in a dark wig, exudes vitality as the first of many young women to seduce the young hero, all in the spirit of Tony Richardson’s reduction of Henry Fielding’s great mock heroic “novel of manners” to a bawdy romp.
By now married to Connery – whom she had met in 1957 in an ITV production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, and with whom she had a son – Cilento made a brief sortie into Hollywood. It started with Carol Reed’s spectacular but half-baked The Agony and The Ecstasy (1965), in which, as the Countess de Medici, she kept her dignity while encouraging Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo to finish painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Martin Ritt’s Hombre (1967), a Stagecoach variation, gave Cilento a chance to shine as a widowed landlady in a western opposite Paul Newman as a blue-eyed white man raised by Apaches.
Back in the UK, Cilento made a few more films, culminating in The Wicker Man in 1973, written by Anthony Shaffer, whom she was to marry 12 years later. In this mixture of horror, eroticism and religion, set on a pagan Scottish island, Cilento had fun as the schoolteacher who upsets the repressed religious police sergeant by her teaching her girl pupils about phallic symbols.
After her divorce from Connery, Cilento returned to Australia and retired from cinema, but not acting. She also returned to her first love – the theatre. She had already appeared on Broadway in 1956 as Helen of Troy (for which she won a Tony award) in Tiger at the Gates, Christopher Fry’s adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s play on the Trojan war. Also on Broadway, she was Ellie Dunn in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1959-60), and in The Good Soup (1960), an adaptation from Félicien Marceau’s play.
Cilento had also been busy in the London theatre in the 1950s and 60s. Roles in The Changeling, The Big Knife, Miss Julie (perfect in the title role at the Lyric Hammersmith) and other plays at the Royal Court all gave her more satisfaction than her films.
In the 1980s, she settled in Mossman, Queensland, where she built her own outdoor amphitheatre called the Karnak Playhouse in the rainforest. She made one last film in Australia, the rather feeble The Boy Who Had Everything (1985), playing the mother of her real-life son, Jason Connery.
Shaffer died in 2001. Cilento is survived by her two children.
• Diane Cilento, actor, born 5 October 1933; died 6 October 2011
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN, British poster, Laurence Harvey center heads top from left: Diane Cilento, Julie Harris, Elina Labourdette, Mai Zetterling, heads bottom from left: Catherine Boyle, Eva Gabor, Jocelyn Lane, 1957 Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDTRAB EC101
David Daker was born in 1937 in the West Midlands. He is perhaps best known for his role of Harry Crawford in the popular television series “Boon” which ran from 1986 until 1995. His films include “O Lucky Man”in 1973 , “I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle”, “Stardust” and “Aces High”. Link to British Film Forum thread on David Daker here.
Daphne Anderson was born in 1922 in London. Her film debut came with “Trottie True” in 1949 which starred Jean Kent. Ms Anderson’s films include “Hobson’s Choice”, “A Kid for Two Farthings”, “The Prince and Showgirl” with Laurence Oliver and Marilyn Monroe and “No Time for Tears” with Anna Neagle. In 1965 she starred with John Gregson in the popular television series “Gideon’s Way”. She died in 2012.
Her obituary in “The Stage”:
Having taken dancing classes, she made her professional debut as a member of the chorus in Cinderella at the Richmond Theatre in 1937-38. Later in 1938, she appeared at the Windmill Theatre in Revudeville, the non-stop variety show that featured tableaux of nude young women whom the law prevented from moving while on stage.
Her first substantial role was Dora in a tour of the Gershwins’ musical Funny Face. During the Second World War, she worked for the Entertainment National Services Association, the organisation set up to entertain the troops. Towards the end of the war, she began a long association with the Players Theatre, the ersatz music hall club underneath Charing Cross station.
In 1943, she appeared in a musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, playing both Father William and the walrus at the old Scala Theatre. Two years later, she was in a rather more upmarket revue than Revudeville – Noel Coward’s Sigh No More at the Piccadilly, in which she played the clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, in the Blithe Spirit Ballet.
Coward was evidently sufficiently impressed with her to give her a small part in Pacific 1860, his musical about a British colony set in Victorian times, at Drury Lane (1946-47).
After a revue at Bolton’s, a small theatre club in South Kensington, she returned to the West End to appear in a long forgotten Eric Maschwitz musical, Belinda Fair (1949). More work at the Players and another small theatre club, the Watergate, followed. She then landed the best role of her career, playing Polly Peachum in the Brecht/Weill musical, The Threepenny Opera (1956), at the Royal Court. The Stage commended her for exhibiting “the right blend of coarseness and charm”.
Her cinema career, which began in 1949, included three films of note – The Beggar’s Opera (1953), Hobson’s Choice (1954) and A Kid for Two Farthings (1955).
Daphne Anderson, who was born Daphne Scrutton on April 27, 1922, died on January 15, aged 90.
“The Stage” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Although her father was a Russian émigré and her mother was Swiss-French, Muriel Pavlow, who has died aged 97, will be remembered as a quintessential British heroine on stage and screen. This meant being well spoken and standing by her man through thick and thin, particularly in the staid England of the 1950s. Not only did she fulfil these requirements admirably, but she established herself as a compelling presence.
As a J Arthur Rank contract player, Pavlow waited bravely for pilots Alec Guinness in Malta Story (1953) and Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky (1956) to return safely from missions during the second world war, and was the steadfast nurse who loves accident-prone Simon Sparrow (Dirk Bogarde), the medical student in Doctor in the House (1954) – the first in the popular series – and Doctor at Large (1957). In the theatre, Pavlow was generally a “nice gel” in well-made West End productions, often touring the UK and beyond.
Muriel was born in Lewisham, south-east London, to Boris Pavlov, a salesman, and his wife, Germaine. They changed their name to Pavlow to sound more British. She grew up in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, and went to school locally. She started acting at an early age and her first, brief, film appearance came at the age of 13 in the Gracie Fields morale-boosting musical Sing As We Go! (1934). Having co-starred three years later in Hansel and Gretel, a pioneer BBC television broadcast, she was able to claim, when in her 90s, that she had made the earliest TV appearance of anyone living.
This was followed by her being cast as a young girl in Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus (1938), with John Gielgud and Marie Tempest at the Queen’s theatre, London. “I was 17 or 18 and still playing children,” Pavlow recalled. “I was afraid I was going to play children for the rest of my career, until John Gielgud said to me while we were waiting in the wings, ‘I read a very good play today by John Van Druten and I said to Binkie [Beaumont, the theatre impresario], “You ought to cast Muriel as the girl.” It’s all right, it’s not a child, it’s an ingenue role!’”
The play was Old Acquaintance (1941), starring Edith Evans, at the Apollo. The Spectator critic at the time wrote: “This magnificent woman [Evans] is supported by a cast which has apparently been specially selected to stand up to her talent … A polished performance is given by Muriel Pavlow, who surmounts with astonishing skill even such lines as ‘God! How I dislike sherry!’”
While appearing in the play in the evenings, Pavlow was shooting Quiet Wedding (1941) during the day. However, the role in the latter was a small one, as a teenage bridesmaid. Directed by Anthony Asquith, the romantic comedy starred Margaret Lockwood and Derek Farr, whom Pavlow married in 1947, and with whom she often starred.
She had to wait until after the war, during which she joined the Wrens, to play adult roles. Her postwar career began with Terence Rattigan’s drawing-room comedy While the Sun Shines (1945), opposite Hubert Greggat the Globe, and in the spy film Night Train to Dublin (1946), as an Austrian helping secret agent Robert Newton track down a Nazi spy. Although, for purposes of the plot, they go through a mock marriage and share a flat, their relationship is rigorously chaste until the happy ending.
In 1947, after playing Ophelia to John Byron’s Hamlet on TV, Pavlow appeared as the sweet, musical daughter of shady antiques dealer Oscar Homolka in the blackmail thriller The Shop at Sly Corner. With Farr as her fiance, Pavlow had nothing much more to do than pretend to play the violin in long shot.
It was only in the 50s, with her Rank contract, that Pavlow’s film career blossomed with It Started in Paradise (1952), a piece of Technicolor froth about rival dress designers, which gave new meaning to the word “catwalk”. But, according to the New York Times critic, in contrast to the scheming Jane Hylton, “pretty Miss Pavlow is as straight and as neat as a well-stitched seam”.
Her next leading role was as a Maltese girl, working in the British war operations room, in love with Guinness’s RAF pilot in Malta Story (1953). Her hair darker than usual, and with what passed for a Maltese accent, she managed to reveal more emotion than hitherto.
More to Pavlow’s satisfaction was her sojourn with the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon for the well-received 1954 season during which she played Cressida to Laurence Harvey’s Troilus in Glen Byam Shaw’s production, as well as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Bianca in both The Taming of the Shrew and Othello.
Then it was back to British pictures with Doctor in the House. “It was my first experience of being in a smash-hit movie, and it was a very sweet experience,” Pavlow remembered. At the end of Doctor at Large, after three bungling amorous adventures, Bogarde seems to settle for Pavlow, now also a doctor.
She showed some fighting spirit and even some flesh in a bathing scene with her soldier boyfriend John Gregson in Conflict of Wings (1954), a likable sub-Ealing film about a rural Norfolk community which Pavlow leads in opposing the RAF’s plan to use a nearby bird sanctuary for target practice.
In the inspiring biopic Reach for the Sky (1956), Pavlow was Thelma, the supportive wife of the pilot Douglas Bader (Kenneth More). She meets him after he has had both his legs amputated, and is adapting to the artificial ones. One of the key scenes involves him taking a turn on the dance floor with her. Fearing he has been shot down by German aircraft, Thelma greets the news that he is alive and has been made a prisoner of war with: “I knew in my heart they’d never get him.”
In Rooney (1958), set in Dublin, Pavlow is a single woman secretly in love with a happy-go-lucky dustman (Gregson). She tells him: “I’m 28, but I feel 50.” Pavlow was actually 37 and nearing the end of her film career.
Having left Rank, Pavlow appeared in Murder She Said (1961), the first of four Miss Marple whodunnits starring Margaret Rutherford. In it, Pavlow played dictatorial James Robertson Justice’s long-suffering daughter. It was to be her last film, apart for her cameo in Stephen Poliakoff’s starry Glorious 39 (2009).
She and Farr had a long and happy marriage until his death in 1986. After this, she was semi-retired, occasionally popping up in television series such as The Bill (1993), The Rector’s Wife (1994) and House of Cards (1995).
She is survived by three nieces and two nephews.
• Muriel Lilian Pavlow, actor, born 27 June 1921; died 19 January 2019
Richard Leech was born in Dublin in 1922. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, qualifying as a doctor in 1945. He then turned to acting as a career. Virtually all his career was in British film and television. Among his films are “The Dambusters” in 1955, “Night of the Demon” with other Irish actors, Peggy Cummins and Niall MacGinnis, “The Moonraker” in 1957 and “The Shooting Party” in 1985. Richard Leech died in 2004 in London at the age of 81.
Richard Leech’s “Guardian” obituary:
Richard Leech, who has died aged 81, practised as a doctor in Dublin for a year before deciding to try his luck as an actor. He never looked back – within two seasons he was a leading man on the West End stage.
His embodiment of military officers, police inspectors and, inevitably, doctors, not to speak of monarchs, politicians, conspirators, courtiers, butlers and philanderers, established Leech’s career on stage and screen as one of the most intelligent and cultivated character actors of the postwar generation.
With his sturdy build, snub nose, crinkly hair and intense gaze, Leech was not only a useful all-round player, but also one whose clarity of speech made him audible in the largest auditorium. At a time when stage diction was in decline, this was an asset.
So was his assumption of transatlantic accents. He was not the first Irishman whose voice could reproduce a transatlantic note with authenticity. It served him well in his first two plays for HM Tennent Ltd, London’s most influential management, in the British premieres of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1948) and John van Druten’s The Damask Cheek (1949).
Leech’s most notable West End performances ranged from the title-role in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1948) to Dr Emerson in Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1978-79). His numerous film credits included The Dam Busters, A Night To Remember, Ice Cold In Alex, Young Winston, Gandhi and The Shooting Party, and he appeared on television in Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, A Woman Of Substance, Dickens Of London, Edward VII, Occupations, Brassneck, and as Inspector Duval in Interpol Calling. From 1969 to 1971 he was one of the four GPs in the BBC’s twice-weekly drama serial The Doctors.
Richard Leech
Born Richard McLelland in Dublin and educated at Haileybury College, Hertfordshire, and Trinity College, Dublin, he was intended for medicine. Having obtained three medical degrees, in 1945 he practised successfully in Dublin for a year. At 20 he began working semi-professionally at the Gate, Dublin, under its directors Michéal MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, for whom he made his debut as a Nubian slave in The Vineyard. He made his first appearance in London in 1946 with an Irish company in three plays at the Glanville, Walham Green, south-west London: Robert Collis’s drama, Marrowbone Lane, in which he played several small parts, including a surgeon; then in The White-Headed Boy and Drama At Inish.
In 1947, Leech spent a year with a repertory company in Hereford before being put under contract by a London management company. His first role was in an Irish country house play, Elizabeth Bowen and John Perry’s Castle Anna; and in Arthur Miller’s first work to reach the West End, All My Sons, in which he played Chris Keller, the surviving brother in a family headed by a parent responsible for the faulty design of wartime aircraft.
Leech’s voice came into its own in 1948, when he partnered Flora Robson in Shaw’s Captain Brasshound’s Conversion. As a philanderer in The Damask Cheek (1949), Leech was, according to Harold Hobson, “good in the honest ruggedness of a factory hand and farmer”.
Later that season, Leech won more plaudits as the somewhat pompous Humphrey Devize in the West End premiere of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning, in which he later transferred or the first time to Broadway. But in between he acted with Gladys Cooper in Thomas Browne’s The Hat Trick (1950); and on returning from New York played Robert Catesby in a try-out, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot (Ipswich, 1951).
Richard Leech
In Noël Coward’s Relative Values (1951), Leech played an all-knowing butler, who according to a critic, “talks like Shaw with the accents of Coward and rolls out the syllables as though the part were entirely new: indeed he and Coward between them make us believe that it is”.
Back in the West End in 1954, Leech appeared in Jack Roffey’s No Other Verdict as a man wrongfully accused of murder; and in Charlotte Hastings’s Uncertain Joy (1955), he was the cruel father of a problem child befriended by a schoolmaster.
One of his best remembered roles came as Henry VIII in the premiere of Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons (1960). In another long run, The Right Honourable Gentleman (1964-65), Leech first played the husband of a woman who accused the statesman Sir Charles Dilke of adultery; and when Anthony Quayle left the cast, Leech took over the lead from him. He was a friend of Alec Guinness, and returned to the West End in 1968 in Guinness’s revival of TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.
Leech was never able to forget his days as a doctor, and in 1968 resumed his association with the medical world by becoming a regular columnist in the periodical World Medicine. His articles were headed Doctor In The Wings.
Leech’s first wife Helen Hyslop Uttley predeceased him. He is survived by his second wife, Margaret, and his actress daughter, Eliza.
· Richard Leeper McLelland (Leech), actor, born November 24 1922; died March 24 2004
