John Alderton was born in 1940 in Gainsborough in England. He has had many successful British television series including “Emergency Ward 10”, “Please Sir”, “Upstairs, Downstairs”, “Thomas and Sarah” , “My Wife Next Door”,and “Forever Green”. His films include “Duffy” in 1969 and more recently “Calender Girls”. He is long married to actress Pauline Collins. Interview here.
He made his first stage appearance with the repertory company of the Theatre Royal, York in August 1961, in Badger’s Green by R.C. Sherriff. After a period in repertory, made his first London appearance at the Mermaid, November, 1965, as Harold Crompton in Spring and Port Wine, later transferring with the production to the Apollo. At the Aldwych, March 1969, played Eric Hoyden in the RSC’s production of Dutch Uncle. At the Comedy Theatre, July 1969, played Jimmy Cooper in The Night I Chased the Women with an Eel. At the Howff, October, 1973, played Stanley in Punch and Judy Stories, and played the same part in “Judies” at the Comedy, January, 1974. At the Shaw, January 1975, played Stanley in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. At the Apollo, May 1976, played four parts in Ayckbourn’s Confusions.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Alderton had few roles, but he narrated the children’s original animated series ‘Little Miss‘ in 1983 (with his wife Pauline Collins) and, from 1987 to 1994, he narrated and voiced all the characters in the original series of Fireman Sam. From 1989 to 1992, he starred in the series Forever Green as the character Jack Boult, and appeared in the film Clockwork Mice in 1995.
John Bindon was a very interesting screen actor in British films in the 1960’s and 70’s . He usually played tough guys a role which he seemed to play in real life. The director Ken Loach spotted him in an East End pub in London in 1966 and cast him as the abusive husband of Carol White in the excellent “Poor Cow”. He was then cast in “Performance” with Mick Jagger. He also had major roles in “Quadrophenia” and “Get Carter”. He died in 1993 at the age of 50.
His “Independent” obituary:
A MAN of the Sixties, John Bindon lived a life at least as colourful as the roles he played: he was the archetypal actor-villain, and an all- round ‘good geezer’. ‘The fundamental thing about John was that he was a bright, intelligent man a size bigger than the room he was in,’ recalls his agent, Tony Howard.
The son of a Fulham cabbie, Bindon had an upbringing shrouded in machismo myth. It was all good training for the adult Bindon, for whom the term method acting might have been invented. The director Ken Loach cast him in Poor Cow (1967), the gritty realist film of Nell Dunn’s novel, having been introduced to him by Dunn ‘through a contact of hers. He was very easy to direct,’ says Loach, ‘and he was very good in it, very straight.’ Bindon’s portrayal of Carol White’s wife-battering husband was to set the tone for his acting career.
The celebrity of Poor Cow brought the model Vicki Hodge into Bindon’s life, and Bindon into high society. He was ‘not an East End tough,’ says Tony Howard. ‘He was a genial fellow welcome everywhere he went, from the highest to the lowest places. He could make a horse laugh – he could put people on the ground. He could charm Princess Margaret equally as well as anyone else.’ Bindon’s bonhomie certainly won him many celebrated friends: ‘John Huston loved him, Stanley Kubrick loved him,’ Howard says. Bindon appeared in the former’s film The Mackintosh Man (1972) , with Paul Newman, and had a small part in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975).
In 1970 Bindon was cast, alongside Mick Jagger and James Fox, in Performance, in which he played minder to the Kray-like ‘Harry Flowers’. The film’s co-director Nicholas Roeg remembers him as a ‘wild, naked talent; an extraordinary man; a totally unafraid person; people often mistrust that, mistake it for pugnacity.’ Bindon kept in contact with Roeg, who met him again some 10 years later, when the actor came to the United States ‘shortly after his ‘other problems’. We were always able to pick up a friendly conversation. I had a very great regard for him. I liked his attitude of raw courage; he had an unencumbered attitude – people are so often encumbered by fear.’ Bindon won the Queen’s Award for bravery in 1968, after rescuing a drowning man from the Thames (although it was alleged that Bindon had pushed the man in himself, and only pulled him out when a policeman appeared).
In between bouts of acting, Bindon became involved in the music scene, acting as tour manager and security for Led Zeppelin and David Bowie; he was a particular friend of Bowie’s manager, Tony de Fries, and through him got to know Angie Bowie, with whom he had a well-publicised affair. Bindon’s amatory interests – Christine Keeler, Serena Williams – excited almost as many gossip column inches as did his other activities.
Unfortunately, what Roeg calls his ‘other problems’ soon established another sort of fame. In 1976 Bindon was declared bankrupt; two years later he killed John Darke, a London gangster, outside a pub in Putney, allegedly for a fee of pounds 10,000. Bindon escaped to Dublin, badly wounded. He returned to England, however, and was acquitted on a plea of self-defence when it was revealed that he had saved a victim whom Darke had stabbed in the face. The substantial appearance of Bob Hoskins as a character witness at the trial helped sway the verdict.
Bindon made various appearances, generally portrayed as a ‘heavy’, in television series such as Hazell, The Sweeney, Softly, Softly and Minder, where his tough-guy persona lent an authentic air to such productions. But film work declined after the adverse publicity of his trial – although he did memorably play a drug dealer in the rock film Quadrophenia (1979), a role which again appeared perilously close to typecasting.
In 1981, Bindon’s 12-year relationship with Vicki Hodge ended, and his criminal activities began to garner more publicity than his acting work. In 1982 he was convicted of threatening a law student with a piece of pavement; and two years later was sentenced to two months in prison for holding a carving knife in the face of a detective constable. Although this sentence, and a similar one of six months for carrying an offensive weapon, was suspended, Bindon had spent time inside for other crimes. Tony Howard recalls: ‘His time in jail was well spent, reading avidly. He had a great knowledge of history and Shakespeare – he loved the classics – he knew everything there was to know about people like Wellington – he could quote Shakespeare freely, and did.’
Bindon’s last appearance was at the tiny King’s Head theatre in Islington in 1987, but his performance merited a worthy critical mention. The latter part of Bindon’s life was spent in a small flat in Belgravia, in a degree of poverty. His death from cancer brought unlikely tributes to the man’s goodheartedness from colleagues and close friends. Over 200 people attended his funeral at Putney Vale crematorium, spilling out of the chapel in their eagerness to show respect.
His “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Brian Glover was an actor, writer and wrestler from the English midlands . He was born in 1934 in Sheffield. His first film role was as Mr Sugdon the bossy soccer coach in Ken Loach’s “Kes” in 1970. He had a recurring role in the classic TV series “Porridge”. On the stage he acted in Lindsay Anderson’s “The Changing Room”. He died from a brain tumour in 1997 at the age of 63.
His “Independent” obituary:
Bluff and bald Brian Glover, who made his acting debut as the ebullient games master in Kes, was one of Britain’s most distinctive and popular character actors. His chunky frame was familiar from countless television appearances as well as film and stage work, while his homely Yorkshire tones were heard as voice-overs in television commercials, notably his assurances that “Tetley make tea bags make tea”, and that Allison’s bread has “nowt taken out”.
me that when Glover starred in a West End revival of The Canterbury Tales a few years ago it was advertised as “Chaucer with nowt taken out”.
Glover was born in Sheffield in 1934, but raised in Barnsley. His parents did not marry until he was 20. “I was in the gym in Barnsley one day and me dad came in and said, `Me and your mother made it all right today’, and I said `About bloody time!’ ” His father was a wrestler who called himself the Red Devil (“I don’t know what the neighbours thought when me mum used to hang out his masks on the clothes line”), and his mother ran a small grocer’s shop.
With his stocky frame, it was inevitable that Glover too would become a wrestler, eventually topping bills under the name of Leon Aris. Prompted by his mother to get a good education, he attended Sheffield University and became a teacher of French and English in Barnsley, where a fellow teacher was Barry Hines, the author of Kes.
In 1968, when the film was in preparation, Hines suggested that the director Ken Loach consider Glover for the role of the bullying games master Sugden. “Ken Loach was improvising a fight with a load of kids, and he asked me to stop it like a teacher would,” recounted Glover. “Well, I’d stopped a good few playground fights, and I had the confidence of being in the ring all those years, so I just grabbed the two kids who were fighting and banged their heads together.”
Though both the film and Glover’s performance in it were successful, he returned to teaching for two years until the entrepreneur Binkie Beaumont saw Kes while casting Terence Rattigan’s play about Nelson, Bequest to the Nation, and thought Glover right for the role of Hardy. The actor wickedly commented later, “Binkie used to take me to the Ivy – I must have been his rough trade or something.”
Glover’s acting career continued to flourish with roles at the Royal Court (including two David Storey plays directed by Lindsay Anderson, The Changing Room, 1971, and Life Class, 1974), and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, including Charles the Wrestler in As You Like It. Anderson cast him in his epic allegorical film O Lucky Man! (1973) and as Sergeant Match in his stage production of Orton’s What the Butler Saw (1975).
Prolific work with the National Theatre included roles in The Long Voyage Home, The Iceman Cometh (both 1979), Don Quixote (1982) and Saint Joan (1983), while other films included Brannigan (1975), The Great Train Robbery (1979), Company of Wolves (1984), Aliens 3 (1991) and Leon the Pig Farmer (1992).
The advertising industry, which grades voices by colour, had Glover’s as a robust, no-nonsense dark brown, and it was in demand for commercials, including his famous ones for bread and tea. His dozens of acting roles on television included a Doctor Who adventure in 1984 that proved a source of steady income. “I get more repeat fees for that than anything,” he said recently, adding, “The other big success is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Get in a Shakespeare on the telly and the BBC sell it all over the world on video to schools.”
Though he played Bottom in this production, and had one of his greatest successes playing a blunt but benign God in The Mysteries (1985), he accepted with good humour that many of his roles would be villainous. “You play to your strengths in this game,” he said, “and my strength is as a bald- headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.”
Along with his success as an actor, Glover pursued a writing career which included over 20 television plays and short films, plus a regular column for a Yorkshire paper. A committed socialist, he proved a lively member of the BBC television discussion programme Question Time. A totally unpretentious and down-to-earth personality (he refused to be ferried by limousines even when they were offered), he was enormously liked within the profession.
Though he had an operation for a brain tumour last September, he was back at work two weeks later filming John Godber’s Up and Under, in which he plays a Rugby League fan who is mentor to a younger player. “I first met Brian in 1977,” said Godber yesterday, “when he was one of the few people to see my first play, Bouncers, on the Edinburgh Fringe. He was kind enough to write me a little note and say he thought I might have something.”
Having always wanted to make a film with Glover, Godber created the film role especially for him. “He was a little bit poorly during the shoot,” said Godber, “but he never let it get in the way. He was always terrific company.”
Brian Glover, actor: born Sheffield 2 April 1934; twice married (one son, one daughter); died London 24 July 1997.
Rupert Graves was born in 1963 in Weston-Super-Mare in Somerset. He started his career as a circus clown. His breatkthrough roles came with two E.M. Forster’s novels into film, “A Room With A View” in 1985 and two years later “Maurice”. Among his other films are “Where Angels Fear to Tread”, “The Sheltering Desert” and “Mrs Dalloway”.
Gary Brumbrugh’s entry:
Born in a seaside resort town, Britain’s Rupert Graves was born a rebel, resisting authority and breaking rules at an early age. In his teens he became a punk rocker and even found work as a circus clown and in traveling comedy troupes. In 1983 he made his professional stage debut in “The Killing of Mr. Toad” and went on to co-star with Harvey Fierstein in the London production of “Torch Song Trilogy.” It didn’t take long for somebody to take note of Rupert’s boyish good looks and offbeat versatility. By the mid-80s he was a presence in quality films and TV, primarily period pieces such as his Freddy Honeychurch in A Room with a View (1985) and the gay drama Maurice (1987).
Rupert moved to the front of the class quickly. His decisions to select classy, obscure arthouse films as opposed to box-office mainstream may have put a dimmer on his star, but earned him a distinct reputation as a daring, controversial artist in the same vein as Johnny Depp. In A Handful of Dust (1988) he essayed the role of a penniless status seeker who beds down a married socialite; in Different for Girls (1996) he was the lover of a male-to-female transsexual woman; in The Innocent Sleep (1996) he played a derelict drunk; and in the award-winning Intimate Relations (1996) he portrayed an aimless boarder who has a relationship with both the mother/landlady and her daughter.
Equally adept at costume and contemporary drama, Rupert more recently earned rave reviews on Broadway with “Closer” in 2000 and “The Elephant Man” in 2002. Rupert is currently married to production coordinator Susie Lewis.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Gia Scala was a beautiful English actress of Italian/Irish parentage. She was born in Liverpool in 1934. Her family moved to Rome and then on to New York when she was fourteen. She was signed to a Hollywood contract with Universal Studios and her first film was “The Price of Fear” with Merle Oberon and Lex Barker in 1956. She went on to make “Don’t Go Near the Water”, “Four Girls in Town”, “The Garment Jungle” and probably her most famous film “The Guns of Navarone”.She died in 1972 at the age of 38.
Her IMDB entry:
This tall, dazzling, yet shy and painfully sensitive foreign import was born Giovanna Scoglio in Liverpool, England but moved to Sicily with her aristocratic Sicilian father and Irish mother at three months of age. She migrated to New York at age 14 and attended Bayside (Queens) High School, graduating in 1952.
She worked various jobs as a file clerk and airline reservations taker while studying with Stella Adler and the Actors Studio. While appearing as a contestant on a television game show, a Universal Studios agent spotted her and placed the young beauty under contract in 1954.
The Angry Hills, poster, from left: Gia Scala, Robert Mitchum, 1-sheet poster art, 1959. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Her best known film role came as Anna, the Greek resistance fighter, in the classic all-star epic film, The Guns of Navarone (1961).
From there things began to spiral downhill for Gia personally and professionally. Riding on the coattails of her ever-rising glamour and success were those deep-rooted insecurities, and she began to drink heavily as compensation.
She eventually lost her contract at Universal due to her unreliability, which forced her to seek work overseas. Her marriage to actor Don Burnett burnt itself out, and, at one point, she threw herself off the Waterloo Bridge in desperation.
She would have drowned in the Thames River had a passing cab driver not plucked her out of the water in time.
Her alcoholic addiction led to numerous arrests, and her bouts with depression grew so severe that she was forced to undergo frequent psychiatric observations.
On April 30, 1972, it all ended for her. Gia was found dead in her Hollywood Hills bedroom of an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, another Tinseltown statistic. It was listed as a suicide.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Simon McCorkindaleMichael York & Simon McCorkindale
Simon McCorkindale was born in 1952 in Ely in Cambridgeshire. His father was a Group Captain in the Royal Air Force and he hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps but he was shortsighted and unable to enlist. He made his West End stage debut in “Pygmalion” with Sir Alec MacCowan and Dame Diana Rigg. His film breakthrough came with the higly popular “Death on the Nile” where he was caught in a love triangle with Mia Farrow and Lois Chiles. He went to Hollywood where he made the TV series “Manimal” which was not a success. He was then part of the cast of “Falcon Crest” with Jane Wyman. After some years he returned to the UK and was cast in the long running “Casualty” as clinical lead consultant Harry Carpenter. Simon MacCorkindale died in October 2010. He was long married to actress Susan George.
His “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:
In common with his contemporaries Jeremy Irons, Michael York and Hugh Grant, the actor Simon MacCorkindale, who has died of cancer aged 58, on screen projected the very English persona of an ex-public schoolboy. But unlike them, MacCorkindale never made it big in films. Nevertheless, his “posh” accent, his suave demeanour and patrician good looks made him a natural for roles in television soap operas, from the opulent mansions of Falcon Crest (1984-1986), to the hospital corridors of Casualty (2002-2008). In the latter, he played the autocratic clinical consultant Harry Harper, who ran Holby City hospital’s emergency department. A doctor of the old school, he sweeps through the wards, advising, cajoling, admonishing and seducing colleagues and patients alike.
In 2007, having already been diagnosed with bowel cancer, MacCorkindale learned that it had spread to his lungs and that he had no more than five years to live. It was cruelly ironic that he continued to play Harry Harper, sometimes being required to inform patients that they had an incurable disease. “I don’t want people to think that I’m pale, losing my hair, losing weight and on the way out,” he commented in 2009. “I’m not. I’m as active as I’ve ever been.”
Immediately after leaving Casualty, and refusing to let his illness interfere with his work, MacCorkindale toured in the strenuous part of Andrew Wyke in Sleuth, took over the role of Captain Georg Ludwig von Trapp in the London Palladium production of The Sound of Music, as well as appearing in a couple of films and television plays. This stoicism may be put down to his upbringing.
MacCorkindale was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, the son of Scottish parents. He spent much of his early childhood moving around because his father, a group captain and a station commander in the RAF, had postings at various bases in Britain, Germany and Belgium. Eventually, Simon was sent to Haileybury school, Hertfordshire, where he played rugby and was head boy. His desire to follow his father into the RAF was thwarted when he failed an eyesight test, so he decided to train for the stage, despite his father’s conviction that it was “not a sensible job”.
While in his early 20s, MacCorkindale started to get small parts on stage (“a sarcastic bystander” in Pygmalion, 1974) and on television (Paris in Romeo and Juliet; Lucius in I, Claudius, both 1976). But his breakthrough came with the role of the charming cad Simon Doyle in Death on the Nile (1978), in which he was in no way outshone by the starry cast of murder suspects under the scrutiny of Peter Ustinov’s Hercule Poirot. The following year, MacCorkindale appeared as an astronomer in The Quatermass Conclusion, co-starring with John Mills, a hero of his, and in The Riddle of the Sands, based on Eskine Childers’s adventure novel, wherein he and Michael York were two British yachtsman who foil a German plot to invade Britain in 1901.
In 1982, following his divorce from the actor Fiona Fullerton, to whom he had been married for six years, MacCorkindale went to live in California. There, along with Joan Collins in Dynasty, MacCorkindale found himself in the first wave of British stars to make an impact in American television shows. After appearances in one episode each of Hart to Hart and Dynasty, he was given the lead in Manimal (1983), which had the rather absurd conceit of having MacCorkindale as a British college professor at New York University who has the unusual ability to transform himself into any kind of animal in order to help the police battle crime. Not surprisingly, despite some clever special effects, the show ran only eight episodes. Fortunately, MacCorkindale, who always refused to Americanise his accent, got the part of Greg Reardon, a conniving British lawyer employed by Angela Channing (Jane Wyman), the equally conniving matriarch who runs the family winery in the glossily extravagant Falcon Crest.
However, after a few more soaps, he and the actor Susan George, whom he had married in 1984, decided to return to Britain, where he set up a production company called Amy International Artists, named after the character his wife had played in the controversial Straw Dogs (1971). In 1995, they bought and took over a 45-acre stud-farm on Exmoor, where they bred Arabian horses. Then came the six-year run in Casualty, which required a relatively more realistic acting style than in American soap operas.
MacCorkindale is survived by his wife.
• Simon MacCorkindale, actor, born 12 February 1952; died 14 October 2010
The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Dirk Bogarde obituary in “The Independent” in 1999.
His “Independent” obituary:
Dirk Bogarde
LIKE GARBO before him, Dirk Bogarde mysteriously exceeded the sum of his parts. Many of his 63 films were forever banal, while others initially thrilling and controversial were tamed or stultified by time. In a career spanning almost 60 years he willingly switched disguise, but neither wigs nor breeches, the officer’s khaki nor the doctor’s white coat, could long conceal his limitations of range. When he offered subtlety and suggestiveness instead of versatility those limitations appeared almost a virtue; but with the failure of that exchange in the mid-1970s his acting became almost intolerably arch and repetitive.
Yet he could never be dismissed – and his stature involved something more than the fact that to critics and colleagues he suggested stylish professionalism, or that in 1955 and 1957 his popularity made him Britain’s principal box-office attraction, or that he rejected formulaic heroism in Hollywood and Pinewood to redeem himself in the European cinema he found more inquisitive.
Dirk Bogarde was a major figure because, wherever they were made, his finest films are all somehow about him. He was a great self- portraitist and the screen persona he fashioned, a stylisation of his private being, not only dominated its surroundings but spoke subliminally and powerfully to British audiences about the tensions of the time, about the connivances and cruel respectabilities of England in the Fifties and Sixties.
By the time he renounced acting for writing his numerous renditions of acquiescers, outsiders, self-doubters and repressors of secrets constituted a poetic enquiry into the dramas of pragmatic dishonesty and subterranean emotion and had made Bogarde emblematic, a man who might have been born to play exiles from happiness.
Indeed when he took to writing in his fifties Derek Jules Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde’s first impulse, in A Postillion Struck By Lightning, was to depict his childhood as a lost paradise, only later conceding that despite its contentment he had learnt before adolescence “every lesson needed to get through adult life, from courage, to control, to determination and deceit”.
His Scottish mother, Margaret Niven, daughter of Forrest Niven, actor and painter, was compelled by her husband to abandon acting, despite her Haymarket appearance in Bunty Pulls The Strings and despite an invitation from Hollywood to join the Lasky Players. Her regret was lifelong and she looked to alcohol for the mitigation three children could not always provide. Besides, her half-Dutch husband, art editor of The Times, worked too hard; soon Dirk and sister Elizabeth sought amusement in nursery theatricals.
While still a schoolboy, and perhaps with encouragement from his actress godmother Yvonne Arnaud, Dirk appeared in an amateur production of Alf’s Button and every summer, when the family retreated to a cottage in Sussex, he and his sister animated the enchanted countryside with make-believe.
Innocence, inevitably, was doomed. A new-born brother Gareth usurped attention and Dirk, installed at the Allan Glen’s School in Glasgow, was bullied into chronic self-doubt. Further patchy schooling in London culminated in a course of commercial art at Chelsea Polytechnic, where he was taught by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland (who later found his features too anodyne to merit portraiture).
Despite Ulric’s hopes that his son would pursue a career in art or diplomacy Dirk wanted to act: in 1939 he was an extra in the George Formby comedy Come On, George and months later, when he made his West End debut in J.B. Priestley’s Cornelius, The Stage praised his “sulky true-to-life office boy”.
Engagement to the actress Annie Deans quickly failed and following conscription into Ensa he was called to war at Catterick army camp. He proved an inept signaller, but eventually became a major in Intelligence; he was in Normandy for D-Day, was decorated, and demobbed in Singapore. Distinction notwithstanding, military life taught advanced disenchantment: off-duty war paintings (some of which now belong to the Imperial War Museum) helped channel distress but many experiences registered anguish too great for anything but later flippancy. As for witnessing the liberation of Belsen, “We never spoke of it again to anyone”.
He returned to civilian life without much hope or many credentials, yet within two years he had anglicised his name, acquired a first agent, won Noel Coward’s admiration for his proletarian murderer in Power Without Glory at the New Lindsay Theatre and appeared in a television adaptation of Rope, playing the first of many homosexuals.
Coward urged that the beginner’s destiny lay on stage but events swiftly confounded him. Wessex Films offered Bogarde a part in Esther Waters (1947); then with Stewart Granger’s defection the leading role was thrust upon him; then J. Arthur Rank, which distributed Wessex Films, proffered a contract, despite anxieties about its new recruit’s skinny neck, uneven leg length and asymmetrical head.
His 14 years with Rank proved a glamorous apprenticeship. Beginning in 1947 on pounds 30 a week, he emerged a decade later as Britain’s principal star: each film gained him about pounds 10,000, his off-set publicity involved the land-owning accessories of dogs, Bentleys and big houses and Rank appointed the actresses he dated.
Of the 36 films he made with the studio few merited his or his audience’s attention: The Blue Lamp (1949), paean to the British bobby, made his name; Doctor in the House (1954), based on Richard Gordon’s novels about medical students, his fortune; and Victim (1961) his reputation, as an actor prepared to venture his popularity in a film which at the dawn of the Sixties appeared almost self-destructively controversial and conscientious.
Nevertheless he learnt the technicalities of filming and understood why whole sets rose around his gentler left profile. He developed a confidant intimacy with the camera and enriched every film he made with his exotic prettiness, his thoroughness and his tense, truculent style.
After Victim, which confronted homosexuality as a certainty and exposed the evils of its illegality, there was no returning to studio fantasias. Bogarde left Rank in 1961, and for the next 17 years devoted himself freelance to the films which brought him international fame, films which taxed his sensitivity of interpretation and showed him willing, in his forties and fifties, to address the controversial preoccupations of a youthful and liberal age.
The social allegory of Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963) may now seem dated but Bogarde’s performance (which won him his first British Film Academy Award) retains its stealthy menace. Death in Venice (1971, directed by Luchino Visconti) has its longueurs but Bogarde’s Von Aschenbach remains a virtuoso rendition of almost wordless yearning. For all its flamboyance, The Night Porter (1973) is a determined investigation, structured around Bogarde’s Max, into the passions of sado-masochism.
Yet as his European prestige grew so, despite the direction of Losey, Visconti, Resnais and Fassbinder, did his mannerisms; and his celebrated facial inflexions, which began as disclaimers of involvement and passion, developed into an unwitting but almost declamatory spinsterishness.
In any case, he was retreating – from England and from film. Along with Anthony Forwood, the former husband of Glynis Johns who became his manager and lifelong companion, he restored a 15th-century farmhouse near Grasse and recreated the paradise of distant Sussex; and in 1977 he began his successful career as an autobiographer and novelist with Postillion, his first volume of memoirs.
He was retreating also from people. He had never cultivated the common touch, never welcomed fame’s intrusions into privacy; and unscheduled digressions in later interviews revealed with what asperity he manned his fortress. But he was an illusionist by trade and he outmanoeuvred curiosity with dexterity.
His best-selling autobiographies won him a reputation for self- revelation when in fact they camouflage: Postillion (which merits survival) beautifully evokes his childhood, indeed is generous with its harmless secrets and sins; but the sequels, which could have explained the mature Bogarde’s inner workings and should have given some account of Tony Forwood, the most important figure in his life, are in varying degrees thespian anecdotage.
His excursions into the more revealing medium of fiction (inspired by experience) were smooth; but although the slickness of his novels is occasionally animated by accounts of female domination, male narcissism and male prostitution, their author’s true pleasures remained classified.
Even as he guarded it, Dirk Bogarde’s neat world crumbled. Having been ill since 1983 Forwood died in 1988, doubly stricken with cancer and Parkinson’s disease. The French house was sacrificed to medical bills and proximity to London hospitals and Bogarde’s last years passed in a flat in Chelsea. Planning ahead, he espoused euthanasia in 1991 and in 1992 he received a knighthood. He reviewed books for The Sunday Telegraph, contributed irritable, anglophobic articles elsewhere and testily reiterated his heterosexuality – but discreetly friends thought him unbearably embittered by Forwood’s death.
It was a grief he could not allow himself to acknowledge, a grief which united with his early and frequently reinterpreted disillusion to lend to his public appearances a great disenchantment. Off-duty, he seemed even more poignant – squeamishly skirting Sloane Square, his hair as black as the dying Von Aschenbach’s, his manner no less fussy, frail and furtive; and Chelsea’s pavements, like Visconti’s Lido, a lonely place for yearning.
Derek Jules Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde (Dirk Bogarde), actor and writer: born 28 March 1921; Kt 1992; died London 8 May 1999.
“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Marianne Stone’s list of film credits must be the longest of any actor in British film. At one time she seemed to pop up in every film made in the UK between the late 1940’s and the late 1980’s. She played minor roles but they were always choice and she could do a lot in a few minutes. She usually played charladies, office typists, waitresses, clerks in the civil service, bar ladies and often appeared in crowd secenes where she would stand out with a few words. Her films include “Brighton Rock” in 1947, “The Clouded Yellow”, “The Good Die Young” and several Carry On’s. She retired in 1989 and died in 2010 at the age of 87. She was the widow of the show business writer Peter Noble.
Tom Vallance’s obituary on Marianne Stone in “The Independent”:
The accomplished character actress Marianne Stone had the distinction of being the most prolific actress in the UK, appearing in over 200 films, an achievement that earned her a place in the latest Guinness Book of World Records as “the actress with the most screen credits”. She has also been hailed in the book English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema for her contribution to the horror movies that flourished in the Sixties, but most of her screen roles were as working-class characters. In two of her earliest films she was respectively a shop assistant in When the Bough Breaks (1947), and a sluggish waitress in Brighton Rock (1947).
Though she occasionally had lines to speak, many of her roles were wordless and uncredited, but she had some pithy roles in the Carry On films (nine of them) and she had a small, but striking, role in Lolita (1962), directed by her friend Stanley Kubrick and adapted from the controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Stone played Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of the author’s name), a mysterious lady who is seen dancing with the jaded writer Clare Quilty, played by Peter Sellers. (In the 2001 fantasy Donnie Darko, Maggie Gyllenhaal attends a fancy dress Halloween party as “Vivian Darkbloom”, Stone’s character.) For 50 years Stone was the wife of the film and theatre reporter, gossip columnist and bon vivant Peter Noble, and the parties they used to give at their rambling house in Abbey Road were legendary.
She was born Mary Stone in London in 1922, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she became friends with fellow student Richard Attenborough. From 1943 to 1945 she was part of the company performing at the Intimate Theatre in Palmers Green, where she won particular accolades for her performance as the cunning Cockney trollop Betty Watty in Emlyn Williams’ The Corn is Green. Noble was a young journalist who covered the Intimate’s productions for a local paper, and Stone began to notice that he always gave her favourable reviews, even when her part was minuscule. They began going out together, often joining the Attenboroughs at the Arts Theatre Club, and in 1947 they were wed. They had two daughters, Kara and Katrina, and the marriage lasted until Noble’s death in 1997.
In 1946 Stone appeared at the St James Theatre in two alternating plays in repertory produced by the actor-manager John Clements: John Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode (in which Moira Lister and Stone played sisters) and the premiere of Margaret Luce’s The Kingmaker, a biography of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the key protagonist in the Wars of the Roses. Stone then played Betty Watty again when The Corn is Green was staged at the New Theatre, Bromley, where the actor playing the young miner who is given the chance of a university education was played by the then little-known Bryan Forbes.
Throughout these years she was billed as Mary Stone, but as her career in films got underway she changed her first name to Marianne, though her friends still knew her as Mary Noble.
She made her screen debut in the Arthur Askey musical comedy Miss London Ltd. (1943) and her early roles included a factory girl in Miss Pilgrim’s Progress (1950), a “woman in a phone box” in the apocalyptic drama Seven Days to Noon (1950), and in 1954 she played barmaids in three films, You Know What Sailors Are, The Good Die Young and The Gay Dog. Her first foray into the Carry On franchise was in Carry on Nurse (1959), and her flair for comedy was particularly apparent in Carry On at Your Convenience (1971). She was typically a “woman in a scarf” in The Jokers (1967), and in Oh, What a Lovely War (1969), directed by Richard Attenborough, she was a mill girl. Her finest opportunity to display her prowess was probably as Lena Van Broecken in three episodes of the BBC television series Secret Army (1977/8). Her last film appearance was in the gothic tale set in the world of ballet, Deja Vu (1985).
At the parties she and Noble gave, it was quite likely that one would run into top stars, in London to make or promote a film, to appear on stage or just to visit. The Kubricks were good friends, and the family have three paintings by Christiane Kubrick that she gave to the Nobles. One of their regular guests remembers meeting Lana Turner and Sean Connery (the latter not yet a major star), who were filming Another Time, Another Place, and stars who could always be found at the Abbey Road dwelling when in town included such illustrious names as Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Roger Moore, Shelley Winters, Paul McCartney and Herbert Lom, who was the best man at their wedding.
Stone is survived by her two daughters and a grandson, Nicholas Frew.
……… Tom Vallance
“The Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
‘Being discovered” by the director Mike Leigh when she was about to turn 50 changed Liz Smith’s life. Bleak Moments (1971), his first film, seemed an appropriate title for an actress who was brought up in poverty after the death of her mother and lived a hand-to-mouth existence raising her own children single-handedly – “hard labour” she called it.
Smith, whose face could go from doleful to riotously expressive with a sudden quirky or quizzical look, regretted never playing young female leads but was grateful for the long list of dotty old women that came her way, most famously “Nana” in The Royle Family. In the sitcom created by Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash, she played Norma Speakman, mother of Barbara (Sue Johnston), the long-suffering wife of Jim (Ricky Tomlinson). She frequently feuded with Jim, especially after moving in with the family when her health declined. Smith appeared in all three series (1998-2000), but her character died in the subsequent Christmas special, “The Queen of Sheba” (2006).
The actress, who died on Christmas Eve aged 95, played a string of mothers on screen, beginning in Bleak Moments. Another was Maggie Smith’s in A Private Function (1984), Alan Bennett’s comedy about a pig being fattened secretly and illegally during the days of post-war food rationing. She landed the role after sending her son to Bennett’s house with a postcard asking for a part in the film. It won her the 1984 Bafta Best Supporting Actress award.
However, Smith did not become a star until the 1990s, when she played church organist Letitia Cropley in The Vicar of Dibley’s’ first series (1994) and a 1996 Easter special. The batty old woman in a hat was renowned for the awful cakes she made – the subject of a tricky question she asked Dawn French’s pioneering female priest when Smith was written out: “My cooking. Was I a great experimenter, a pioneer, whose rich command of unorthodox mixtures will be the stuff of legend in the new millennium, or was my food just ghastly? You can tell a dying woman the truth, vicar.” The Reverend Geraldine Granger looked up appearing to ask for forgiveness as she gave a diplomatic answer.
Despite suffering three strokes over two days in 2009 and announcing her retirement, Smith continued taking occasional television roles for another four years.
The actress was born Betty Gleadle, an only child, in Crosby, Lincolnshire, now a Scunthorpe suburb. When she was two, her Yorkshire-born mother, Nellie (née Foster), died in childbirth (the baby girl also died) and she was aged seven when her father, Wilfred, a butcher, abandoned her and moved to Lancashire to marry Ellen Webster, who was also a widow. Smith recalled him telling her that he would write, but he never did.
She was brought up by her maternal grandparents, but more heartbreak came when her grandfather died in a flu epidemic. In a 2008 television interview with Mark Lawson, Smith reflected on losing her parents and her lonely existence as a child: “I’m sure it’s made me odd… I’m very wary of people because you feel a reject… you feel uncomfortable.”
Smith – she took the name when her grandmother adopted her – attended Scunthorpe Modern and Day Commercial Schools. Regular visits to the cinema, which screened silent films with stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy, and Scunthorpe’s Palace Variety Theatre made her want to act and she performed in church halls and in school plays at that theatre.
On leaving school, Smith worked as a seamstress before joining the WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) in early 1940, months after the outbreak of war. She served in the Fleet Air Arm in Scotland, then in South Africa and India.
During this time, when she was 20, Smith’s grandmother died, leaving her £2,500 to buy a house and be independent. This helped her after the war when she found herself bringing up two children alone. In 1945, she had married Jack Thomas, known as “JT”, who worked in a tax office but aspired to write plays.
Smith bought a house in London’s Westbourne Grove area and did jobs from home, such as painting lead model soldiers. She also followed her plan of studying art for a year, at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art, then training as an actress, at the Gateway Theatre.
In 1954, with two children, Sarah and Robert, the family moved to Epping Forest and Smith concentrated on bringing them up. Shortly afterwards, JT left her for another woman.
Seeking acting work again alongside daytime jobs, she joined London’s Unity Theatre, spent five years with Charles Marowitz’s company, which paid no money but gave her experience in improvisation that would be invaluable years later, and acted with the Forbes Russell Repertory Company at Butlin’s holiday camps for many summers, giving her children their first holidays.
While working at Hamleys toy shop in London, Smith received a telephone message that Mike Leigh was looking for an older woman to improvise the role of a mother. Bleak Moments opened the floodgates – she ended her Butlin’s seasons and became a prolific bit-part actress on television.
There were also recurring roles – in sitcoms as the matronly Mrs Brandon in I Didn’t Know You Cared (1975-79), Gran in Now and Then (1983-84), Mrs Anstruther in Mann’s Best Friends (1985), Mrs Giles in Valentine Park(1987-88) and the dual roles of Bette and Aunt Belle in 2point4 Children(1991-99), and in drama as Gran Turner in One by One (1984), Mrs Fisher in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986) and Zillah in the first series of Lark Rise to Candleford (2008). She also played Grandma Georgina in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and worked again with Mike Leigh in High Spirits (1988).
Smith won the 2007 British Comedy Awards Best Actress honour, a year after her memoirs, Our Betty: Scenes from My Life, were published, complete with her own drawings.
In 2008, Mark Lawson asked Smith whether she had had a happy life and she sadly responded: “No. I consider I’ve had too much struggle and too much loneliness and too much rejection, really, and I’m so thankful for the later half of it that it’s been so lucky, very lucky.”
Betty Gleadle (Liz Smith), actress: born Crosby, Lincolnshire 11 December 1921; MBE 2009; married 1945 Jack Thomas (divorced 1959; one son, one daughter); died 24 December 2016
