British Actors Archives

Brian Roper

Brian Roper. (Wikipedia)

Brian Roper was born in 1929 in Doncaster, Yorkshire. He made his film debut in 1947 in the British movie “Just William’s Luck”. He screen tested for the role of Dickon in 1949’s “The Secret Garden” with Margaret O’Brien and Dean Stockwell. He won the part and travelled to to Hollywood to make the movie. Although he was nearly twenty at the time, he made a convincing 13 year old. Although the film was a popular success and is now regarded as a classic, he returend to Britain and made films there throughout the 1950’s. He returned to Hollywood to work as a film agent and then went into sales training. He died in Livermore, California in 1994.

Wikipedia entry:

Roper played youthful parts during his career due to his young physique, which included his appearance as the animal-loving young boy “Dickon” with a pet fox in The Secret Garden (1949), starring Margaret O’Brien. The Secret Garden was prepared for MGM’s 25th anniversary as a film studio and was heavily promoted in 1949–50. Newspapers would claim his age as 14 at the time. He appeared this age but was actually five years older. Roper was noted for his reddish hair and some freckles.

Born in Doncaster, Roper left England at age 19 on American Overseas Airlines from London on 5 October 1948 via a Constellation plane (number N90922, Flagship Denmark) after his selection for The Secret Garden from more than 100 boys who were tested during a six-month search.

He arrived in Washington, D.C. in the United States on 6 October 1948,^[noteen route to MGM-British Studios in Culver City, California (now Sony Pictures Studios) who had paid for his trip. Work on the film began 4 October 1948 and lasted to late November, during a period of excitement regarding the appearance of a predawn bright long-tailed comet (1948 L, aka the Eclipse Comet of 1948) becoming visible. He lived in both Britain and California, depending on shooting locales, and acted for 24 years.

Following his acting career he went briefly into the film industry agency business. Roper married Barbara L. Eaton (aka Barbara L. Stafsudd), in Los Angeles when he was 38 years old, on 30 December 1967. Shortly after this marriage, Roper established the Roper School of Real Estate in 1968 in Hayward, California and served as its lecturer and instructor. He would go on to train new salespeople while serving as director of sales training for Red Carpet Realtors in Northern California.

Zena Marshall obituary in “The Guardian” in 2002.

Zena Marshall can claim the distinction to be the first of all the Bond beauties to have a romantic interlude with James Bond in 1962’s “Dr No”. She played Miss Taro the Chinese double agent. She had been appearing in British films since 1946’s “Caesar and Cleopatra”. Zena Marshall was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1926. Her other early films include “Sleeping Car to Trieste” and “So Long at the Fair”. After “Dr No” she featured in “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines” as the wife of Alberto Sordi. In more recent years she attended film functions celebrating the James Bond films. She died in 2009 at the age of 83.

“Guardian” obituary by Gavin Gaughan:

Zena Marshall, who has died aged 83, played a small but pivotal part in establishing the formula of the James Bond series. As the Eurasian secretary, Miss Taro, revealed to be working for the title character in the first Bond film, Dr No (1962), while dallying with 007 (Sean Connery), she was the first of those unscrupulous, exotic beauties who, in the service of the villain, would try but fail to entrap Bond.

For more than a decade beforehand, she had lent a hint of the exotic to monochrome, domestic British cinema. With her dark hair and colouring, the Rank Organisation may have signed her due to a similarity to Ava Gardner.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, she was raised in Leicestershire, and described her ancestry as “part French” (her mother), “part English and part Irish”. She attended St Mary’s school, Ascot, but had already undertaken theatre tours for the Entertainments National Service Association by the time she was in her late teens. Her first film was the misguided epic Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) as a lady in waiting; her fellow super- numeraries included her friend Kay Kendall, and another Bond, Roger Moore.

By 1946, she was part of Rank’s Company of Youth, often dubbed the Charm School, where fellow conscripts includ- ed Sir Christopher Lee, Diana Dors and the broadcaster Pete Murray. The studio, and affiliates such as Gainsborough, cast her in The End of the River (1947), produced by Powell and Pressburger, and as a passenger in the compact thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948).

Good-Time Girl (1948), Snowbound (1948) and The Lost People (1949) all teamed her with Dennis Price, then a suave leading man. Unfortunately, both were also in the much-derided The Bad Lord Byron (1949); fortunately for her, Dr No’s director, Terence Young, was among the screenwriters.

At London’s New Torch Theatre, she was in the poorly received Snow (1953), by the novelist Diana Marr-Johnson, niece of Somerset Maugham. With John Ringham in late 1959, she toured Germany and Holland in The Late Edwina Black. She played a determined doctor in Men Against the Sun (1952), a Kenyan-British co-production starring the august John Bentley, in much the same mode as his later television series African Patrol (1958), in which she also appeared. August 1952 saw her small-screen debut in The Portugal Lady, a live BBC costume drama that was part of its Sunday Night Theatre series, as Charles II’s bride Catherine of Braganza.

During ITV’s opening weeks Marshall appeared in a shampoo commercial, assuring female viewers it was fine to use the product before going to a party. For the new channel, she did The Bob Hope Show (1956), pre-sold by Lew Grade to NBC, then played a scientist “from behind that Curtain” in The Invisible Man (1958), enduring a very silly ending in which she hugs and kisses the unseen hero goodbye.

Marshall appeared three times, between 1960 and 1964, in the series Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan, who had declined the Bond role: twice Marshall played fellow agents who needed to be rescued. She also guested in the now-forgotten shows Man of the World (1962), The Sentimental Agent (1963) and The Human Jungle (1963).

After several of the Edgar Wallace thrillers, she was glimpsed waving off Alberto Sordi in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965). Her last film was The Terrornauts (1967), with the unlikely presence of Charles Hawtrey.

Her marriage to the bandleader Paul Adam ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage. In 1991, she married the producer Ivan Foxwell, whose credits included The Colditz Story. He predeceased her in 2002.

Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.

The great comedian and write Spike Milligan was born in India in 1918. The majority of his career was spent in British radio, television and film. He was part of the famous radio quartet “The Goons” which included Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. His films include “The Bed-sitting Room”, “Adolf Hitler, My Part in His Downfall” and “Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World”. Spike Milligan was an Irish citizen. He died in 2002.

“Guardian” obituary by Stephen Dixon:

Spike Milligan, who has died aged 83 of kidney failure, was once talking about Eccles, his favourite Goon Show character. “Eccles represents the permanency of man, his ability to go through anything and survive. They are trying to get off a ship on the Amazon and lower a boat. When they get to the shore Eccles is already there.”‘How did you get ashore?'”‘Ho hum, I came across on that log.’

“‘Log… that’s an alligator!’

“‘Ooh. I wondered why I kept getting shorter.'”

That brief exchange, recognisable instantly as something only Milligan could have written, does tell us something about this troubled, gifted man, with his unique mind and puzzled pity for humanity.

Jimmy Grafton, who co-wrote many of the early shows, maintained that Eccles was the nearest thing to Milligan’s own id – a very simple, uncomplicated creature who doesn’t want to be burdened with any responsibility and just wants to be happy and enjoy himself. Grafton added: “Spike achieved a reputation for eccentricity and has become, by his own choice, a sort of court jester. You begin to wonder to what extent in some circumstances the eccentricity is involuntary and to what extent it is deliberate. He can always get out of trouble by going a little mad.”

Milligan never achieved Eccles’s simple dream of happiness, and comedy is richer for his failure. He lived his life at the end of his mind’s tether and was always a man of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions: an anarchist with a passion for conservation, a vulnerable and acutely sensitive exhibitionist, a sophisticated person who preferred to retain a vision of childlike purity.

He was often distinctly unsettling, both offstage and as a writer/performer. The writer and jazz singer George Melly, while admitting that Milligan was not the sunniest person all the time, added that his was “the greatest mind in what is loosely called comedy”.

George Orwell’s assertion that “whatever is funny is subversive” was never truer than in the case of Milligan. He didn’t invent surrealistic radio comedy – nor did he ever claim to – but he opened up the medium with his uncluttered anarchic vision, and his influence since the early 1950s has been vast. It took its toll: “I was trying to shake the BBC out of its apathy. I had to fight like mad and people didn’t like me for it. I had to bang and rage and crash. I got it right in the end, and it paid off, but it drove me mad in the process… I’m unbalanced. I’m not a normal person, and that’s a very hard thing to have placed upon you in life.”

Milligan was born in Poona, India. He was the son of an Irish captain in the Royal Artillery, and Irishness, represented by his contempt for authority and his free-wheeling humour – one thinks of the novelist Flann O’Brien – always ran through his work. His father was a frustrated entertainer who did impressions of GH Elliott, the “Chocolate-Coloured Coon” at camp concerts, but never had the confidence to turn professional, and Milligan appeared at such concerts from an early age.

“I wasn’t consciously aware of it,” he said, “but I had had enough of the British empire. The Goons gave me a chance to knock people my father and I had to call ‘Sir’. Colonels. Chaps like Gritpipe-Thynne with educated voices who were really bloody scoundrels.”

Milligan was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and, after his father was posted to Rangoon in 1929, at the Brothers de La Salle; the family stayed in Burma until 1933, when they returned to England to what Milligan described as a fairly impoverished life and where his education continued at the South East London Polytechnic in Lewisham. He worked in a nuts and bolts factory, but had already decided to become an entertainer, and learned to play the ukulele, guitar and trumpet. At one point he won a Bing Crosby crooning competition at the Lewisham Hippodrome.

When the war broke out he joined his father’s old regiment and served in north Africa, where he first met Harry Secombe. He began to organise music and comedy shows for the armed forces entertainment organisation Ensa with Secombe and others, and was wounded in Italy. His war experiences later formed the basis for a number of bestsellers, including Adolf Hitler, My Part In His Downfall (1971), Monty, My Part In His Victory (1976) and Mussolini, His Part In My Downfall (1978).

Back in civvies in 1946, he formed a trio and started the weary round of agents and audition rooms. The act failed to generate any enthusiasm, and when it broke up Milligan “sort of wandered around”. It was during these wanderings that he renewed his friendship with Secombe, who had been struggling along as a comic at the Windmill Theatre in London’s West End which, in a pre-strip club era, provided static nude tableaux. He also made the acquaintance of another young hopeful, Peter Sellers, and the wild-haired and equally anarchic Michael Bentine.

All gravitated to Jimmy Grafton’s pub in Westminster, where they would do turns in the back room to entertain each other. And it was there that the seeds of the Goon Show were sown.

Grafton was writing jokes for the radio comedian Derek Roy and, impressed by Milligan’s unique view of the world, asked him to co-write some material. In this way Milligan wrote for several top comics of the day – Bill Kerr, Alfred Marks and even Frankie Howerd. He also wrote for Secombe and Sellers, who had started to become established, in a modest way, as radio performers. Sellers had the best contacts and first put the idea for the Goon Show to the BBC (“Goon” came from a strange being in the Popeye cartoons which Milligan loved).

The corporation was lukewarm, but agreed to give the show – starring Sellers, Milligan, Bentine and Secombe – a trial run under the title Crazy People. Thus it began in May 1951, swiftly changing its title and losing Bentine, whose surreal style clashed with Milligan’s. It ran, with 26 shows a year, for nine years. It toured the variety theatres as a stage show in the early 1950s, and it was on this tour that Milligan’s emotional imbalance began to assert itself. In Coventry his solo spot went badly and he strode to the footlights and raged at the audience: “You hate me, don’t you?”

Receiving an affirmative, he threw his trumpet to the stage and stamped on it, and when this was greeted with appreciative applause, left the stage and locked himself in his dressing room. Knowing about their friend’s mental instability, Secombe and Sellers broke down the door, fearing that he had tried to kill himself. He hadn’t, but it was an omen of unhappy times to come.

Milligan, with or without Grafton or Larry Stephens, wrote all the shows, with Eric Sykes drafted in to help on occasion. Although the show could hardly have existed without Milligan’s participation, his difficult behaviour kept him at constant loggerheads with the BBC. However, it was when the programmes ended – at Milligan’s instigation – in 1960 that his personal demons started to dominate his private and professional life. “When the Goons broke up I was out of work,” he said. “My marriage ended because I’d had a terrible nervous breakdown – two, three, four, five nervous breakdowns, one after other. The Goon Show did it. That’s why they were so good.”

Because of the “difficult” label, he almost had to beg for work, and the first to respond was the actor/manager Bernard Miles, who asked him to play Ben Gunn in Treasure Island at the Mermaid Theatre on the edge of the City of London. It was during its successful run that Milligan and John Antrobus wrote the bleak comedy The Bed-Sitting Room, which was set in the aftermath of the third world war. It, too, opened at the Mermaid, in 1963, with Milligan appearing as a sort of disruptive “chorus”, and then went to the Duke of York’s Theatre and the Comedy Theatre. In 1970 the play was made into a film.

His next piece, Oblomov, was just as successful, opening at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in 1964. It was based on the Russian classic by Ivan Goncharov, and gave Milligan the opportunity to play most of the title role in bed. Unsure of his material, on the opening night he improvised a great deal, treating the audience as part of the plot almost, and he continued in this diverting manner for the rest of the run, and on tour as Son Of Oblomo

In the late 1960s he did a number of television series, notably the World Of Beachcomber and Q5. He also became a favourite on TV chat shows, although it was with some trepidation that the host – be he Michael Parkinson, Eamonn Andrews or Terry Wogan – would introduce him. Milligan rarely had much of an inkling of what he was going to do, even at far more formal, scripted occasions. “I turn up on the day,” he said. “They point me at the audience and I do it.”

He also turned his attention to the cinema. His films included The Magic Christian (1971), The Devils (1971), The Three Musketeers (1973), The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977) and Monty Python’s Life Of Brian (1978). On the the big screen there was not marked success, for it was impossible to get near the essence of Milligan in short, carefully rehearsed takes.

He worked harder than almost any entertainer one can think of, but seemed to have an imperfect grasp of what was good and what was dashed-off self-indulgence in his prolific output – a Private Eye cartoon in 1984 had a bookshop with a sign in the window: “Spike Milligan will be here to write his latest book at three o’ clock.” Novels, memoirs, verse – words gushed from him in a torrent.

He seemed to mellow in later years, but there was always a hint of the dangerous spark that had brought him to the brink of despair so many times and lit beacons of laughter to cleanse us all. In 2000, to a clutch of awards was added an honorary knighthood. It was honorary because – and earlier the cause of considerable furore – his father’s Irish background meant that he was denied automatic British citizenship and thus the official title.

His first marriage, to June Marlowe, ended in divorce. His second wife, Patricia Ridgeway, died in 1978. He is survived by his third wife, Shelagh Sinclair; they were married in 1983. He leaves two daughters and a son from his first marriage, and a daughter from his second.

· Terence Alan (Spike) Milligan, writer and performer, born April 16 1918; died February 27 2002.ccessed

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Melvyn Hayes was born in London in 1935. He is best remembered for role in the long-running British comedy TV series “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”. He has also featured in many movies including 1957’s “The Curse of Frankenstein” and supporting Cliff Richard in “The Young Ones” and “Summer Holiday”. “Daily Telegraph” with Hayes on the making of “Summer Holiday” can be accessed here.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Hayes attended Sir Walter St John’s Grammar School for Boys, Battersea. He was also in a theatrical troupe called Terry’s Juveniles and his acting career stretches back to 1950 when he was “disappearing twice daily for £4 per week” performing theIndian Rope Trick in Maskelyne’s Mysteries at the Comedy Theatre in London. He also appeared in Repertory Theatres in Surrey,Derbyshire and the Midlands. One of his earliest roles was in the BBC television adaptation of Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School. He played Edek in The Silver Sword (author Ian Serraillier) in 1957, a children’s television production about Polish refugee children trying to find their parents after the Second World War. His film roles include the young Victor Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Cecil Biggs in Bottoms Up (1960), Jimmy in The Young Ones with Cliff Richard (1961), Cyril in Summer Holiday, again with Cliff Richard (1963) and ‘Brother’ Willy in Crooks in Cloisters (1964). He also performed voices on children’s cartoons such as SuperTed, The Dreamstone, Little Dracula, Alfred J. Kwak, Pongwiffy and Budgie the Little Helicopter.

Hayes played dames in British Christmas Pantomimes – his most recent roles being Nanny Nellie in Sleeping Beauty in Worthing, (2006) and Widow Twankey in Aladdin inChatham (2005). Other roles include parts in EastEnders as Michael Rawlins. Carry On England, Love Thy Neighbour, The Thin Blue Line, Here Come the Double Deckers, Potter’s Picture Palaceand the final series of Drop the Dead Donkey. He also provided the voice to characters in the English translation of the cartoon Alfred J. Kwak. In March 2011, Hayes appeared as Mr Pink in the ITV1 comedy TV series Benidorm. His latest theatre appearance was in You’re Only Young Twice (2012) He was also in the audio The Scorchies (2013).

Hayes first married actress Rosalind Allen, with whom he has two daughters and one son. He has two daughters with his second wife, actress and agent Wendy Padbury;^[their daughter, Charlie Hayes, also became an actress. He is now married to Jayne Male and lives in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. Hayes has one child with Male.

He has been a pub landlord, at the Stag Inn in the village of Offchurch in Warwickshire and in Hertfordshire, as landlord of the White Hart Tap in St Albans. He presented awards at the annual Isle of Wight County Press amateur theatre ceremony on 9 November 2010, at Shanklin Conservative Club. Hayes is a member of the Grand Order of Water Rats and in 2004, was made King Rat.

The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.

Tim Seely was born in 1935 in England. He has featured in numerous television productions. He had a major role in the Irish made feature film “Sally’s Irish Rogue” with Julie Harris.

“Wikipedia” entry:

In 1957, he gave his theatre debut in the play Tea and Sympathy at the London Comedy Theatre. Seely played the young Tom Lee, who fell in love with the senior Laura, played by Elizabeth Sellars.^[2] He played the same role in the adaption at New Shakespeare Theatre, Liverpool. There he also played Rodolfo in Arthur Miller‘s A View From the Bridge. In 1958, he acted alongside Maggie Smith at the London St Martin’s Theatre in an adaption of The Stepmother.

Seely was member of the BBC Radio Drama Company, with whom he acted the title role in Pericles, Prince of Tyre.^[1] He also had roles in various Shakespeare plays, including as Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew, Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, Polonius in Hamlet, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing and the King of France in All’s Well That Ends Well.^[1]In the late 1950s, he also took roles in film and television productions. One of his more prominent roles was Midshipmen Ned Young in the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, where Seely played alongside Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.

His “Wikipedia” entry can be read here.

Gladys Henson was an Irish born actress whose career was on the British stage and in character parts in movies. She usually played careworn housewives. Her films include “The Captive Heart” and “The Blue Lamp”. She was especially good in Sidney Furie’s “The Leather Boys” in 1964. She died in 1982 at the age of 85. Her “Wikipedia” page can be viewed here

Patrick Malahide was born in Berkshire, England the son of Irish parents in 1945. He made his television debut in 1976 in “The Flight of the Heron”. His many television appearances including “Middlemarch”, “The Singing Detective”and the title role of “Inspector Alleyn” in the 1993 series. His films include “Comfort and Joy” “and the James Bond thriller “The World Is Not Enough”. His website can be accessed here.

One Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;

Eric Portman. Wikipedia.

Eric Portman was born in 1901. He started work in 1922 as a salesman in the menswear department at the Marshall & Snelgrove department store in Leeds and acted in the amateur Halifax Light Opera Society.

He made his professional stage debut in 1924 with Henry Baynton‘s company. In 1924, Robert Courtneidge’s Shakespearian company arrived in Halifax. Portman joined the company as a ‘passenger’ and appeared in their production of Richard II at the Victoria Hall, Sunderland which led to Courtneidge giving him a contract. Portman made his West End debut at the Savoy Theatre in London, in September 1924, as Antipholous of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors. He was engaged by Lilian Baylis for the Old VicCompany. In 1928, Portman played Romeo at the rebuilt Old Vic. He became a successful theatre actor. In 1933, Portman was in Diplomacy at the Prince’s Theatre with Gerald du Maurier and Basil Rathbone.

In the 1930s, he began appearing in films, starting with an uncredited bit in The Girl from Maxim’s (1933) directed by Alexander Korda. In 1935, he appeared in four films, including Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn with Tod Slaughter. He also made Hyde Park Corner with Gordon Harker and directed by Sinclair Hill; Old Roses and Abdul the Damned.

In 1936 Portman had a stage hit playing Lord Byron in Bitter Harvest. After Hearts of Humanity (1936), he played Giuliano de’ Medici in Hill’s The Cardinal (1936). Portman made another film with Tod Slaughter, The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936), and was in Moonlight Sonata (1937).

He went to the US and played in Madame Bovary on Broadway for the Theatre Guild of America. He also had a small role in The Prince and the Pauper (1937), but disliked Hollywood and did not stay long.

He was back on Broadway in I Have Been Here Before by J. B. Priestley. Portman’s last London stage show was Jeannie.

In 1941 he had his first important film role playing a Nazi on the run Hirth in Powell and Pressburger‘s 49th Parallel, which was a big hit in the US and Britain. Portman was established as a star and signed a long term contract with Gainsborough Pictures.

Portman was in Powell and Pressburger’s follow up, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), which reworked the story of The 49th Parallelto be about Allied pilots in occupied Holland. He played a Belgian resistance leader in Uncensored (1942) from director Anthony Asquith, and a German pilot in Squadron Leader X (1943) with director Lance Comfort. Portman was a sailor in Asquith’s We Dive at Dawn (1943) and a factory supervisor in Millions Like Us (1943) from Launder and Gilliat.He was in another war story in Comfort’s Escape to Danger(1943), then was back with Powell and Pressburger for A Canterbury Tale (1944). Portman had the lead in Great Day (1945) with Flora Robson and in the expensive colonial epic Men of Two Worlds (1946).

In 1945, exhibitors voted him the 10th most popular star at the British box office. He maintained that ranking the following year.

He played the bogus Major in Terence Rattigan‘s play Separate Tables in 1956–57 on Broadway. For this performance, he was nominated for a Tony Award (Best Actor (Dramatic)). In 1958 he appeared on Broadway in a short-lived production of Jane Eyre as Rochester. Portman had better luck the following year in a production of Eugene O’Neill‘s A Touch of the Poet, which had a long run. In contract, Flowering Cherry by Robert Bolt, with Portman in the title role only lasted five performances on Broadway.

Later film roles included in The Naked Edge (1961), Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), West 11 (1963), The Man Who Finally Died (1963), The Bedford Incident (1965), and The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966).

In 1962 Portman was in a stage adaptation of A Passage to India that ran for 109 performances on Broadway.

Near the end of his life he played character roles including Number Two in the TV series The Prisoner, appearing in the episode “Free For All” (1967), as well as films including The Whisperers (1967) and Deadfall (1968), both for director Bryan Forbes. His final film was Assignment to Kill (1968).

Portman was homosexual, although newspapers never reported this during the mid-1950s when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Newspapers refrained from identifying his sexuality throughout the 1960s when it could still have damaged his career. His partner was actor Knox Laing.

Portman died at age 68 at his home in St Veep, Cornwall on 7 December 1969 from a heart disease. He was buried in St. Veep parish church, Cornwall, UK.

A blue plaque was erected by the Halifax Civic Trust.

Catherine Woodville was born in London in 1938. She featured in many television series in Britain in the 1960’s. In the late 60’s she went to Hollywood and made the terrific Western “Posse” with Kirk Douglas. She has guest starred in several of the U.S. television series. She was at one time married to the actor Patrick Magee of “Avengers” fame and was married for several years to the late actor Edward Albert. She died in 2013.

Her “Times” obituary:

The actress Catherine Woodville was an attractive presence on television and in the cinema. She was in the first episode of The Avengers in 1961 and made a glamorous one-off appearance as the priestess Natira in Star Trek.

She was born in London in 1938 and started acting at the age of 16 in a touring production of T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. Her first important television role was Helena Landless in the 1960 adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and she appeared with Ian McShane, John Hurt and Samantha Eggar as university students in the 1962 film, The Wild and the Willing.

In 1961 she was in the first episode of the secret agent spoof, The Avengers, opposite the bowler-hatted Patrick Macnee, and her character’s death helped to launch the series. She had a small part in a later episode and in 1965 she became Macnee’s second wife, though the marriage lasted barely a year and ended in divorce after four.

She was busy in television through the 1960s. She played Estelle opposite Harold Pinter (one of his occasional acting roles) in a BBC adaptation of Sartre’s In Camera and had guest spots in popular series including Z-Cars, Danger Man, The Saint and No Hiding Place. Her other films included the thriller, The Informers, the political drama The Crooked Road, with Robert Ryan and Stewart Granger, and the frontier adventure, The Brigand of Kandahar.

During her British career she was credited as Catherine Woodville and on moving the US in 1967 she changed her professional name to Kate Woodville. She made an early mark on American television playing Natira, the priestess who rules the people of the asteroid Yonada and falls in love with Dr McCoy, in the 1968 Star Trek episode, For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.

Other American television credits included Mission: Impossible, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Little House on the Prairie and Wonder Woman. She played Betty Gow, nurse to the family, in the TV movie, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, with Cliff de Young as the aviator and Anthony Hopkins as Bruno Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. In 1975 she returned to the cinema in the western Posse, starring and directed by Kirk Douglas. She became a life member of the Actors Studio.

In 1979 she married the actor and environmentalist, Edward Albert, son of the actor Eddie Albert. She gave up acting and started a business breeding and training horses.

Edward Albert died in 2006, aged 55, and she is survived by their daughter, Thaïs, a poet and songwriter.

Katherine Woodville, actress, was born on December 4, 1938. She died of cancer on June 5, 2013, aged 74