British Actors Archives - Page 135 of 138

Lynn Redgrave

Smashing Time, poster, US poster art, top from left: Lynn Redgrave, Rita Tushingham, 1967. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Lynn Redgrave was my very favourite of all the talented Redgrave dynasty. She had a drollness and unique comic tough that was a true delight. She was born in 1943 in London. She was the youngest child of Sir Michael Redgrave and his wife Rachel Kempson. Lynn’s older siblings were Vanessa and Corin. She made her film debut in 1963 in “Tom Jones” and the following year was terrific as Baba Brennan the friend of Rita Tushingham in this tale of Irish country girls moving to Dublin. She had a huge success in 1967 with “Georgy Girl” with James Mason and Alan Bates. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance and soon afterwards began making films in the U.S. In 1999 she gave a great performance in “Gods and Monsters” and was again Oscar nominated. This wondeful actress sadly died in May 2010

.Her “Guardian” obituary by Michael Coveney:

Even by the colourful standards of her own family’s public profile and professional achievements, Lynn Redgrave, who has died of breast cancer aged 67, was an exceptional personality. Her death seems particularly cruel after the loss of both her niece, Natasha Richardson, after a skiing accident last year, and her brother, Corin Redgrave, last month. The third child of the actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Lynn was a gifted comedian who received her first Oscar nomination for a delightful, clownish performance in the title role of Georgy Girl (1966), one of the defining movies of the so-called swinging 60s. She went on to spend many years living and working in America. Less politically engaged than her older siblings, Vanessa and Corin, she was no less a remarkable talent.

Her 1991 television remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? with Lynn and Vanessa in the Bette Davis and Joan Crawford roles respectively, is a collector’s item. The sisters also starred together in a riotous and emotionally raw 1990 revival of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Queen’s Theatre, directed by Robert Sturua of the Rustaveli theatre in Tbilisi, Georgia. Vanessa played Olga, and the sisters’ niece Jemma Redgrave (Corin’s daughter) played Irena. Lynn’s Masha was an unforgettable, frustrated bundle of nervous energy seeping through her cigarette smoke, musical wails and sudden cries.

In her touring solo show, Shakespeare for My Father (1994-96), she exorcised her feelings of distance from the imperious Michael Redgrave by relating how she reached him only by becoming an actor herself. The lonely, lumpy child was transformed by her talent, and the evening, full of wonderful vignettes and speeches, reached a moving climax in the reconciliation scene of Lear with Cordelia. She turned her attention to her mother’s life in a 2001 play for seven actors, The Mandrake Root. In her later one-woman show Nightingale, which won the LA Drama Critics Circle award for best solo performance, she again explored the life of her mother, as well as her maternal grandmother, and also touched upon her own failed marriage.

Lynn’s legal battles and marital upheavals were the stuff of soap opera. In 1967 she married John Clark, a former child actor who played the title role in Just William on BBC radio. She settled happily in California in 1974, with Clark as her manager. In 1981 she sued Universal Television for wrongful dismissal and claimed she was not allowed to breast-feed her third child, Annabel, in her dressing-room during the filming of the CBS sitcom House Calls. The litigation lasted 13 years; she lost the suit and was declared bankrupt.

Her marriage to Clark was dissolved in 2000, two years after he revealed that he had had an affair with her personal assistant, Nicolette Hannah, and that Lynn’s supposed grandson Zachary was in fact Clark’s own son by Hannah, who had married (and subsequently divorced) their son Benjamin. Lynn battled with her weight and was a spokesperson for WeightWatchers in the 1980s. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, had a mastectomy the following year and wrote a journal of her recovery with photographs by her daughter Annabel.

Lynn was born in London and, like Vanessa before her, attended Queen’s Gate school, Kensington, and the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her first job was at the Royal Court in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962). The director Tony Richardson (Vanessa’s then husband) told her to play Helena “as a giraffe”.

She was one of the original 12 contract artists in Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, tragic as the daughter Kattrin in Mother Courage and hilariously dim as the gormless flapper Jackie Coryton in Noël Coward’s own 1964 revival of Hay Fever – the one which had a cast, Coward said, that could play the Albanian telephone directory. (Her co-stars were Edith Evans, Robert Lang, Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens and Derek Jacobi.)

Before she left for California, she appeared in the West End transfer of David Hare’s Slag in 1971 and at Greenwich in 1973 with Dave King in Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday. But her career, to British eyes at least, became unfocused. None of her films really matched the charm of early work in Tom Jones (1963) with Albert Finney; The Girl With Green Eyes (1964) with Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch; and, of course, Georgy Girl, with Alan Bates and Charlotte Rampling.

There was the odd sighting on Broadway, from Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy with Michael Crawford in 1966 to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads in 2003. A London visit in 2001, when she took over Patricia Hodge’s role as Dotty Otley in a revival of Michael Frayn’s sensationally funny backstage farce Noises Off, reminded audiences of her zany brilliance.

Lynn played Dotty, the fast-fading rep actress in a floral housecoat, like some ridiculous parody of Gloria Swanson in Ashton-under-Lyne, refusing grandly to speak when constrained by a neck brace and dark glasses, or cutting loose maniacally in a symphony of hilarious postures and stricken pretensions, bearing plates of sardines around the stage as if they were the crown jewels. No Dotty was ever dottier, or funnier.

Her films included such oddities as Woody Allen’s 1972 version of a sex manual, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) and the title role in a low-budget version of Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker (1975). One of her best screen roles was the jaded London hostess in Getting It Right, adapted by Elizabeth Jane Howard from her own novel, in 1989.

She had fine and graceful supporting appearances in Shine (1996), opposite Geoffrey Rush as the tortured pianist, and in Gods and Monsters (1998), with Ian McKellen as the eccentric film director James Whale. Her performance as Whale’s longtime housekeeper was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar. Later on, she appeared in such diverse films as the romantic comedy The Next Best Thing (2000), David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002), Peter Pan (2003) and Kinsey (2004).

The occasional glimpses and rare stage appearances only served to whet the appetite. For surely, in her own and very different way, Lynn was as great an actress as Vanessa. It just never really seemed like it. In an interview in the New York Times in 2003, she described her recurring stage nightmare, in which she starred in a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country: “I walk through a door of a Russian house and suddenly I’m in the Colosseum in Rome. And there are huge crowds and I can’t be heard. They’re yelling, ‘We can’t hear you!’ It’s awful. They keep yelling, ‘We can’t hear you.'”

She appeared on Broadway in 2005 at the same time as both Natasha (in A Streetcar Named Desire) and Vanessa (in Hecuba), receiving the best reviews for her performance as Mrs Culver in Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife at the Roundabout theatre. “Every night, for a couple of hours,” she said, “I wasn’t a person with cancer. You almost feel like yourself when there’s so much evidence, mainly the mirror, to show you you aren’t. It was true ‘Doctor Theatre’.”

She was appointed OBE in 2002. Lynn is survived by her children Ben, Pema and Annabel, sister Vanessa, and six grandchildren.

• Lynn Rachel Redgrave, actor, born 8 March 1943; died 2 May 2010

This “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed on-line here.

Joan Rice obituary in “The Daily Telegraph” in 1997.

Joan Rice is best remembered for her role as a lovely Maid Marian to Richard Todd in Walt Disney’s “The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men” in 1952. She then went on to star in the big budget “His Majesty O’Keefe” opposite Burt Lancaster. Her other films include “Operation Bullshine” in 1959 and her last film was in 1970 “The Horror of Frankenstein”. She died in 1997 at the age of 67.

This was Joan’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph, which was very kindly sent to me by her nephew, Richard Keeble:

“Joan Rice who has died aged 66 [1997], was a Rank starlet of the 1950’s; her best remembered role was Maid Marian in Disney’s Robin Hood (1952) opposite Richard Todd. Hers was a Cinderella story without the glass slipper. She was discovered as a waitress at the former Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly and signed to a film contract after winning the Lyons ‘Miss Nippy’ contest of 1949. With no formal acting training, she was sent to the Rank charm school and rushed into a stream of mostly minor roles in British films of the day. One‘His Majesty O’Keefe,’ (1953) was a Hollywood production set in the South Seas, with Burt Lancaster, but it made little impact at the box office.

A Day To Remember, poster, US poster art, top left: Joan Rice; top right: Stanley Holloway; bottom left: Odile Versois; bottom second left: James Hayter, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Joan Rice never found the big role that might have established her on the international scene. She dropped out of the cinema in the 1960’s to build aless glamorous life in provincial repertory. She claimed never to miss her movie career, and later in life, at the instigation of her father-in-law, she took up live acting to repair the omissions of youth. She toured in ‘Rebecca’ and ‘A View from the Bridge,’ her favourite play. She never attracted bad notices, but none of these productions reached the West End and she became a forgotten figure to many of the cinemagoers of the 1950’s who fondly recalled herEnglish rose complexion and shapely contours. After seven years she abandoned acting completely because she disliked being away from home for such long periods. She was tempted into television only once – as a contributor to a ‘This Is Your Life’ show for Richard Todd, but dried up before the cameras and had to be steered through the programme by Michael Aspel.

Joan Rice was born in Derby on February 3rd 1930, one of four sisters from a broken home. She was brought up for eight years in a convent orphanage in Nottingham. After early experience as a lady’s maid and a housemaid, she left for London with half a crown in her purse and took a job as a waitress withLyons at £3 a week. Balancing tea trays and negotiating obstacles gave a natural poise that stood her in good stead in the company’s in-house beauty contest. The prize was a week’s promotional tour in Torquay ( a town to which she returned 20 years later in a revival of ‘The Reluctant Debutante’ at the Princess Theatre). As winner of the ‘Miss Nippy’ contest, she was introduced to the theatrical agent Joan Reese, who went to work on her behalf and secured a screen test and a two-line bit part in the comedy, ‘One Wild Oat.’ Her first substantial role, however, was in ‘Blackmailed’ (1950), a hospital melodrama, starring Mai Zetterling and Dirk Bogarde, in which Joan Rice played a good time girl.

It caught the eye of Disney and led to the role of Maid Marian, in which she was hailed as the “new Jean Simmons.” Rank however, seemed unable to capitalise on this. In the 11 years that she was active in British films, Rank offered her only supporting roles in films dependant on a large cast of character actors. ‘Curtain Up’ (1952), for example was about a seaside repertory company,‘A Day to Remember’ (1953), about a darts team on a one day excursion to France, ‘The Crowded Day,’ (1954) about the staff of a department store coping with the Christmas rush and ‘Women without Men,’ (1956) about a breakout from a women’s prison. Only ‘Gift Horse’ (1952), a traditional wartime naval picture, had quality, yet her role as a Wren was subsidiary to Trevor Howard, Richard Attenborough and Sonny Tufts. In ‘One Good Turn’ (1954), she was wasted as a stooge to Norman Wisdom. After ‘Payroll’ in 1961, she effectively called it quits, returning for only one last picture, ‘The Horror of Frankenstein’ in 1970.

After leaving show business, she lived quietly with her beloved Labradors,Jessie and Sheba, took work as an insurance clerk and later set up an estate agent, letting accommodation in Maidenhead through the Joan Rice Bureau, though she had only one member of staff.

She smoked heavily and suffered from asthma and emphysema, which kept her largely housebound for the last six years.

She married first, in 1953 (dissolved in 1964), David Green, son of the American comedian, Harry Green; they had one son. She married secondly, in 1984, the former Daily Sketch journalist Ken McKenzie, who survives her [1997].”

A Daily Telegraph obituary of Ms Rice can be accessed here.

Brenda de Banzie starred in several major films in Britain in the 1950’s and 60’s but biographical information on her seems very scarce. She was born in Manchester in 1909. She did not begin a career on film until she was in her mid 40’s. Her film debut was in “The Yellow Balloon” with Kathleen Ryan and Kenneth More in 1953. She had the female lead opposite John Mills and Charles Laughton in “Hobson’s Choice”. Her other major films include “The Purple Plain”, “The Man Who Knew too Much”, “A Kid for Two Farthings”, “Doctor at Sea” , “The Entertainer” and “The Pink Panter”. Her last film was “Pretty Polly” as the aunt of Hayley Mills in 1967. She died in 1981 at the age of 71. She never seemed to play tender roles. It would have been interesting to see her in such parts.

Her IMDB mini biography:

The daughter of a musical conductor, fair-haired, slightly plump Brenda de Banzie appeared in just a handful of films. As the result of two outstanding performances, she became an unexpected star when well into her middle age. Brenda first came to public notice as a sixteen year old chorine on the London stage in “Du Barry Was a Lady”, in 1942. By that time, she had already been treading the boards in repertory for some seven years. The theatre was, first and foremost, her preferred medium. In the early 1950’s, she had an excellent run of top-billed performances at the West End, which included “Venus Observed” with Laurence Olivier, and “Murder Mistaken”, as a wealthy hotel owner whose husband is plotting to bump her off for her money. For this, she won the coveted Clarence Derwent Award as Best Supporting Actress.

Critical plaudits tempted her to try her luck on screen, so Brenda eventually made her celluloid debut in Anthony Bushell‘s murder mystery The Long Dark Hall (1951). Her performance, as a rather vulgar and dowdy boarding house landlady, drew good notices – including one from Bosley Crowther of The New York Times. In 1954, director David Leancast Brenda in her defining role as Maggie Hobson, a middle-aged, temperamental spinster, opposite Charles Laughton and John Mills in Hobson’s Choice (1954). She pretty much stole every scene from her illustrious co-stars. Rather surprisingly, a BAFTA, eluded her. In 1958, Brenda landed the prize role of Phoebe Rice, the bitter, alcoholic wife of a second-rate music hall performer (played superbly by Olivier) in John Osborne‘s The Entertainer (1960). She recreated her performance for Broadway and for the film version in 1960 and received a Tony Award nomination. Sadly, little else came along which did much justice to Brenda’s intelligence and acting skills. During the 1960’s, she appeared primarily in matronly character roles and passed away during surgery for a non-malignant brain tumor in March 1981.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

Interesting article on Brenda de Banzie here.

John Alderton. TCM Overview

John Alderton was born in 1940 in Gainsborough in England. He has had many successful British television series including “Emergency Ward 10”, “Please Sir”, “Upstairs, Downstairs”, “Thomas and Sarah” , “My Wife Next Door”,and “Forever Green”. His films include “Duffy” in 1969 and more recently “Calender Girls”. He is long married to actress Pauline Collins. Interview here.

“Wikipedia” entry:

John Alderton was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, the son of Ivy (née Handley) and Gordon John Alderton. He grew up in Hullwhere he attended Kingston High School.

Alderton first became familiar to television viewers in 1962, when he played Dr Moone in the ITV soap opera, Emergency – Ward 10. He married his co-star, Jill Browne, but they later divorced. After appearing in British films such as The System (1964), Assignment K(1968), Duffy (1968) and Hannibal Brooks (1969), he played the lead in the comedy series Please Sir!, as hapless teacher Mr Hedges, which later resulted in him also playing the character in the 1971 feature film of the same name. In 1972 he appeared with Hannah Gordon in the BBC comedy series My Wife Next Door which ran for 13 episodes, and for which he won a Jacob’s Award in 1975. He then transferred to another top-rated ITV series when he played Thomas Watkins, the chauffeur, in Upstairs, Downstairs, opposite his wife, Pauline Collins. They had a daughter (the actress Kate Alderton) and two sons and also acted together in spin-off series, Thomas & Sarah, and another sitcom, No, Honestly, as well as in Wodehouse Playhouse (1975–78), a series that featured adaptations of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse (primarily the Mr. Mulliner stories.) In the meantime, he appeared on the big screen against-type as ‘Friend’ in John Boorman‘s cult sci-fi film Zardoz (1974), before returning to more familiar territory, as 1930s Yorkshire vet James Herriot in the 1976 film, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet.

He made his first stage appearance with the repertory company of the Theatre Royal, York in August 1961, in Badger’s Green by R.C. Sherriff. After a period in repertory, made his first London appearance at the Mermaid, November, 1965, as Harold Crompton in Spring and Port Wine, later transferring with the production to the Apollo. At the Aldwych, March 1969, played Eric Hoyden in the RSC’s production of Dutch Uncle. At the Comedy Theatre, July 1969, played Jimmy Cooper in The Night I Chased the Women with an Eel. At the Howff, October, 1973, played Stanley in Punch and Judy Stories, and played the same part in “Judies” at the Comedy, January, 1974. At the Shaw, January 1975, played Stanley in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. At the Apollo, May 1976, played four parts in Ayckbourn’s Confusions.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Alderton had few roles, but he narrated the children’s original animated series ‘Little Miss‘ in 1983 (with his wife Pauline Collins) and, from 1987 to 1994, he narrated and voiced all the characters in the original series of Fireman Sam. From 1989 to 1992, he starred in the series Forever Green as the character Jack Boult, and appeared in the film Clockwork Mice in 1995.

Alderton played against his wife Pauline in Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War in 2002 and made something of a comeback in the 2003 film, Calendar Girls. Then, in 2004 he played a role in the BBC series of Anthony Trollope‘s He Knew He Was Right. Also in 2004 Alderton starred in the first series of ITV 1’s Doc Martin in an episode entitled “Of All The Harbours In All The Towns” as sailor John Slater, a friend and former lover of Aunt Joan. He played Christopher Casby in the 2008 BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens‘ Little Dorrit. In 1969, he married actress Pauline Collins and they had three children, a daughter and two sons, and a step daughter.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

John Bindon was a very interesting screen actor in British films in the 1960’s and 70’s . He usually played tough guys a role which he seemed to play in real life. The director Ken Loach spotted him in an East End pub in London in 1966 and cast him as the abusive husband of Carol White in the excellent “Poor Cow”. He was then cast in “Performance” with Mick Jagger. He also had major roles in “Quadrophenia” and “Get Carter”. He died in 1993 at the age of 50.

His “Independent” obituary:

A MAN of the Sixties, John Bindon lived a life at least as colourful as the roles he played: he was the archetypal actor-villain, and an all- round ‘good geezer’. ‘The fundamental thing about John was that he was a bright, intelligent man a size bigger than the room he was in,’ recalls his agent, Tony Howard.

The son of a Fulham cabbie, Bindon had an upbringing shrouded in machismo myth. It was all good training for the adult Bindon, for whom the term method acting might have been invented. The director Ken Loach cast him in Poor Cow (1967), the gritty realist film of Nell Dunn’s novel, having been introduced to him by Dunn ‘through a contact of hers. He was very easy to direct,’ says Loach, ‘and he was very good in it, very straight.’ Bindon’s portrayal of Carol White’s wife-battering husband was to set the tone for his acting career.

The celebrity of Poor Cow brought the model Vicki Hodge into Bindon’s life, and Bindon into high society. He was ‘not an East End tough,’ says Tony Howard. ‘He was a genial fellow welcome everywhere he went, from the highest to the lowest places. He could make a horse laugh – he could put people on the ground. He could charm Princess Margaret equally as well as anyone else.’ Bindon’s bonhomie certainly won him many celebrated friends: ‘John Huston loved him, Stanley Kubrick loved him,’ Howard says. Bindon appeared in the former’s film The Mackintosh Man (1972) , with Paul Newman, and had a small part in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975).

In 1970 Bindon was cast, alongside Mick Jagger and James Fox, in Performance, in which he played minder to the Kray-like ‘Harry Flowers’. The film’s co-director Nicholas Roeg remembers him as a ‘wild, naked talent; an extraordinary man; a totally unafraid person; people often mistrust that, mistake it for pugnacity.’ Bindon kept in contact with Roeg, who met him again some 10 years later, when the actor came to the United States ‘shortly after his ‘other problems’. We were always able to pick up a friendly conversation. I had a very great regard for him. I liked his attitude of raw courage; he had an unencumbered attitude – people are so often encumbered by fear.’ Bindon won the Queen’s Award for bravery in 1968, after rescuing a drowning man from the Thames (although it was alleged that Bindon had pushed the man in himself, and only pulled him out when a policeman appeared).

In between bouts of acting, Bindon became involved in the music scene, acting as tour manager and security for Led Zeppelin and David Bowie; he was a particular friend of Bowie’s manager, Tony de Fries, and through him got to know Angie Bowie, with whom he had a well-publicised affair. Bindon’s amatory interests – Christine Keeler, Serena Williams – excited almost as many gossip column inches as did his other activities.

Unfortunately, what Roeg calls his ‘other problems’ soon established another sort of fame. In 1976 Bindon was declared bankrupt; two years later he killed John Darke, a London gangster, outside a pub in Putney, allegedly for a fee of pounds 10,000. Bindon escaped to Dublin, badly wounded. He returned to England, however, and was acquitted on a plea of self-defence when it was revealed that he had saved a victim whom Darke had stabbed in the face. The substantial appearance of Bob Hoskins as a character witness at the trial helped sway the verdict.

Bindon made various appearances, generally portrayed as a ‘heavy’, in television series such as Hazell, The Sweeney, Softly, Softly and Minder, where his tough-guy persona lent an authentic air to such productions. But film work declined after the adverse publicity of his trial – although he did memorably play a drug dealer in the rock film Quadrophenia (1979), a role which again appeared perilously close to typecasting.

In 1981, Bindon’s 12-year relationship with Vicki Hodge ended, and his criminal activities began to garner more publicity than his acting work. In 1982 he was convicted of threatening a law student with a piece of pavement; and two years later was sentenced to two months in prison for holding a carving knife in the face of a detective constable. Although this sentence, and a similar one of six months for carrying an offensive weapon, was suspended, Bindon had spent time inside for other crimes. Tony Howard recalls: ‘His time in jail was well spent, reading avidly. He had a great knowledge of history and Shakespeare – he loved the classics – he knew everything there was to know about people like Wellington – he could quote Shakespeare freely, and did.’

Bindon’s last appearance was at the tiny King’s Head theatre in Islington in 1987, but his performance merited a worthy critical mention. The latter part of Bindon’s life was spent in a small flat in Belgravia, in a degree of poverty. His death from cancer brought unlikely tributes to the man’s goodheartedness from colleagues and close friends. Over 200 people attended his funeral at Putney Vale crematorium, spilling out of the chapel in their eagerness to show respect.

His “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Edmund Purdom obituary in “The Guardian”.

Edmund Purdom was born in 1926 in Welwyn Garden City. In 1946 he joined the Northampton Repertory Company. In 1951 he came to the U.S. to appear on Broadway with Laurence Oliver and Vivien Leigh in “Anthony & Cleopatra”. He was spotted by a talent scout and brought to Hollywood and cast as one of the ship’s officers in “Titanic” by 20th Century Fox in 1952. He was then cast to replace Mario Lanza in “The Student Prince” opposite Ann Blyth. Lanz’s singing voice was used in the film. For a brief period Edmund Purdom was cast in big budget MGM films such as “The Prodigal” and “The Egyptian”. However by the mid 50’s his U.S. career seemed to be waning and he went to Italy where he made many films over the coming decades. He died in 2009 at the age of 82.

It was the sad fate of the actor Edmund Purdom, who has died aged 84, that the best known of his films, The Student Prince (1954), is remembered more for the star who wasn’t in it. After the temperamental tenor Mario Lanza was fired from the film, the non-singing unknown Purdom replaced him. Luckily for MGM, Lanza had recorded the songs for the CinemaScope production before shooting began. Thus his voice is heard bellowing incongruously out of the slender frame of Purdom.

Purdom’s reputation as a surrogate is underlined by the fact that he got his first chance of stardom when he replaced Marlon Brando in The Egyptian (1954) after Brando wisely cried off, preferring to play Napoleon in Desirée instead. In addition, Purdom was married to Linda Christian, better known as Tyrone Power’s first wife.

Purdom was born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the son of a London drama critic. After being educated by Jesuits at St Ignatius College and by Benedictines at Downside School, he made his acting debut in repertory in 1945, aged 21. Six years later, he appeared with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh on Broadway in alternating performances of Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra, playing respectively a Persian and Thyreus, the unfortunate messenger of Octavius Caesar who gets whipped for his pains.

The roles gave Purdom an early taste for wearing togas and sandals as he was to do for a great deal of his career. One of his first film roles was in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953) as Strato, the young servant of Brutus (James Mason), who holds the sword out for his master to run on to at the climax.

Purdom, with his ex-ballerina wife, Anita Phillips, had gone to Hollywood in 1952 to test for My Cousin Rachel, but Richard Burton got the part. “I was so broke,” Purdom recalled, “that I couldn’t afford to pay the doctor’s bill when my daughter was born. I had no money for bus fare. I had to walk from studio to studio looking for a job. Once we were evicted for not paying the rent.”

Then after two bit parts, he was cast in the title role in The Egyptian, the brilliant physician in the service of the Pharaoh in 18th-dynasty Egypt. Purdom’s striking dark good looks and dimpled cheeks made up for his rather wooden personality and inability to pronounce his ‘r’s, but not even Brando could have known how to react to dialogue such as: “You have bold eyes for the son of a cheesemaker.”

At MGM, Purdom was given a huge build-up by the studio for The Student Prince after Mario Lanza’s drugs-alcohol-weight problems got the better of him. Purdom made a handsome and likeable Prince Karl of Karlsburg in love with a barmaid (Ann Blyth) in the Heidelberg of 1894 in Sigmund Romberg’s rather dated operetta. Apart from the (mismatched) singing of Lanza, the film’s highlight for today’s audiences is a group of students interlocking arms and warbling: “Come boys, let’s all be gay boys.”

After Vincente Minnelli gave up his attempts to film, with Purdom and Pier Angeli, Green Mansions, WH Hudson’s South American fantasy novel Purdom went into another musical, Athena (1954). This told of an athletic vegetarian family, of which one of seven daughters, Jane Powell, falls for stuffy, meat-eating weakling Purdom, when she could have had Steve “Mr World” Reeves.

More significant was the fact that the Mexican-born beauty Christian, wife of Power, played his snooty fiancée. Christian had been at the same school as Purdom’s wife, and the Powers and the Purdoms became good friends, even going on holidays together. But sexual jealousy broke up the once cosy foursome and, in 1955, Christian divorced Power, citing mental cruelty. Purdom’s name was not mentioned in court. Meanwhile, his short-lived Hollywood stardom was, inevitably, ending. He was bearded to disguise his pretty-boy looks as a highwayman in Restoration England in The King’s Thief (1955), a rather pallid swashbuckler, but the nail in the coffin was The Prodigal (1955). This risible spectacle, based on the Old Testament parable, had Purdom as a young Hebrew leaving his rural life for the big city where he falls under the spell of a beautiful scantily clad pagan priestess (Lana Turner, a former lover of Power’s) who induces him to squander his money and betray his faith. A prodigal flop.

After Purdom’s MGM contract was terminated, Christian found no shortage of millionaires to help keep him in the manner to which he was accustomed. But it was not until 1962 that they were married. The marriage lasted little more than a year.

By the end of the 1950s, like a number of stars for whom Hollywood work had dried up – including Reeves – Purdom went to Italy and into rubbishy costume melodramas such as Herod the Great (1959), The Cossacks, Salambo (both 1960), Suleiman the Conqueror and Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile (both 1961). This stream of Italian films was interrupted by some British television work and, in 1964, two films made in England, The Beauty Jungle, revealing the seedier side of beauty contests, and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. In the latter Rex Harrison, an English peer, finds his French wife (Jeanne Moreau) in the embrace of caddish Purdom in the vehicle of the title.

Then it was back to his home in Rome and a stream of eurotrash horror movies, such as Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks (1974). Purdom directed and starred as a police inspector in a British stalk-and-slash picture called Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984) which features a psychopath hunting down and killing streetcorner santas. Apparently he saw his mother murdered by a Father Christmas when he was a kid.

Purdom, who kept his looks and sense of humour into old age, is survived by his fourth wife, Vivienne, a photographer, and two daughters by Phillips.

• Edmund Purdom, actor, born 19 December 1924; died 1 January 2009

To view “The Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan of Edmund Purdom, also please click here.

Brian Glover was an actor, writer and wrestler from the English midlands . He was born in 1934 in Sheffield. His first film role was as Mr Sugdon the bossy soccer coach in Ken Loach’s “Kes” in 1970. He had a recurring role in the classic TV series “Porridge”. On the stage he acted in Lindsay Anderson’s “The Changing Room”. He died from a brain tumour in 1997 at the age of 63.

His “Independent” obituary:

Bluff and bald Brian Glover, who made his acting debut as the ebullient games master in Kes, was one of Britain’s most distinctive and popular character actors. His chunky frame was familiar from countless television appearances as well as film and stage work, while his homely Yorkshire tones were heard as voice-overs in television commercials, notably his assurances that “Tetley make tea bags make tea”, and that Allison’s bread has “nowt taken out”.

me that when Glover starred in a West End revival of The Canterbury Tales a few years ago it was advertised as “Chaucer with nowt taken out”.

Glover was born in Sheffield in 1934, but raised in Barnsley. His parents did not marry until he was 20. “I was in the gym in Barnsley one day and me dad came in and said, `Me and your mother made it all right today’, and I said `About bloody time!’ ” His father was a wrestler who called himself the Red Devil (“I don’t know what the neighbours thought when me mum used to hang out his masks on the clothes line”), and his mother ran a small grocer’s shop.

With his stocky frame, it was inevitable that Glover too would become a wrestler, eventually topping bills under the name of Leon Aris. Prompted by his mother to get a good education, he attended Sheffield University and became a teacher of French and English in Barnsley, where a fellow teacher was Barry Hines, the author of Kes.

In 1968, when the film was in preparation, Hines suggested that the director Ken Loach consider Glover for the role of the bullying games master Sugden. “Ken Loach was improvising a fight with a load of kids, and he asked me to stop it like a teacher would,” recounted Glover. “Well, I’d stopped a good few playground fights, and I had the confidence of being in the ring all those years, so I just grabbed the two kids who were fighting and banged their heads together.”

Though both the film and Glover’s performance in it were successful, he returned to teaching for two years until the entrepreneur Binkie Beaumont saw Kes while casting Terence Rattigan’s play about Nelson, Bequest to the Nation, and thought Glover right for the role of Hardy. The actor wickedly commented later, “Binkie used to take me to the Ivy – I must have been his rough trade or something.”

Glover’s acting career continued to flourish with roles at the Royal Court (including two David Storey plays directed by Lindsay Anderson, The Changing Room, 1971, and Life Class, 1974), and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, including Charles the Wrestler in As You Like It. Anderson cast him in his epic allegorical film O Lucky Man! (1973) and as Sergeant Match in his stage production of Orton’s What the Butler Saw (1975).

Prolific work with the National Theatre included roles in The Long Voyage Home, The Iceman Cometh (both 1979), Don Quixote (1982) and Saint Joan (1983), while other films included Brannigan (1975), The Great Train Robbery (1979), Company of Wolves (1984), Aliens 3 (1991) and Leon the Pig Farmer (1992).

The advertising industry, which grades voices by colour, had Glover’s as a robust, no-nonsense dark brown, and it was in demand for commercials, including his famous ones for bread and tea. His dozens of acting roles on television included a Doctor Who adventure in 1984 that proved a source of steady income. “I get more repeat fees for that than anything,” he said recently, adding, “The other big success is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Get in a Shakespeare on the telly and the BBC sell it all over the world on video to schools.”

Though he played Bottom in this production, and had one of his greatest successes playing a blunt but benign God in The Mysteries (1985), he accepted with good humour that many of his roles would be villainous. “You play to your strengths in this game,” he said, “and my strength is as a bald- headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.”

Along with his success as an actor, Glover pursued a writing career which included over 20 television plays and short films, plus a regular column for a Yorkshire paper. A committed socialist, he proved a lively member of the BBC television discussion programme Question Time. A totally unpretentious and down-to-earth personality (he refused to be ferried by limousines even when they were offered), he was enormously liked within the profession.

Though he had an operation for a brain tumour last September, he was back at work two weeks later filming John Godber’s Up and Under, in which he plays a Rugby League fan who is mentor to a younger player. “I first met Brian in 1977,” said Godber yesterday, “when he was one of the few people to see my first play, Bouncers, on the Edinburgh Fringe. He was kind enough to write me a little note and say he thought I might have something.”

Having always wanted to make a film with Glover, Godber created the film role especially for him. “He was a little bit poorly during the shoot,” said Godber, “but he never let it get in the way. He was always terrific company.”

Brian Glover, actor: born Sheffield 2 April 1934; twice married (one son, one daughter); died London 24 July 1997.

His “Independent” obituary can be accessed here.

Rupert Graves was born in 1963 in Weston-Super-Mare in Somerset. He started his career as a circus clown. His breatkthrough roles came with two E.M. Forster’s novels into film, “A Room With A View” in 1985 and two years later “Maurice”. Among his other films are “Where Angels Fear to Tread”, “The Sheltering Desert” and “Mrs Dalloway”.

Gary Brumbrugh’s entry:

Born in a seaside resort town, Britain’s Rupert Graves was born a rebel, resisting authority and breaking rules at an early age. In his teens he became a punk rocker and even found work as a circus clown and in traveling comedy troupes. In 1983 he made his professional stage debut in “The Killing of Mr. Toad” and went on to co-star with Harvey Fierstein in the London production of “Torch Song Trilogy.” It didn’t take long for somebody to take note of Rupert’s boyish good looks and offbeat versatility. By the mid-80s he was a presence in quality films and TV, primarily period pieces such as his Freddy Honeychurch in A Room with a View (1985) and the gay drama Maurice (1987).

Rupert moved to the front of the class quickly. His decisions to select classy, obscure arthouse films as opposed to box-office mainstream may have put a dimmer on his star, but earned him a distinct reputation as a daring, controversial artist in the same vein as Johnny Depp. In A Handful of Dust (1988) he essayed the role of a penniless status seeker who beds down a married socialite; in Different for Girls (1996) he was the lover of a male-to-female transsexual woman; in The Innocent Sleep (1996) he played a derelict drunk; and in the award-winning Intimate Relations (1996) he portrayed an aimless boarder who has a relationship with both the mother/landlady and her daughter.

Equally adept at costume and contemporary drama, Rupert more recently earned rave reviews on Broadway with “Closer” in 2000 and “The Elephant Man” in 2002. Rupert is currently married to production coordinator Susie Lewis.

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

To view Rupert Graves Website, please click here.

Gia Scala. IMDB.

Gia Scala was a beautiful English actress of Italian/Irish parentage. She was born in Liverpool in 1934. Her family moved to Rome and then on to New York when she was fourteen. She was signed to a Hollywood contract with Universal Studios and her first film was “The Price of Fear” with Merle Oberon and Lex Barker in 1956. She went on to make “Don’t Go Near the Water”, “Four Girls in Town”, “The Garment Jungle” and probably her most famous film “The Guns of Navarone”.She died in 1972 at the age of 38.

Her IMDB entry:

This tall, dazzling, yet shy and painfully sensitive foreign import was born Giovanna Scoglio in Liverpool, England but moved to Sicily with her aristocratic Sicilian father and Irish mother at three months of age. She migrated to New York at age 14 and attended Bayside (Queens) High School, graduating in 1952.

She worked various jobs as a file clerk and airline reservations taker while studying with Stella Adler and the Actors Studio. While appearing as a contestant on a television game show, a Universal Studios agent spotted her and placed the young beauty under contract in 1954.

The Angry Hills, poster, from left: Gia Scala, Robert Mitchum, 1-sheet poster art, 1959. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

After a few starlet bit parts, Gia earned good notices for her “second lead” role in The Price of Fear (1956), which led to even better love interest parts in The Garment Jungle(1957) with Kerwin Mathews, Don’t Go Near the Water (1957) opposite Glenn Ford, The Two-Headed Spy (1958) paired with Jack Hawkins, The Angry Hills (1959) starring Robert Mitchum, and I Aim at the Stars (1960) [aka I Aim at the Stars] with Curd Jürgens.

Her best known film role came as Anna, the Greek resistance fighter, in the classic all-star epic film, The Guns of Navarone (1961).

From there things began to spiral downhill for Gia personally and professionally. Riding on the coattails of her ever-rising glamour and success were those deep-rooted insecurities, and she began to drink heavily as compensation.

She eventually lost her contract at Universal due to her unreliability, which forced her to seek work overseas. Her marriage to actor Don Burnett burnt itself out, and, at one point, she threw herself off the Waterloo Bridge in desperation.

She would have drowned in the Thames River had a passing cab driver not plucked her out of the water in time.

Her alcoholic addiction led to numerous arrests, and her bouts with depression grew so severe that she was forced to undergo frequent psychiatric observations.

On April 30, 1972, it all ended for her. Gia was found dead in her Hollywood Hills bedroom of an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, another Tinseltown statistic. It was listed as a suicide.