There was a time in ther sixties when it looked that Barbara Ferris was going to have a major film career. It di not happen to the level it should have but she did have the lead in three good movies. John Boorman cast her in “Catch Us If You Can” with the Dave Clark Five, “Interlude” with Oskar Werner and “A NIce Girl Like Me” in 1969. Since then she has worked regularly on the stage and television in the UK. Her “Wikipedia” page can be read here.
TCM Overview:
t the tender age of 16, Barbara Ferris began her entertainment career as an actress. Ferris kickstarted her acting career in various films such as the drama “Children of the D*mned” (1963) with Ian Hendry and the Laurence Olivier dramatic adaptation “Term of Trial” (1963). She was nominated for a BAFTA Award for “Having A Wild Weekend” in 1965. Ferris also brought characters to life with her vocal talents in the adaptation “Tom Thumb” (1958) with Russ Tamblyn.
She continued to work steadily in film throughout the sixties and the eighties, appearing in “Interlude” (1968) and “A Nice Girl Like Me” (1969). She also worked in television around this time, including a part on “The Strauss Family” (ABC, 1972-73). Film continued to be her passion as she played roles in “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and “A Chorus of Disapproval” (1989). Ferris more recently acted in “The Krays” (1990) with Billie Whitelaw.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
David Royle was born in 1961 in Salford, Manchester. He spent three years in the British army (Royal Artillery)before studying acting at the Drama Centre in London. He is best remembered for featuring in 29 episodes of “Dalziel & Pascoe”. The series was not the same since he left the show. Sadly David Royle died of MS in 2017. His IMDB page can be accessed here.
Googie Withers obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.
Googie Withers was one of the great stars of the Golden Age of British Cinema. She was born in 1917 in Karachi in now Pakistan. Her father was British and her mother Dutch. She acted on the London stage and made her film debut in 1935 in “The Girl in the Crowd”. She was one of Margaret Lockwood’s chums in “The Lady Vanishes”. Some of her best remembered films include “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing”,””Pink String and Ceiling Wax”, “It Always Rains On Sundays” and “Miranda”. She married the Australian actor John McCallum and went to live there with him. However they acted on the stage in Britain and were acting on Broadway when they were in their eighties. John McCallum died in 2010. Googie Withers died at the age of 94 in her home in Sydney, Australia in July 2011.
“Guardian” obituary:
Dead Of Night, poster, bottom left from left: Ralph Michael, Googie Withers, right top to bottom: Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, 1945. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers’s striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. A bored wife, she gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, played by John McCallum, soon to be her real-life husband. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards.
What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped, she acquired great skill at playing wives in various states of dissatisfaction because of the implied sexual shortcomings of their husbands.
She was especially effective as the not entirely unsympathetic wife of a judge in the stage version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952). “Respectable” but emotionally unsatisfied, she throws herself at a weak and irresponsible ex-RAF wonderboy.
Another Rattigan creation that might have gone to Withers was the part of the wife of the dried-up and professionally despised schoolmaster in the film of The Browning Version (1951). In the event, Jean Kent provided one of the most harrowing moments to that date in British cinema when she tried to destroy her husband’s remaining hopes with such vicious hatred that the scene was often booed and hissed in 1950s cinemas. Withers, while making the cause of the wife’s frustration just as plainly sexual, might well have conveyed a certain residual warmth and humanity that would have transformed melodrama into drama.
Withers was a loss to the British stage and screen when she followed her husband to his native Australia in the late 1950s. They had married in 1948, and had two daughters, Joanna and Amanda, and a son, Nicholas. From 1955 onwards, she alternated between productions in the southern and northern hemispheres, including Broadway. But while her touring work focused more on Australia and New Zealand, she still made the first three seasons of a British TV series, Within These Walls (1974-75), as the governor of a women’s prison, which provided her biggest national and international audience.
Georgette Lizette Withers was born in Karachi, in pre-partition India, to a British naval captain who hated the thought of his daughter going on the stage and a Dutch mother who quietly encouraged her. The captain, who tried to run a Birmingham foundry after leaving the Royal Navy through poor health, was a high-handed man who clashed with fellow directors whom he openly despised, and lost his job. His daughter inherited his imperious inability to keep his opinions to himself, but in her case it was softened by her feminine humour.
At 12, while a boarder at Fredville Park private school near Dover, she took dancing lessons, initially to straighten bandy legs. At the same age she made her first professional appearance, in the chorus of a children’s show at the Victoria Palace, London. She persuaded her parents to send her to the Italia Conti school after she had worked her normal school day at the Convent of the Holy Family in Kensington.
A fall during dancing class permanently weakened an arm and indicated a less arduous form of dancing. She did cabaret in Midnight Follies at the Mayfair hotel and the Kit Kat Club. At 16 she was the youngest member of the chorus of Nice Goings On and was soon appearing in other popular musicals.
From 1935 onwards, she appeared in more than 60 films and television productions, including some of the finest movies of their time: One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), They Came to a City (1944, from the JB Priestley novel); Miranda (1948), in which Glynis Johns played the mermaid and Withers the all-too-normal woman; and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), with Richard Widmark.
On the stage she was a beguiling Beatrice in Stratford-upon-Avon’s production of Much Ado About Nothing (1958), and though her move to Australia often brought her under the umbrella of her husband’s theatre management, she continued to play in adventurous work in Britain, including Ionesco’s Exit the King for the Edinburgh Festival and the Royal Court theatre. A production of Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the Chichester Festival theatre in 1976 was so successful that it went to the West End, Canada and on tour in Britain. Withers’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1979) at Chichester managed to step out of the shadow of Edith Evans’s high-camp shadow without losing impact.
In the 1970s, when traditional leading ladies were less in demand, Withers’s career became more variable. In 1971 she starred in a film produced and directed by her husband, and featuring her daughter Joanna, called Nickel Queen, otherwise known as Ghost Town Millionairess, an examination of socialites and riff-raff in an Australian town dominated by nickel production. It was not well received, one comment being that it was an appalling bit of Australiana that made Barry Humphries’s film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) look like a refreshing can of Foster’s.
The role of Faye Boswell in Within These Walls three years later proved to be a sounder vehicle. Giving her formidability a greyer hue, Withers played a prison governor striving to be, as well as a disciplinarian, as sensitive as possible to the problems of the prisoners. The series led to further successes in the 1980s, when on television she appeared in distinguished productions including adaptations of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up.
She continued to be active in the 1990s, appearing in two highly praised films. Country Life (1994), directed by Michael Blakemore, was a version of Uncle Vanya set in Australia in 1919, showing what was on the collective mind of one part of the British Empire as Chekhov had shown what was on the minds of a fading Russian social class.
Shine (1996) was based on the career of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, beset by struggles against family pressures and mental instability. His real-life interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto was used in the film and became a controversial attraction in the concert hall. Withers played the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, who helped Helfgott in his ambition to get away from his possessive father and to London for his higher musical training, but died before she could enjoy his success.
Withers was a great trouper of the old school who, coming back to England in 1967 to play the forceful mayoress in Shaw’s Getting Married, found the country “changed and lacking in energy”. The woman who was once called “the best bad girl in British films” was always prepared to help make up any deficiency in that respect. At 85 she was still commanding attention on the West End stage, in Lady Windermere’s Fan.
In 1980 she was appointed AO, and in 2001 CBE. Her husband died last year, and she is survived by her children.
• Googie (Georgette Lizette) Withers, actor, born 12 March 1917; died 15 July 2011
The “Guardian” obituary on Ms Withers can also be accessed here.
Anita Harris had a neat reputation as a ballad singer when she also began an acting career on film. She was born in Somerset in 1942. She was part of the Cliff Adam Singers and made several television appearances on British television with the group. She then began a solo singing career and in 1967 has a massive hit with “Just Loving You”. In thelate sixties she became part of the “Carry On” group and starred in “Follow that Camel” and “Carry On Again Doctor”. She still continues to appear on stage and concert halls in Britain. Interview with “Express Newspapers” can be read here.
Anita Harris. Wikipedia.
Anita Harris was born in 1942 and is an English actress, singer and entertainer.
Harris was born in Somerset; her family moved from Midsomer Norton to Bournemouthwhen she was seven. She won a talent contest at the age of three. However, it was her penchant for figure skating which led to her performing career, she began skating at the neighbourhood rink, eventually becoming a regular at the Queens Ice Rink in London. Seen by a talent scout shortly before her sixteenth birthday, she was offered a chance to skate in Paris or to travel to Las Vegas where she would be a dancer in a chorus line. She accepted the latter, danced at the El Rancho Hotel in Las Vegas. We did three shows a night and on the 12th night, we had the night off”, she said years later.
On returning to the UK, she performed in a vocal group known as the Grenadiers and then spent three years with the Cliff Adams Singers.She was still in her teens when John Barry’s manager, Tony Lewis, offered her a recording contract by EMI and made her first recordings with the John Barry Seven — a group which was a successful chart act. This first single, a double A-side of “I Haven’t Got You”, written by Lionel Bart and “Mr One and Only”, did not reach the charts.
Subsequent to their meeting, when they both auditioned for a musical revue, Mike Margolis and Harris formed a personal and professional relationship marrying in 1973. He became her manager and wrote the songs which served as her second and third singles: “Lies”/”Don’t Think About Love”(Vocalion, September 1964) and “Willingly”/”At Last Love” (Decca, February 1965).
In January 1965 she performed at the San Remo Music Festival. Her duet with Beppe Cardile, “L’amore è partito”, failed to reach the finals but even to participate in such a star-studded event augured well for her stardom. She made her label debut for Pye Records with the May 1965 release “Trains and Boats and Planes“, although rival versions by both the song’s composer Burt Bacharach (with vocals by the Breakaways) and Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas eclipsed her recording. She had four subsequent releases on Pye, including the only evident recording of the Burt Bacharach/ Hal David composition “London Life”.
In 1966, she moved to CBS Records where her debut release was also her debut album: Somebody’s in My Orchard. Her chart breakthrough came in the summer of 1967 with the single “Just Loving You“, a Tom Springfield composition which singer Dusty Springfield had suggested that Tom (her brother) give to Harris after Dusty and Harris had performed on the same episode of Top of the Pops.
Recorded at Olympic Studios in a session produced by Margolis and featuring harmonica virtuoso Harry Pitch, Just Loving You” had been released in January 1967 but did not reach the UK Top 50 until 29 June 1967.[10] Even after peaking at No. 6 on 26 August 1967 “Just Loving You” remained in the UK Top 40 until the end of the year, and was reported to have accumulated UK sales of 625,000 in six months. Besides charting at No. 18 in Ireland, “Just Loving You” was a Top Ten hit in South Africa where sales reached 200,000 copies. The disc was released in September 1967 in the United States where it rose to No. 20 on the “Easy Listening” chart in Billboard and approached the mainstream Pop “Hot 100” chart. It rose no higher than No. 120 on the “Bubbling Under” chart. In January 1968 Harris made her only appearance on the UK album chart when her Just Loving You album reached No. 29.
The sustained interest in “Just Loving You” predicated a mild chart impact for her follow-up single “The Playground”, released in September 1967. This reached its chart peak of No. 46 by 28 October 1967, the same week “Just Loving You” (which had dropped out of the Top 20 at No. 21) returned to the Top 20 for three more weeks. However she did score a substantial hit with her 5 January 1968 release, a remake of the standard “Anniversary Waltz“, which spent eight weeks in the UK Top 40, peaking at No. 21.
After just missing the UK Top 50 with the single “We’re Going on a Tuppenny Bus Ride” (released 17 May 1968), she made her final chart appearance with her rendition of “Dream a Little Dream of Me“. Released on 26 July 1968, her single version peaked in the UK Top 50 at No. 33,[10] whilst the Mama Cass Elliot version peaked at No. 11.
A third album, Cuddly Toy, was released in 1969.
Since 1961 she has made numerous television appearances, mostly as a performer, occasionally as an actress, and her few film roles included a cameo as a casino singer in Death Is a Woman (1966) and co-starring roles in the comedy films Follow That Camel (1967) and Carry On Doctor (1968). Harris gained her role in the latter film while working in a revue Way Out in Piccadilly with Frankie Howerd. Backstage, he introduced her to the producer and director of the series resulting in the decision to cast Harris as well as Howerd.[2][4] In December 1970, Thames Television debuted the children’s TV series Jumbleland which she co-produced and in which she starred as Witch Witt Witty.
In 2014, Harris appeared in a lead guest role in the prime-time BBC drama, Casualty . She continues to perform with her band around the country, including at the Royal Albert Hall, London. She performed in pantomime over Christmas 2014-15 by appearing as the wicked Baroness in a production of Cinderella at the Grand Opera House in York. “I’ve played Aladdin, Jack and Dick Whittington and Robinson Crusoe. I’ve loved playing principal boy and I’m sorry that boys are now playing that role”, she told a York press meeting at the time.
On 12 January 2015, The Mail on Sunday reported that Anita Harris and her husband and manager Mike Margolis were, or were about to be, declared bankrupt by HM Revenue and Customs over historic tax arrears of £14,000 and £25,000 respectively.[13] The bankruptcy order of 11 August 2014 was annulled when an IVA was approved on 27 May 2015.
Anita Harris
During 2016, Harris toured with her show across the UK, An Evening with Anita Harris. With musical accompaniment, she revealed anecdotes from her life in showbusiness, the people she has met and the places she has been. She appeared in ITV‘s Last Laugh in Vegas, and was a contestant in the BBC‘s Celebrity MasterChef 2018.
In 2019, Harris guest starred in the first episode of Series 20 of Midsomer Murders’ entitled “The Ghost of Causton Abbey” as Irene Taylor, an accomplice to the killer.
She will guest star as a medium in an episode of EastEnders which is due to be aired in August 2019.
Anita will be starring in the UK Tour of Cabaret, alongside John Partridge from August 2019 to early 2020.
Ben Daniels was born in 1964 in Nuneaton, England. On TV he has appeared in plays such as “The Lost Language of Cranes” and in the TV series “Cutting It” and “Law & Order UK”. On film he has been in “Beautiful Thing” and “I Want You”. Website on Ben Daniels can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
Ben Daniels first became enamored with acting when he took drama lessons in comprehensive school. After graduating, his love for the craft led him to carry on studying at the well-respected London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. When he finished there, he found success on various stages around the United Kingdom. His portrayal of a murderer in the production of “Never the Sinner” earned him a nomination for a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor, boosting his theater career even further. He first appeared on screen with a role as a policeman in the dramatic comedy film “Wish You Were Here.” From there, he began to make his mark on television with a string of appearances. He could be seen in such productions as the 1988 TV movie “Freedom Fighter,” the military drama “Soldier Soldier” in 1992, and playing Mercutio in the 1994 TV movie production of “Romeo & Juliet.” His first recurring role came in 1994 in the short-lived comedy series “Outside Edge.” It was his performance from 2002 to 2004, however, in the lauded drama “Cutting It,” playing Finn Bevan, the ex-husband and business rival of a hair salon owner, that exposed him to a wider audience. He went on to have recurring roles in many other productions, such as crime drama “Law & Order: UK,” the mini-series “The Passion,” and the war thriller “The Sate Within.” Some of his other films include 2002’s drama “Fogbound,” 2005’s action film “Doom,” and the fantasy drama “Luna.”
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Barbara Shelley is an English actress best known for her roles in many of the Hammer horror films of the 1960’s. She was born in London in 1933. Her film career began in Italian movies in the mid 1950’s. She then gained smal parts in international films like “The Little Hut” with Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger in 1957. Among her notable fims we must mention “Dracula, Prince of Darkness”, “The Gorgon”, “Rasputin the Mad Monk” and “The Camp at Blood Island”. She has now retired from acting. Interview with Barbara Shelley in “Express Newpapers” can be read here.
Barbara Shelley obituary: Actor who traumatised and tantalised
Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 00:26
Barbara Shelley and Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), which ‘traumatised and tantalised’ generations of viewers. Photograph: Everett/Rex
Barbara Shelley (Barbara Kowin)
Born: February 13th, 1932
Died: January 4th, 2021
During the heyday of Hammer, the Berkshire-based film production company that transformed the horror genre, there were few surer signs of a film’s integrity than Barbara Shelley’s name in the credits. The copper-haired Shelley, who has died aged 88 after contracting Covid-19, brought elegance and conviction to her work. She possessed a grounded, rational quality that instantly conferred gravitas on whatever lunatic occurrences were unfolding around her.
In Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), she gave a deft two-sided performance as the straitlaced Helen, who becomes a ravenous bloodsucker after being taken under the bat-wing of the Count, played by Christopher Lee. When next we meet her in his Karlsbad castle, she assures a stricken friend that “nothing’s wrong”, only for her lips to part to reveal tiny pointed fangs.
Generations of viewers were traumatised and tantalised by that scene, as well as a later one in which Helen taps on her friend’s window in the middle of the night. “Please let me in,” she pleads. “It’s cold out here. So cold. Everything’s all right now.” Shelley makes the appeal sound so reasonable that any one of us would surely have unfastened the latch.
She should be much bigger than she is, but I don’t think she really cares whether she is a star or not. She can act, God, she can act!
Helen’s eventual demise, held down on a table by monks as a stake is driven into her heart, was physically demanding on Shelley, who suffered from chronic back pain. Nevertheless, she was proud of that scene. “There’s absolute evil in there when she’s struggling,” she told Mark Gatiss in his 2010 documentary series A History of Horror, “and then suddenly she’s staked.
She also recounted how she and Lee, who prided themselves on being “un-corpseable”, would compete to make one another laugh during takes.
For Quatermass and the Pit (1967), her last of eight films for Hammer, Shelley was part of a team of scientists investigating an alien spacecraft found during an expansion of London’s underground transport system. She kept her cool while decomposing aliens were disinterred from the tunnels and ferried past her, dripping with green goo. When she fell under the electro-magnetic spell of the spacecraft, her body convulsing as images of alien life were fed into her brain, she made the ordeal look painfully believable.
Shelley named the picture’s director, Roy Ward Baker, as her favourite of all the film-makers she had worked with. He, in turn, told Bizarre magazine in 1974 that he was “mad” about her. “Mad in the sense of love,” he said. “We used to waltz about the set together, a great love affair. It puzzles me about her. She should be much bigger than she is, but I don’t think she really cares whether she is a star or not. She can act, God, she can act!”
Italy
She was born Barbara Kowin in London. She worked as a model but found that precluded casting directors from taking her seriously, despite her theatrical training. A fleeting role in the Hammer whodunit Mantrap (1953) came her way but she enjoyed better luck in Italy, where she worked as both model and actor after being discovered by the Italian comic Walter Chiari while on holiday in Rome.
Returning to the UK four years later, Shelley was put under contract by British Lion and cast in Cat Girl (1957), an unofficial remake of Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People. To prevent too much of her body being shown during nude scenes, she wrote “STOP” on her chest. She also refused to appear topless in Blood of the Vampire (1958), in which she was menaced by Sir Donald Wolfit, and threatened to sue the studio if it went ahead with a body double.https://8d2c73e993bd21e28fd0c48fbcdc9094.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
She had no issue, however, with a revealing seduction scene in Rasputin, The Mad Monk (1966). “That scene was in the script when I read it,” she told Fangoria magazine in 2010. “The scenes I refused to do were when they suddenly would say to me, ‘Oh, you take your clothes off here’. The answer to that was always no.”
In Village of the Damned (1960), adapted from John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, she was heartbreaking as a woman who gives birth to one of a breed of malevolent telepathic children. For one of her first woman-turned-monster roles, in The Gorgon (1964), she offered to have snakes draped over her. “I wouldn’t need any makeup,” she told the studio, “just a green face and the headdress of real snakes.”
Surprised enough when her proposal was rejected, and another actor (Prudence Hyman) cast as the monster into which her character transformed, she was positively crestfallen when she saw what the effects department produced instead. “They came up with these terrible sorts of rubber snakes dancing around, and it just looked awful. It wasn’t frightening at all.” She called it “probably the biggest regret I’ve had in any film I ever made” though she admired the look of the picture, noting that “every shot . . . resembles a Rembrandt painting”.
Her numerous television appearances included roles in The Man from UNCLE (1965), Crown Court (1972), Z Cars (1973), Doctor Who (1984) and EastEnders (1988). She was also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1975 and 1977.
Shelley claimed not to have grasped the reach of her horror movies until she began attending fan conventions. “I realised that my work had been appreciated and that I had – through those horror films – actually reached a far bigger audience than I would ever have done if I’d stuck to the theatre.”https://8d2c73e993bd21e28fd0c48fbcdc9094.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Any irritation she felt stemmed from the emphasis placed on the sexual component of her films. “I had one or two dissertations on horror sent to me by students, and all the discussion ever seems to be concerned with is exploitation and the licking of blood and a scene of people making love, and it’s not right. It annoys me intensely, because my career was not built on exploitation and sex. It was built on working very hard.”
She retired from acting in 1988. Though she never got around to writing her autobiography, she had a title in mind: What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Film Like This? – Guardian
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
The sexy lady subsequently dubbed “The First Leading Lady of British Horror” was born Barbara Kowin in 1933 in London, England. With her beautiful looks and stature, she worked as a model during her salad days. Her film career began in Italy in the mid-1950s in such tempting fare as New Moon (1955) [New Moon] and Nero’s Mistress (1956) [Nero’s Mistress], but when it seemed like she was going to remain in the minor ranks, she returned to England to try to better her career. After appearing in the minor sex farceThe Little Hut (1957) with Stewart Granger, David Niven and Ava Gardner
Barbara Shelley & Martin Stephens
, Barbara caught a bit of film notoriety in the title role of Cat Girl (1957), a low budget production in which she played a woman possessed by a family curse who develops psychic links with a leopard. This paid off and she quickly evolved into a popular Gothic glamour woman at Hammer Studios. Starting things off with The Camp on Blood Island (1958) and Blood of the Vampire (1958), the lovely actress proceeded to stake out her own lucrative territory in the horror genres. Throughout the 1960s she co-starred in the classic Village of the Damned (1960), along with The Shadow of the Cat (1961), The Gorgon (1964), The Secret of Blood Island (1964) (which was the sequel to her aforementioned Camp on Blood Island), Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966) andFive Million Years to Earth (1967). By the late 60s, however, Barbara’s film career had fallen aside and she turned to TV. Retired now, she has pursued interior decorating in recent years. Whether playing female monsters or their intended victims, Barbara played it straight and handled it all with requisite style and grace. For this, she is now occasionally seen by film fans at conventions as an integral figure of camp horror history.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Kitty McShane was part of the famous British double bill “Old Mother Riley and her daughter Kitty”. She was born in Dublin 1897. She was the fourth of seventeen children. In 1913 she married Arthur Lucan (Old Mother Riley). They became a popular music hall act. They began making films together in 1937 with”Old Mother Riley”. Together they made 13 Mother Riley films together. Their off-screen fights were legendary. Kitty McShane did not appear in the final Mother Riley film. Kitty McShane died in 1964. Radio recording of Arthur Lucan & Kitty McShane can be heard here. Very good article on Arthur Lucan & Kitty McShane can be accessed here on the Britmovie website.
“In a long career, Kathleen Harrison was rigidly type-cast, kept firmly below stairs. On the few occasions she was not a maid or the daily, she was a nosy neighbour or a Cockney mum – clearly the British character actress par excellence. She has been loyal, cheeky, vague ( ‘I dunno, dear’ is one of her stock remarks) and chin-up cheerful -‘common’ to use a word she (the screen Harrison) uses about others but never herself. There have been other actresses of this vernacular – Thora Hird, Dandy Nichols and the more eccentric and divinely funny Irene Handl – but Harrison is the only one who achieved real film stardom. In her own modest way she was as accomplished a screen artist as any.” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972)
Kathleen Harrison was long a stalwart of British cinema. Her place was always firmly below stairs – a cook perhaps, or a cleaning lady often answering the door with a puzzled expression always fearful that trouble was just around the corner. She was born in 1892 in Blackburn in Lancashire. She studied at RADA and then went to live in Agentina for some time. On her return to Britain, she made her stage debut in 1926 in “The Constant Flirt”. Her first major film role was in 1931 in “Hobson’s Choice”. Kathleen Harrison made one film in Hollywood in Emlyn Williams “Night Must Fall” in 1937 as a maid (naturally). She achieved national fame as Mrs Huggett in four films about the Huggett family. In the mid 1960’s she starred in a very popular television series Mrs Thursday about a cleaner who won the football pools. She died in 1995 at the age of 103.
Her “Independent” obituary by Anthony Hayward:One of the greatest British film character actresses of the Forties and Fifties, the homely Kathleen Harrison made a career out of playing cockney mothers, maids and charwomen. After fame as the cleaner Ma Huggett in the series of Huggetts film comedies and a long-running radio serial, she found a new audience on television in the Sixties with the hugely successful comedy- drama Mrs Thursday.
She was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1892. Her family moved to London when she was five and the aspiring actress trained at RADA (1914-15), where she won the Du Maurier Bronze Medal. While playing Eliza Doolittle there in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the writer attended rehearsals and gave her a piece of advice that was to become the inspiration for many of the roles she would later play. “Go out into the Old Kent Road and just listen to the women talking,” he told her.
However, on graduation, she married and went abroad to live in Argentina and Madeira for eight years. On her return to Britain, Harrison made her stage debut as Mrs Judd in The Constant Flirt, at the Pier Theatre, Eastbourne, in 1926, and appeared in the West End for the first time the following year as Winnie in The Cage, at the Savoy Theatre. Her many subsequent West End plays included A Damsel In Distress, The Merchant and Venus, Lovers’ Meeting, Line Engaged, The Corn is Green, Night Must Fall – later repeating her role as the housekeeper in the 1937 film version – and Sailor Beware!, in which she took over the lead role of fearsome mother Emma Hornett that had made a star of Peggy Mount.
Harrison had already made her film debut with a small role in Our Boys, back in 1915, when she returned to the screen in the 1931 picture Hobson’s Choice, based on Harold Brighouse’s play set in her native Lancashire. Cast firmly in the mould of cockney domestics and mothers, she appeared in another 85 films, including The Man from Toronto (1932, as Jessie Matthews’ maid), The Ghoul (1933, with Boris Karloff), Home from Home (1939, as Sandy Powell’s wife), In Which We Serve (1942), Oliver Twist (1948, as Mrs Sowerby), The Winslow Boy (1948, repeating her stage role as the excitable maid), Scrooge (1951, with Alastair Sim), The Pickwick Papers (1952, as Miss Wardle), Lilacs in the Spring (1954, as Anna Neagle’s dresser), The Big Money (1956, as Ian Carmichael’s mother), Alive and Kicking (1958, with Sybil Thorndike and Estelle Winwood as three lively old ladies escaping from a home), On the Fiddle (1961, as Stanley Holloway’s wife) and West 11 (1963, as Alfred Lynch’s mother).
Harrison first played the London East End charwoman Ma Huggett in Holiday Camp (1947), a film featuring the fictional Huggett family and capitalising on a post-war leisure innovation. The public loved it and the actress continued in the role, alongside Jack Warner as her screen husband and, at various times, Jimmy Hanley and Petula Clark playing two of their children, when Rank tried to capitalise on the original’s success by making the sequels Here Come the Huggetts (1948), Vote for Huggett (1949) and The Huggetts Abroad (1949). When the series received a critical mauling, Rank axed it, but such was the Huggetts’ popularity that they switched to radio in Meet the Huggetts, a serial that ran from 1953 to 1962.
As her cinema appearances became less frequent, Harrison also turned to television, finding a large following as the star of Mrs Thursday, a role created for her by Ted Willis in 1966. Again, the series was panned by the critics, but viewers loved it and immediately made Mrs Thursday the most popular programme on television, even toppling the mighty Coronation Street from its No 1 slot in the ratings. In the programme, also featuring Hugh Manning – later to play the Rev Donald Hinton in Emmerdale Farm – Harrison acted a charwoman who inherits pounds 10m and the controlling interest in a multinational company.
Five years later, she turned down the title role in Jeremy Sandford’s acclaimed BBC play Edna the Inebriate Woman, which won Patricia Hayes a Best Actress on TV award. Harrison’s other television appearances included Shades of Greene, Danger UXB and two BBC serialisations of Charles Dickens novels, Our Mutual Friend and Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens was her favourite author). She made her final screen appearance in the 1979 Disney comedy chase film The London Connection in the small role of an elderly bystander.
In 1992, Harrison owned up to reaching the grand old age of 100 and received her telegram from the Queen, after a lifetime of making herself out to be six years younger. She was one of Britain’s oldest surviving actresses.
Anthony Hayward
Kathleen Harrison, actress: born Blackburn, Lancashire 23 February 1892; married 1916 John Henry Back (died 1960; one son, one daughter, and one son deceased); died 7 December 1995
Kathleen Harrison’s “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.
During the late 1960s Mills began performing in theatrical plays, and played in more mature roles. The age of contracts with studios soon passed. For her success with Disney she received the Disney Legend Award. Although she has not maintained the box office success or the Hollywood A-list she experienced as a child actress, she has continued to make films and TV appearances, including a starring role in the UK television mini-series The Flame Trees of Thika in 1981, the title role in Disney’s television series Good Morning, Miss Bliss in 1988, and as Caroline, a main character in Wild at Heart (2007–2012) on ITV in the UK.
Mills was born in Marylebone, London. She was 12 when she was discovered by J. Lee Thompson, who was initially looking for a boy to play the lead role in Tiger Bay, which co-starred her father, veteran British actor Sir John Mills. The movie was popular at the box office in Britain.
Bill Anderson, one of Walt Disney‘s producers, saw Tiger Bay and suggested that Mills be given the lead role in Pollyanna. The role of the orphaned “glad girl” who moves in with her aunt catapulted Mills to stardom in the United States and earned her a special Academy Award (the last person to receive the Juvenile Oscar). Because Mills could not be present to receive the trophy, Annette Funicello accepted it for her.
Disney subsequently cast Mills as twins Sharon and Susan who reunite their divorced parents in The Parent Trap. In the film, Mills sings “Let’s Get Together” as a duet with herself. The film was a hit around the world, reaching number 8 on a US TOP TEN list.
Mills received an offer to make a film in Britain for Bryan Forbes, Whistle Down the Wind(1961), about some children who believe an escaped convict is Jesus. It was a hit at the British box office and Mills was voted the biggest star in Britain for 1961.
Mills was offered the title role in Lolita by Stanley Kubrick but her father turned it down. “I wish I had done it,” she said in 1962. “It was a smashing film.”
Mills returned to Disney for an adventure film, In Search of the Castaways (1962) based on a novel by Jules Verne. It was another popular success and Mills would be voted the fifth biggest star in the country for the next two years.
In 1963 Disney announced plans to film I Capture the Castle, from the novel by Dodie Smith, with Hayley Mills in the role of Cassandra. However, Disney never produced the film.
Her fourth movie for Disney did less well though was still successful, Summer Magic (1963), a musical adaptation of the novel Mother Carey’s Chickens.
Mills had a change of pace with Sky West and Crooked (1965), set in the world of gypsies, written by her mother and directed by her father. It was not very popular. In contrast, her last film with Disney, the comedy That Darn Cat!, did very well at the box office.
During her six-year run at Disney, Mills was arguably the most popular child actress of the era. Critics noted that America’s favourite child star was, in fact, quite British and very ladylike. The success of “Let’s Get Together” (which hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, No. 17 in Britain and No. 1 in Mexico) also led to the release of a record album on Disney’s Buena Vista label, Let’s Get Together with Hayley Mills, which also included her only other hit song, “Johnny Jingo” (Billboard No. 21, 1962). In 1962 British exhibitors voted her the most popular film actress in the country.
For Universal, Mills made another movie with her father, The Truth About Spring (1965), co-starring Disney regular James MacArthur as her love interest. It was mildly popular. However The Trouble with Angels (1966), was a huge hit; Mills played as a prankish Catholic boarding school girl with “scathingly brilliant” schemes, opposite screen veteran Rosalind Russell, and directed by another Hollywood veteran, Ida Lupino. She then provided a voice for The Daydreamer (1966).
Shortly thereafter, Mills appeared alongside her father and Hywel Bennett in director Roy Boulting’s critically acclaimed film The Family Way (1966), a comedy about a couple having difficulty consummating their marriage, featuring a score by Paul McCartney and arrangements by Beatles producer George Martin. She began a romantic relationship with Roy Boulting, and they eventually married in 1971.
She then starred as the protagonist of Pretty Polly (1967), opposite famous Indian film actor Shashi Kapoor in Singapore.
Mills made another movie for Boulting, the controversial horror thriller Twisted Nerve in 1968, along with her Family Way co-star Hywel Bennett. She made a comedy, Take a Girl Like You (1970) with Oliver Reed, and made her West End debut in The Wild Duck in 1970. She worked for Boulting again on Mr. Forbush and the Penguins (1971), replacing the original female lead.
In 1981 Mills returned to acting with a starring role in the UK television mini-series The Flame Trees of Thika, based on Elspeth Huxley‘s memoir of her childhood in East Africa. The series was well received, prompting Mills to accept more acting roles. She then returned to America and made two appearances on The Love Boat.
Mills recalled her childhood in the 2000 documentary film Sir John Mills’ Moving Memories which was directed by Marcus Dillistone and written by her brother Jonathan. In 2005 Mills appeared in the acclaimed short film, Stricken, written and directed by Jayce Bartok. In 2007 she began appearing as Caroline in the ITV1 African vet drama, Wild at Heart; her sister Juliet Mills was a guest star in series 4 of the drama.
In 2010 Mills appeared in Mandie and the Cherokee Treasure, based on one of the popular Mandie novels of Lois Gladys Leppard.
Mills made her stage debut in a 1966 West End revival of Peter Pan. In 2000 she made her Off-Broadway debut in Sir Noël Coward‘s Suite in Two Keys, opposite American actress Judith Ivey, for which she won a Theatre World Award. In 1991 she appeared as Anna Leonowensin the Australian production of The King and I. In December 2007, for their annual birthday celebration of “The Master”, The Noël Coward Society invited Mills as the guest celebrity to lay flowers in front of Coward’s statue at New York’s Gershwin Theatre, thereby commemorating the 108th birthday of Sir Noel.
In 1997, Mills starred in the U.S. national tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I.
Mills later had a second son, Jason Lawson, during a relationship with British actor Leigh Lawson.
Mills’ partner since 1997 is actor and writer Firdous Bamji, who is 20 years her junior.
Mills had involvement with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishna” movement). She wrote the preface to the book, The Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking, published in 1984. However, in a 1997 article of People magazine, Mills stated that “she is ‘not a part of Hare Krishna’, though she delved into Hinduism and her own Christianity for guidance.”
In 1988 Mills co-edited, with Marcus Maclaine, the book My God, which consisted of brief letters from celebrities on their beliefs, or lack thereof, regarding God and the afterlife. Mills has been a pescetarian since the late 1990s.
On 18 April 2008, Mills was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery and started, but quickly abandoned, chemotherapy after only three sessions due to the severity of side effects. Mills credits her survival to the alternative treatments she tried out. She told Good Housekeeping magazine in January 2012 that she had fully recovered.
Mills is a trustee of the children’s arts charity Anno’s Africa.
References to Mills sometimes appear in fiction and music. The 1985 song ‘Goodbye Lucille’ by the British band Prefab Sprout refers in passing to Mills.
