British Actors Archives - Page 134 of 138

Barbara Murray

Barbara Murray.

Barbara Murray was a very gifted British actress who had a long career on film and television in the UK. She was born in London in 1929. Her first major part was in the classic Ealing comedy “Passport to Pimlico” in 1949. Other films include “Street Corner”, “Doctor at Large”, “Campbell’s Kingdom” and “A Cry in the Streets”. On television she won great acclaim for her role as Lady Pamela Wilder with Patrick Wymark in “The Power Game” in the mid 1960’s. She died in May 2014 in Spain.

Note from “Silver Screen Oasis”:It’s a wonder British actress Barbara Murray wasn’t a big a star as she should have been. She was a beautiful talented actress.

I was wondering if the death of Patrick Wymark (The leader of the tratiors in Where Eagles Dare, was in Cromwell and was on the verge of a movie career at time of death) may have hurt her career in the early 7Os. Her pk yrs in the U.K appear to have been in 2 hugely successful tv shows The Plane Makers and its sequel The Power Game where she played the wife of powerful businsessman John Wilder, Pamela. The series was cancelled after the death of Wymark and Barbara wasn’t seen much afterwards, though fellow co-stars Jack Watling and Peter Barkworth went on to have great tv careers. However, in 1971 Barbara played Michael Horden’s wife in the film version of Frankie Howard’s tv hit Up Pompeii

I don’t know to much about her film career, but she was great as Stanley Hollaway’s daughter in Passport To Pimlico. She was also good as Dirk Bogarde’s love interest in the action thriller set in Canada Campbell’s Kingdom with Michael Craig and was a lady cop in Street Corner with Rosamund John. While Samantha Edgar was paired Bogarde in the Dr. series movie Doctor In Distress, Barbara was involved ith Bogie’s boss James Robertson Justice in the same film. Sadly she died in May 2014.

Her “Independent” obituary by Simon Farquar:

An enticing presence, all misty eyes and pale beauty, Barbara Murray was a blossomy Rank starlet who made a smooth and successful transition from decorative roles in films to become a television and theatrical draw for two decades. Her beauty seemed to strengthen in middle age, as did the regality that placed her firmly as a lady of a certain era, but there was a delicious mischievousness in her grand voice which ensured there was always more to the characters she played than just elegance and sophistication.

Her greatest success on television was as the socialite wife of Patrick Wymark’s ruthless tycoon John Wilder in ATV’s The Power Game (1965-69), a part she worked hard at, and with good results. “I wasn’t happy with the character at the start,” she commented during the show’s first series, when she was helping to pull in over 10 million viewers a week. “I felt it was written by men, for men, and the women weren’t real, weren’t complete.” A sense of humour was one of the main qualities she added to the mix: she was always a witty player, be it in Oscar Wilde or Ray Cooney.

Born Barbara Ann Murray in London in 1929, she was sent to boarding school in Huntingdonshire to allow her theatrical parents to tour the country with their dancing act. She accompanied them on stage when she could but developed a passion for acting, and when sent to a dance school she sneaked instead into the drama classes. She then worked briefly as a photographic model before auditioning for the Rank Organisation’s charm school. At 17 she landed a £10-a-week five-year contract.

Her break came while assisting in screen tests at Ealing Studios for roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). She read in Joan Greenwood’s part and bewitched the film’s star, Dennis Price, and its director, Robert Hamer, who then shot a test of her and talked her thought her strengths and weaknesses. Hamer introduced her to Henry Cornelius, who cast her in the adorable Passport to Pimlico (1949). Cornelius was an intimidating perfectionist but the film was a surprise hit, a charming get well card for an austere, war-weary Britain.

Diligently, she juggled her Rank commitments with stage work, joining the repertory company at Newcastle Playhouse in 1949. She was given meatier stage roles, and refused Rank’s offer of a juicier contract in 1952. Instead she starred in the debut production of the reopened Royal Court, The Bridge of Denmark Hill (1952), making her West End debut two years later in No Other Verdict at the Duchess. She married the actor John Justin, and for the next few years only acted when family commitments allowed. She was well-suited to traditional West End fare but also played Stella in the original production of Harold Pinter’s The Collection for the RSC at the Aldwych in 1962.

She and Justin had three children, but divorced in 1964. The same year she married Bill Holmes, who gave up acting to teach, and, reassured by a regular wage coming in, she returned to acting full-time. Very quickly she built up a wealth of television appearances, mostly in single plays, and she remained a regular on the West End stage, especially in thrillers: she was particularly praised as the blind heroine of Wait Until Dark at the Duchess in 1967.

After The Power Game she was a television star and was rarely seen in films again, although she was a good sport in the ever-so-rude Up Pompeii (1971), and the well-above-average horror Tales From the Crypt (1972). Instead, on television she took over from Nyree Dawn Porter as the accident-prone Deirdre in Never A Cross Word (1970), a typically charming Donald Churchill comedy series, and had her own sitcom, His and Hers (1972). She was very at home as part of an illustrious cast for The Pallisers (1974), a handsome dramatisation of Trollope (currently enjoying a surprise repeat on BBC2), but ended her television career with a real peach of a part, as the diva mother of a theatrical dynasty in the Twenties saga The Bretts (1987-89).

Co-created by Rosemary Anne Sisson, one of television’s finest period storytellers, the series was nostalgic in the writing and also in the making, being one of the last blasts of theatrically conducted studio drama, a form that ideally suited its world of natty dialogue and ensemble playing. Murray did make a few brief appearances on television after The Bretts before making her last bow theatrically in a reunion with Sir Peter Hall, nearly 30 years after he directed her in The Collection, in a tour of An Ideal Husband (2001).

She then quietly retired to Spain, contentedly ending a career that had begun during the golden age of British film-making and ended with the end of the golden age of British television. Although both her marriages ended in divorce, she once remarked: “I’m a lucky woman. In all my life I’ve loved two men, and I married them both.”

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

Her obituary in “The Stage”

he granddaughter of professional ballroom dancers, the actor Barbara Murray inherited a stage and screen presence that was every bit as graceful and elegant.

Born in London, she was sent to a boarding school at the outbreak of the Second World War and eventually evacuated to Wales. Her stage career began in regional rep at the Newcastle Playhouse in 1949 before she developed a close early relationship with the Connaught Theatre, Worthing. She made her screen debut in the period comedy Badger’s Green and the Ealing Comedy Passport to Pimlico (both 1949) and quickly made the transition to the small screen, where she became an increasingly familiar face throughout the 1950s.

On stage, she maintained a presence in what were then referred to as “the provinces”, and in 1952 was in the first production at the newly reopened Royal Court, The Bridge of Denmark Hill. She made her West End debut in Jack Roffey’s No Other Verdict at the Duchess Theatre in 1954.

Murray returned to the West End often in the years that followed, initially opposite Ian Carmichael in the Robert Morley-directed The Tunnel of Love, which opened at the Royal Court, Liverpool before transferring to Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1957 and the Apollo Theatre the following year.

She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1962 for the premiere of Harold Pinter’s The Collection, playing alongside Michael Hordern and Kenneth Haigh in Peter Hall’s production. The same year she made her sole and short-lived appearance on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre in Leslie Weiner’s comedy about a family-run lingerie business, In the Counting House; the show closing after just six performances.

Other West End appearances included the thrillers Trap for the Lonely Man (Savoy Theatre, 1963) and Wait Until Dark (Duchess Theatre, 1967); the comedies Flip Side (Apollo Theatre, 1968) and Key for Two (Vaudeville Theatre, 1982); opposite John Mills in Little White Lies (Wyndham’s Theatre, 1984), in Peter Hall’s revival of An Ideal Husband (Gielgud Theatre and subsequently the Apollo Theatre and Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 1998). She also appeared with Peter O’Toole in Pygmalion and in Ray Cooney’s Two Into One at the Theatre of Comedy in the mid-1980s.

With Toby Robertson’s Prospect Productions, Murray appeared in Shaw’s The Apple Cart (1965) and was an imperiously refined Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest for the Cambridge Theatre Company (1975). At Chichester Festival Theatre, she was seen in Patrick Garland’s revival of A Woman of No Importance (1978) and the Hart/Kaufman comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner (1979). She returned to Chichester in 1993 for a revival of Shaw’s Getting Married.

In later years, Murray appeared in the farce No Sex Please, We’re British (Grand Theatre, Swansea, 1999), The Importance of Being Earnest (Leicester Haymarket, 1999), Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon (King’s Head Theatre, 2000) and for the Peter Hall Company in An Ideal Husband (national tour, 2001).

Her television career spanned five decades and included the title role in the six-part murder-mystery The Widow of Bath (1959) and the family saga The Plane Makers (1963-64) before becoming a household name in the boardroom drama The Power Game (1965-69), the sitcom Albert and Victoria (1971) and the BBC’s period blockbuster The Pallisers (1974). Later appearances included Robin’s Nest, Doctor Who, The Bretts (1987-89) and Casualty.

Barbara Murray was born on September 27, 1929. In retirement, she moved to Spain where she fell and broke her hip earlier this year. Admitted to hospital in May for an operation to fix her injury, she suffered a heart attack and died on May 20, aged 84. She was twice married and divorced, and is survived by three daughters from her first marriage to the actor John Justin.

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

Margaret Rutherford is one of the greatest character actresses ever on film. She was born in 1882 in Balham, London. She worked as an elocution teacher and did not become a professional actress until she was 37 when she joined the Old Vic in 1925. She gained major film fame in 1n 1945 with her performance as Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit”, a part she had created on the stage. Throughout the late 40’s and into the sixties she created a gallery of characterisations on film ranging from the Miss Marple series to her Oscar winning performance in 1963 with “The V.I.P.’s”. She made one film in Hollywood, “On the Double” with Danny Kaye. Margaret Rutherford died after a lengthy illness in 1972 at the age of 80.

TCM Overview:

Gifted, endearing character player, in films since the mid-1930s. A master scene-stealer, Rutherford personified the eccentric English spinster in a number of famous comedies, including David Lean’s classic “Blithe Spirit” (1945), as the enthusiastic, bicycle-riding psychic, Madame Arcati. In “The Happiest Days of Your Life” (1950), she teamed beautifully with Alistair Sim for a rollicking secondary school farce.With her plump figure, small and piercing eyes, and bulldog expression, Rutherford could embody a spirit of prim, stiff-upper-lip efficiency or could play a classic, fidgety bungler with equal ease. She made a memorably nervous Miss Prism in a sterling film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s farce, “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1952). Rutherford is perhaps best known as the indomitable title character in four “Miss Marple” mystery films of the 60s. Most of Rutherford’s credits are British, but she won an Academy Award for her hilarious rendition of a daffy duchess down on her luck in the old-fashioned, all-star Hollywood anthology drama, “The V.I.P.s” (1963). This much-loved trouper was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the late 60s shortly before her death.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

Mikey North is best known for his part as Gary Windass in “Coronation Street”. He was born in 1986 in Yorkshire. His first professional stage work was in “Bottle Universe” in London’s West End. He has also featured in episodes of “The Bill”. His films include “A Mind of her Own ” in 2006 and a year later in “The Mark of Cain”. Interview on “Digital Spy” can be accessed here.

Kenneth Haigh obituary in “The Guardian” in 2018.

The actor Kenneth Haigh, who has died aged 86, was the original Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in May 1956, the game-changing new play that gave voice to a new generation, disaffected, provincial, working class, alienated by the Sunday newspapers, disgusted by the dreariness and hypocrisy of public life and private behaviour.

The play, in some ways, was a rant, but it was also a call to arms and, in Haigh, Osborne found his ideal representative on the stage: as abrasive as he was bright, Haigh was a “school of hard knocks” Yorkshireman who, like Osborne, had served time in weekly rep and the touring theatre of the 1950s and disliked most of what he had been required to do.

Osborne’s play showed a new direction, very different from the other plays Haigh had signed up to perform with the newly formed English Stage Company that season in Sloane Square; these were Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (he was the Rev John Hale) and, even more remotely to his experience, two new plays by middle-class novelists, The Mulberry Bush by Angus Wilson and Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis.Advertisement

He became synonymous with the “angry young men” (a phrase coined by a Royal Court PR man) of the time. To a large extent he was Jimmy Porter. When he went to Broadway with the play in 1958, a young woman in the audience, Joyce Greller, climbed on the stage and slapped him around the face. The scene she interrupted, she explained to the New York Times, “reminded me of all the rotten men I’ve known – it was a composite of every one of those fine rats”; which is just how people take actors in television soap operas “for real” these days, forgetting about fiction. It emerged later, however, that the interruption was a publicity stunt rigged by the producer David Merrick, who had paid Greller, an out-of-work actor, $250 in order to boost the sagging box office, which she did … the play ran for another 15 months.

Haigh’s other signature role was Joe Lampton in the ITV series Man at the Top (1970-72), in which he embodied John Braine’s womanising northern antihero first seen in the film Room at the Top. It was Haigh’s bad luck that both Jimmy Porter and Joe Lampton were more easily identified on celluloid with Richard Burton and Laurence Harvey, the respective stars of the movie adaptations.

Haigh had a double Richard Burton connection: with the great actor when he played Brutus in the Burton/Elizabeth Taylor blockbuster Cleopatra (1963), and with the explorer of the same name who competed with David Livingstone to discover the source of the African river in one of the best ever BBC documentaries, The Search for the Nile (1971). This was narrated by James Mason, and Haigh was Burton to Michael Gough’s Livingstone.

He was at least lionised in New York for a while after Look Back. He played the title role of Caligula by Albert Camus in 1960, directed by Sidney Lumet, missing the madness (according to the critic Kenneth Tynan) but worrying at his lines like a dog with a bone and surveying the patricians with contemptuous aplomb. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 to play in Harold Pinter’s The Collection at the Aldwych and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar at Stratford-upon-Avon. But he was more at home as a Liverpudlian wildcat strike leader in Lionel Bart and Alun Owen’s underrated musical Maggie May, co-starring Rachel Roberts, in 1964.

Haigh was born in Mexborough, South Yorkshire, the son of Margaret (nee Glyn) and William Haigh, and educated at Gunnersbury grammar school in London. After national service, he trained at the (now Royal) Central School of Speech and Drama and in 1952 toured in Ireland with Anew McMaster’s repertory company; he played Cassio to McMaster’s Othello, succeeding Pinter in the role as Pinter moved on to play Iago.

Haigh had returned to Britain after a period of teaching and performing at Yale drama school in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was encouraged by the critic Robert Brustein to play Prometheus and Pirandello’s Henry IV. His film career was insignificant, but he was superb as an embittered, exiled Napoleon in Eagle in a Cage (1972), though his last UK stage appearances, in Strindberg’s The Father at the Leicester Haymarket in 1975 and as a bland and chubby Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing in Manchester Cathedral in 1976, were disappointing.

[Look Back in Anger Alison PorterMary Ure Jimmy PorterKenneth Haigh

After Look Back, Haigh became soul mates with Tynan, whose review of the play – “I doubt if I could love anyone who did not want to see Look Back in Anger” – transformed so many lives, inside and outside the theatre, and he often dined with him at his home in South Kensington. Haigh also befriended another critic, Michael Billington, after they met at a Christmas party at Tynan’s house in 1973. They occasionally dined together and some years later Haigh cheerily remarked to Billington, on turning up one night for supper: “I don’t know. Same house, same job, same wife. Why haven’t you fucked your life up like the rest of us?”

He suffered the misfortune of spending the last 15 years in a care home as a result of brain damage incurred after swallowing a chicken bone in a Soho restaurant and suffering oxygen loss.

In 1974 he married the model Myrna Stephen. She and their son survive him.

• Kenneth Haigh, actor, born 25 March 1931; died 4 February 2018

• This article was amended on 14 February 2018. Yale drama school is located not in Boston, as originally stated, but in New Haven, Connecticut.

Michael Gambon. TCM Overview.

Michael Gambon was born in Cabra, Dublin in 1940. His family moved to live in London when he was five. At the age of eighteen he went on to study at RADA. He made his preofessional debut in 1962 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in “Othello”. He spent three years at the Old Vic and then joined the Birmington Repertory Company. In 1974 he had a huge success with “The Norman Conquests”. He made is fil debut in 1965 with Laurence Oliver and Maggie Smith in “Othello”. In 1986 he starred on television in Dennis Potter’s “The Singing Detective” to great acclaim. Among his films are “The Gambler”, “Dancing at Lughnasa” and “Sleepy Hollow” and the “Harry Potter” series where he took over from Richard Harris. 2013 article on Michael Gambon in “MailOnline” here.

TCM Overview:

One of the most respected and accomplished actors on stage, film and television since the 1960s, Sir Michael Gambon essayed men of complex passions, flaws and appetites in projects ranging from classical theater and “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” (1989) to the “Harry Potter” franchise, where he replaced Richard Harris as the fatherly wizard Dumbledore

. An acolyte of Laurence Olivier, he honed his craft on the British stage in productions of plays by Samuel Beckett and Alan Ayckbourn; major theater awards precipitated celebrated turns on television in “The Singing Detective” (BBC1, 1986), which in turn launched a film career as dastards like his brutal gangster in “Thief” or men hobbled by regret in “Dancing in Lunghnasa” (1998).

Hits in Hollywood like “Sleepy Hollow” (1999) boosted his profile, which led to Emmy nominations for “The Path to War” (HBO, 2002) and “Emma” (BBC1, 2009) as well as steady work on stage and in front of the camera. While most moviegoers recognized him as Dumbledore, his vast and storied career displayed a breadth of talent that made him an actor worthy of his late mentor’s mantle of the world’s finest working actor.

Alan Cuthbertson was a great character actor in British films. He was especially good as sneering public officials or smarmy businessmen or bossy military types. He was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1920. He came to England in 1947 and appeared in many plays on London’s West End. He appeared in army uniform in such films as “Carrington VC” in 1955, “Ice Cold in Alex” in 1958 and three years later “The Guns of Navarone”. He was particularly good as Simone Signoret’s condescending husband in “Room at the Top”. In 1960 he travelled to Hollywood and formed part of the British contingent in Danny Kaye’s “On the Double”. The other British stars included Margaret Rutherford, Dana Wynter and Diana Dors. He has a very extensive filmography and his last film was “Invitation to the Wedding” in 1985. He died in 1988 at the age of 67. An article on Allan Cuthbertson can be accessed here.

Gabrielle Drake is a very talented and attractive actress who starred in some of the more popular televsion series in Britain in the 70’s ioncluding “The Brothers”. She was born in India in 1944 and lived in other countries in the East before moving to England. Her film credits include is “Connecting Rooms” with Bette Davis, “There’s a Girl in my Soup” with Peter Sellers, Goldie Hawn and Diana Dors and “The Steal”. Recently she has appeared on television as the mother of Lynley in “The Inspector Lynley Mysteries”. She is the sister of the late cult songwriter and singer Nick Drake.

“Telegraph” interview with Gabrielle Drake from 2004:

“Wikipedia” entry

Drake was born in Lahore, British India, the daughter of Rodney Drake and amateur songwriter Molly Drake. Her father was an engineer working for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. As a child she lived in several Far Eastern countries. In 1942 her family had to flee Burma for Britain to escape advancing Japanese forces. She later commented that,

Until then, life was fairly easy out east. There were lots of servants … not that I remember having a spoilt childhood. Then suddenly we were back in England and in the grips of rationing. And yet, we were lucky in a way. We came back with my nanny who knew far more about England than mummy did. I remember the two of them standing over the Aga with a recipe book trying to work out how to roast beef, that sort of thing

On the ship travelling to Britain she appeared in children’s theatrical productions, later saying of herself “I was a dreadful exhibitionist.”^[2] She attended Edgbaston College for Girls in Birmingham, Wycombe Abbey School, Buckinghamshire and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. She has had a long stage career beginning in the mid-1960s, and has regularly appeared in television dramas.

Drake first gained wide attention for her portrayal of Lieutenant Gay Ellis in the 1970 science fiction television series UFO, in which her costume consisted of a silver suit and a purple wig.^[3] In the series, the character of Lt Ellis is the commander of Moonbase, which is Earth’s first line of defence against invading flying saucers. Drake appeared in roughly half the 26 episodes produced, leaving the series during a break in the production to pursue other acting opportunities.

In 1971 Drake appeared in a short film entitled Crash!, based on a chapter in J. G. Ballard‘s book The Atrocity Exhibition. The film, directed by Harley Cokeliss, featured Ballard talking about the ideas in his book. Drake appeared as a passenger and car-crash victim. Ballard later developed the idea into his 1973 novel Crash.^[4] In his draft of the novel he mentioned Drake by name, but references to her were removed from the published version.^[4] In 2009, Ballard appeared on the BBC documentary series Synth Britannia and played Gary Numan‘s song Cars. He interspersed clips of Drake from Crash! with Numan’s 1979 video. A reviewer in The Scotsman commented that the presence of Drake “brought serious glamour to urban alienation”.

In the early 1970s Drake was associated with the boom in British sexploitation movies, repeatedly appearing nude or topless. She played a nude artist’s model in the 1970 filmConnecting Rooms, and was one of Peter Sellers‘ conquests in the film There’s a Girl in My Soup. She also played one of the lead roles in the sex comedy Au Pair Girls (1972) and appeared in two Derek Ford films, Suburban Wives (1972) and its sequel Commuter Husbands (1973), in which she played the narrator who links the disparate episodes together.

Her early television appearances include The Avengers (1967), Coronation Street (as Inga Olsen in 1967) and The Saint (1968). In 1970, she auditioned for the part of Jo Grantin Doctor Who, reaching the final shortlist of three, but did not get the part. She had roles in The Brothers (1972–74, in a regular leading role), She also appeared in an episode of Brian Clemens’ ’70s series Thriller, in The Kelly Monteith Show (as Monteith’s wife 1979–80), a television version of The Importance of Being Earnest (1985, for LWT/PBS),Crossroads (1985–87, as motel boss Nicola Freeman) and returned to Coronation Street in 2009 as Vanessa. In The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2003–05) she played the protagonist’s mother.

Drake made her stage debut in 1964, during the inaugural season of the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, playing Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1966, she joined the Birmingham Repertory Company and played Queen Isabella in Marlowe’s Edward II. She also had roles in Private Lives (with Renee Asherson), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (with Linda Marlowe and Patrick Mower), Twelfth Night and Inadmissible Evidence.^[ The following year, she was Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park.^] In the 1974-5 season at the Bristol Old Vic, she played in Cowardy Custard, a devised entertainment featuring the words and music of Noël Coward In 1975, she appeared as Madeline Bassett in the original London cast of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn musical Jeeves. She also appeared in French Without Tears at the Little Theatre, Bristol.^[9] In 1978, she played Lavinia, opposite Simon Callow in the title role, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, directed by Adrian Noble, at the New Vic, Bristol. She also appeared at the Bristol Old Vic in that year, in Vanbrugh‘s The Provok’d Wife.

She was directed by Mike Ockrent in Look, No Hans!, alongside David Jason, during the 83-84 season at the Theatre Royal, Bath. She made a second appearance in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Royalty Theatre, London, in a production directed by Donald Sinden, which also starred Wendy Hiller, Clive Francis, Phyllida Law and Denis Lawson (87-88).^[10] In 1988, she played Fiona Foster in a revival of Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves, first at the Greenwich Theatre, then at the Duke of York’s Theatre.^[11]During the 1990-91 season at the Theatre Royal, Bath, she played in Risky Kisses with Ian Lavender.^[12] She was in the Mobil Touring Theatre’s official centenary production ofCharley’s Aunt in 1991, with Frank Windsor, Patrick Cargill and Mark Curry.^[13] In 1993, she was Monica in Coward’s Present Laughter at the Globe Theatre, London, in a revival directed by and starring Tom Conti.^[14] She co-starred with Jeremy Clyde in the 1995 King’s Head Theatre tour of Cavalcade, directed by Dan Crawford.^[15] In 1999, she was Vittoria in Paul Kerryson’s production of The White Devil at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester.^[16] She also toured with the Oxford Stage Company in that year, as Hester Bellboys in John Whiting‘s A Penny for a Song, alongside Julian Glover, Jeremy Clyde, and Charles Kay.^[17] She played Mrs Malaprop in the 2002 touring production of The Rivals with the British Actors’ Theatre Company, whose artistic director, Kate O’Mara, was Drake’s co-star in the TV series The Brothers.^[18]

She has made regular appearances at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, since her debut there in a non-pantomime version of Cinderella, written by Trevor Peacock, in 1979.^[ That same year, she co-starred with Sorcha Cusack and Susan Penhaligon in Caspar Wrede’s production of The Cherry Orchard. In 1986, she was Madame Gobette in the British premiere of Maurice Hennequin‘s Court in the Act, which subsequently played at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, and the Theatre Royal, Bath, before transferring to the Phoenix Theatre in London (1987). Other roles at the Royal Exchange include Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1996);^[ Anna in The Ghost Train Tattoo (2000);^[ Fay in Loot (2001);^[25] Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (2004);^[26] and The Comtesse de la Briere in What Every Woman Knows (2006). At the same theatre in 2001, Drake replaced Patricia Routledge as Mrs Conway during the rehearsal period for J. B. Priestley‘s Time and the Conways, when Routledge was forced to withdraw from the production due to illness.

Elsewhere, she has appeared in her one-woman show, Dear Scheherazade, as the 19th century writer Elizabeth Gaskell (2005, 2007, 2010). At the Chipping Campden Literature Festival in 2011, she and Martin Jarvis read extracts from the letters and diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann in the recital, Beloved Clara. She had appeared in the same piece the previous year, again with Jarvis and the pianist Lucy Parham, at the Wigmore Hall in London.

Drake has helped to ensure the public renown of her brother Nick Drake and her mother Molly Drake. She can be heard accompanying her brother Nick on a number of songs that he recorded privately, and which have since been released on the album Family Tree. After the release of songs written and performed by her mother, she said “Her creativity was a personal thing, and she was lucky to be able to develop it in an environment where that side of her was totally accepted. Indeed, my father encouraged it. He was so proud of her. On one occasion, he even made the 20 mile drive to Birmingham to get four songs pressed onto a disc.”^[ In 2004 she published Nick Drake: Remembered for a While, a memoir of her brother.^[2]

She lives in Wenlock Abbey in Much Wenlock, Shropshire with her husband of over 40 years the South African-born artist Louis de Wet. The couple bought the house in 1983. She and her husband have renovated their home over several years as an artistic project. In 2004 he described it as “the most beautiful building site in the world”. Drake was the producer of In the Gaze of the Medusa, a 2013 film by Gavin Bush about the renovation project and her husband’s designs for the house.

“There are many different ways of being frightening.” Gabrielle Drake says this in a low, menacing purr, leaning slightly forward and then slightly to one side, like a spinning-top about to keel over. “The obvious way, she says, is the gorgon, the battleaxe, the ugly old boot. “We’ve all seen that.” Her Lady Bracknell will be different: the gorgon with charm. “A woman can be more frightening if she is superbly turned out, superb looking and immaculately polite. You know what her values are and it is very unlikely that you are going to come up to scratch.”

Even as herself, Drake sounds very grand and cut-glass, as if she is about to tick one off for not having the right gloves. Very few actresses talk like this any more and the ones who do would never admit, as she does, that they hate the way they speak. “I think my accent is particularly horrible,” she says, with a shudder. Her voice is actually quite seductive – breathy, conspiratorial and deep. It’s not surprising that she was once invited to read the Kama Sutra on an audiotape of erotic literature. But she has a quaint repertoire of archaic phrases like “thereby reduced” and “raised the ire” – expressions that make her sound like her heroine, Mrs Gaskell, rather than a luvvie having a chat over a cup of tea at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.

Still, with her mane of chestnut hair and sparky form, Drake is a cheerful advertisement for the alluring possibilities of middle age. Braham Murray, director of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Exchange, says he chose her to play Lady B because he wanted a spirited, attractive woman and not some “dried up old prune”.

He first met her in 1978 when she was playing Lavinia in Titus Andronicus at Bristol Old Vic and was swept away. “Gaby was stunningly beautiful – still is – but people didn’t take her seriously as an actress. I thought: this is a great, great lady and I used her for some heavy roles such as Time and the Conways.”

Since her debut – as Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest at Liverpool’s new Everyman Theatre in the Sixties – Gabrielle Drake has deployed her fine vowels in a huge range of modern classic comedies, period drama and minor films (including Suburban Wives and Steal). Her television credits are a catalogue of old faithfuls – The Brothers, Coronation Street, Crossroads, UFO.

Recently, she played Lady Asherton in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. Last year, she was Mrs Malaprop in Kate O’Mara’s touring production of The Rivals, and now Lady B, a part she was born for. “It’s good fun to be coming into the great comic roles for older women,” she says gamely, though the competition is stiff.

As well as all this, Drake has a non-theatrical role that is only now becoming apparent. Listed in one of her web biographies under the heading “Trivia”, it is “Sister of the late singer-songwriter Nick Drake”. Her younger brother died from an overdose of anti-depressants at the age of 26 in 1974, and she has been the guardian of his reputation and his estate ever since.

At first, this was not too onerous. Nick had a pitifully brief career. Unappreciated in his lifetime, he recorded only three albums – gently melancholic folk-rock songs with an unusually pure guitar accompaniment. His fan base was tiny, though a persistent trickle of followers would turn up at their family home in Warwickshire on the anniversaries of his birth and death.

“Young people would just show up on the doorstep and we would have to be there with tea and cakes. One or two said that if it had not been for his music, they would have ended up as he did.

“His music was an enormous comfort to them. My mum was receiving people at her house almost up to the day of her death. She used to love that.”

In his depression at what he saw as the world’s rejection of his music, Nick seemed to move beyond the reach of family and friends. His parents felt they had failed him. “Other people have had businesses and hobbies,” said his bereaved father. “We’ve had Nick.”

Then, in 1995, something puzzling happened. Nick Drake’s reputation started to take off and has been rising ever since. Gabrielle is suddenly very busy indeed. Recently, she was in London for two days to promote an album of rare and previously unreleased songs to mark the 30th anniversary of his death.

“Wretched boy!” she says, in mock annoyance. “Here I am, still doing his publicity. One of the most difficult things is trying to work out what he would have wanted.

“If I meet him again, I will probably get into terrible trouble. I will have to say to him: ‘Listen, I did my best.’ My deepest sorrow is that he’s not here to do it himself.”

Contemporary musicians such as Paul Weller, Travis, Beth Orton, David Gray and REM are falling over themselves to acknowledge Nick Drake’s influence.

Last month, his first single, Magic, was released and Brad Pitt narrated an hour-long radio documentary of his life, Lost Boy – In Search of Nick Drake. There has been tremendous excitement over the discovery of possibly his last song, Tow the Line, which was found at the end of a reel.

“I am sad,” says his sister, “that the whole Nick thing started after my mother died. She would so loved to have known about it.”

Gabrielle was born in 1944 in Lahore, where her father, an engineer, was building a sawmill. Nick arrived four years later. The family returned to England when Gabrielle was eight. On board the ship home, she loved taking the stage in children’s concerts.

“I was a dreadful exhibitionist,” she says. “My brother was far shyer.”

Their comfortable upbringing in Tanworth-in-Arden seems to have been without a tremor of angst or disharmony. Gabrielle went to Wycombe Abbey School for Girls; Nick to Marlborough College, where he was head boy and a champion sprinter.

She trained at Rada; he dropped out of Cambridge to pursue a musical career under the producer Joe Boyd. For a while, they shared a flat in Hampstead where he showed her his first album, Five Leaves Left.

She says she admired her brother for never trying to disguise his middle-class origins by sounding American or cockney in his songs. “He was what he was and that stood him in good stead with time.

“He was an unfashionable figure; we were both unfashionable figures. To be at Rada and speak with my sort of accent was almost synonymous with lack of talent. I understood his battle from my side.”

But Nick hated the self-exposure of touring and performing live as much as she thrived on it, and gradually he retreated into himself at the lack of public recognition.

“He was a funny combination of not wanting to compromise his work and go commercial, yet wanting his work to be well known. I can’t help but be pleased that it now is.”

She doesn’t subscribe to the theory that his songs in any way prefigured his early death.

“I don’t think The Fruit Tree was necessarily written about himself. After all, that is what happens to a lot of young poets: they don’t flourish till after their death.”

And she believes that although he may have committed suicide, it was not premeditated.

“He was in a pretty low state and I feel that he just threw a whole lot of pills into his mouth and thought: `Either I die or I come out of this and things will be different.’ I think he was always wanting new starts.”

With more sensitivity than most siblings would show, Gabrielle doesn’t lay claim to a special understanding of her brother or his work.

“I try not to talk too much about his music. It would be presumptuous of me and he can’t stand up and defend what I say. I am led by journalists at times to be more definite than I actually feel.”

In musical and business matters, she is happy to take the advice of Nick’s posthumous “manager”.

Besides, she has a career of her own to promote and, as Mrs de Wet, a medieval priory in Shropshire to keep up. Twenty years ago, she and her husband, the painter Louis de Wet, moved into what he described as “the most beautiful building site in the world”.

They have been labouring on it ever since. “It is a mad project and will probably never be finished. It is my husband’s vision to restore it and take it back to something of its medieval beauty – but it is also representative of the way he sees art and his work: making a new link in an old chain.” He is currently building a medieval library.

His wife, meanwhile, is safeguarding against lean times by compiling her own one-woman show about the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. She tried it out at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford and it went down “rather well”, so she will take it touring after her stint as Lady B.

“There are hardly any parts written for women of my age. Work was patchy, so I decided to construct something for myself,” she says, with Bracknellian determination. “Work breeds work.”

This “Telegraph” interview can also be accessed online here.

by Pete Stampede and David K. Smith

Born 30 March 1944 in Lahore, Pakistan, Gabrielle Drake had the distinction of being tested to play Emma Peel and Tara King. She was best known for The Brothers, a 70s BBC evening soap, and was a purple-wigged regular on Gerry Anderson’s UFO(1970). More recently she was a “consultant” on Medics (1995). Her guest turns on TV include The Saint, “The Best Laid Schemes” (1968), The Champions, “Full Circle” (1969) and The Professionals, “Close Quarters” (1978).

Although she usually had minor film parts, particularly sex dramas such as Derek Ford’s Suburban Wives (1971) and Commuter Husbands (1973), she also frequently and successfully played lead roles in the theatre, including Alan Ayckbourn’s How The Other Half Loves and most recently Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. Whatever possessed her to make a full-frontal appearance as “Randi from Denmark” in Au Pair Girls (1972, with Norman Chappell, Ferdy Mayne and John Le Mesurier), an atrocious soft-core romp, goodness knows! The last credit on record for her is in the “documentary” A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake (2000) as herself, being Nick Drake‘s sister

Gary Bond obituary in “The Independent” in 1995

Gary Bond was born in 1940 in Alton, Hampshire. He spent most of his career on the stage but has one major classic film to his credit the terrific Australian “Wake in Fright” released in 1971. His other films include “Zulu” and “Anne of a Thousand Days”. Gary Bond died in 1995 at the age of 55.

His “Independent” obituary:Gary Bond was one of the most enduringly handsome actors of his generation. He was also a resourceful and sensitive performer of wide range and polished technique. But perhaps in the dramatic era of the kitchen sink and, in John Osborne’s cutting phrase, the “white tile” university, such dazzling good looks were no longer quite at such a premium.

Bond also possessed a strong, warm and pleasing tenor voice; and he earned his greatest fame in musical theatre, notably in the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. This phase of his career achieved its peak in the revival last year of Aspects of Love at the Piccadilly Theatre, and subsequently on tour. In this second production Bond finely recreated the role of the philandering hero, George Dillingham, causing mild shock to his admirers who, accustomed to Bond’s perennial youthfulness, found it somewhat surprising to see him interpreting the role of a loveable roue in his sixties.

Bond was born in Hampshire in 1940, the son of a soldier, and educated at Churcher’s College, Petersfield. His father, who wanted a steady career for him, died when Bond was 16, leaving him free to pursue his ambition to become an actor.

He trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at the age of 23 got his first job in that forcing-house of young talent, the Connaught Theatre, Worthing. The play was Not in the Book and was followed by Doctor in the House, in which Bond took the role of the light-hearted Dr Simon Sparrow. A year later he appeared at the Royal Court Theatre, London, as Pip in Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything, one of the theatrical landmarks of the Sixties.

Bond was a natural charmer and the combination of his good looks and debonair manner made him ideal casting in light comedy and in romantic leading roles. These included John Shand in J.M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows (1967), Giles Cadwallader in The Man Most Likely To . . . (1968) and a trio of sharply contrasting roles in Noel Coward’s We Were Dancing, Red Peppers and Family Album at the Hampstead Theatre in 1970, and at the Fortune Theatre, London, in the following year.

Invited to join the Prospect Theatre Company in 1968, Bond had a welcome opportunity to try his hand at classical roles and he appeared as Sebastian in Twelfth Night and as a fiery Sergius in Shaw’s Arms and the Man. In 1970, at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, he was a lively Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, and a passionate and youthful Byron in The Lord Byron Show.

Bond’s first success as a singer and dancer came in the musical revue On the Level, put on at the Saville Theatre, London, by the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. But it was not until 1972 that he enjoyed a huge and sudden hit in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This highly original early musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber opened to great acclaim on the Edinburgh Fringe, was then brought to the Roundhouse in Camden Town and finally moved into the West End to enjoy a long run at the Albery Theatre. In the role of the young biblical hero abandoned by his brothers in the wilderness, Bond achieved a new popularity, establishing himself as a most versatile and personable musical performer.

His association with Rice and Lloyd Webber was to continue with the musical Evita when in 1978 he took over, from the pop star David Essex, the role of the revolutionary hero Che Guevara, who acts both as character and narrator. Bond’s handling of this pivotal part was greatly admired by the show’s American director, Hal Prince. After the exhausting rigours of a long-running West End musical, Bond gave a series of concert performances with Marti Webb of Lloyd Webber’s songs.

But Bond had not abandoned his first love of straight theatre, and in State of Affairs (1983), a study of marital turmoil which transferred from the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, to the Duchess Theatre, he found an unexpected edge of anger and frustration. In 1982 he played Otto in Noel Coward’s Design for Living opposite Maria Aitken at the Globe Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. At the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1988 he appeared opposite Keith Michel in The Baccarat Scandal, which transferred to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. And in 1992 he appeared as the Count in a revival of Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal at the Garrick Theatre.

For one so obviously photogenic it was curious that Bond did not have a more substantial career in films and television. In his first television role in 1963 he made a poignant young suitor to Natalia in Granada’s production of War and Peace and in 1964 he won an important role in the film Zulu playing opposite Michael Caine and Stanley Baker. For BBC Television he was Pip in Great Expectations and the young suitor in Anouilh’s Colombe; and in 1968 for Thames Television he took the role of a young Indian army colonel in the military adventure series Frontier. But it was in the theatre that he chose to make his real mark.

Alan Bond had a twinkling humour and a sometimes wicked sense of fun. His easy warmth of manner made him a popular figure among his friends and fellow actors. For 16 years he shared his home with the distinguished American artist and illustrator E.J. Taylor, who sustained him through a long and painful illness.

Derek Granger

Gary James Bond, actor, singer: born Liss, Hampshire 7 February 1940; died Ealing, London 12 October 1995.

To view “The Independent” Obituary on Gary Bond, please click here.

Gary Bond

Athene Seyler has a very long career in film and theatre. She was born in 1889 in Hackney in London. She made her film debut in 1921 and she seemed to specialise in eccentric old ladies. Her films include “The Mill on the Floss”, “Dear Octopus”, The Secret People”, “Yield to the Night” and “Campbell’s Kingdom”. She lived to the age of 101 dying in 1990. Video clip of Athene Seyler on “Wogan” here.

From British Film Forum by Alex Jennings:
Athene Seyler (1889-1990), actress, was born on 31 May 1889 at 18 Goulton Road, Hackney, London, the seventh and youngest child by ten years of Clarence Heinrici Seyler, secretary and financial adviser to a Greek millionaire, and his wife, Clara Thies, a baker’s daughter. Both parents were of German extraction. Her father was a Hellenophile; he called all his daughters by Greek names. Athene was educated at Coombe Hill, a progressive co-educational school where the emphasis lay on tutorials not textbooks, and Bedford College, London, where she studied Restoration comedy, of which she was to become a peerless interpreter.

From her first performance as a child, dancing a hornpipe at the Conway Hall and reducing the audience to helpless laughter when her ‘draws fell down’, Athene Seyler was determined on a stage career. Her father died when Athene was fifteen years old leaving wife and daughter in straightened circumstances, and although both parents had disapproved of her theatrical ambitions, Sir Henry Irving, a one-time neighbour, encouraged the young Athene (she had once fainted while watching his death scene in Tennyson’s Becket). With his support she applied to the Academy of Dramatic Art, auditioning for Arthur Wing Pinero, Sir Squire Bancroft, and the pioneering female director Lena Ashwell, who took her aside and told her she would never make an actress because of the way she looked. But Athene persevered, recited as Rosalind, and gained a scholarship. She made her debut at the academy as Charles the Wrestler in As You Like It and graduated as the gold medallist in 1908. It was Ashwell who gave Seyler her first professional role as Pamela Grey in W. T. Coleby’s The Truants (1909) at the Kingsway Theatre.

Between her debut and the end of the First World War, Athene Seyler appeared in almost thirty productions, in London and on tour, but it was not until 1920 at the Lyric, Hammersmith, that she began to attract attention: as Rosalind (her favourite role), and particularly in Sir Nigel Playfair’s Restoration revivals, as Melantha in John Dryden’s Marriage a la mode and Mrs Frail in Love for Love by William Congreve. Athene Seyler never stopped working, alternating between the classics and scores of forgotten light comedies, glorying in such wonderfully named characters as Mrs Bucket, Savina Grazia, Mrs Nelly Fell, and Lavinia Mildmay. Classical highlights included three Lady Fidgets in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1924, 1926, and 1934), Titania (1923) and Hermia (1924), another Melantha and Miss Prism back at the Lyric, Hammersmith (1930). She toured Egypt, South Africa, and Australia in the 1930s; played in a season at the St James (1932) as Emilia and Nerissa to Ernest Milton’s Othello and Shylock; and in 1933 joined the Old Vic/Sadler’s Wells Company as Maria, Mme Ranyevskaya, Lady Bracknell, Mrs Frail, and also as first Weird Sister in Macbeth.

In 1937 Athene Seyler shone as Mrs Candour in an all-star (Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, and Alec Guinness) School for Scandal by R. B. Sheridan at the Queen’s Theatre and in 1941 played another and much admired Ranyevskaya in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, both directed by Tyrone Guthrie; and was unusually in modern dress for Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1942) and as Veta Louise in Harvey (1949) by Mary Chase. In the 1950s she played the Nurse at the Old Vic, and Mrs Malaprop. Her final stage appearance was in 1966, with her old friend Dame Sybil Thorndike as the sweetly murderous spinster sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace by J. Kesselring.

In a stage career of nearly sixty years Athene Seyler was recognized as one of the great technical experts on the playing of high comedy, relishing with instinctive wit the turn of a phrase or the eloquent manipulation of a fan. In 1943 she co-wrote a book, The Craft of Comedy, which took the form of an exchange of letters with the actor Stephen Haggard (1911-1943), who died on active service. They had acted together in the British premiere of G. B. Shaw’s Candida (1937) and in Haggard’s own play Weep for the Spring (1939). The book offered a marvellous series of reflections on the practice of playing comedy. Seyler wrote that ‘Comedy is the sparkle on the water, not the depths beneath. But note the waters must run deep’, and she developed a system for the getting of laughs: ‘Have I been heard? Have I been truthful? Has the feed line been heard?’ (Seyler and Haggard, 11).

Athene Seyler made her (silent) film debut in 1921 as Rachel Wardle in The Adventures of Mr Pickwick, and managed to appear in over sixty films in a career dominated by the stage. She was invariably cast in comic cameos, as eccentric and imperious aunts or dowagers, and unsurprisingly in several more Dickensian adaptations-as Misses La Creevy, Witherfield, and Pross in Nicholas Nickleby (1947), in The Pickwick Papers (1952), and in A Tale of Two Cities (1958). In the 1950s and 1960s she made a few television appearances, in the classics and in The Avengers.

On 14 February 1914 Athene Seyler had married James Bury Sterndale-Bennett (1889/90-1941), a journalist, the grandson of Sir William Sterndale-Bennett, composer and entertainer. They had one daughter. In 1922 she met the actor Nicholas ‘Beau’ Hannen (1881-1972), the son of Sir Nicholas James Hannen and his wife, Jessie Woodhouse, and he was to be the love of her life. She changed her name by deed poll to Hannen in 1928, but they were not to marry until 1960, after the death of his first wife, who had refused a divorce. Although Seyler was appointed CBE in 1959, it was generally assumed that the DBE many thought rightfully hers was withheld on account of her unmarried partnership with Beau.

In 1950 Athene Seyler was elected president of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the first former pupil to hold that post, and in the same year became life president of the Theatrical Ladies Guild. She lived for some fifty years in the Coach House, Chiswick Mall, and would explain to passers-by the finer points of the boat race (and that she was not in fact Margaret Rutherford). She abandoned an autobiography because its leading character bored her but in her hundredth year she was still working, making mischievous appearances on television chat shows and a belated debut at the Royal National Theatre on her 101st birthday, vividly recalling G. B. Shaw and Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and Mrs Patrick Campbell. She died three months later on 12 September 1990 at the Coach House, 26 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, London.

Alex Jennings

The above article can also be accessed on the British Film Forum online here.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Barbara Murray

Barbara Murray.

Margaret Rutherford

Mikey North

Kenneth Haigh

Kenneth Haigh obituary in “The Guardian” in 2018.

Michael Gambon

Michael Gambon. TCM Overview.

Allan Cuthbertson

Gabrielle Drake

Gary Bond

Gary Bond obituary in “The Independent” in 1995

Athene Seyler

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