Vinnie Jones was born in 1965 in Watford. He was a reknowned footballer and played for Leeds United and Chelseaamong others. In 1998 he made his feature film debut in “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” directed by Guy Ritchie. Other films include “Snatch”, “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “X-Men”.
TCM Overview:
One of the toughest of England’s “hard men” of football, Vinnie Jones parlayed his notoriety as a talented if ruthless player for championship teams into a career as a supporting actor and occasional lead in films on both sides of the Atlantic. Jones’ movie roles rarely asked him to do more than provide a physically imposing presence, but from time to time – most notably in Guy Richie’s “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (1998) – he displayed a knack for comic delivery as well. He also successfully parodied his two-fisted soccer persona in a string of popular television ads in England, making him a bit of public treasure in his homeland.
Born Vincent Peter Jones in Watford, Hertfordshire, England on Jan. 5, 1965, Jones’ soccer career began with the semi-professional Wealdstone Football Club and the Swedish club IFK Holmsund, before joining the Wimbledon Football Club in 1986. Jones quickly earned a reputation as an aggressive player – he set a still-unbroken record of earning a yellow flag (which cites a second warning from an official and removal from the game) after only five seconds of play, and earned admirers and detractors alike for distracting an opposing player by grabbing his testicles. Despite these and numerous other offenses, Jones helped to earn the Wimbledon team the Football Association Cup – the highest honor in English football – in 1988.
Jones left Wimbledon in 1989 and played for several other teams, including Chelsea and Leeds, before returning to Wimbledon in 1992. During his tenure in Leeds, he proved that he was able to play at the top of his skill set without resorting to dirty tricks. However, after returning to Wimbledon, he solidified his image as a brawler by hosting “Soccer’s Hard Men,” a direct-to-video compilation of footage featuring Jones and other players getting tough on the field. The Football Association publicly excoriated Jones for his participation and fined him 20,000 pounds.
While completing his final stint with Wimbledon, Jones’s record of 384 games and 33 goals earned him a spot on the Wales International Team, for which he played from 1994 to 1997. He eventually brought his professional sports career to a close with a stint as player/coach for the Queens Park Rangers in 1998. He retired from the game a year later after being passed over as the team’s manager; instead focusing on the business of living up to his reputation.
First on the docket was an autobiography, Vinnie, which was published in 1998. He quickly followed this with a string of television commercials which played up to his sports persona to great effect. His film career got off to a rollicking start with Guy Ritchie’s crime caper romp “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” in which he played Big Chris, the stone-faced and brutal debt collector for porn magnate “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale (P.H. Moriarty). Jones’s dry delivery was perfect for the offbeat character, which brought his equally taciturn son with him on collection jobs, and it brought him the first of two Empire Awards; the second came for his reunion with Ritchie on the more star-studded (Brad Pitt, Benecio Del Toro) but less clever “Snatch” (2001).
Jones made his Hollywood debut as a taciturn car thief named “The Sphinx” in Dominic Sena’s overblown remake of “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2000), and quickly settled into a string of roles in mediocre American product that emphasized his imposing figure, including “Swordfish” (2001) and “The Big Bounce” (2004). In his native England, however, Jones got his first chance to play a lead in “Mean Machine” (2001), a remake of “The Longest Yard” (1974), which cast him as an imprisoned former soccer champ who organizes a team from his fellow cons to play against the jail’s guards. Jones also cut an album of blues and soul covers titled Respect in 2002, and began a long and lucrative collaboration with Bacardi in spots for UK television. These came to an end in 2003 after Jones was convicted of assaulting a crew member on board a Virgin Atlantic flight.
Jones manfully handled the crooks and cronies he was assigned in a handful of bland action and comedy pictures for most of 2004 and 2005; his sole notable character during this period was, appropriately enough, a berserk soccer hooligan in the otherwise dim teen sex comedy “Eurotrip” (2004), which again gave Jones a showcase for his comic skills. He later proved that he could capably handle a lead role (and even a smattering of romance) in the little-seen Irish crime drama “Johnny Was” (2005), which cast him as a crook attempting to stay straight, despite the temptations of his former mentor (Patrick Bergin) and his girlfriend (Samantha Mumba).
Jones enjoyed another comic turn as a hard-nosed soccer coach in “She’s the Man” (2006), a likable teen comedy about a female soccer prodigy (Amanda Bynes) who must dress as a boy in order to play for a prestigious team. That same year, Jones was used to excellent effect as Cain Marko, the unstoppable and flippant mutant known as Juggernaut in “X-Men: The Last Stand” (2006) who makes life difficult for Ellen Page’s Kitty Pride in one tense chase scene through walls. Jones reportedly made enough of an impression on the film’s producers that his character was spared in the film’s room-clearing final assault, and was signed to future related projects.
In 2006, Jones appeared in several UK television ads promoting greyhound racing for the bookmaker company Ladbrokes; Jones was a recognized figure in that sport as both a greyhound owner and racing enthusiast. On the film front, he remained remarkably busy, and if the projects rarely allowed him to show much range, he had established himself as a dependable “type,” capable of handling most genres. In his native country, he acquitted himself nicely opposite such acclaimed talents as Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Jacobi in “The Riddle” (2007), a mystery about a sports reporter (Jones) who sets out to solve a murder connected to an unpublished Charles Dickens manuscript. Hollywood, however, continued to cast Jones as pure muscle; he was the most villainous of a group of criminals dispatched to a private island to compete in a televised elimination match in “The Condemned” (2007), a lunkheaded if entertaining exploitation effort that featured World Wrestling Entertainment hero “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in his first starring role. Jones even took to American television to help Austin promote the movie at “No Way Out,” a 2007 pay-for-view wrestling event promoted by the WWE.
Jones’ schedule was booked solid for most of 2008 and 2009; he was cast as a subway serial killer in the gruesome horror film “The Midnight Meat Train” (2008), which was directed by Japanese cult filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura and based on a short story by acclaimed novelist Clive Barker. True to form, he then shifted gears to play a Biblical heavy in “Year One” (2009), a Judd Apatow-produced comedy set in ancient times that reunited “Superbad” (2007) stars Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse under director Harold Ramis.
TCH Overview on Vinnie Jones can also be accessed online here.
Bonnie Langford is a very popular British all-round entertainer. She was born in 1964. She achieved national fame in the UK for her performance as Violet Elizabeth Bott in the very popular television version of the “Just William” books by Richel Crompton in 1976 . Recently she appeared with greta success on the ‘Dancing On Ice’ series. Bonnie Langford’s website can be accessed here.
Harry Andrews was born in 1911 in Tonbridge Wells, Kent in 1911. He served with the Royal Artillary in the Second World War. In 1933 he made his first stage appearance in Liverpool in the “The Long Christmas Dinner”. Beore the War and into the 1950’s he concentrated on the stage. His first film was in 1953, “The Red Beret” with Alan Ladd. From then on he was constantly on the screen playing in the main, tough military characters. He was cast against type with Beryl Reid and Peter McEnery in “Entertaining Mr Sloane” in 1970. He died in 1989 aged 77.
“A stern and rugged British character actor with ears as distinctive as Bing Crosby’s. He spent nearly 20 years in live theatre before making his movie debut in the 1952 film “The Red Beret”. Over the next 30 years his lantern-jawed face was a familiar addition to many international productions usually in historical or military dramas e.g. “The Hill” which offered perhaps his greatest showcase as the pigheaded martinet in charge of a prison camp. His craggy weather appearance made him one of the most authentic looking whalers in director John Huston’s impressive filming of ‘Moby Dick’. Outside of these genres he was am Amish dad searching for his daughter in sinful New York in “The Night They Raided Minsky’s”, Dr Sorin in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in 1968, the aging homosexual with designs on Peter McEnery in “Entertaining Mr Sloane” and a drama critic who has his heart cut out in retaliation for a bad review in “Theatre of Blood” “. – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors”. (2003).
His IMDB entry:
British character actor Harry Andrews had the sort of massive granite face and square jaw that would stamp that career, but he set himself apart with brilliant stage and screen work.
He had graduated from Wrekin College in Shropshire and then moved on to the stage, appearing with Liverpool Repertory in 1933 and focusing on Shakespearean roles.
He was befriended by stage star John Gielgud who invited him to New York and Broadway as part of the cast of “Hamlet” in 1935. On the return to London, Andrews did a run of plays in the West End.
Then Gielgud invited him into his own stage company. Soon after he was asked into the Old Vic Company by its director Laurence Olivier. His roles were becoming increasingly substantial, authoritative parts to match his sharp and forceful, through-the-teeth delivery of lines.
Next he did not pass up the opportunity to join the Stratford Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he spent a decade honing himself into an established, fine, versatile actor, described by the controversial London theater critic Kenneth Tynan as “the backbone of British theater.”
He came to the small screen before the large, having debuted in British experimental television in 1939, followed over a decade later with his debut on the ever expanding and fecund American playhouse TV in 1952. His big screen debut came the next year in a character part which would accent his career-from ancient to modern-the disciplined military man in Paratrooper (1953). From there the roles came his way – three or four per yearwell into 1979, when TV took up most of his time. His movie makingwas spent either before American or British cameras. And the military roles were always masterly done, whether a roughed out sergeant or a more dignified officer. Though his most famous noncom may be Sergeant Major Tom Pugh alongside ‘John Mills’ in J. Lee-Thompson’s classic adventure Ice Cold in Alex (1958), his achievement as Sergeant Major Bert Wilson, the near psychotic martinet, opposite Sean Connery and Ian Bannen, in The Hill (1965) was an over-the-top tour de force. That same year he was back in costume – having played many an ancient and medieval noble role through the 1950s – in something different – playing the great Renaissance architect Donato Bramante against Charlton Heston as rival Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). Not a big part, nevertheless Andrews gave the role a subdued and matter-of-fact strength that well fit the ambitious architect of the fiery Pope Julius II (played with great verve by ‘Rex Harrison’). While Andrews was also excellent with a tongue-in-cheek style for comedic roles, as in the send up, The Ruling Class (1972), he excelled against type as a flamboyant homosexual in the black comedy Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970). He had said something like: “I don’t want to be a star — I want to be a good actor in good parts” – but his presence always made him standout. It was ironic that he had difficulty in memorizing lines. Sometime later co-star Alan Bates thought him very courageous for his obvious triumph over this impediment. Bates further remarked that Andrews’ great sense of humor and no-nonsense personable character made him a favorite with younger actors as a continuous well of encouragement and learning experiences. Though his parts were smaller as he grew older, he filled each of his roles, big or small – over 100 of them – with a giant’s footsteps.
Joan Sims was a wonderful comedy actress best remembered for her contribution to the “Carry on” films. She has though made many terrific performances in other British films. She was born in 1930 in Essex. She graduated from RADA in 1950. Her first fil part was in “Will Any Gentleman?” with George Cole. Other per-Carry On films include “Trouble in Store” with Norman Wisdom, “Lost” with Julia Arnall, “The Captain’s Table” with John Gregson and Peggy Cummins. Her first appearance in the Carry on series was in 1958 in “Carry On Nurse”. In all she starred in 25 “Carry On Films” the last been “Carry On Emmannuelle” in 1978. Her later films include “The Canterville Ghost” and in 2000 with a wonderful collection of mature actresses in “The Last of the Blonde Bombshells”. The cast included Judi Dench, Leslie Caron, Olympia Dukakis, Cleo Laine, June Whitfield and Billie Whitelaw. Joan Sims died in 2000.
“Guardian” obituary:
Joan Sims English actress whose fame and popularity was based on a series of high-spirited characters in the Carry On and Doctor films Dennis Barker
That extreme rarity, a natural rather than thought-out comedian, Joan Sims, who has died aged 71, exuberantly enhanced the bawdiness of one of the British movie industry’s biggest successes, the Carry On films. She brought to 24 of them – 20 in an unbroken sequence – a plump, high-spirited raucousness, that might have been offensive, but for her obvious good nature. Never married, though in her youth she had two close relationships – with the actor Tony Baird, and the stage manager John Walters – she claimed that, generally, men were put off by funny women, and that sometimes she had had to steel herself to get through the filming of the Carry Ons – especially as the male cast were apt to play practical jokes on her. The scripts also placed demands on her sensitivity; she had to strain hard to make funny anecdotes out of the sufferings she endured for her art. She was not in the first of the series, Carry On Sergeant, but, in November 1958, she was hired to play the student nurse in the second, Carry On Nurse, the biggest box office success of 1959. Playing the gym mistress in the next, Carry On Teacher (1959), she developed thrombophlebitis, and had her bad leg propped up on off-camera cushions before being hospitalised for 10 days. In Carry On Constable (1960), her role was that of a WPC called Gloria Passworthy – and the jokes were to match. For Carry On Regardless (1961), she was required to take the tickets at the door of a wine tasting, then take part, ending up by falling down dead drunk. Simultaneously, Sims was also appearing – on a similar nudge-nudge-wink-wink basis – in that other highly successful, if slightly more genteel, run of films, the Doctor series. By 1960, she had reached her third, Doctor In Love, followed by Doctor In Clover, both with Leslie Phillips, a more refined leading man than the bucolic Sid James, but the Doctor films satisfied her less than the Carry Ons, which she said gave her a unique comradeship and fun during shooting.
The producer Peter Rogers did, in fact, claim that he would do anything for his Carry On team – the camp Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey, the randy Kenneth Connor, the mountainous Hattie Jacques – except pay them. The top men in the cast got a £5,000 fee and the women, including Sims, £2,500 – well below the market rate. By the final one, Carry On Columbus (1992), the jokes had grown laboured and joyless, and Sims wrote that she was glad she was not in it. Her motivation for acting, she claimed, was a child’s desire to please. Her mother had been deeply in love with a man who, after a misunderstanding, took off, returning after a few weeks to discover that his beloved had married on the rebound. Divorce not being an option in those days, Sims’s father and mother showed no affection towards one another – and little to their daughter.
Joan compensated by dressing up and entertaining passengers at Laindon station, in Essex, where her father was station-master. A neighbour brought a gramophone to spice up the act, and Joan became adept at increasing her wardrobe by asking the passengers for cast-off clothes. At Brentwood county school for girls, she became determined to find something at which she could excel. Acting seemed the most likely – she arranged entertainments in the school air-raid shelter, joined amateur groups, played old ladies (like Madame Arcati, in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, and Fumed Oak), and danced in Gilbert and Sullivan. But she failed her school certificate twice, and only got a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on her third application, after her father persuaded the academy to give her a chance.
An agent, who also handled Ronnie Barker and Peter Eade, took her on, and she progressed through repertory at Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Southend, Luton and Salisbury to being principal girl in the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre’s production of the pantomime The Happy Ha’Penny. After that she showed her adaptability in the West End by appearing in two plays at once – a Grand Guignol shocker at the Irving Theatre Club and a revue called The Bells Of St Martin’s. In 1952, Sims got her first small role in a British film, Colonel March Investigates. The following year, she had a bigger part, with George Cole, in Will Any Gentleman?, and appeared in the revue High Spirits, where she met John Walters and from which she took the title for her autobiography, High Spirits (2000).
A string of stage revues, films and radio comedies followed. Her association with Kenneth Horne, the urbane straight man of the BBC radio comedy, Round the Horne, began in 1968, but was cut short by his death the following year. She was in the show’s successor, Stop Messing About, starring her friend Kenneth Williams, but, with no straight man to play against, his hysterics fell flat. In her last years, Sims struggled against illness, heavy drinking and depression. But audiences and producers thrived on her high-spirited lifeblood and she successfully appeared last September, with Dame Judi Dench, in the award-winning BBC TV film, Last Of The Blonde Bombshells. Irene Joan Sims, actor, born May 9 1930; died June 27 2001
Her obituary from the Guardian newspaper can be found here.
Alfred Lynch was born in 1931 in Whitechapel, London. His first film was “Look Back in Anger” in 1959. Other films include “On the Fiddle”, “The Hill” and “The Krays” in 1990. Alfred Lynch died in 2003 at the age of 71.
Alfred Lynch’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
The actor Alfred ‘Alfie’ Lynch, who has died of cancer aged 72, was one of that pioneering breed of unashamedly working- class actors who emerged at the Royal Court theatre in the 1950s and 1960s.
Born the son of a plumber in Whitechapel, in the heart of London’s East End, he left his small, Roman Catholic school at 14, worked in a draughtsman’s office, completed national service, and then – having always wanted to be in the theatre – attended evening classes at Toynbee Hall, while working in a factory. There, he also met James Culliford, another cockney drama student; they fell in love, and were together for nearly 50 years.
After two years in rep, in 1958 Alfie transferred to the Royal Court in a production of Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley. As Monty, he transformed himself from a young revolutionary blazing with hope and ideals into a resigned, middle-aged shopkeeper. It was a performance of great strength and truthfulness, and led to several other parts at the Court in the late 1950s: John Arden’s Live Like Pigs, Donald Howarth’s Sugar In The Morning, Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse’s The Long And The Short And The Tall, and Wesker’s The Kitchen.
I got to know Alfie during Live Like Pigs, which I co-directed with George Devine. He had great vitality, an infectious lightheartedness, an independent mind and strong, well-informed opinions about current affairs and the arts. He read the Guardian and the Observer regularly and critically; he would have made a marvellous talk show host. His innate common sense rejected bullshit, but there was also a deep vulnerability in his personality and performances.
In 1959, he was cast in the leading role in Joan Littlewood’s famous Theatre Workshop production of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. He had some problems with Littlewood’s improvisational techniques; while recognising her as a remarkable director, he felt she also had a frightening power to destroy, as well as animate, actors.
Yet he triumphed with his naturalness and vitality; he was particularly pleased by a fan letter from the Edwardian actor Marie Lohr, who thanked him for his “perfect performance”, and added: “You have the art of ‘listen ing’, seldom seen on the London stage these days.”
The Hostage moved to the West End, and a successful run on Broadway in 1960, and it set Alfie on course for a successful film and television career. He co-starred with Sean Connery in On The Fiddle (1961), and gave a wonderful performance as the battered teacher Medvedenko in Sidney Lumet’s The Seagull (1968). Other films included The Hill (1965), West Eleven (1963), The Password Is Courage (1963), 55 Days At Peking (1963) and Zeffirelli’s The Taming Of The Shrew (1967).
The early 1960s were a halcyon period for new television drama, with regular slots like Play For Today and Armchair Theatre. Alfie’s quality of down-to-earth truth worked perfectly for plays like Alan Plater’s A Smashing Day (1962) and John Hopkins’s Horror Of Darkness (1965), which also featured Glenda Jackson and Nicol Williamson. Perhaps, the television work for which he is remembered most is the 16 episode series, Hereward The Wake (1965).
On stage, as Aston, in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1961), at the Oxford Playhouse, Alfie achieved a remarkable poetic naturalism in the way he portrayed the patience and goodness of this damaged character.
I also directed him in the first English revival of Waiting For Godot (1965) at the Royal Court. Beckett, who attended the last two weeks of rehearsal, had, he said, written the play without any conscious preparation and with no idea of what was coming next. But he had heard the tones of the characters’ voices clearly. Alfie picked up everything Beckett said about Estragon’s earthbound pessimism.
While he appeared in many productions at the National, the Young Vic and in the West End, Alfie would always return to small repertory theatres to play both classics and modern plays. He also turned his attention and creativity to directing, among others, Wilson John Haire’s Within Two Shadows and Peter Ransley’s Runaway at the Royal Court, Shakespeare at the Young Vic in the 1970s, and Rada productions by Chekhov and Edward Bond in the 1980s – all of which were characterised by clarity and strength of performance.
Jimmy Culliford suffered a stroke in 1972, after which he and Alfie moved from London to Brighton, where, until Jimmy’s death in 2002, Alfie largely put aside his career to look after him. It was the central relationship of Alfie’s life. He attracted many passionate admirers but, despite little detours and adventures, which included a fling with Nureyev, it was to Jimmy that he always returned.
Alfred Cornelius Lynch, actor, born January 26 1931; died December 16 2003
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed on line here.
Anthony Steel was born in 1920 in London. He was the son of an Indian army officer and studied at Cambridge. He was a film favourite in Britian in the early 50’s and his films include “The Wooden Horse” in 1950 followed by “The Mudlark”, Malta Story” and “The Sea Shall Not Have Them”. In the mid 50’s he married Anita Ekberg and went to Hollywood, His stay in the U.S. was short and he returned to film making in the UK. He died in 2001 .
One Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;
His “Guardian” obituary by Dennis Barker:
The life of Anthony Steel who, alongside Dirk Bogarde, was the highest-paid star in the great 1950s peak of the British film industry, was a sad story of riches to rags. Steel, who has died aged 80, was the stiff-upper-lipped star of many distinguished British war films, and seen by the Rank Organisation as someone who could be promoted as a heart-throb – the British answer to Gregory Peck and Rock Hudson
But at the height of his fame, Steel – tall, handsome, well-connected, and gentlemanly off the screen as well as on it – suddenly broke his contract with Rank to go in pursuit of the voluptuous Swedish actress Anita Ekberg in Hollywood. He was never forgiven by Sir John Davis, the bull-headed chief of Rank at that time.
His career in Hollywood died in comparison with Ekberg’s, and his marriage to her ended in bitter rows. His subsequent career was patchy, and, after stage tours in the 1980s, the next decade found him living, first in a seedy Earl’s Court hotel, then in sheltered accommodation in a tiny council flat in Northolt, west London, with graffiti on the walls. Almost totally cut off from his past, he would never tell friends where he was, and never contact his agent, David Daly.
When he read of Steel’s plight in a tabloid newspaper in the middle 1990s, Daly had £1,500 due to the actor in television residual payments and other fees, but had no idea where to send it. The newspaper told him the address, and Daly drove there. At first, Steel refused to answer the door bell, which Daly did not find inexplicable in view of the environment, but later he opened a window and recognised his personal friend of 31 years’ standing.
Daly passed Steel £500 in cash, and told him he would find him somewhere better to live, ultimately getting him admitted to Denville Hall, the London home for retired theatrical people, and getting him a role as Dr Steven Hart, the guest lead in the television series The Brokers Man II.
But he was not entirely surprised to find that Steel had lived in the tiny council flat for seven or eight years, and had cut himself off from outside contact: “He was a very private man. He just decided that he would withdraw. He found a place to live and simply went into hiding. In some ways, it was not unlike him; if he decided that things weren’t right, he would withdraw into himself and not contact anybody.”
Such was the downbeat ending. In 1948, when Steel made his first film, Saraband For Dead Lovers, he was hailed as a more polished version of what was then thought of as the beefcake which would beat Hollywood idols at their own game. The following year, Marry Me was hailed as a principal showcase for his presence and, in 1950, when the wartime escape film, The Wooden Horse, appeared, he seemed to be well on his way to becoming an international icon.
For the next few years, Steel was continuously busy, making, among others, the comedy Laughter In Paradise (1951), Another Man’s Poison, and the war stories, The Malta Story (1952) and Albert RN (1953). In 1955, it was The Sea Shall Not Have Them and, in 1956, Storm Over the Nile, The Black Tent and Checkpoint.
It might have continued like that, but Steel was accident prone – the worst being meeting Anita Ekberg in December 1955, though he had previously been run through the hand by Errol Flynn’s sword in The Master Of Ballantrae and injured his leg, requiring an operation on his knee, after colliding with a tree while making Where no Vultures Fly, in which he played a game warden in east Africa.
Steel met Ekberg after making Storm Over The Nile, a remake of The Four Feathers, in which an apparent coward turns out to be a hero. After their initial encounter, at a film premiere, he called her the most beautiful woman he had ever met. They married in Florence in 1956.
But while Steel was reserved and not at all stagey, Ekberg liked displaying herself, and there were soon rumours of drink-fuelled rows. Steel became prone to what was called “hellraising”; he hit photographers who pursued his wife, and was twice arrested for drink driving.
It all seemed to be out of character. He had been born into genteel circles in Chelsea, the son of an Indian army officer, and gone to school in Ireland before Cambridge. When the second world war broke out, he joined the Grenadier Guards, all of which sat perfectly with the reputation he was to make in the Britain of the postwar years.
Some of his friends believe the collapse of his marriage to Ekberg was a disaster from which he never recovered emotionally; he had previously been married to Juanita Forbes and, after Ekberg, married Johanna Melcher, a former Miss Austria, in 1964. It is certainly arguable that he never recovered professionally, for when he returned to Britain at the end of the 1950s, the affronted British film industry showed little interest. His later films included Hard Core (1977), The Racing Game (1979) and the Swords Of Wayland (1986), none of them notable.
Apart from the stage tours of the 1980s, Steel’s last assignments were polished guest appearances in pop-ular television series such as Bergerac, The Professionals, Tales Of The Unexpected, Robin Of Sherwood and Jemima Shaw Investigates.
He leaves two daughters and a son.
Anthony Maitland Steel, actor, born May 21 1920; died March 21 2001 “The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed on-line here.
Gracie Fields was by far the most popular actress in Britain in the 1930’s. She was born Grace Stansfield in Rochdale, Lancashire in 1898. She began her career in music halls and revue singing comic songs. She appeared in the West End in “Mr Tower of London” and was soon gaining public recognition. Her first film “Sally in our Alley” in 1931 was an enourmous success. She had a string of film hits in Britain movie hits including”Looking On the Bright Side”, “Sing As We Go” and “Shipyard Sally”. During the Second World War she worked some of the time in Hollywood and made films there such as “Molly and Me”. Her US films showed a more restrained Fields. She worked tirelessly for the war effort. After the War she settled on the Isle of Capri where she died in 1979 at the age of 81
Her TCM Biography:
One of Great Britain’s most popular film stars during the 1930s and a major figure in the history of English popular culture. Beginning as a music hall entertainer, Fields had already achieved considerable popularity when she entered films in 1931.
With her boundless optimism, hearty Lancashire humor and inimitable singing voice, Fields practically became a national heroine as her proletariat “Miss Fix-it” persona kept an entire nation cheerful through the worst days of the Depression. Her first film, “Sally in Our Alley” (1931), and particularly “Sing as We Go” (1934), which would later become the title of her autobiography, are her best-known films, but such other films as “Looking on the Bright Side” (1932), “The Show Goes On” (1937) and “Shipyard Sally” (1939) have more than their fair share of delightful and amusing moments.
Fields moved to Hollywood in the middle of WWII and made several films for Twentieth Century-Fox. More matronly than before, she was also somewhat prettified by the Hollywood system, which lightened her hair and glamorized her photography. Although some critics preferred her more plain-Jane days, Fields’ first US film in particular, “Holy Matrimony” (1943), basked in the warmth which had made her best British efforts so special.
She continued performing the many rousing songs associated with her career for some years after WWII, and was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire shortly before her death.
Her TCM biography can also be accessed online here.
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Paris Underground, poster, US poster art, Kurt Kreuger (top), Constance Bennett (center), Gracie Fields (bottom right), Charles Andre (center right), 1945. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Actress Gracie Fields in her capacity as an Honorary Captain in Canada’s Women’s Volunteer Reserve Corps.
1940
Kenneth Branagh was born in Belfast in 1960. When he was nine his parents moved to the UK. In 1982 he starred on television in three plays about the one character Billy written by Grahan Reid. The same year he starred in “Another Country” on stage. He had made his film debut in a small part in 1981 in “Chariots of Fire”. Throuout the 80’s and 90’s his career continued on a steller path – films like “A Month in the Country”, “Dead Again” and Peter’s Friends” and television work such as “Fortunes of War”kept him in the public eye. In recent years he scored huge praise for his title performance in “Wallander” a tale of a tired Swedish police officer.
His TCM biography:
Once hailed as the “new Laurence Olivier,” Shakespearean-trained actor and director Kenneth Branagh struggled throughout his career to balance his near-obsessive drive to work with the need for a somewhat normal, settled life. After his directorial breakthrough with his excellent interpretation of The Bard’s “Henry V” (1989), Branagh had what appeared to many to be the picture-perfect life: a beautiful wife in Emma Thompson, a thriving career – thanks to his deft thriller “Dead Again” (1991) – and a reputation replete with an air of seriousness and unerring artistic credibility. But on the inside, Branagh claimed to have been going a bit mad – a realization exacerbated by his separation from Thompson and the debacle of “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1995). Later in life, he learned how to relax every now and then, but continued to push himself to greater artistic heights, sometimes to the point of failure, as with “Hamlet” (1996) and “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (2000). He rebounded, however, with a marvelous performance as a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt in “Warm Springs” (HBO, 2005), followed by an acclaimed turn as a brilliant but dysfunctional detective in the “Wallander” (PBS, 2009) miniseries and a return to the director’s chair for the superhero smash “Thor” (2011). With his heralded body of work as an actor, writer and director, Branagh had long emerged from Olivier’s shadow to be recognized as one of the more formidable filmmakers of his generation.
Born on Dec. 10, 1960 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Branagh was raised in a working class home devoid of any form of artistic expression; surprising for someone later intimately linked to the greatest writer of the English language. Branagh moved to England with his family when he was 10 and began his love affair with Shakespeare, reading 25-cent paperback volumes of his plays as an escape from schoolyard bullies who taunted him for being too much of a joker on the playground. An isolated child who sat enraptured in front of the TV, watching movies with James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy, Branagh later brought his desire to engage in fantasy to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he won the Bancroft Gold Medal for Outstanding Student of the Year and later earned Britain’s prestigious Best Newcomer award for his 1982 performance as Judd in “Another Country.” In a short time, Branagh had made a quick rise to become one of England’s promising new talents.
Branagh soon became a familiar face on British television, becoming a star of the acclaimed 1984 BBC trilogy “Too Late to Talk to Billy,” “A Matter of Choice for Billy” and “A Coming to Terms for Billy.” After making a name for himself with “Another Country,” he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at age 23, opening its 1984 season at Stratford-upon-Avon as the youngest “Henry V” in the troupe’s history. He also wrote and directed his first play, “Tell Me Honestly” (1985), presented as part of the inaugural season of “Not the RSC.” Deeming the RSC too large and impersonal, Branagh co-founded the Renaissance Theatre Company with David Parfitt. Though disbanded in 1994, Branagh successfully played “Hamlet,” staged his original play “Public Enemy,” which nearly bankrupted the company before it began, and mounted an acclaimed interpretation of “King Lear” – all before the age of 30.
He continued acting in high-quality British TV ventures such as the 1986 small screen version of Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the BBC’s acclaimed seven-part drama, “Fortunes of War” (1987), which joined him for the first time with frequent co-star and future wife, Emma Thompson. Finding time for two features, he played a bungling British agent posing as one-half of the archetypal English tourist couple in the weak-scripted “High Season,” but fared far better in his first leading role as a homosexual tormented by his World War I experiences in the plush period drama, “A Month in the Country” (both 1987). Branagh gained international recognition and dual Oscar nods as the director and star of the 1989 screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s lyrical “Henry V.” Strikingly dark and atmospheric, the pared-down film contrasted sharply with the lavishness and optimism of Laurence Olivier’s 1945 version, which reflected England’s enthusiasm for the war effort.
Branagh traveled to the United States to helm his next feature, the contemporary thriller “Dead Again” (1991). Dismissed by many reviewers for its overly complex story and emphasis on style over substance, “Dead Again” nonetheless was a commercial success. Branagh, however, came away disenfranchised with Hollywood, returning home to make “Peter’s Friends” (1992), a fey and overbearing British variation on “The Big Chill” that somehow managed to make the usually intelligent Thompson appear shrill. The same year, Branagh directed “Swan Song,” a short based on a Chekhov short story, starring John Gielgud as an aging actor who takes the stage in a closed theater to revisit the great Shakespearean characters he performed throughout his career. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Film – Live Action.
In his autobiography Beginning, written at age 28 in part to raise funds for his theater company, Branagh described himself as a “short-assed, fat-faced Irishman.” Lacking the matinee idol looks of the young Olivier, his somewhat plebeian features (pug nose, weak chin, and slightly jowly countenance) brought an earthy reality to his roles which did not always enhance the films. For instance, the 1940s segment of “Dead Again” would have benefited from more old-fashioned glamour and star power. In contrast, Branagh vividly recreated “Henry V” for modern audiences. His theater and TV work – such as his Jimmy Porter in a telecast of John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger” airing on Bravo in 1993 – consistently demonstrated that he was just as comfortable with modern types as with classic characters.
Branagh went back to his love of Shakespeare in adapting “Much Ado About Nothing” (1993) as a big-screen, all-star romp through Tuscany with Thompson, Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves. As he did for “Henry V,” Branagh largely dispensed with the traditional declamatory style in favor of more naturalistic line readings. The art-house hit enhanced his reputation as a canny popularizer of Shakespeare for modern movie audiences, paving the way for such things as Baz Luhrmann’s version of “Romeo and Juliet” in 1996 and “Shakespeare in Love” in 1998. He then took on a big budget, special effects, a name producer (Francis Ford Coppola) and a major star (Robert De Niro) in hopes of snaring a potentially wider audience with his “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1994), even transforming himself into a long-haired, muscled hunk for his portrayal of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Critical and popular responses were brutally unenthusiastic for his indulgent and ham-handed take on the classic novel.
Returning once again to Shakespeare, Branagh won critical acclaim for his turn as Iago to Laurence Fishburne’s “Othello” (1995) and also won praise for writing and directing “A Midwinter’s Tale” (1995). Filmed in black and white, the latter followed the travails of a troupe of actors attempting to mount a production of “Hamlet” with generally comic results. Branagh appeared as himself in Al Pacino’s documentary “Looking for Richard” (1996), which explored the Bard’s work through rehearsals for a filmed version of Richard III, then followed with his own big screen version of “Hamlet,” setting it in the 19th Century and playing the tortured, over-the-top Dane amidst an all-star cast that included Charlton Heston, Julie Christie, Kate Winslet, Jack Lemmon, Rosemary Harris, Derek Jacobi and many others. For his “Hamlet” – the first to use the complete Shakespearean text – Branagh won his fourth Oscar nomination (for Best Adapted Screenplay), but unlike the profitable “Much Ado,” the four-hour film failed to make back even half of its investment.
Branagh next collaborated with director Robert Altman, working from an original screenplay by John Grisham on “The Gingerbread Man” (1998). Though its January release was a box-office kiss of death, critics marveled at his dead-on Savannah accent and convincing portrayal of a lawyer who gets in hot water when he tries to protect a woman (Embeth Davidtz) he has just met. He then signed on with another legend and gave a performance that brought to mind the stuttering, neurotic persona of Woody Allen in Allen’s “Celebrity” (1998). Unfortunately, most people felt him hopelessly miscast as the messed-up New York magazine writer and that Allen was simply coasting, recycling ideas about infidelity dating back to his 1970s-era pictures. That year also saw Branagh in “Theory of Flight,” acting opposite his then-love Helena Bonham Carter, with whom he began a much-publicized relationship after his divorce from Thompson. “Theory of Flight” told the story of an uneasy friendship between a con man trying to construct his own backyard airplane and a motor-neuron disease sufferer who wants to lose her virginity before she dies. The film resolved itself in a funny, touching way, with the airplane serving as a metaphor for escape from earthly afflictions.
Returning to dreaded Hollywood, Branagh embarked on his biggest picture to date, portraying the villainous, legless Dr. Arliss Loveless, nemesis to Will Smith and Kevin Kline in “Wild Wild West” (1999). Despite the gargantuan investment, the flick turned out to be an embarrassment; all concept, no content. He reunited with Kline, however, to provide the voices for the leading characters in the animated film “The Road to El Dorado;” then contributed his distinctive vocals as the narrator of the Oscar-nominated animated short “The Periwig-Maker” (2000). In 1998, Branagh had announced plans to film three Shakespeare adaptations under the new banner of the Shakespeare Film Company, established in partnership with Intermedia and Miramax. He delivered the first of these in 2000, recasting “Love’s Labour’s Lost” as a breezy, 93-minute Hollywood musical, taking out some of the more impenetrable verse and substituting classic songs by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. While he clearly had not lost his touch for making Shakespeare accessible and whetted appetites for his “Macbeth” and “As You Like It;” the dismal box-office returns made it unlikely that the other proposed films would appear.
Branagh was well cast as a quick-tempered, chain-smoking playwright in the comedy “How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog” (2002) and offered a neat cameo as an English bureaucrat in the based-on-fact “Rabbit Proof Fence” (2001), about three Aboriginal girls who walked to freedom in 1930s Australia. On the small screen, Branagh was mesmerizing in an Emmy-winning performance as Reinhard Heydrich, the man who led the notorious Wannsee Conference in the HBO original “Conspiracy” (2001), a role which earned him an Emmy for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Miniseries. He portrayed British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton in a Channel 4/A&E jointly produced miniseries “Shackleton.” (2002), another part for which he won much critical praise. Branagh next stepped into the fantasy realm as the vainglorious Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in the much anticipated family feature “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (2002).
Branagh made for a convincing Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the HBO telepic “Warm Springs” (2005), which chronicled the president’s life from his diagnosis with polio at age 39 through his fruitless quest for a miracle cure before pursing the high office. His compelling performance earned the actor Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Sticking with the small screen, Branagh managed to bring to life Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy “As You Like It” (HBO, 2006), setting the film in the 19th century and starring Kline and a game Bryce Dallas Howard as the beguiling Rosalind. Continuing to enjoy working more behind the camera, Branagh directed the remake of “Sleuth” (2007), a comic game of cat-and-mouse between a brilliant writer and man of society (Michael Caine, assuming the role from Olivier from the 1972 version) seeking revenge on an out-of-work actor (Jude Law, taking over the part originally played by Caine) for stealing his wife.
After co-starring alongside Tom Cruise in “Valkyrie” (2008), he starred in and executive-produced three feature-length adaptations of Henning Mankell’s best-selling Wallander crime novels for the BBC. The three-part miniseries, “Wallander” (2009), later aired on PBS and earned the esteemed actor another Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of an existential detective whose empathy for murder victims takes its toll on his already dysfunctional personal life. That same year, he played a conservative government minister intent on shutting down off-shore broadcasting operations in the 1960s set docu-comedy “Pirate Radio” (2009). Branagh then took some time away from the spotlight to focus on his latest directorial effort, the big-budget adaptation of Marvel Comics’ “Thor” (2011). Although some fans of the property initially found Branagh an odd choice to helm the blockbuster, the classically-trained actor-director’s experience with bombastic, stylized period epics proved just the ticket, resulting in huge box-office business. In a bit of serendipity, he returned to screens later that year as the actor he had most often been compared to, Sir Laurence Olivier, in “My Week With Marilyn” (2011), a fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe’s (Michelle Williams) week touring London with a young film assistant (Eddie Redmayne) during the production of 1957’s “The Prince and the Showgirl.” Branagh’s performance earned him a number of accolades, including nominations at the Golden Globes and Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor.
His TCM biography can also be accessed online here.
Young Bess, poster, Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Deborak Kerr is rightly regarded as one of the most foremost of British actresses to reach true international stardom. Her CV of both British and U.S. films is extremely impressive. She was born in Glasgow in 1921. She originally trained as a ballet dancer with the Sadler Well’s Ballet Company. However she changed careers and in 1940 made her first film “Contraband” when she 19. She was soon in major roles in such films as “Major Barbara”, “Hatter’s Castle”, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and “Black Narcissus” in 1947. She then went to Hollywood and had to wait a few years before she obtained topflight roles. This was achieved with “From Here to Eternity” in 1953 and for the next eight years she gave some terrific performances e.g. “Tea and Sympathy”, “The King and I”, “An Affair to Remember”, “Seperate Tables” and “The Sundowners”. In the late 60’s her cinema career was waning and she returned with great success to the stage. She did though in the 80’s return to film with “The Assam Garden”. Sadly illness curtailed her later career and she died in 2007.
Her “Independent” obituary:
One of the few British actresses to become an internationally successful film star, in 1957 Deborah Kerr was named “The world’s most famous actress” by Photoplay magazine. She had had a highly successful career in British cinema before being poached by Hollywood. There she was regarded as little more than classy, patrician decoration before she famously shocked the town – and many of her admirers – with a steamy performance as the unfaithful wife of an army captain in From Here to Eternity (1953).
Her beach scene with Burt Lancaster, in which they make love as the raging surf envelops them, has become an iconic screen sequence, imitated and parodied as well as celebrated. Kerr’s accomplished skill and versatility resulted in six Oscar nominations (the most for any star in the Best Actress category who has not actually won).
Her many memorable performances included the bewitchingly determined Irish spy of I See a Dark Stranger (1946), the repressed nun of Black Narcissus (1947), the downtrodden sheep-drover’s wife in The Sundowners (1960) and the ambiguous governess in The Innocents (1961). Perhaps best of all she is remembered for her work in two perennial classics of romantic cinema, the musical The King and I (1956), and the tear-jerker supreme, An Affair to Remember (1957). “I adore not being me,” she once said. “I’m not very good at being me. That’s why I adore acting so much.”
The daughter of a civil engineer, she was born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer in 1921 in Helensburgh, overlooking the Firth of Clyde. As a child, she studied dance at a drama school in Bristol run by her aunt, winning a scholarship to Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells ballet group, with whom she made her London stage début at the age of 17.
Watching the progress of her fellow pupils Margot Fonteyn and Beryl Grey convinced Kerr that she would never be a great ballerina, so she concentrated on developing her acting skills and in 1939 did walk-on roles in several Shakespearean productions at the open-air theatre in Regent’s Park. She was spotted there by the powerful film agent John Gliddon, who signed her to a five-year contract.
Michael Powell’s lively thriller Contraband (1940) would have marked her screen début, but her role was excised from the final print. “The film was full of restaurants and night-clubs,” Powell wrote, “in one of which was an adorable little cigarette girl, all lovely liquid eyes and nice long legs, who had a tiny scene with Conrad Veidt that ended up on the cutting room floor.” Kerr was acting with the Oxford Repertory Players when spotted while dining at the Mayfair Hotel by a producer, Gabriel Pascal. Kerr recalled,
He came over to me and said, “Sweet virgin, are you an actress?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Then take down your hair, you look like a tart!”
Publicising her as “The Botticelli Blonde”, Pascal cast her as a Salvation Army officer, Jenny Hill, in Major Barbara (1940), based on Bernard Shaw’s play and starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. Kerr’s Jenny was described by her biographer Eric Braun as “a signpost to the kind of part in which she would excel – moral fortitude concealed by a frail appearance”. Her impressive performance led to her being given the leading role of Sally Hardcastle in a screen adaptation (much delayed by British censors) of Walter Greenwood’s bleak story of the working-class, Love on the Dole (1941), directed by John Baxter. Kerr’s spirited yet touching performance as a girl who becomes the mistress of a wealthy bookie to escape poverty established that a major British star had arrived.
Leading roles in Penn of Pennsylvania (1941), Hatter’s Castle (1941) and The Day will Dawn (1942) followed, before the first of her film classics, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). When Wendy Hiller, originally cast, became pregnant and had to drop out, Powell gave to Kerr the challenging assignment of the colonel’s ideal woman, who comes into his life in three separate incarnations over a 40-year period. Each incarnation was given individuality by her incisive playing. During the filming, she and Powell became lovers. “I realised,” said Powell, “that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for.” The film was controversial (Churchill thought it would ruin wartime morale, and the British army refused co-operation), but it proved an artistic and commercial triumph.
Powell had hoped to reunite Kerr and Roger Livesey, who had played Blimp, in his next film, A Canterbury Tale (1944), but Gabriel Pascal had sold her contract to MGM. According to Powell, his affair with Kerr ended when she made it clear to him that she would acccept an offer to go to Hollywood if one was made.
Her first film for MGM paired her with Robert Donat in the British production Perfect Strangers (1945), about a dull couple whose personalities are changed by their wartime experiences. Stewart Granger, who was filming Caesar and Cleopatra at the time, recounts in his autobiography Sparks Fly Upward (1981) that during this period Kerr (whom he described as “devastatingly beautiful”) seduced him in the back of a taxi. Whenever this was mentioned to Kerr by interviewers, she would smile wryly and reply, “What a gallant man!”
In 1945 she and Granger made an eight-week tour of theatres of war in Belgium, Holland and France starring in Patrick Hamilton’s thriller Gaslight. During the tour Granger introduced her to the Battle of Britain pilot Anthony Bartley, who became her first husband. Kerr’s next film was Launder and Gilliatt’s thriller I See a Dark Stranger (1946), in which she was Bridie Quilty, a high-spirited Irish lass. With Kerr and her co-players Trevor Howard and Raymond Huntley all making the most of the witty script, it was a delight.
MGM then loaned her to Powell to star in Black Narcissus (1947). He had initially thought of trying to lure Greta Garbo out of retirement to play the part of troubled Sister Superior, in charge of a group of nuns who try to establish a community from a dilapidated palace in a remote part of the high Himalayas (created entirely at Pinewood). Black Narcissus was a hit in the US as well as the UK, and Kerr won the New York Film Critics’ Award as Actress of the Year. MGM was now ready to launch her American career, and she departed for Hollywood with her husband.
Advertisements for her first film, The Hucksters (1948), proclaimed her as “Deborah Kerr (rhymes with star)” and her photograph was on the cover of Time magazine, tellingly set against a background of English roses. The screenwriter Luther Davis recalled, “The studio were rather in awe of Deborah, treating her like this great legitimate actress who’d deigned to join MGM.” The Hucksters, a satire on radio advertising, was a moderate success, but it was followed by If Winter Comes (1949), a clumsily told melodrama that received limited release.
Kerr had the meaty role of a wife who descends into alcoholism in the screen version of Robert Morley’s play Edward, My Son (1949), and her uncompromising performance won her an Oscar nomination, but the downbeat tale, co-starring Spencer Tracy, did not attract large audiences. Her next film, Please Believe Me (1949), was a minor comedy with Peter Lawford and, unhappy, she told the studio head Dore Schary that there was a story she would love to do, The African Queen.
He replied that the property was owned by Warners, but that he had another African tale, King Solomon’s Mines (1950). “The next thing I knew I was on location 25,000 miles into darkest Africa.” Co-starring Stewart Granger, the film was a great success, and was followed by another blockbuster, the big-budget epic Quo Vadis? (1951), to which she brought her best patrician nobility as Lygia, the Christian slave girl. She was stoic again in Richard Thorpe’s excellent remake of The Prisoner of Zenda (1952).
She was happy to play the small role of Portia in Julius Caesar (1953), but was then given the role of Catherine Parr in Young Bess (1953), in which both she and Stewart Granger played second fiddle to the performances of Jean Simmons (as Bess) and Charles Laughton (as Henry VIII). “I came over to act,” she said, “but it turned out all I had to do was to be high-minded, long-suffering, white-gloved and decorative.”
After asking for MGM to let her freelance between assignments, she was delighted when a new agent, Bert Allenberg, persuaded the Columbia chief Harry Cohn to cast her as Karen Holmes in From Here to Eternity when Joan Crawford, originally given the part, walked out after requesting her own cameraman. Under Fred Zinnemann’s direction, Kerr effectively conveyed the sad, quiet desperation of her character, an alcoholic nymphomaniac. Said Kerr, “I studied voice for three months to get rid of my accent and I changed my hair to blonde. I knew I could be sexy if I had to.”
A third Oscar nomination resulted, and she consolidated her new status with her début on the Broadway stage in Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), as Laura Reynolds, the schoolmaster’s wife who offers compassion to a troubled pupil suspected of homosexuality. In the controversial closing scene, she seduces the boy for his own good, and has one of the most famous closing lines in modern drama, “Years from now, when you talk about this – and you will – be kind.” The performance earned her two Donaldson Awards, (Best Actress and Best Début), the Variety Drama Critics’ Poll, and when she toured in the play she won Chicago’s Sarah Siddons Award.
She returned to the screen in Edward Dmytryk’s British-made The End of the Affair (1955), and followed this with one of her greatest triumphs, as Anna Leonowens, the governess who travels to Siam to teach the King’s many children, in The King and I, Walter Lang’s screen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Victorian determination sparked her spirited exchanges with the King (Yul Brynner), genteel warmth pervaded her scenes with the children, and the voice of Marni Nixon blended seamlessly with Kerr’s own recitative introductions to the songs, resulting in one of Hollywood’s finest dubbing achievements. Kerr was nominated for an Oscar, and Brynner won one for his forceful portrayal.
In 1957 Kerr was seen in the screen version of Tea and Sympathy. Although stylishly directed by Vincente Minnelli, the project inevitably suffered from the screen censorship of the time. Kerr’s Hollywood career was now at its peak. She starred with William Holden in The Proud and Profane (1956), Holden describing her as “the most no-problem star I ever worked with, and she has a salty sense of humour which surprises everyone”. She played a nun again, teamed with Robert Mitchum (“Such a wonderful actor”) in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1956), for which she received her fourth Oscar nomination, then starred with Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember (1957), one of her best-loved films. As a couple who fall in love during an ocean trip, and promise to meet in six months if they feel the same, Grant and Kerr merge a delightfully light bantering touch with suggestions of genuine passion.
The following year Kerr won her fifth Oscar nomination, for her depiction in Separate Tables of a dowdy spinster cowed by a domineering mother. It is one of the actress’s most debated performances, detractors finding it too studied, though few will deny the frisson of the moment when she finally defies her mother and consorts with the disgraced, phony major (David Niven, in another instance where Kerr’s co-star won a statuette but she did not). She had an entirely different role with Niven in Otto Preminger’s under-rated version of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958), playing the glamorous widow Anne, whom Niven’s daughter (Jean Seberg) sees as a threat to the life-style she enjoys with her father.
She partnered Brynner again in the cold war thriller The Journey (1958), co-written by Peter Viertel, who was to become her second husband. She played the columnist Sheilah Graham in Beloved Infidel (1959), based on Graham’s account of her tempestuous love affair with the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the film was diluted when Gregory Peck agreed to play Fitzgerald only on condition that the first part of the script, dealing with Graham’s fascinating rise to fame, was excised.
In 1960 Kerr submerged completely any trace of her patrician persona with an immensely moving depiction of a downtrodden sheep-drover’s wife in Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners. It features one of the most memorable moments in Kerr’s career, as her weatherbeaten Ida, sitting on a station platform, sees an elegant woman adjusting her make-up in a train compartment, and the ladies’ eyes meet in mutual rapport.
It is the performance which many think should at last have won her the Oscar – it was the year Elizabeth Taylor won for Butterfield 8. “I should have won that year,” she told the writer Christopher Frayling, “I should’ve!” It is an undoubted miscarriage of justice that Kerr was not made a Dame, though she was appointed CBE in 1997. She won the New York Critics’ Awards for her performances in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison and Separate Tables, was given a British Film Institute Fellowship in 1986, and received a Bafta Special Award in 1991.
In 1961 Kerr made Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, arguably (with Robert Wise’s The Haunting) one of the two best ghost stories of the Sixties. She was superb as the enigmatic governess who comes to believe that her two charges are possessed by an evil spirit in this superb transcription of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Although she was fine as the mysterious Miss Madrigal, a governess with a criminal past, in The Chalk Garden (1963), and particularly as the kind and gentle artist in The Night of the Iguana (1964), based on Tennessee Williams’s play, a string of second-rate movies caused her career to dim in the mid-Sixties.
Marriage on the Rocks (1965), Eye of the Devil (1966), in which she replaced Kim Novak, Casino Royale (1967) and Prudence and the Pill (1968) were all poorly received, and John Frankenheimer’s The Gypsy Moths (1969) pleased critics more than audiences. It was her last film for 13 years, Kerr announcing her retirement from films and stating afterwards, “I didn’t want to do disaster movies, ending up in an airplane at the bottom of the sea.”
She returned to the theatre in 1972, recreating her role in Separate Tables in a one-performance Midnight Matinee in honour of Sir Terence Rattigan. Later that year she had a personal success in a West End production of The Day After the Fair, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s short story “On the Western Circuit”. The following year she toured the United States and Canada in the same play. In 1975 she starred on Broadway in Edward Albee’s short-lived Seascape, and in London she played the title role in Shaw’s Candida (1977). She returned to film in a television movie of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution (1982).
She was honoured by the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, and the following year she made her last feature film, The Assam Garden. In a revival of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green (1985), she portrayed the admirable school-teacher Miss Moffat who recognises the talent in one of her miner pupils, but the run was marred by apparent nerves and fluffing of lines. On television she had particular success with the mini-series A Woman of Substance (1983), sharing with Jenny Seagrove the role of the founder of a department store dynasty.
In 1994 Kerr was finally awarded an honorary Oscar. Elia Kazan, who directed her on stage in Tea and Sympathy and on screen in The Arrangement (1968), said,
Deborah Kerr is a great lady. Let that stand by itself. She is also a fine actress, a joy to work with, devoted, understanding and gifted with a sense of humour. She is outstandingly fair to her fellow performers. She is regally handsome. That’s enough. If I say any more it might embarrass her or swell her head. And I wouldn’t want that.
