Brittish Actors

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Bernadette O’Farrell
Bernadette O’Farrell

Bernadette O'Farrell
Bernadette O’Farrell

Bernadette O’Farrell.

IMDB entry{

Bernadette O’Farrell was born in Birr, Co Offaly in Ireland in 1924.   She auditioned for and won a small part in the Frank Lauder film “Captain Boycott” in 1947.   She later married Frank Lauder.   She gained international recognition in the 1950’s for her role as Maid Marian to Richard Greene’s Robin Hood on television’s “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.   The series was a huge success in Britain and the U.S.   She acted occasionally on film and her last movie was “The Bridal Path” in 1959.   She retired to Monaco with her husband and she died there in 1999.   Her obituary in “Variety” can be accessed here.

Although often seen in the St. Trinian’s movies, written by Sidney Gilliat and her husband, Frank Launder, it was her role as Maid Marian in the long-running Robin Hood series that catapulted her to stardom. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955) became one of the first British Television programs to succeed in the United States, having over 30 million viewers. O’Farrell left the series in 1957 despite receiving thousands of letters asking her to stay. She was born in Birr, County Offaly, Ireland, in 1926. Her father was a bank teller, and her mother was an amateur actress. After being educated at a local convent, she was working as a secretary when she was invited to an audition by Sir Carol Reed.

Through Reed, she met Frank Launder, who gave her a small part inCaptain Boycott (1947) opposite Stewart Granger. After several movies, including Launder’s St. Trinian’s series, some stage work and Robin Hood, she starred in her last movie, The Bridal Path (1959) in 1959. She retired from acting to spend time with her family on their farm in Buckinghamshire, England, UK. She and Launder were married in 1950 and had two daughters. They would later move to Monaco and become active in local charities and stage productions. While living in Monaco, Frank suffered a serious stroke in 1989 and, finally, a fatal heart attack in 1997. Bernadette O’Farrell died on September 29, 1999, after battling with cancer.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Mick Williams <host@cyber-line.com>

“Irish Times” obituary:

In the mid-1950s, Bernadette O’Farrell was one of the best-known Irish actresses in the world. As Maid Marion in the television series The Adventures of Robin Hood, she was watched by an estimated 30 million people each week. She gave up the role after two years when shopkeepers started addressing her as Maid Marion.

The daughter of a bank manager, she was born in Birr, Co Offaly, on January 30th, 1924, and educated at a local convent.

She was working as a solicitor’s clerk when the film director Carol Reed, a friend of the family, suggested she audition for producers Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. They had set up a film unit in Ireland to make Captain Boycott, a film based on the tenant farmers’ revolt of 1880.

The result was the part of the wife of a farmer (Liam Gaffney), who joins others to ostracise the ruthless landlord, Boycott. When the landlord, defeated, leaves Ireland, the local priest advises the community to “boycott” anyone else who tries to do them harm, thus bringing the word into the English language.

Launder later commented, “It was a fascinating and memorable film to make, and I met a lot of marvellous people on it, including my wife”.

He married Bernadette O’Farrell in 1950, and in the same year cast her in The Happiest Days Of Your Life, which told of the hilarious results of a group of girls being mistakenly billeted at a boys’ school.

Among other films were Lady in the Fog (1952) in which she co-starred, helping a reporter (Hollywood actor, Cesar Romero) track the killer of her brother; The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953), as a member of the D’Oyly Carte company; and The Square Ring (1953), as the wife of an ageing boxer attempting a comeback.

But it was her casting in the Robin Hood series in 1955 which made her a household name, as she pluckily helped her sweetheart thwart the plans of his arch enemy the Sheriff of Nottingham. The high-quality scripts, many written under pseudonyms by blacklisted American writers, and the show’s theme tune (“Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen . . .”) were other elements in the show’s success. Its popularity in America led to a tour of the country by Bernadette O’Farrell and her co-star Richard Greene in 1956.   Three years later she retired to raise her two daughters on the family farm in Buckinghamshire, and on her husband’s retirement, the couple moved to Monaco. Frank Launder died in 1997.

Bernadette O’Farrell is survived by her two daughters.

Alan Bates
Alan Bates
Alan Bates

Alan Bates obituary in “The Independent” in 2003.

Alan Bates was a brilliant versatile actor who made many fine films in both Britain and the U.S.   He started his career on film with “The Entertainer” with Sir Laurence Oliver.   He was part of that great group of young British actors including Michael York, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Tom Courtney  and Terence Stamp who sored to stardom in the 1960’s.   He went to the U.S. to make “An Unmarried Woman” and “The Rose”.   He continued to make many fine films and act on the stage until his death in 2003.

His obituary by Alan Strachan from “The Independent”:

The quiet man among his generation of British stage and film stars, Alan Bates had a charisma, with a potent suggestion of banked and often ambivalent inner emotion, which marked him out as a leading actor of rare quality.

He had an undervalued comic gift – his performance in Clive Donner’s filmNothing but the Best is as slyly funny as anything in an Ealing classic – but the brooding power behind such stage portrayals as Redl in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me and the title role in Simon Gray’s Butley; and, on screen, Gabriel Oak in Far From the Madding Crowd, Anthony Quinn’s English friend in Zorba the Greek, or Julie Christie’s lover in The Go-Between, inevitably will be best remembered.

Bates was a Derbyshire boy and returned there often; he helped open a new Playhouse in Derby in 1976 by leading a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. His grammar-school education in Belper began his love-affair with Shakespeare; his theatre-loving mother also often took him to the Derby Little Theatre Club. He trained for the stage at Rada at a time when a new breed of British dramatists were creating the chances for young actors such as Bates, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Kenneth Haigh to bring distinctive voices to the stage alongside the well-bred tones of a West End then still in thrall to the deferential, well-made play.

More or less straight out of Gower Street, Bates was snapped up by George Devine for the new ensemble based at the Royal Court Theatre directed by Devine and his young associate director Tony Richardson. The English Stage Company bridged the generations from the pre-war glory days of companies led by John Gielgud and Michel Saint-Denis to the emergent new wave, its acting talent ranging from Devine, Peggy Ashcroft and Rachel Kempson to Bates, Haigh, Joan Plowright and Mary Ure, with its designers including Gielgud’s Motley (with “Percy” and Sophie Harris) and the younger Jocelyn Herbert and Alan Tagg.

Bates thrived in the “family” atmosphere at Sloane Square. It was there to a large extent, surely, that he absorbed the values of the company ideal so important to his standards as an actor subsequently. Always much loved and deeply respected by colleagues, he had when an established star the rare gift of being the centre of a company without dominating it.

In that unpredictable first 1956 ESC season, Bates had a good run of roles, following Simon in Angus Wilson’s comedy The Mulberry Bush with Hopkins in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (surprisingly tepidly received critically) and then Cliff Lewis in the premiere of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which justified the whole ESC enterprise as a forcing-ground for new talent. Often in production simply a feed to Jimmy Porter, opposite Kenneth Haigh’s Jimmy, Bates as Cliff found a dogged, often baffled and torn devotion at the heart of the role, most powerfully in its suggestion of Cliff’s unvoiced love for the Alison of Mary Ure. After further ESC work, Bates made a highly praised Broadway début with Look Back in Anger (Lyceum, NY, 1958), an experience which provided him with many splendid anecdotes featuring the provocative behaviour of its producer, themonstre sacré David Merrick.

Back in London, Bates startled even those who had marked him out as a gifted younger actor with the edgy emotional tension which he brought to Edmund, the consumptive younger brother of the haunted Tyrone family at the centre of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (Globe, 1958) in the play’s British premiere. Even in a glittering company including Anthony Quayle, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Ian Bannen, this was excitingly risky high-wire acting, refreshingly free from the costive restraint of so much contemporary work.

That sense of the primal also stamped Bates’s Mick in the first production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (Duchess, 1960 and Lyceum, NY, 1961); there was a dangerous glint, something feral at the heart of this wide boy, that was distinctly unsettling. Bates stayed on in New York after The Caretaker. By now an established London and Broadway star, he was headlined in a new play by the popular comedy dramatist Jean Kerr, Poor Richard (Helen Hayes, 1964), but in trying to extend her range Kerr’s tone was uncertain, although Bates’s endearingly self-deprecating performance carried the play to a moderate success.

Broadway offers were abundant, and movies in England and Hollywood were also luring him. Having launched his film career with The Entertainer (1960) for Tony Richardson, he followed it with beautifully gauged performances in Whistle Down The Wind(1961) as the mysterious Messiah-figure and as the trapped anti-hero of Alan Sillitoe’s A Kind of Loving (1962) for John Schlesinger. Bates, however – as would be evident throughout his career – was never particularly keen to follow the easiest or most lucrative path.

Returning to England and to the theatre he took on the challenge of Arnold Wesker’s The Four Seasons (Saville, 1965). A two-hander love-story packed with dense, often heightened language, this somewhat unexpected departure by Wesker baffled most critics and the play was a commercial flop but, opposite Diane Cilento, Bates was in formidable form, coping with the dramatist’s technical demands (he had to make strudel-dough on stage) with as much aplomb as he handled a difficult text.

He then moved off to Canada to take on classic work at Stratford Ontario; in its 1967 season he was an unusually dark Ford, eaten by self-loathing jealousy, in The Merry Wives of Windsor and appeared even darker in the title-role of Richard III, the sardonic joker, flicking off his jests and quips with whiplash zest, collapsing into hideous and terrified despair. This remarkable double was followed by his truthfully understated playing in David Storey’s family play In Celebration (Royal Court, 1969) under Lindsay Anderson.

With his unselfish, touching screen performance in Zorba the Greek(1964), Bates became a genuinely international star. For a brief period he concentrated on movies, but deliberately kept ringing the changes, reluctant always to succumb to the siren-lures of the Hollywood Hills. He combined quirky British choices – Nothing But the Best (1964) in which he and Denholm Elliott gave master-classes in the timing of cool comedy, and the surprise-hit of Georgy Girl(1964) – with off-beat American films such as The Fixer (1968, for which his performance rightly brought him an Oscar nomination) and foreign work including King of Hearts (1967) as well as two of the most successful British pictures of the later 1960s, Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) and Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969). InWomen in Love, he and Oliver Reed were ideally cast as D.H. Lawrence’s contrasted heroes, both actors committing wholeheartedly (aided by generous swigs of vodka) to the famous nude wrestling scene.

The 1970s saw some remarkable performances from Bates as he alternated between stage and screen. His long association with the work of Simon Gray, usually directed by Harold Pinter, began withButley (Criterion, 1971 and NY, 1972) which won him Evening Standard Best Actor and Tony Awards. He was mesmerising as Gray’s troubled don, totally inhabiting the character’s acid wit and mordant irony and never once playing for sympathy; in Butley’s more reflective moments, the performance fused some of the qualities which had distinguished Bates’s Hamlet (Cambridge Theatre, 1971). This was in a somewhat antiseptic production but Bates’s performance was remarkable for its sense of inner solitude; this Hamlet was almost paralysed into emotional immobility by the loss of a clearly adored father, freighting his scene opposite Gertrude (Celia Johnson) with a powerful mixture of resentment and love.

The Gray/Bates/Pinter team had an even bigger success withOtherwise Engaged (Queens, 1975) with Bates at the centre of a Rolls-Royce cast as the music-loving Simon, a man with an almost monastic dedication to the practice of detachment, humanised by Bates with his uncanny ability to suggest subterranean lets and hindrances in his characters. He gave an equally subtle portrayal as the tutor at the heart of Life Class which happily returned him to Sloane Square (Royal Court and Duke of York’s, 1974) by David Storey, another dramatist to whose writing Bates always brought a special affinity. Another Simon Gray piece, a less than thrilling thriller, Stage Struck (Vaudeville, 1979) gave Bates the chance to play a juicily bravura, devious character, which he clearly enjoyed and which he made extremely successful at the box-office.

His next noteworthy stage appearance was not until 1983 when he played the tortured Redl in Osborne’s epic play, A Patriot For Me(Chichester and Haymarket), unrevived since its Royal Court premiere. Ronald Eyre’s production was a lucid reappraisal of a flawed masterpiece with Bates’s performance its vital centre. The sexual confusion of the character was movingly traced but Bates also crucially brought to his performance the sense of a character who felt himself also an outsider socially, fatally nudging him into his career of espionage.

After a wonderfully bold black comedy take on Strindberg’s The Dance of Death (Riverside Studios, 1985), a Pinter double-bill ofVictoria Station and One for the Road (Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, 1985), a selflessly loyal performance in Peter Shaffer’s strenuousYonadab (National Theatre, 1985) and another Gray, Melon(Haymarket, 1987), Bates returned to ensemble-based theatre with a West End season of Chekhov’s Ivanov in tandem with Much Ado About Nothing (Strand, 1989). He and Felicity Kendal had a lovely partnership, full of quicksilver raillery in the Shakespeare, Bates wryly funny as a soldier surprised by late- flowering love, splendidly contrasting with the volatile, shambolic emotional mess that he created of Ivanov.

Bates had not acted for the Royal Shakespeare Company since a disappointing Taming Of The Shrew in 1974. He returned in 1999 to take on a role he seemed born to play – Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, opposite Frances de la Tour. The production was cordially loathed by many, with its opening scenes of graphic oral sex and the well-intentioned but in practice faintly risible notion of dead bodies rising up to walk off stage. Undoubtedly the production has its flaws, but its leading players brought to it an exhilarating emotional energy and erotic charge; Bates was immeasurably moving in those perilous later scenes as Antony faces his end. Sadly, illness meant his withdrawal from the same season’s Timon of Athens, another role to which he was ideally suited.

A good number of Bates’s later films after the New Cinema resurgence of the 1960s were, as he owned, poor stuff. After the triumph of The Go-Between for Joseph Losey (1971) there were some genuine turkeys, not least the Bette Midler vehicle The Rose(1979), with a heavily bearded Bates looking somewhat uneasy as the rock diva’s manager, while the truly terrible Michael Winner remake of The Wicked Lady (1984) was even worse.

Bates’s best later films tended to be in low-budget or independent pictures – in the underrated Merchant-Ivory Quartet (1982), he had a delightful, rumpled avuncular charm as a Ford Madox Ford figure and he was also impressive in the film version of Patrick McGraph’sThe Grotesque (2000).

After a period of some disappointing films, a time also marked by personal sadness (the early death of one of his twin sons, closely followed by his wife’s death) and illness, Bates’s later work happily saw him in full flower once more. In one of his final films – Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2002) – his performance of unctuous rectitude was a highlight even in an unusually lustrous cast, while on stage he had a New York success opposite Eileen Atkins in Yasmina Reza’s delicately poised two-hander The Unexpected Man (NY, 2001); he returned to match that success for one last Broadway appearance with Fortune’s Fool (NY, 2002) in which he had previously appeared at Chichester (1996).

Bates’s comic gift perhaps had its best opportunities on the smaller screen; even the most rabidly loyal Mitfordists had to concede that in the most recent television version of Love In a Cold Climate (2001), his Farve, splenetically disappearing behind the useful carapace ofThe Times or boggling in bug-eyed disapproval at the sight of any potential suitor for his daughters, was the real thing.

Other memorable Bates television appearances included the son in John Mortimer’s autobiographical A Voyage Round My Father(1983), quizzically tender opposite Laurence Olivier’s glorious English eccentric, which appeared in the same year as one of his supreme performances, in Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad. Based on the meeting in Moscow between the actress Coral Browne (who played herself) and the defected traitor Guy Burgess in 1959, John Schlesinger’s film revolved round Bates’s glorious performance.

Looking like a debauched Botticelli angel and seemingly gleefully unrepentant, still full of the camp, mandarin Cambridge style of the 1930s, cannily and gradually Bates revealed the hollow man below, lost and loveless in his chosen promised land. The film ends with Browne, as requested, arranging for a new suit to be made by Burgess’s old Savile Row tailors; the final shots of a seemingly revived and squeaky-clean Burgess encased in his new pinstripes, with bowler and tightly-furled brolley, beaming as he strides jauntily through the Moscow crowds, to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “To Be an Englishman”, are unforgettable.

Alan Strachan’s obituary from the “Independent” can also be accessed online here.

Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn

Vera Lynn

The magnificent Dame Vera Lynn became in 2009 the oldest living artist to have a Number 1 album chart at the age of 92. 

  The Forces Sweetheart of World War Two published her autobiogaphy in 2010 and has given several television performances which show her genuineness and gentleness. 

  She made three films in the 1940’s, the most popular been “We’ll Meet Again” in 1942 with the beautiful Patricia Roc. 

  A boxed set of these three movies has just been rele

ased on DVD in 2010

Interview with Dame Vera Lynn in “Saga” magazine can be accessed here.

Dame Vera Lynn obituary

Singer known as the ‘Forces Sweetheart’ whose recordings of We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover shaped the national mood in wartime Britain

Vera Lynn in uniform in 1941. Her songs embodied the wartime spirit in Britain.
Vera Lynn in uniform in 1941. Her songs embodied the wartime spirit in Britain. Photograph: Popperfoto

Dave LaingThu 18 Jun 2020

At the start of the second world war, Vera Lynn, who has died aged 103, was an up-and-coming dance band singer. By 1945, this working-class young woman had become a symbol of the British wartime spirit, with a status comparable to that of the patrician prime minister, Winston Churchill. After the war, her friend Harry Secombe liked to joke that “Churchill didn’t beat the Nazis. Vera sang them to death.”

Lynn’s iconic status as the “Forces’ Sweetheart” was due to the success of her radio series, Sincerely Yours, which linked the soldiers at the front with their loved ones at home. In 1944, she visited the troops in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, which kindled her lifelong commitment to the welfare of veterans, especially those of the Burma campaign. Above all, her celebrity was due to her hit songs. Such numbers as We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover caught and moulded a national mood, despite the harsh criticism her crooning style provoked from some politicians and BBC managers.

After VE Day, Lynn resumed her career as a variety artist and recording star, but her association with wartime Britain remained central to her identity and reputation throughout her long life. Until very recently, Lynn was a prominent presence at commemorations of the war. Her place at the heart of national life was officially recognised when she was made OBE in 1969, a dame in 1975 and a Companion of Honour in 2016; her 100th birthday, in March 2017, was marked by the release of a new album and a concert in her honour at the London Palladium. Equally, she became part of popular culture as cockney rhyming slang made her synonymous with gin, chin and skin (as in cigarette papers), she was hymned by pop singers of later generations including Pink Floyd and Ian Dury, and she was the subject of numerous comic impersonations, something she tried unsuccessfully to control through court action in the 1950s.

She was an unlikely candidate for the role of national heroine. Born in the penultimate year of the first world war, she was the second child of a working-class family who lived in a small apartment in East Ham, east London. Her father, Bertram Welch, had various jobs, including working as a plumber and docker. Her mother, Annie, was a dressmaker.

Vera’s vocal talent was evident from a very early age. After singing at family parties, she made her public debut at a local working men’s club aged seven, billed as a “descriptive child vocalist”. Adopting her grandmother’s maiden name, Vera Lynn soon joined a juvenile concert party, the Kracker Kabaret Kids.

In 1932, still only 15, she was signed up by Howard Baker, a bandleader and agent, who supplied dance bands for functions throughout the East End of London. A brief period with Billy Cotton’s band followed, culminating in a week’s engagement in Manchester, from which Cotton sent Vera home. He later described this as “the worst day’s work I ever did”. Cotton’s loss was the pianist Charlie Kunz’s gain. Vera sang with his band on BBC broadcasts.

Unusually for the time, Kunz gave Lynn free rein to choose the songs. She visited music publishers in Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley. There Vera met Walter Ridley, of the Peter Maurice company, who not only found songs for her but undertook to transpose them to a suitable key for Lynn’s unusually deep voice, which was variously described in the press as a “rich contralto” and “a freak mezzo-soprano with an irresistible sob”.

From 1937 to 1940, Lynn worked with another top bandleader, Bert Ambrose, who was impressed by her enunciation of lyrics. She toured variety theatres with the Ambrose Octet and took part in broadcasts for the BBC and for Radio Luxembourg, in a show sponsored by Lifebuoy soap. There was also a debut television broadcast from Alexandra Palace in 1938. The following year, she recorded We’ll Meet Again for the first time, shortly before a newspaper columnist claimed she was selling more records than either Bing Crosby or the Mills Brothers.

Dame Vera Lynn with her daughter, Virginia, in 1969, after being made OBE.
Dame Vera Lynn with her daughter, Virginia, in 1969, after being made OBE. Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

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Her growing success was reflected in the growth of her fan mail and in her increasing salary. In 1938, she was able to move her family to a new house in Barking and to buy a fur coat and her first car, an Austin 10.

In 1939, a new saxophonist joined the Ambrose orchestra. Harry Lewis soon showed his admiration for Vera and in 1941 they were married. Very soon afterwards, the band felt the full impact of the war as Lewis and others volunteered for military service. As members of the RAF they set up the Squadronaires, a dance and jazz group that continued after the cessation of hostilities. Lewis was to give up his career in the late 1940s to become Lynn’s personal manager. He became well known for answering the phone with “What do you want her for?”

By 1941 Lynn was a star in her own right and she left Ambrose to begin a solo career. She soon found work on the variety theatre circuit, beginning at Coventry Hippodrome, often topping the bill working with only a piano accompanist.

At this time, BBC producers were seeking new ideas for the Forces Programme, which had been established to broadcast to the British expeditionary force. Howard Thomas, later a pioneer of commercial television, proposed a format that would be “a letter to the men of the forces in words and music”. Lynn had previously been voted “No 1 forces sweetheart” by Forces Programme listeners and was an ideal choice to read and sing such a letter. To quote the music historian Paul du Noyer, “she was not a glamorous sex-bomb pandering to the lonesome soldiers’ lower instincts. Instead she aroused a wistful yearning for the idealised fiancee.”

It was an immediate success. Up to 2,000 messages were received each week from domestic listeners from which Lynn read out a small sample. She also sent out signed photographs and brief letters to servicemen at the front. This occasionally led to misunderstandings, as when she was accosted by a wife who had found a letter to her absent husband and accused Lynn of stealing him.

Above all, Sincerely Yours was about Lynn’s voice and her songs. Three songs came to embody the wartime spirit and became indelibly associated with her. Yours (recorded in 1941) was a straightforward song of love and fidelity; We’ll Meet Again (1939) expressed a mood of fervent optimism and was described by Lynn as a “greetings card song: a very basic human message of the sort people want to say to each other but find embarrassing actually to put into words”; and The White Cliffs of Dover (1942) was intensely patriotic – despite having been composed by Americans.

While Sincerely Yours had exceptional audience numbers, behind the scenes at the BBC controversy raged. A committee minute noted that the assembled members deplored Sincerely Yours but “noted its popularity”. The opposition to the show was part of a wider dislike of crooners, whose vocal style was held to be over-sentimental and tinged with Americanisms. Male crooners were especially denigrated but Lynn was in the eye of the storm because her show attracted such a large listenership. It was attacked in parliament as liable to undermine the morale of British fighting men. One MP went further in criticising Lynn’s speaking voice as “refaned cockney”. She was stung into responding that “millions of cockneys are fighting in this war”.

So great was her public profile that she starred in three films between 1942 and 1944. They traded on Lynn’s persona, to the extent that We’ll Meet Again and Rhythm Serenade borrowed titles of her songs. All had wartime themes as a backdrop to lightweight romantic stories, which did not fulfil the promise of the title of the third, One Exciting Night. While they served their morale-boosting purpose, Lynn did not pursue a career in cinema after the war.

The most affecting phase of her wartime career came in 1944 when she volunteered to travel abroad for Ensa, the organisation set up to provide entertainment for the forces. The five-month trip took in concerts and hospital visits in the Middle East, India and finally Burma. The weeks she spent with troops in this relatively forgotten theatre of war remained with her for the rest of her life and she became the most ardent advocate for the remembrance and care of veterans of the 14th Army who fought in Burma.

Dame Vera Lynn applauded by Cliff Richard during her final public performance, at a VE Day 50th anniversary concert in Hyde Park, London.
Dame Vera Lynn applauded by Cliff Richard during her final public performance, at a VE Day 50th anniversary concert in Hyde Park, London. Photograph: Kieran Doherty/Reuters

In the changing conditions of peacetime, Lynn faced competition from new and sometimes younger rivals, such as Anne SheltonDorothy SquiresEve Boswell and Petula Clark, all of whom made rival recordings of new songs in the 50s. She remained in demand for variety theatre tours and starred in the long-running London Laughs with the comedians Jimmy Edwards and Tony Hancock in 1952-54. But she was not offered work by BBC radio for several years because in 1949 the head of variety, Michael Standing, told her that “sob stuff” was outmoded. A few years later he was quoted as “still looking for the new Vera Lynn”.

In the meantime, Lynn made broadcasts for Radio Luxembourg. Several of these shows were recorded with an audience of RAF servicemen, who occasionally joined in the chorus of a song. That combination was repeated on bestselling Decca recordings, billed as “Vera Lynn with Soldiers and Airmen of HM Forces”. Among these were Auf Wiederseh’n SweetheartThe Homing Waltz and The Windsor Waltz. The first of these inspired the title of the 80s sitcom Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. The disc was listed in the first published British hit parade in the New Musical Express in 1952 and topped the American charts, selling over a million copies there. Her biggest hit in Britain was My Son, My Son, co-written by the trumpeter Eddie Calvert, which reached No 1 in 1954.

With the arrival of commercial broadcasting in 1955, Lynn was given her first television series and in the following year the BBC invited her back with a two-year exclusive contract to include both television and radio appearances.

Unlike some of her contemporaries’ careers, Lynn’s continued to prosper despite the arrival of rock’n’roll and, later, the Beatles. During the 60s and 70s, she made frequent concert performances, recordings and television appearances. For many of these, including two nostalgic LPs of “Hits of the Blitz”, she reprised her wartime and 50s favourites, but she was briefly persuaded to record contemporary songs such as Lennon and McCartney’s Fool on the Hill and Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix, and to make an album in Nashville. Several CD reissues of her recordings have been made, including the No 1 album We’ll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn (2009) and Unforgettable (2010), which included three previously unreleased tracks from the 40s.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/T5C4meGkNyc?wmode=opaque&feature=oembedVera Lynn sings We’ll Meet Again in the musical film of the same name (1943)

A prominent feature of Lynn’s career was her commitment to charities, including several that support ex-service personnel and others concerned with polio, breast cancer, blindness and cerebral palsy. A trust for children with cerebral palsy was set up in her name and continues to support a school near Lynn’s home in West Sussex.

In 1995, Lynn made her final official public performance at a VE Day anniversary event at Hyde Park. Even afterwards, she attended second world war commemorations, sometimes giving a speech, as at the 2005 VE Day event at which Katherine Jenkins, Lynn’s preferred successor as the forces’ sweetheart, performed We’ll Meet Again. Jenkins later recorded the song to add to Lynn’s original. Their virtual duet was included on the 2014 CD release, Vera Lynn – National Treasure. 

Three days before her 100th birthday, she released Vera Lynn 100, featuring new orchestrations of her best-known songs alongside her original vocals. She was joined on the album by the British singers Aled Jones, Alexander Armstrong and Alfie Boe. Her birthday was also marked with a projection of her face on to the white cliffs of Dover. The album went to No 3, making her the first centenarian to enter the UK charts, and charted again in May this year following the 75th anniversary celebrations of VE Day, which were also marked by a duet between Jenkins and a hologram of Lynn at the Royal Albert Hall, and the re-release of We’ll Meet Again.

The Queen invoked the spirit of the song as she addressed a nation in coronavirus lockdown in April, assuring Britons “We will meet again”, and echoing Lynn’s own message to fans in March: “In these uncertain times, I am taken back to my time during World War II, when we all pulled together and looked after each other. It is this spirit that we all need to find again to weather the storm of the coronavirus.”

Harry died in 1998. She is survived by her daughter, Virginia.

 Vera Lynn (Vera Margaret Welch), singer, born 20 March 1917; died 18 June 2020

 Dave Laing died in 2019

Mandy Miller
Mandy Miller
Mandy Miller

Mandy Miller. (Wikipedia)

Child actors of prominence in British films are few and far between.   Mandy Miller was one of the few children to gain widespread public recognition in British films of the 1950’s.   She was first noticed in a small part in the Ealing comedy “The Man in the White Suit” with Alec Guinness in 1951.  

The following year she gained national fame for the title role of “Mandy” about the trials and tribulations of a young girl who is profoundly deaf.   She made her last film in 1959 when she made “The Snorkel” when she 15.   She continued to act on television uuntil the mid 1960’s when she retired from performing.  

When she was a child she even had a hit children’s song which is still heard to-day – “Nellie the Elephant”.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

The sensitive-looking British child star of the fifties was born Carmen Isabella Miller in 1944 but affectionately called “Mandy” practically from birth. Her father, a BBC Radio producer, took Mandy (then age 6) and her older sister, Jan Miller to watch a film being made at Ealing Studios. Instead of her sister, it was Mandy who impressed the powers-that-be at the studio commissary that day and was offered a small role in the Alec Guinness film The Man in the White Suit (1951).

The little girl took gingerly to acting and signed up for classes along with dancing lessons, finding some work in commercial modeling. She achieved in the 1950s what popular child star Hayley Mills would accomplish a decade later, except in a dramatic vein for Mandy’s strong suit was no-holds-barred tearjerkers. Her finest hour in film came with the movie Crash of Silence(1952), in which she portrayed a disturbed deaf girl called “Mandy”.

Other moving performances came in Edge of Divorce (1953), as the young product of a bitter divorce,The Secret (1955), which was a covert thriller, and Child in the House (1956), which proved to be another sob story suited to her talents. In her final film, The Snorkel(1958), Mandy played a young teen who leads police to her mother’s murderer. After guest shots on TV’s The Avengers (1961) and The Saint (1962), she left the limelight, forever. At the age of 18, she moved to New York to become an au pair. Mandy married an architect in 1965, had three children (two girls and a boy), and settled down to a life of domesticity.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Review of the film “Mandy” in “MovieMail” can be found here.

David Robb
David Robb
David Robb

David Robb. TCM Overview.

David Robb has many television appearances to his credit including a major role with Haley Mils in “The Flame Trees of Thika”.   He is a very interesting actor and brings great characterisation to his guest roles on such television series as “Taggart”, “Rebus”, “The Bill”, “Casualty”, “Monarch of the Glen” etc etc.

TCM Overview:

Actor David Robb was known for his roles on the silver screen. Robb started off his acting career mostly in film roles, appearing in “The Swordsman” (1974), the Michael York dramatic adaptation “Conduct Unbecoming” (1975) and “The Wars” (1983). He additionally landed roles in the TV movies “The Four Feathers” (NBC, 1977-78) and “Ivanhoe” (CBS, 1981-82). He worked in series television while getting his start in acting, including a part on “The Flame Trees of Thika” (PBS, 1981-82).

His film career continued throughout the eighties and the nineties in productions like the Pierce Brosnan dramatic adventure “The Deceivers” (1988), the action film “Hellbound” (1993) with Chuck Norris and the Robert Sean Leonard dramatic musical “Swing Kids” (1993).

He also worked in television around this time, including a part on “King Arthur” (1987-88). More recently, he continued to act in the action picture “Treasure Island” (2002) with Jack Palance, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (2007) and the historical love story “The Young Victoria” (2009) with Emily Blunt. Most recently, Robb appeared in “Wolf Hall” (2014).

David Robb’s interview in “Daily Express” can be found here.

Diana Wynyard
Diana Wynyard
Diana Wynyard

Had she wanted it, Diana Wynyard might have had a screen career as long and distinguished as that of Davis or Hepburn.   As a stage actress she was excellent but seldom outstanding, nor was her later screen work likely to make anybody’s eyes pop out.

   But her early film work is quite, quite stunning.   Quiet, cool, gracious, ladylike, she was warmer and more believable than those adjectives imply: either her acting has not dated an iota or it was years before it’s time. 

In “Rasputin and the Empress” the Barrymores are acting away like mad and about as convincing as a tree-full of parrots, but Wynyard simply exists ion the same way that someone like Spencer Tracy existed.  

In “One More River” the cast are expectedly more subdued, the film is still Galsworthy junk but when Wynyard is on screen at any point, you might be watching a film made yesterday” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars” (1970).

Diana Wynyard was born in London in 1906.   She had a cool calm presence on film and was seen to best effect  in the UK made “Gaslight”, and “An Ideal Husband”.  

In the earlier part of her career she made films in Hollywood including “Rasputin and the Empress” and “Cavalcade” by Noel Coward.   Diana Wynyard had a flourishing stage career and was in rehersal for a new play with Maggie Smith when she died suddenly in 1964.   An article reviewing Diana Wynyard and her role in “Cavalcade” can be found here.

TCM Overview:

A luminous and intelligent British actress, Diana Wynyard brought genteel grace and an aristocratic dignity to a highly successful stage career. With a carriage and mien well-suited to period drama, she briefly made her mark in several classy roles in Hollywood during the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. Her US film stardom didn’t take, however, but she was sporadically active in British film for 20 years thereafter, leaving behind several outstanding performances that made one wish she had done more in film.

Alec Guinness
Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness

 

“Apart from Oliver, none of the serious highly regarded top-drawer British actors has had such a successful career in films as Alec Guinness.   He has been in many very popular films,most of them enhanced by his performance.   His versatility has been a byword over the past 30 years and perhaps it is the diffidence in his character which has prevented him from being a really magical actor” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972).

Alec Guinness was one of the most distinguished British screen actors ever.   His first screen role was as Herbert Pocket in “Great Expectations” and then went on to play Fagin in “Oliver Twist”.   Both of these films were directed by David Lean and Guiness made several films with Lean over the years including “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, “Laurence of Arabia”, “Dr Zhivago” and “Passage to India”.   He won an Oscar for his performance in “Kwai” but he was dreadfully miscast as an Indian in “A Passage to India”.   He won critical acclaim for his performance on television in the series “Tinker, Tailor, Spy” as George Smiley.   Alec Guinness was also an accomplished write and had several books published.   He died in 2000 at the age of 86.

Tom Sutcliffe’s”Guardian” obituary:

Sir Alec Guinness, who has died aged 86, was one of the best known and loved English actors of the 20th century. He was also a profoundly unostentatious and reserved man, and although he undertook a great variety of roles, all were informed at heart with the wisdom of the sad clown. It was this spiritual severity, together with those cool, clear, wide-open eyes, capable of melting on screen to the most reassuringly serene of smiles, which lent his performances force and authenticity.

In his later career, Guinness became something of an icon of spirituality and enlightened human understanding – especially after playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, in Star Wars (1977), with a notable and profound emotional charge. Subsequently, he was bemused to find himself being consulted as an agony uncle by American students, as a sort of substitute for CS Lewis. More important for him personally, his Star Wars contract guaranteed 2% of the profits, though the role had been much reduced, and he had nearly left the production.

The resulting financial security made this already fastidious actor even choosier about live stage roles. After Star Wars he was in just two West End plays, and was an unusual and sensitive Shylock at Chichester in 1984.

But Guinness was not the first great actor to find the ability, and the inclination, to learn parts after 70 much reduced. He had already avoided the theatre for six years when he came to star as TE Lawrence in Terence Rattigan’s Ross in 1960. More than any other English star of his generation, he was equally at home on stage, in film and on television – where he had an Indian summer as John Le Carré’s spymaster, Smiley, in the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1981-82) .

Guinness had an impecunious childhood, with a modest boarding-school education at Pembroke Lodge, in Southborne, and Roborough, in Eastbourne. At 18, he got a job as a junior copywriter in Arks Publicity, an advertising agency.

In his discreet autobiography, Blessings In Disguise (1985), he describes how the acting bug had bitten him. On the recommendation of John Gielgud, who assumed he was related to brewing and money, he got in touch with the formidable and eccentric Martita Hunt. She was, he noted, the first woman he had met who wore silk trousers and painted her toenails, and she coached him to audition for a Leverhulme scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But Rada were not giving the award that year, so he enrolled at the Fay Compton studio for as long as his money lasted, and then rapidly went to work in the London theatre. He made his debut at 20, walking on in Libel! at the Playhouse.

In his unpretentious and beautifully written book, Guinness exorcised a long-suppressed anxiety about his origins. He was, he made clear, illegitimate – his name a mystery, his father probably called Geddes, the circumstances of his conception vague. His mother was Agnes Cuffe, and he was registered as Alec Guinness de Cuffe.

Finally, the question of his birth did not matter to him, but in the beginning it must have. A reluctance to expose himself, an almost neurotic discretion, was famously the mark of both his professional and his personal style. In a 1953 monograph about him, the critic, Kenneth Tynan, wrote: “Were he to commit a murder, I have no doubt the number of false arrests following the circulation of his description would break all records.”

While still only 20, Guinness was a flowery Osric, in Gielgud’s Hamlet at the New Theatre. Thereafter, until the outbreak of the second world war, his career alternated between working with Gielgud, or with Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic, where he impressed with a modern-dress Hamlet in autumn 1938. Even the Sunday Times’s formidable critic, James Agate, conceded that Guinness’s refusal to play the role in a traditional way had “a value of its own”.

Guinness always denied having any technique as an actor – or knowing what technique might be. Yet he was proud of his gift. A favourite story, which he told quite often, concerned his time in The Seagull, in May 1936, playing the small part of Yakov. The director Komisarjevsky, a big influence, was convinced that he was pulling a rope to open the little stage curtains for the play within a play in the first act. But, as Peggy Ashcroft pointed out to Komis’s chagrin, there was, in fact, no rope.

For Guinness, the purpose of acting was to make believe. The theatre was an act of faith, whose object was to tell the inner truth about situations and feelings, not to embroider falsehood with trickery and display.

He was a master of disguise, as he demonstrated in the Ealing comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949), with a multiplicity of roles. But the Kind Hearts gallery of family victims was consciously broad brush. Guinness was an actor, not an entertainer or vaudevillian like Peter Sellers, who specialised in pretence and adopting other personas. The spiritual core of his inner conviction remained the same – whatever game of actorish disguise he might play.

Guinness’s conversion to Roman Catholicism followed an episode in France during the 1954 filming of Father Brown, in which he was GK Chesterton’s cheery cleric-cum-detective. Walking back in the dark to the station hotel of a village near Macon, and still wearing his cassock, his hand was seized by a small boy, a complete stranger, who called him “Mon père” and trotted along beside him chatting in French. Despite his phony credentials as a cleric, Guinness felt strongly that the reality of this trust was important. When his 11-year-old son Matthew was temporarily crippled with polio, he had taken to dropping in on church and praying.

As an actor, Guinness had acute and particular tastes, an infallible instinct for the apt moment, the ideal tone, the canny strategy. When he was Fool, to Laurence Olivier’s unsuccessful King Lear (1947), he explained to me once, the irritating (to Olivier) fact that he, Alec, had the lion’s share of the reviewers’ favour was a direct consequence of Larry’s actor-managerish vanity.

“Every time Larry came on stage, the lights went up in his vicinity. All I had to do was just stay very close to him.” Guinness, of course, could not fail to be noticed – if only because he was doing so little so well.

He knew his own vulnerabilities and exploited them with courage. That lent the danger to his best performances. He had resented, for instance, the Oliviers’ assumption, in the mid-1930s, that he was Gielgud’s boyfriend. Not because he could not have been, or was ashamed or offended to be cast in that role, but because he was not, and they had no reason to assume it. In 1938, Guinness became a scrupulous husband and father – though his sexuality was complex.

Typically, he did not balk at playing the transvestite criminal Mrs Artminster in Wise Child (1967), with the then glamorous-looking Simon Ward. His Lawrence, in Ross, rang dangerously true to self. Being mixed-up, discreet, acutely intelligent and voraciously well-read fuelled the neurotic, but muffled, engine that drove him as an artist.

Being so private a personality let Guinness bring out the normally hidden interior aspects of Harcourt Reilly, in TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. He played this role at Chichester, Wyndham’s and the Haymarket in 1968 and 1969, as well as in Edinburgh and New York in 1950. His radio reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets were spellbinding. He was perfect material for Alan Bennett’s Old Country (1977) and Habeas Corpus (1973). In the latter, he devised – and performed alone – a typically self-revealing dance at the end.

Tynan’s fine portrait of him misinterpreted the diffidence and humility. Guinness, Tynan wrote, “never will be a star in the sense that Olivier is . . . He does everything by stealth . . . He will illumine many a blind alley of subtlety, but blaze no trails . . . His stage presence is quite without amplitude; and his face, except when, temporarily, make-up transfigures it, is a signless zero.” The suggestiveness, the wish to avoid being domineering, was a different sort of contract with the audience’s imagination. Guinness also wielded glacial fierceness and terror with unchallengeable authority.

His greatness did without Olivier’s showmanship, Ralph Richardson’s abandoned cussedness or Gielgud’s resonant lyricism. Tynan admired, but was inclined to patronise, Guinness’s poetry and versatility. At 24, in 1951, the critic was engaged by Guinness as Player King, in his second Hamlet. Guinness invested much amour propre in this production. Tynan called it “Hamlet with the pilot dropped”, and said it was cast with “exuberant oddness”.

Yet, ironically, its failure turned out to be a major factor in Guinness’s career, leading him away from the classics and Shakespeare into films, ultimately television, and new plays. Tynan found Guinness less potent in the classical arena because he expected actors to perform like concerto soloists.

I did not see Guinness’s inspirational Richard II, for Ralph Richardson’s Old Vic company, at the New Theatre (now Albery) in 1947. But his Macbeth at the Royal Court (1966) was certainly a quiet, clipped tragic victim, without the expected sexiness and physicality.

In fact, Guinness was an actor for a new theatrical style, subtle and undecorated. From the 1960s, in the West End, he mostly created roles in brand new plays, rather than challenging memories of Gielgud, Richardson or Olivier. He might have been a marvellous and unusual Lear, but, when he took the role on radio, it was underwhelming. Though his work in Alan Bennett’s plays was superb, he was far less inclined at the end of his career to accept risks as Gielgud – secure in a theatrical dynasty – famously did with Harold Pinter, David Storey and Julian Mitchell.

He was always a bit of a social upstart in an English theatre world full of great families, a self-made actor with no advantages, dependent on a very spiritual stillness and charisma. When I first met him in the mid-1970s, he had a slightly grand shyness off-stage. Yet, of all the great British stage actors, his was the busiest film career, for which his modest way of acting was flawless.

Guinness was not just an actor. He was good at drawing and did a really charming, diffident design for his own Christmas cards each year. Like Caruso, he was a natural at caricatures, especially of himself. His handwriting was beautiful. He was a very able author. Just before the war, his stage version of Great Expectations – later the basis of David Lean’s film – had been directed by George Devine.

His adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, directed by Peter Brook in 1946, marked his return to the stage, as Mitya, after war service in the Royal Navy. He had joined as a rating in 1941, been commissioned in 1942 and commanded a landing-craft ferrying supplies to the Yugoslav partisans. He also appeared in the West End during the war, in Rattigan’s Bomber Command play, Flare Path.

After playing Herbert Pocket, in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), and Fagin, in Oliver Twist (1948), Guinness went on to a series of glorious Ealing comedies – perhaps most memorably as the bankteller-turned-robber Henry Holland in Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and as the criminal Professor Marcus, in Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955).

His greatest film role was probably Colonel Nicholson, in Lean’s The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), where his quintessentially English stiff upper lip under dreadful Japanese maltreatment and, eventually, obsessive unreasonableness, won him a best actor Oscar and numerous other prizes.

Further work included the artist Gulley Jimson, in The Horse’s Mouth (1958) – another Oscar nomination – with his own screenplay based on Joyce Carey’s novel. In 1959, he starred in Carol Reed’s Our Man In Havana, and a year later gave a brilliantly unpleasant Scottish impersonation of an irascible soldier in Tunes Of Glory. It was not followed by many more good film starring roles, and Guinness settled mostly for lucrative supporting parts in films like The Quiller Memorandum (1966), The Comedians (1967) and Cromwell (1970).

Yet some of those supporting roles were distinguished – Prince Feisal, in Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), General Yefgrav Zhivago, in Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Professor Godbole, in A Passage to India (1984). In Anthony Mann’s The Fall Of The Roman Empire (1964), Guinness’s Marcus Aurelius was one of the film’s few redeeming features.

He was again nominated for an Oscar with Star Wars (1977), and six years later appeared in its sequel, Return Of The Jedi. Yet another Oscar nomination followed his appearance as Dorrit, in Christine Edzard’s epic adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1988).

At the end of the 1970s, he achieved a new fame with his television appearances in the BBC2 adaptations of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. These works were effectively his screen monument, and for which he achieved Bafta awards.

Guinness was a charming, fascinating and elusive companion. He did not enjoy playing the star, though he liked the respect he got when visiting famous restaurants. From the mid-1950s, he lived in a modest way outside Petersfield, in Hampshire, with a large garden that much occupied his wife, Merula, whom he had married in 1938.

He had a small circle of particular friends, many outside the theatre. For years, he and Merula were close to Rachel Kempson and Michael Redgrave. If one visited him in his dressing room in the West End in the 1970s, one might find a surprisingly broad collection of people there, many of whom were never destined to discover what the others’ link with the great actor might be. He preferred to keep his friends separate; he was a one-to-one person.

He liked good food and drink. His favourite London hotel was the Connaught, with its superb cuisine. He was not a club man. He was knighted in 1959 and made a Companion of Honour in 1994.

Anybody outside his immediate circle was intrigued by the Guinness enigma. But the reserve through which that attractive generosity and warmth powerfully shone was, for him, an impenetrable and necessary protection.

He is survived by Merula and his son, Matthew.

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

A “Guardian” article by Xan Brooks on Alec Guiness’sbest movies can be found here.

June Ritchie

June Ritchie. TCM Overview

June Ritchie has one great role on film to her credit – ‘Ingrid’ opposite Alan Bates in “A Kind of Loving” in 1962.   She was born in 1938 in Manchester.   Her other films include “Live Now – Pay Later” and “Man in the Moon”.   Details on her best known film “A Kind of Loving” can be found on the IMDB website here.

TCM Overview:

June Ritchie was a big screen film actress known for powerful performances.

Ritchie found her beginnings in film with roles in “A Kind of Loving” (1962) and “Live Now – Pay Later” (1962).

She went on to act in the Margaret Rutherford adaptation sequel “The Mouse on the Moon” (1963) and “Pere Goriot” (PBS, 1970-71).

Later in her career, Ritchie appeared in “December Flower” (PBS, 1986-87).

Evelyn Laye

Evelyn Laye obituary in “The Independent” in 1996.

Evelyn Laye was a British musical comedy star who made her Boradway debut in 1929 in Noel Coward’s “Bitter Sweet”.   She made a few films in Hollywood before returning to Britain to concentrate on stage and film there.   One of her last roles was as Jean Simmon’s mother in “Say Hello to Yesterday”.   She died in 1996 at the age of 96.   Article about Evelyn Laye and Jessie Matthews can be accessed here.

“Independent” obituary:

“They don’t make them like that any more,” was the refrain of Evelyn Laye’s hit number in the 1969 musical Phil the Fluter at the Palace Theatre, and as she sang it audiences must irresistibly have related the sentiment to the singer herself – for, even 27 years ago, they were being enchanted by an artist who had been a major figure in the British musical theatre for over 50 years.That, if you think about it, was no easy feat. The musical part of Laye’s career belonged to the era long before the use of amplified sound had ruined the immediacy and charm of the naturally projected singing voice in the theatre, and when leading ladies were expected to give the full complement of eight performances a week in the identical large venues used by today’s miked singers, who can rarely be prevailed upon to manage more than five.

As for miming to a pre- recorded “click” track – another creeping disease afflicting the musical theatre – I once saw her at a rehearsal for a Royal Gala Charity performance refuse point blank to cheat the public in this way, with the result that, of all the many singers who took part, only she and Dame Vera Lynn actually sang their numbers live on the night.

I doubt if any artist has ever had a fiercer commitment to the “profession” than Evelyn Laye had – it was, without doubt, the ruling passion of her life. Her adored parents, Gilbert Laye and Evelyn Stuart, were minor touring actors forever struggling to make a living between their annual pantomime engagements (her mother was a respected provincial Principal Boy), and eking out their precarious existence either in theatrical digs, or, when there was no work, in a series of furnished rooms.

Nevertheless, they were the kind of old pros who would never even consider “giving it up” and changing their way of life, and it was this sense of dedication that they passed on to their daughter. No wonder that a theatre was the only place in which she really felt she was at home, and why she was still working in the theatre even in 1992, when she was 92 years of age.

She was only 15 when she made her debut at the Theatre Royal, Brighton (where her father was briefly manager of the pier), as a Chinese servant girl in a touring company of the London success Mr Wu. For three years she played the provinces in a variety of parts (including a revue, Honi Soit, and the Principal Girl in pantomime at Portsmouth), by which time her singing voice and emerging beauty had begun to be recognised.

She made her London debut in 1918 when she took over a supporting role in The Beauty Spot at the illustrious Gaiety Theatre in the Strand, still basking in the glory that its late manager, George Edwardes, had bestowed on it by mounting a long succession of glamorous musical comedies. She remained a “Gaiety Girl” for the next three years, appearing in such shows as Going Up (during the run of which she made the first of her many records), and The Kiss Call. Whilst playing in the theatre every night, it was typical of her determination to equip herself for stardom that she sought to add to her armoury all the techniques she might conceivably need to help her to gain it. So her days were filled with dancing, fencing and singing lessons, all paid for out of her meagre salary.

She did not have long to wait. Seymour Hicks and his wife, the exquisite Ellaline Terriss, had had an enormous success at the Gaiety in 1894 with The Shop Girl. Now it was to be revived under Hicks’s direction, and he chose the 19-year-old Laye to play the lead. Her reception was so rapturous that it made her a star overnight. As the applause roared over her, Ellaline Terriss, standing up in her box, threw her own bouquet down at the young girl’s feet, whilst in the dressing-room afterwards, Sir Alfred Butt, the manager, tore up her contract for pounds 20 a week and trebled it.

London was now hers to command, and the successes of the next 20 years consolidated her position as the undisputed leading lady of the English musical comedy stage. Among them were three shows for Charles B. Cochran, a revival of The Merry Widow, and, most ambitious of all, her assumption of the Fritzi Massary role in Leo Fall’s Madame Pompadour (Daly’s Theatre, 1924).

Massary was no less than a theatrical genius, and the arch-sophisticate of German operetta, so no one thought that Evelyn Laye would be able to touch the role. But her success in it was emphatic, and the critics wrote lavishly in praise of her perfomance, noting that, in addition to the “inventory of beauty which is Miss Evelyn Laye” (James Agate’s phrase) and the lovely quality of her singing voice, was now added the confidence and ease of an accomplished actress. Other musicals – The Dollar Princess, Cleopatra, Betty in Mayfair, Princess Charming, Lilac Time, and Jerome Kern’s Blue Eyes – soon followed.

In 1925 Laye fell in love with and married the light comedian Sonnie Hale, much against the wishes of her parents, who refused to attend her wedding or to give her a reception afterwards. Since she had never before been separated from them, her deep distress soon led to a reconciliation, but it may well have been the strain that this must have imposed on the marriage that led Hale to abandon her in 1928 for another emerging talent, Jessie Matthews. The break-up led to the greatest mistake of her career.

Noel Coward invited her to star in his new musical play Bitter Sweet – she refused out of pique because it was to be presented by Cochran, who at that time was employing both Hale and Matthews in a Coward revue at the London Pavilion. Only when she saw Peggy Wood playing Sari in Bitter Sweet at a matinee did she realise the extent of her folly, and, as she admitted in her autobiography Boo To My Friends (1958), “I had broken the great rule of the theatre; I had not put it first.”

It was a mistake I doubt she ever made again. She had the considerable guts to swallow her pride and ask them humbly if she could be considered for the part when it was produced in New York. Meanwhile she was appearing in Sigmund Romberg’s The New Moon at Drury Lane, in which, with the cruellest irony, she nightly had to sing the hit number of the show, “Lover, Come Back to Me”.

In his autobiography Present Indicative, Noel Coward, describing the Broadway opening of Bitter Sweet, paid her the tribute of a lifetime:

It was Evelyn’s night from first to last. She played as though she were enchanted . . . Early on in the ballroom scene she conquered the audience completely by singing the quick waltz song so brilliantly and with such a quality of excitement, that the next few minutes of the play were entirely lost in one of the most prolonged outbursts of cheering I have ever heard in a theatre . . . It was she, and she alone, who put the play over that night.

In a letter to his mother, he also wrote, “How right you were about Evelyn, she certainly does knock spots off Peggy.”

Laye’s tremendous success on Broadway led to a Hollywood contract with Sam Goldwyn, for whom she made just one film, One Heavenly Night (1932). Seeing it today, even an appalling script and mediocre songs do not entirely efface her charm and beauty. But the experience made her escape back home to play Bitter Sweet in London, where she was triumphantly received.

At the Adelphi Theatre in 1932, she starred in Helen!, for which Cochran had assembled an astonishing array of talent. The musical adaptation of Offenbach’s La Belle Helene was by Korngold, the translation by A.P. Herbert, the choreography by Massine, the designs by Oliver Messel (the revolutionary all-white bedroom scene with the bath shaped like a great white swan), and the production by Max Reinhardt, the most admired director in Europe. Reinhardt’s telegram to her read: “You are that rare and holy trinity of the stage, a great singer, a great actress, and a great beauty. If I have added to your splendour at all, I could not have given you anything that was not already in you.”

After Helen! she made several British films, among them Evensong (1935), based on Beverley Nichols’s bitchy novel about the supposed rivalry between the opera-singers Nellie Melba and Toti dal Monte, in which she played Melba to Conchita Supervia’s Dal Monte. By this time, she had become romantically attached to the charming actor Frank Lawton, and, after a protracted courtship, they were married in 1934 in Hollywood, where he was playing David in MGM’s all-star production of David Copperfield. She made her second Hollywood film there, The Night is Young (1936), with Ramon Navarro, and the score by Sigmund Romberg included one of the many songs which will always be associated with her, “When I grow too old to dream”. Eventually they stayed in the United States for three years, while Lawton completed his contract, and she played on Broadway and in Los Angeles. Their marriage, though childless, was a famously happy one.

On her return, Cochran mounted a lavish production of Lehar’s Paganini (Lyceum, 1937), in which she played opposite the great Austrian tenor Richard Tauber. When, early in the rehearsals, she confessed that she was terrified of ruining their duets by singing flat, he immediately reassured her by saying that, when it came to her top notes, he would slip his arm round her waist and support her diaphragm, and this he did at every performance that they gave. Unexpectedly, the production was not a success and, for the first time for years, she found herself out of work and with no offers coming in. Since she couldn’t abide idleness, she launched a new career in variety and pantomime, where she improved on the family tradition by becoming the most sought-after Principal Boy of her time, as well as being top-of- the-bill at all the best variety theatres.

On the outbreak of war, she immediately volunteered to sing for the troops, and, on the formation of Ensa, she was put in command of all entertainments for the Navy. She also did her last Cochran show, Lights Up, at the Savoy, as well as three musicals, all of which were adversely affected by the wartime bombing. When the war finished, she made a success, even if it was not a smash hit, of the Yvonne Printemps roles in Oscar Straus’s Three Waltzes (Prince’s 1945), and, for the next nine years, developed her acting skills, largely in a series of touring versions of West End successes.

In 1954 she accepted a smallish role in a new musical starring Anton Walbrook, Wedding in Paris. During rehearsals, however, her part was constantly being built up, so that when the production opened at the Hippodrome in April, she was co-starred, and found herself once again the toast of London. She stayed with the show for almost two years, just as she later did in 1959 when she had another smash hit with the comedy The Amorous Prawn at the Saville, and for the first two years of the long-running No Sex Please – We’re British at the Strand (1971). By this time she had become a highly accomplished comedienne. In 1973 she was appointed CBE for her services to the theatre. Astonishingly, and surely most unfairly, this was the only honour she was to receive.

In 1969, Frank Lawton died. Though never a star of her magnitude, he was a respected and much-liked actor whose love and support throughout their marriage was matched by her devoted nursing of him during the numerous illnesses he endured at the end of his life.

As Laye’s career gradually slowed down, she still responded to any challenge that came her way. She continued to work on the stage, in radio, films and television. Retirement was anathema to her and as recently as 1992 she had been appearing to sold-out houses on Sunday nights at theatres all over the country. Though her singing voice was by now little more than a husky croak, the authority, the charm, the projection and the star quality were still intact, and audiences responded to it with standing ovations at the final curtain. This culminated in a memorable Sunday night performance at the London Palladium (26 July 1992) given in aid of the Theatrical Ladies Guild, of which she was President. The packed house included many hundreds of her fellow actors, and they seized the opportunity to show their affection and admiration for her superb professionalism and courage.

The genres of musical and light comedy to which she devoted her life may be thought of as essentially lightweight and frivolous. The secret of Evelyn Laye’s triumphant career was the total dedication she gave to honing her talents to as near perfection as it was in her to achieve. She was adored by every company she ever led, but beneath the beauty, the charm and the glamour was an artist of deep seriousness and absolute commitment. She was indeed a very bright, particular star, and one of the great glories of the English stage has finally left the scene.

Elsie Evelyn Lay (Evelyn Laye), actress and singer: born London 10 July 1900; married 1926 Sonnie Hale (marriage dissolved 1931), 1934 Frank Lawton (died 1969), died London 17 February 1996

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