Fiona Shaw is one of Ireland’s greatest actresses who has a leading reputation on the British stage. She was born in Cork in 1958. She trained at RADA in London. Her films include “My Left Foot” in 1989, “Mountains of the Moon”, “Jane Eyre”, “Persuasion” and in the U.S. in “The Black Dahlia” and of course Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter movies.
TCM Overview:
inroads onscreen as well since the late 1980s. Intense and fiercely intellectual off-stage and on, this statuesque brunette with a great aquiline profile graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1982 and promptly made her debut in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”. Since then, she has turned in one powerful–sometimes controversial–stage performance after another, including Celia in “As You Like It” (1985), Erika in “Mephisto” (1986), a near-psychotic Katherine in “The Taming of the Shrew” (1987-1988) and “Mary Stuart” (1988 and 1996), earning a reputation as a superb classical actress/daredevil. Shaw’s most hotly-debated role was as “Richard II”, which she played in 1995 and which marked her sixth collaboration (since 1988) with her longtime friend, director Deborah Warner. The two made their NYC debut in 1996 with a hit staging of “The Waste Land”, T. S. Eliot’s 433-line poem about death and resurrection. Critics praised Shaw for her brilliant performance in the tour de force which had the actress standing alone on a bare stage, conjuring up a bleak gallery of characters lost in a realm of spiritual blight.
Shaw’s best-known film role to date was as the sympathetic therapist with whom the cerebral palsy-afflicted Christy Brown (Daniel Day-Lewis) falls unrequitedly in love in “My Left Foot” (1988). The actress has easily moved between comedy and tragedy onstage and her film performances have also captured her facility with these shifts. Shaw made her debut as a nun caring for children during World War II in “Sacred Hearts” (1984) and following her “My Left Foot” success, has shown her versatility in diverse role ranging from the free-spirited wife of explorer Sir Richard Burton (Patrick Bergin) in “Mountains on the Moon” (1990) to her scene-stealing turn as the sex-starved head of Pileforth Academy in the comedy sequel, “Three Men and a Little Lady” (1990) to a lascivious liberal in “London Kills Me” (1991).
She played over-the-top villainesses in the unworthy comedies “Super Mario Bros.” and “Undercover Blues” (both 1993) before essaying fine supporting turns in “Persuasion” (1995), as the sister of the heroine’s true love, and “Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre'” (1996), as the dreadful aunt. Under Warner’s watchful eye, she recreated her stage triumphs as “Hedda Gabler” (1993, with Stephen Rea) and “The Waste Land” (1995). Shaw once again appeared onscreen alongside Rea and newcomer Eamonn Owens as Mrs. Nugent, the bane of existence for Owens’ “The Butcher Boy” (1997) in Neil Jordan’s acclaimed dark comedy about a serial killer. She was wasted in support of Sean Bean and Sophie Marceau in Bernard Rose’s remake of “Anna Karenina” (also 1997) and Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman as a senior intelligence officer in the disastrous big screen version of “The Avengers” (1998).
Shaw lent her intelligence to the role of Hedda Hopper in the acclaimed HBO movie “RKO 281” (1999), which traced the behind the scenes machinations during the making of “Citizen Kane” in 1940-41. In 2000, she appeared in the popular BBC miniseries “Gormenghast” as Irma Prunesquallor and was prominently featured in Warner’s big-screen debut “The Last September” as a sophisticated Anglo-Irish woman caught up in the decline of a great house. Co-starring stage legends Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon and executive produced by Jordan, “The Last September” was well-received by critics and art-house audiences, with Shaw singled out for praise for her virtuoso performance. Just weeks after the film hit American screens the actress returned to the stage at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre as the tragic heroine in another Warner-helmed project, “Medea”.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Debra Stephenson was born in 1972 in Kingston upon Hull. She first appeared on television at the age of fourteen in “Opportunity Knocks”. In 1999 she played Shell Dockley in TV’s “Bad Girls”. Between 2004 and 2006 she was Frankie Baldwin in “Coronation Street”. She has also featured in “Midsomer Murders” and “Where the Heart Is”.
Angela Baddeley will forever be remembered as Mrs Bridges the cook in the television series “Upstairs, Downstairs which ran from 1971 until 1975 and is still popular to-day. She had a very distinguished stage career with occasional forays into film and television. She was born in 1904 and was the older sister of actress Hermione Baddeley. Her film debut in 1931 was in “The Speckled Band” and other films included “The Ghost Train”, “Quartet” in 1948 and “No Time For Tears” in 1957. She was due to make a series on Mrs Bridges when she died suddenly in 1976 at the age of 71.
Angela Baddeley & Emlyn WilliamsEnglish stage actress Angela Baddeley. Original Publication: People Disc – HS0047 (Photo by Sasha/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Celia Lipton was born in 1923 in Edinburgh. Her film debut was “Calling Paul Temple” in 1948 and “The Tall Headlines”. By 1954 she was in the U.S. mainly appearing on television. She died in 2011 at the age of 87.
“MailOnline” article on Celia Lipton:
On a summer night in 1955, an attractive young British actress, finding the lift out of order in a Manhattan apartment building, arrived panting at her friend’s front door on the top floor. It was like a scene straight out of the Hollywood classic, How To Marry A Millionaire.
She remembers: ‘I was breathing heavily and almost banged straight into a ladder standing right outside.
‘Looking up, I saw a man with black curly hair and the most expressive, brooding brown eyes that seemed to momentarily flash a sign of recognition, while he stood on top of the ladder.
A life less ordinary: Celia Lipton as a young music star
‘He was in the midst of repairing the skylight, and, noting his rolled up shirtsleeves and open shirt, I thought to myself, “What a good-looking plumber”‘.
But to her surprise, the ‘good-looking plumber’ followed her into her friend’s apartment, and was introduced as Victor Farris, a name that meant nothing to Celia Lipton, the 31-year-old West End musical star, singer, actress and daughter of Mayfair’s celebrated Grosvenor House Hotel bandleader, Sydney Lipton.
After hesitantly accepting his offer to drive her home, in ‘the most awful-looking pale blue Cadillac I’d ever seen – it bore the scars, dents and scrapes of endless battles for limited parking space on Manhattan’s streets’ – he took her for coffee.
They sat at a table facing the men’s room. ‘Every time a man came out, Victor pretended he was knocking them off with a machine gun. He had me in convulsions. Our one cup of coffee seemed to last for hours, with much laughter. We both found a new camaraderie.’
By the time Farris, divorced and 12 years her senior, dropped her off at her apartment, she was convinced he was a Mafia Don.
She never dreamed that he owned 17 companies, was a millionaire many times over and the inventor of things the world came to take for granted, including the paper milk carton, the paper clip and Farris safety and relief valves.
Celia Lipton had felt an instantaneous attraction to this ‘macho man whose toughness co-existed with humour and sweetness’.
When she had reeled off her acting credits, he had silenced her, declaring that ‘anyone can act’, a statement that outraged her.
‘All night long,’ she writes, ‘my heart pounded, and I thought, “I’m falling for a gangster! What would my father say?”
‘All these thoughts were running through my mind when the phone rang at 3am. It was Victor “Mafia Don” Farris, solicitously enquiring how I was. He called me “Puppy”. I tried to be nonchalant and said: “I’m fine.”
There was a long pause while I wrestled with my head, which told me to slam the receiver down and never talk to this gangster again. But my heart melted at the very sound of his voice.
‘A chastened-sounding Victor told me softly that he was pulling my leg. He wasn’t a gangster at all. Victor wanted to prove to me that “anybody can act”. He certainly convinced me that he could act!’
Six months later, they were married. Lipton gave up her glittering stage and screen career to become his wife – and the acknowledged Queen of Palm Beach society.
The story of their 29 turbulent, volatile, but deeply happy years together is engagingly told by Celia Lipton Farris, now one of the richest women in the world, in her new autobiography, My Three Lives.
It has to rank as one of the most extraordinary books that has ever come my way.
Lavishly produced in coffee-table format, in almost blinding Technicolor, its 344 pages feature no fewer than 408 photographs, 232 of them of herself.
We have Celia with the Queen, with Prince Philip, with the Prince of Wales, with Princess Diana, with Prince Edward, with Rose Kennedy (the mother of JFK), with Clint Eastwood, with Bob Hope, with a decidedly icy-looking Bette Davis – of whom Farris says: ‘I had the distinct impression that she was wishing I wasn’t with her on stage at all,’ – and of a legion of lesser luminaries who make up the candyfloss world of Palm Beach society.
The New York Post has described the book as ‘an ego trip that counts’. Others might describe it as an ego trip in which you count the pictures.
Yet nowhere in this strange book will you find the date on which its author was born, a matter she declines to countenance, claiming that in America, ‘if you are over 40, you are dead’.
This statement is bound to interest President Barack Obama, who is 47, not to mention Hillary Clinton, 61, and a whole roster of older star ladies such as Lauren Bacall, Dame Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley MacLaine and Debbie Reynolds.
The reality is that on Christmas Day, Celia Lipton Farris was 85, a fact that readers of her book will find impossible to believe after studying the hundreds of photographs in which she appears gleaming, glowing, dressed to the nines, magnificently coiffured and loaded down with jewels that look as if they might have come from the collection of Marie Antoinette.
Celia May Lipton, in fact, was born on December 25, 1923, in Edinburgh, the only child of an English violinist, Sidney John Lipton – as Sydney Lipton he would become one of Britain’s top bandleaders – and of a noted Scottish beauty, May Johnston Parker.
When Celia was eight, her father formed his own band and took it to London’s Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, where he was to remain for 35 years.
Every week, millions of radio listeners tuned in to hear the words: ‘You are listening to Sydney Lipton’s Orchestra broadcasting from the Silver Room at the Grosvenor House Hotel.’
On one occasion in the Fifties, when Lipton and his orchestra played for the Queen at Buckingham Palace, Celia’s mother danced with Group Captain Peter Townsend, the lover of Princess Margaret.
Deeply happy: With Victor Farris on their wedding day in 1956
Both parents attempted to veto Celia’s ambitions to be a performer. But unknown to them, she auditioned for another bandleader, Jack Harris.
When her father heard, he said: ‘I thought, to hell with it. If she’s going to sing with a band, she’ll sing with my band and I can keep an eye on her.’
So, in 1939, at the age of 15, she made her debut at the London Palladium with her father’s orchestra.
At 17, she was back at the Palladium in the revue, Apple Sauce, and four months later, she won her first raves in the West End revue, Get A Load Of This, in which, dressed by the royal couturier Norman Hartnell, she stopped the show every night, singing You’re In My Arms (And A Million Miles Away).
At 20, she played the title role in Peter Pan. The turning-point for Celia came in 1944, when superstar Jessie Matthews walked out of the leading role in the West End revival of The Quaker Girl.
Lipton stepped in at only ten days’ notice, and when the production reached the West End, she took 16 curtain calls and one critic hailed her as ‘the brightest of new stars’.
On the French Riviera, she rubbed shoulders with the young Prince Philip of Greece, before his marriage. ‘He said he’d like to give me a lift to the casino in Cannes,’ she said.
‘I asked him how we were going to get there and he said he’d borrowed a man’s bike and he put me on the back of it. My dress kept catching in the back of the bike – it was really a scream. I got lucky as I danced with him. He was a very good dancer.’
After several more leading roles on the West End stage, and appearances in a number of films, Celia Lipton left Britain in 1952 to try her luck in New York. And there, after two appearances on the Broadway stage, two American TV roles, and some success in cabaret, she met Victor Farris.
They were married at his home in Tenafly, New Jersey. ‘Even though Victor never once suggested that I give up my career, I knew our marriage wouldn’t work if I continued.
‘He wanted a traditional wife, actually the kind my mother was. I wanted to be that for him.’
But their first child, a girl, lived only a day. Their second, a son, was premature and died after a few hours. She suffered, in all, ten miscarriages.
‘My heart was broken,’ she writes. ‘This was a time in my life where I felt useless and inadequate’.
Fortune: Farris left her more than £100million
When, at last, she succeeded in giving birth to two daughters, Marian and Cecile (‘Ce Ce’ for short), Farris was ‘not that enamoured’, and she ‘soon learned that it’s the attention that a child requires that can make a husband irritable. Victor liked to be the centre of attention at all times’.
Although it is clear that their 29-year marriage was not always easy, her account of it, and of Farris’s death in 1985, when she fought desperately to get the paramedics to their Palm Beach mansion, is the one section where her book blazes vividly into authentic literary life.
‘I walked out of the hospital, got into my car, put my head on the steering wheel and sobbed. Finally, after what seemed like hours, I started the car and drove into the bleak, dark night across the Intracoastal Bridge, back to Palm Beach. That five-minute drive home seemed like 500 miles.’
Farris left her a fortune in excess of £100 million. By shrewd investment, she has doubled it, making her one of the wealthiest women on the planet. In widowhood, she started to display her formidable organising abilities.
She became Executive Producer of the American Cinema Awards in Hollywood, sang before the Queen at the 50th anniversary of V.E. Day in Hyde Park, made a brief screen comeback with Burt Reynolds in B.L. Stryker, and released a series of her own, self-financed, nostalgic CDs.
In 2003, she was delighted to learn that her recording of Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner was being played to the troops in Iraq. However, the song’s composer, Hubert Gregg, was less delighted.
‘Hers is the worst version of my song I have ever heard,’ he told me, ‘and that includes the Omsk-Siberian Choir – in Russian!’
Her philanthropy has become legendary. She has funded two hospital wings in her husband’s name, has worked devotedly for Aids sufferers, spearheaded a Salvation Army appeal that raised $10 million, and has given huge sums to numerous causes, sometimes with money raised from exhibitions of her own brilliantly coloured impressionist oil paintings.
The American Cancer Society has named a lifetime achievement award after her in honour of her 30 years of charitable work.
Occasionally, her judgment has failed her. Towards the end of her book, she relates that she was ‘honoured to receive a letter informing me that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth had appointed me a Dame’.
This conveys the impression that she had been created a Dame of the British Empire. Not so. In 2004, she was named a Dame of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, which entitles her to place the letters, D. St. J, after her name.
Yet she now heads her personal notepaper, Dame Celia Lipton Farris, and is announced by that style on all social occasions. But then, in the neverland kingdom of Florida’s Palm Beach, such distinctions are apt to become blurred.
Is Farris’s book the story of ‘an incredible woman who has led an inspiring life’, as one of its more gushing reviews insists?
Sadly, it could have been, had it not been written with one eye on the calendar, and the other on her socialite neighbours.
Despite that, one feels this is one genuine gutsy dame who doesn’t need a cardboard title from some venerable order of which most people have never even heard.
Nor does she need to fib about her age or assume a status she does not possess merely to impress the rich bitches of Palm Beach.
If her book proves anything at all, it is that Celia Lipton Farris is a real-life heroine who has built her own pedestal.
The above “Mail Online” article can also be accessed here.
The Telegraph obituary in 2011.
Celia Lipton, who died on March 11 aged 87, was a child star, known as the “British Judy Garland”, who went on to become a Forces sweetheart in the Second World War; later she gave up a successful stage career to marry the American inventor and industrialist Victor Farris and became the acknowledged ‘Queen of Palm Beach society’.
22 April 2011 • 6:17pm
Celia Lipton CREDIT: Photo: BRUNO
Like any society hostess and former actress Celia Lipton was always vague about her age and was furious when a magazine obtained a copy of her birth certificate, showing that Celia May Lipton was born on Christmas Day 1923, at 73 Leamington Terrace, Edinburgh. Her father was an English violinist, Sidney John Lipton — as Sydney Lipton he would become one of Britain’s top bandleaders; her mother was May Johnston Parker, a dancer, singer and noted Scottish beauty.
When Celia was eight, her father formed his own band and took it to the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, where he was to remain for 35 years. Enthralled by watching the singers and chorus girls at the hotel putting on their make-up and diamonds to go on stage, Celia determined to go into showbusiness. Her chance came when, aged about 10, she spotted an advertisement asking for a Judy Garland sound-alike to play the lead in a BBC radio production of Babes In the Wood. Determined to get the part, she perfected Garland’s lisp and breathy singing style. When her parents refused to let her audition, she set off on her own and secured the part.
She went on to record more radio plays and albums and, aged only 15, appeared at the London Palladium. “My father was leading the orchestra,” she recalled. “He didn’t tell the audience who I was, he just said: ‘There’s a little girl coming out, her name is Celia.’ I sang I’m Just In Between. It didn’t faze me. Everyone cheered, and then my father said: ‘That was my daughter.’ It was thrilling.”
When the Second World War broke out, her father joined up as a private and was away from the family for seven years. As a result Celia became the family breadwinner. She sang to 2,000 troops at the Albert Hall, to severely disfigured men at the burns unit in East Grinstead, to the forces on the European front and at RAF hangars across the country, becoming known for Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner and You’ve Got Your Own Life To Live. With her mother as chaperone she toured Britain.
Her greatest triumphs, though, were her appearances as Peter Pan at the Scala Theatre, Tottenham Court Road, in 1943 and 1944 (the “best ever seen in a London theatre” according to one critic), and in Lionel Monckton’s 1944 revival of the light opera, The Quaker Girl, when she stepped in for Jessie Matthews at the last moment and received a dozen curtain calls on opening night at the Coliseum.
After the war Celia Lipton travelled to Paris and then the French Riviera where, on one occasion, she met the young Prince Philip of Greece, who offered to escort her to the casino in Cannes. “I asked him how we were going to get there and he said he’d borrowed a man’s bike and he put me on the back of it,” she recalled in 2004. “My dress kept catching in the back of the bike. I was lucky since I got to dance with him. He was an exceptionally good dancer.”
She also launched herself on a film career. After making her debut supporting John Bentley and Dinah Sheridan in Calling Paul Temple (1948), she appeared opposite Sonia Dresdel and Walter Fitzgerald in the adaptation of Joan Morgan’s novel, This Was A Woman (1948) and played Sandra in Terrence Young’s melodrama The Frightened Bride (1952).
In 1952 Celia Lipton moved to New York, where she joined the all-star revue, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac (1953-54) at the Imperial Theatre, Broadway, and appeared as Esmeralda to Robert Ellenstein’s Quasimodo in a television version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1954).
While in New York, she met Victor Farris. “I was returning some books to a friend and there was a man up on a ladder fixing a fan – my future husband,” she recalled. At first she thought he was a plumber and then, maybe, a member of the Mafia. In fact he owned 17 companies, was the inventor of the paper milk carton, the paper clip and the Farris Safety and Relief Valve, still used in shipping, oil and chemical industries. He was also a millionaire many times over. The couple wed in 1956, with Celia giving up showbusiness to devote herself to married life in New Jersey and, later, Florida.
Although the marriage was not without its difficulties — her relationship with her husband was sometimes volatile and Celia suffered ten miscarriages and gave birth prematurely to two babies who both died within a week — it was a happy one. At their sumptuous mansion in Palm Beach, once owned by the Vanderbilts, Celia became a leading society hostess.
When Victor Farris died of a heart attack in 1985, closely followed by her parents, Celia’s life altered dramatically again. Her husband had left her his £100 million fortune (an amount she more than doubled through shrewd investments over subsequent years), and she embarked on a new phase of her life as a philanthropist and charity fundraiser. “There are a lot of silly, socially competitive, frivolous women in this town who gossip, go out to lunch every day and dinner every night and that’s it,” she observed. “I’m delighted that I know what hard work is and proud of my Scottish mother and the good Scottish common sense she taught me.”
A convert to Catholicism, she raised large sums for the Salvation Army, the American Heart Association and cancer research charities. At a time when the disease was taboo she was one of the first big private benefactors of Aids research. Other beneficiaries included the National Trust for Scotland, the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, the American Red Cross, the Prince’s Trust and the Duke of Edinburgh Trust.
In addition she became Executive Producer of the American Cinema Awards in Hollywood (which raises funds for actors who have fallen on hard times); sang before the Queen at the 50th anniversary of VE Day in Hyde Park, made a brief screen comeback with Burt Reynolds in BL Stryker (1989-1990), and released a series of her own, self-financed, CDs. In 2008, she published her autobiography My Three Lives.
With her big stack of silvery-blonde hair, pillar-box red lipstick and tailored white suits, Celia Lipton retained the looks of a 1940s star. She lived surrounded by framed — often signed — thank you letters and photographs featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Bob Hope, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, Pope John Paul II, Diana, Princess of Wales, and even John Major.
In her autobiography Celia Lipton related that she was “honoured to receive a letter informing me that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth had appointed me a Dame”, conveying the impression that she had been created DBE. In fact, in 2004 she was named a Dame of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, entitling her to place the letters D St J after her name. Nonetheless she headed her personal notepaper, Dame Celia Lipton Farris, and, in America, was announced by that style on social occasions.
Simon Williams is best remembered for his role as James Bellamy in the popular television series “Upstaris, Downstairs” which ran from 1971 until 1975. He was born in 1946 in Windsor and is the son of the actor and playwright Hugh Williams.Hil film debut was in 1968 in “The Touchables”. His other movies include “Blood on Satan’s Claw”, “The Incredible Sarah” with Glenda Jackson and “The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu”.
Simon WilliamsBelinda Carroll & Simon WilliamsSimon Williams
Diane Keen is currently to be seen on BBC;s “Doctors” series. She was born in 1946 in London. Her film debut came in 1967 in “Popdown”. Other films include “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”, “Tomorrow” wiith Olivia Newton-John and “Silver Dream Racer” with David Essex. She has had much success on television and starred in “The Cuckoo Waltz” and “Rings on Their Fingers”.
Michael Ward was born in 1909 in Cornwall. He made his movie debut in 1947 in “An Ideal Husband”. He went on to feature in such films as “Once A Jolly Swagman”, “Lilli Marlene”, “So Long At the Fair”, “Street Corner”, “Josephine and Men”, “Lost” and “Up in the World” with Norman Wisdom. he usually palye snooty shop managers or hairdressers who looked down on his customers. Michael Ward died in 1997 at the age of 88.
His “Independent” obituary:
Michael Ward belonged to that clutch of character actors whose services were in such demand during the heyday of the British film industry that they seemed to appear in every post-war movie. A master of cameo acting, Ward made his name in small parts throughout the 1950s and 1960s, in such films as Tom Brown’s Schooldays, The Love Lottery and Doctor in Love.
Whether cast as an industrious barman or petulant shop assistant, his unique acting style afforded an air of upper-class nervousness. With light fuzzy hair, aquiline nose and always immaculately attired, he was a distinctive thespian whose haughty tones were well-suited to the fretful and solicitous characters for which he became renowned.
His more substantial film contributions included appearances as Maurice, an effeminate uncle in Norman Wisdom’s seventh film Up in the World (1956), and as the supercilious Gerald in Hammer’s What the Butler Saw (1950). For his performance as Elvin, an ornithologist, in Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), a fine remake of the 1930s classic Rome Express, Ward received glowing reviews. A trade paper commented: “the actor deserving most praise is Michael Ward who gives us a delightful characterisation of a lecturer on English birds.”
He was born George Everard Yeo Ward. His father was a parish vicar which meant that the family moved around the Cornish peninsula, including spells at Falmouth; Hessenford, near St Germans; St Agnus and Marazion. As an only child, Ward admitted to leading a lonely childhood, missing the companionship of brothers and sisters.
He showed an early predilection for the piano and while attending Mannamead Junior School, within Plymouth College, received extra tuition from the housemaster’s wife, an accomplished musician. Although he never pursued his early ambition to become a concert pianist, he became a proficient player and wrote his own material. Later he attended the Central School of Speech and Drama, after a brief stint as a teacher.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, he had already made several stage appearances since graduating, and was living near Luton. After serving two years with the Army he was invalided out through illness in 1942, finishing the war years helping the emergency services around Luton.
He returned to the stage in 1945, playing Beverly Carlton in The Man Who Came to Dinner, followed a year later by an appearance in Gay Pavilion, as the shy footman, and understudying Vic Oliver in The Night and the Music.
Ward made his film debut in 1947 as a French valet in The First Gentleman, a study of the Prince Regent’s reign after the Napoleonic wars. The picture marked the beginning of a busy film career that contained appearances in five Norman Wisdom movies and five Carry Ons, including the part of Archimedes in Carry On Cleo (1964); he was also employed by the Boulting Brothers in several productions. His last film was Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), playing a real estate agent.
On television, he gave a fine performance as Adrian, Eric and Ernie’s neighbour in the Morecambe and Wise Show. There was the role of Penfold in Crossroads (1976) and appearances in many other top shows, including Hancock’s Half Hour, The Two Ronnies, Steptoe And Son, The New Avengers and Rising Damp, as a Labour candidate.
During a career spanning nearly three decades, Ward worked with many of the profession’s top names on both sides of the Atlantic. Acting remained the mainstay of his working life, but for a spell during the 1950s he studied statistics in the evenings, enabling him to work occasionally for a large American pharmaceutical company when acting jobs were scarce.
Ill health forced his retirement from acting in 1980, but repeats of many of his films continued to generate fan mail. In 1990, he was offered a part as a cardinal for the American film Eminence. Sadly, illness prevented him from accepting it.
Although during the years before his death Ward was bedridden, he always retained a lively sense of humour. From 1989 until his death, he was cared for by his close friend James Hogg.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Paul Usher was born in Liverpool in 1961. He is pri marily known for is role in “The Bill” as OC Des Taviner. His other credirs include “Swing”, “Liverpool 1” and “Robin Hood”.
Eddie Calvert was a very famous trumpeter in the 1950’s. He had two hughly popular hits “O My Papa” and “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”. He did feaure in the film “Beyond Mombasa” in 1956 with Cornel Wilde and Donna Reed. Eddie Calvert died in Salsbury, Rhodesia in 1978 at the age of 56.
His “Wikipedia” entry:
Calvert was born in Preston, Lancashire, England,[3] and grew up in a family where the music of his local brass band featured highly. He was soon able to play a variety of instruments, and he was most accomplished on thetrumpet.[3] After World War II he graduated from playing as an amateur in brass bands to professional engagements with popular dance orchestras of the day, including Geraldo’s plus Billy Ternet,[3] and he soon became renowned for the virtuosity of his performances. Following his exposure on television with the Stanley Black Orchestra, an enthusiastic announcer introduced him as the ‘Man With The Golden Trumpet’ – an apt description that remained with him for the rest of his musical career.
Further chart entries were “John And Julie”, taken from the soundtrack of the movieJohn and Juliet, and “Mandy”, his last major hit. Other recordings included “Stranger In Paradise” (1955), “The Man with the Golden Arm” (1956) and “Jealousy” (1960). Calvert co-wrote the song “My Son, My Son“, which was a hit for Vera Lynn in 1954. In spite of being an instrumental, his theme music for the film The Man with the Golden Arm was banned by the BBC “due to its connection with a film about drugs”.[4]
In 1960 he was invited by orchestra leader, Norrie Paramor and their mutual friends Ruby Murray and Michael Holliday to record an extended-play single with four tracks. Calvert played Silent Night and on another track he, Murray and Holliday teamed up in a version of Good Luck, Good Health, God Bless You. The single, released by Columbia Records achieved some success in Britain but was more popular in Australia and South Africa.
As music began to change in the 1960s with the worldwide popularity of groups like The Beatles and the rock n’ roll genre, Calvert’s musical renditions became less popular among record buyers. By 1968 Calvert had become disillusioned with life under the Labour government of Harold Wilson and was especially critical of London’s policy towards Rhodesia. After a world tour that included several stops in Africa, he left the UK, making South Africa his home. He continued to perform there, and was a regular visitor to Rhodesia. He continued to record for the local market and performed a version of “Amazing Grace“, retitled “Amazing Race” specially adapted for Rhodesia.[5]
On the 7 August 1978, Calvert collapsed and died of a heart attack in the bathroom of his home in Rivonia, Johannesburg. He was fifty-six years old.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
