Annette Andre (Birth name Annette Christine Andreallo) is best-known for her work on British television throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
She began as a ballet dancer, moving on to radio, theatre and TV work in Australia, before filming small roles in “Cleopatra” and “Panic Button” in Italy and then settling in London. She immediately found work in the stage musical, “Vanity Fair”, at the Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End. Her first film in the UK was This Is My Street (1964).
Probably her most memorable role was starring as Marty Hopkirk’s widow, “Jeannie Hopkirk”, in the late 1960s ITV classic, My Partner the Ghost (1969).
In 1971, she returned to the London stage to play “Miranda” in “The Collector”, at the King’s Head, and the same role, again, the following year, to open the Bush Theatre in Hammersmith. She continued mainly in theatre for the next two decades, starring in “Suddenly at Home”, Fortune Theatre, West End, and many national tours, including “Come Blow Your Horn”, “Party to Murder”, “Signpost to Murder”, “The Bride Makes Three”, “Streetcar Named Desire”, “Shock”, “There Goes The Bride”, among others.
In 1981, she played “Dr. Scott” in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” on a National tour around Australia. And, in 1984, she starred with Richard Todd in the long-running play, “The Business of Murder”, at the West End Mayfair Theatre in London. In 1988, she played a cameo role in the TV film, Maigret (1988), starring Richard Harris. The film was written and produced by Arthur Weingarten, whom she married a year later.
Andre is now semi-retired from acting, and devotes her time to animal welfare issues with her husband, both having worked closely with Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna of the “Born Free Foundation”. She has begun painting in oils, has sold several works and has been offered a solo show in the near future. She has made rare appearances at the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention in Aberdeen, Maryland in 2007, the Memorabilia Show in Birmingham, England in March 2011 and the New York Memorabilia Show in May 2011.
She and her husband live in upstate New York, and she loves to spend time in London with her daughter, Anouska, and her two wonderful grandchildren, Jake and Nia.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Leo Andre
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Jack Wild was born in Royton in the U.K. in 1952./ Best known for his wonderful performance in “Oliver” in 1968. Sadly he died in 2006.
His “Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:
Jack Wild will be best remembered for his exuberant performance as the cheeky pickpocket, the Artful Dodger, in Carol Reed’s film version of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1968), for which he was deservedly nominated for an Oscar. His top-hatted, mischievous urchin made an indelible impression and accomplished the seemingly impossible by matching the impact of the classic performance of Anthony Newley in David Lean’s earlier non-musical version of Oliver Twist.
His performance was different from Newley’s, less sly and knowing, but perfect for the lighter musical mood. With his impish grin, snub nose, boundless energy and husky voice, he gave splendid impetus to numbers such as “Consider Yourself”, “I’d Do Anything” and “Be Back Soon” and gave Ron Moody, as Fagin, a run for his money in the scene-stealing stakes.
Almost inevitably, his post-Oliver! career was a disappointment, and his descent to alcohol and obscurity could be said to mark him as yet another child star unable to cope with fame, though it is always difficult to follow up such a smash hit (even his co-stars Moody, Shani Wallis and Mark Lester – now an osteopath – never found subsequent movie roles of equal stature).
Wild’s youthful energy and versatility were similar to that displayed by Mickey Rooney 20 years earlier, but Hollywood was no longer making Rooney-type musicals, and Wild had no studio to protect, develop or discipline him. “It’s very hard not to let fame affect you because you are continually being told how good you are,” he said. “After a while you begin to think there must be some truth in it because all those people can’t be wrong.” Wild would adamantly deny, however, that his later drinking problem was the result of early stardom:
A lot of people try to blame the fact that I was successful at a young age. I don’t agree with them. I firmly believe that it wouldn’t have mattered what career I’d have chosen, I’d have ended up with a drinking problem. I think it was just in my genes.
Jack Wild was born in 1952 in Royton, Lancashire, to parents who worked in the cotton mills, but while he was still an infant the family moved to the London suburb of Hounslow, where Wild’s mother worked in a shop and his father in a tyre factory. Jack and his brother Arthur were boyhood friends of the future Genesis star Phil Collins, whose mother June ran a stage school with Barbara Speake. After watching the boys play football in the park one afternoon June Collins was convinced the Wild brothers had charisma and suggested they enrol at her school. Wild began going to auditions at the age of 11 and later revealed that he had to work constantly to pay the school fees:
My parents were working-class and couldn’t afford them. At 12, I was treated as an adult at “work” and it was difficult for me to switch from that role at home. I grew up too quickly.
Arthur Wild was later to be one of the boys who played Oliver in the original stage production of the musical, with Phil Collins as the Artful Dodger. Later Jack, who had already had some small roles on television, took over the role of Oliver in the stage production. When he won the role of the Artful Dodger in the film version, he was 16 and the second oldest boy in the cast:
I was the leader of the gang and we got up to a lot of escapades for the whole year we were making it. But Carol Reed was an excellent director and he knew how to deal with us.
Oliver! won the years’s Oscar for best film, and both Mooney and Wild were nominated for their performances. Wild received a good-luck telegram from his idol James Cagney, but he lost the best supporting actor award to Jack Albertson in The Subject Was Roses. “I didn’t win,” he later said, “but I had a great time in America and lots of doors were opened.” He made guest appearances on top television programmes, and he was given a million-dollar contract with Capitol Records, for whom he made three albums, The Jack Wild Album, Everything’s Coming Up Roses and Beautiful World.
At the Hollywood premiere of Oliver! he had met the puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft, who thought he would be perfect for a Saturday-morning children’s television show they were preparing. Jack and his brother left London and moved in with Marty Krofft’s family while Jack starred in the series H.R. Pufnstuff (1969).
Set on an enchanted island, it was a mixture of live action and giant puppets, in which Wild played a boy befriended by a dragon as he battles the evil Witchiepoo, who wants to steal his magic flute. He received another million dollars for the series. “I spent most of the money on the family,’ he later said, “buying them cars and houses.” He had already started drinking heavily:
I was smoking since I was 12. The people around me – the agents, personal and business managers – could hardly say, “You can’t have a drink.” I was employing them, after all. By the time I was 19 I thought I was God.
In 1970 he starred in a film version of Pufnstuff but the banal script and poor songs stifled the efforts of Wild and his co-stars Billy Hayes, Martha Raye and Mama Cass. Poor songs also blighted Wild’s next film, an otherwise charming family movie made in Ireland, Ralph Nelson’s Flight of the Doves (1971), which reunited the actor with Ron Moody. Wild and Helen Raye were a pair of orphans who run away from their cruel stepfather but encounter further danger from a wicked uncle (Moody) who is a master of disguise. Wild later confessed, “I was never really sober. I just topped myself up every day.”
He was teamed with Mark Lester again in Melody (1971). Lester played an 11-year old boy who wants to marry a 12-year old girl (Tracy Hyde), with Wild playing their older friend who tries to dissuade them from telling their parents. It was an appealing, but minor, film (an early work of the producer David Puttnam and writer Alan Parker) distinguished by a fine score by the Bee Gees.
Oliver! and H.R. Pufnstuff had given Wild a huge fan following, and he was a favourite of teen magazines, but his drinking quickly affected his looks, and he played a supporting role in Jacques Demy’s The Pied Piper (1982), a dark version of the disturbing children’s tale. The last film in which he received top billing was David Hemmings’s touching drama The Fourteen (1983), in which he was the oldest of 14 children who are suddenly orphaned and try to resist inevitable separation.
Relative obscurity followed, but though work became scarce he refused to give up acting. “There is no buzz,” he said, “like performing for a live audience.” He continued to work sporadically, particularly in America, where regular repeats of H.R. Pufnstuff kept his name known.
In the UK he was a popular draw in provincial pantomime. He played Buttons in Cinderella several times until age prompted a switch to an Ugly Sister. He particularly regretted that, having played a famous fictional cockney, he had never appeared in EastEnders. “I’d definitely be up for it,” he said,
just the same as I would if Coronation Street was offered. Either way, it would be like going back to my roots.
His heavy drinking, which he admitted contributed to the breakdown of his marriage to his Welsh wife Gaynor, lasted until 1988, despite attempts to dry out at clinics. “You have to reach your own personal bottom line,” he said,
and the time wasn’t right for me at clinics. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and don’t consider I have a drink problem any more. I might have a low-alcohol lager but that’s all.
A “born again” Christian and a diabetic, Wild had been sober for the past 16 years, and made a minor comeback in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) with Kevin Costner. Wild played one of Robin’s merry men, Much, the Miller’s son. He also appeared as a porn merchant in Channel 4’s series based on the movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, had the small role of a pedlar in Basil (1998), and portrayed the Cowardly Lion in a London production of The Wizard of Oz.
Diagnosed with mouth cancer in 2001, he had his tongue and voicebox removed in 2004, and had become an active campaigner for cancer charities. “My life style had made me a walking timebomb,” he said in an interview last year. Even when unable to speak, he took to the stage in Cinderella, as a mute but touching Baron Hardup.
Supported by his actress girlfriend of 10 years, Claire Harding, whom he met when they were appearing in Jack and the Beanstalk in Worthing and married last September, he continued to give interviews and make appearances. In 2005 he had a part, with Ron Moody, in Danny Patrick’s film Moussaka & Chips, and featured with other members of the Oliver! cast in two television retrospectives, After They Were Famous, on New Year’s Day, and Celebrate “Oliver!”, on Boxing Day. In September the Daily Mail brought him and Mark Lester together on the launch of Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist. “Jack was like my big brother,” recalled Lester, who said that Wild, six years his senior, was “a very good footballer”:
We just got on really well, although I wasn’t allowed to play football because my face got too red and it did not go down too well with the lighting guys.
In a 1996 interview, Jack Wild had remarked with cheerful resignation, “I guess I’ll go to my grave as the Dodger, but at least I’ve made my mark on show-business history.”
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Graham Payn’s obituary by Eric Shotter in “The Guardian in 2005”:
The actor and singer Graham Payn, who has died aged 87, was Noel Coward’s companion for the last 30 years of his life and lit up the playwright’s 1945 revue, Sigh No More, with a nostalgic song, Matelot, written for him. As the Evening Standard put it: “Mr Graham Payn shows that he can do something more than dance in tails and white tie.” What that something was puzzled Coward for the rest of his life. He wanted his friend to make his theatrical mark; but he, in turn, seemed content to be a character actor.
Known mainly until Matelot as a figure in male chorus lines – having started out as Curly in Peter Pan, at the London Palladium, aged 13 – Payn had also been in numerous pantomimes and musical comedies before and during the second world war. After Matelot, Coward cast him in his next three shows, and Payn was later to direct Coward.
Yet if he was not made of Coward’s mettle, Payn’s devotion was unquestionable. When, many years later, Coward was behaving with his customary wit and elegance after encountering Kenneth Tynan at the Savoy Grill, the critic noted how the playwright depended on Payn and another old friend, Joyce Carey, to each take an arm. Having edited (with Sheridan Morley) The Noel Coward Diaries, Payn ended up running his estate in Switzerland.
Payn was born at Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and educated there and privately in England. He appeared in films as a boy soprano in 1932, and his first grown-up stage role in London came with Patricia Burke just before the second world war in Douglas Furber’s song-and-dance show Sitting Pretty. With Binnie Hale and Leslie Henson, he played in another musical, Up and Doing (Saville, 1940) before Fine and Dandy, again with Henson, at the same theatre. In Magic Carpet, he was with Sydney Howard and then, after The Lilac Domino (1944), he turned up at the Palace that year as Lewis Carroll, the Mock Turtle and Tweedledum in Clemence Dane’s version of Alice in Wonderland. Then came Sigh No More.
Pleased with Payn’s success, Coward wrote into Pacific 1860 (1946) the major part of a handsome South Seas islander who falls for Mary Martin as a visiting singer. As the elder son of the principal planter, Payn had eventually to forgo his passion to his brother; but the ability to project emotion was clear and affecting.
In 1947-48, he toured the US in the parts that Coward had created with Gertrude Lawrence in Tonight at 8.30. Back in London, he joined Coward’s rather desperate evocation of the London underworld in Ace of Clubs, before returning to his first love, intimate song-and-dance in West End revue. He was back with Coward again in 1954 in what became – because Coward had inflated it – the leading role of Mr Hopper in After the Ball, a musical version of Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, with an affecting song called Faraway Land.
In an adaptation from the French of a musical comedy by Diana Morgan and Robert MacDermott, Love Is News, Payn shared the lead with Patricia Cree (his partner in the Wilde musical). Under Norman Marshall’s direction, they made a real success of it. It led to a television contract with Richard Hearne (of Mr Pastry fame), though Coward dismissed the opportunity as “unsuitable”.
Turning to legitimate roles, Payn did a stint at Windsor rep and then turned up as a detective in a thriller, Subway in the Sky. Even so, Coward fretted about his young friend’s sense of achievement. He knew he had been good in facing up to various rebuffs; but he seemed content with so little.
Then Payn ventured into another legitimate play, Paul Tabori’s Brouhaha (1959), which Coward rated “a great success”. Later that season, Payn played opposite Margaret Lockwood and Yolande Donlan in Jack Popplewell’s And Suddenly It’s Spring; and in Coward’s next piece, Waiting in the Wings (1960), Coward wrote a part for him.
Four years later, Coward appointed Payn assistant director both in New York and London of a musical version (not by Coward) of Blithe Spirit. As High Spirits, however, the musical comedy merely depressed the spirits of onlookers. The following season, the playwright cast his friend as Morris Dix in a revival of Coward’s Present Laughter, but though Payn acted well enough, Coward declared him to be “a born drifter”.
“He sleeps and sleeps and the days go by. I love him dearly and for ever, but this lack of drive in any direction is a bad augury for the future. I am willing and happy to look after him for the rest of my life but he must do something. If only he would take up some occupation and stick to it. I know that he is unhappy inside but, alas, with his natural resilience these moments of self-revelation dissipate and on go the years and he will be an elderly man who has achieved nothing at all … He won’t work unless he has to – then he is at it like a tiger – and he lacks the self-discipline to force himself … He only reads trash and that very seldom.”
After Coward died in 1973, Payn wrote (with Sheridan Morley and Cole Lesley) Noel Coward and His Friends (1979). He dedicated to Cole Lesley The Noel Coward Diaries (1982), which he edited with Morley, and settled at Coward’s last home in Switzerland, Les Avants.
Philip Hoare writes: Watching the uproarious scene in The Italian Job (1968) in which Noel Coward descends the prison staircase to the applause of his fellow inmates, few could know that the slight figure close behind him was his lover, Graham Payn.
I did not meet Graham until the movie star looks had begun to fade, but you could still see the appeal; more so in the candid album shots of him lounging, naked, around Coward’s swimming pool. He seemed lit by a certain glamour, even when merely visiting a star’s dressing room. “With hair as shiny as wet coal, a winning smile and ruddy complexion,” wrote William Marchant, “he kissed Mary Martin as if it were the fadeout of a particularly romantic film.”
Graham came into Coward’s life when the older man had been let down by his former lover, Jack Wilson. “Everyone was rather surprised,” Pat Frere told me when I was writing my biography of Coward, “he didn’t seem quite Noel’s genre. But it worked wonderfully.”
Graham disproved his partner’s assessment of himself as “an illiterate little sod” by publishing his memoir and by managing the Coward estate. He was a generous, uncomplicated man, and he will be missed by his many friends.
· Graham Payn, actor and singer, born April 25 1918; died November 4 2005
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
“Wikipedia” entry: James Norton (born 1985) is a British film, television and stage actor. He is originally from London and has also lived in Yorkshire.[1][2] He played the lead role of Captain Stanhope in the 2011 revival of Journey’s End, and he has appeared in the films Rush, Belle and Mr. Turner. His television roles include Onegin in an episode of Doctor Who, Henry Alveston in the BBC historical drama Death Comes to Pemberley, and ex-convict kidnapper Tommy Lee Royce in the 2014 BBC crime drama Happy Valley.
Norton had a bit part in the film An Education starring Carey Mulligan in 2009.[6] He was an original cast member of Posh at the Royal Court Theatre in 2010.[7] At the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 2010, Norton starred in That Face as Henry, an 18-year-old who has dropped out of school to care for his mentally disturbed and drug-dependent mother, played by Frances Barber. Lynne Walker of The Independent wrote of his performance: “At the centre of it all is Henry who, in James Norton’s striking portrayal, is like a young caged animal.”[8]
In 2011, Norton starred as Captain Stanhope in the classic First World War drama Journey’s End. The production toured the UK from March to June and transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End from July to September.[2] Norton then took the role of Geoffrey in The Lion in Winter at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket directed by Trevor Nunn, with whom Norton had worked at Cambridge in Cymbeline.[6]
In the 2012 period film Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, Norton played Owen, the would-be groom of a conflicted bride.[9] He appeared in the 2013 film Rush as Formula One driver Guy Edwards. In the 2013 film Belle, he played a suitor of the title character, a mixed-race lady in 18th century English society.[10]
Norton was acclaimed for his role as Tommy Lee Royce, the villain of the hit crime drama Happy Valley. Michael Hogan of The Telegraph wrote: “…the breakout star, seen in only a few small parts before this, has been the devilishly handsome James Norton, 29, as the heinous killer Royce, whom he has played with impressive depth.”[11] As the series came to its dramatic conclusion, Norton commented, “8 million people are currently wishing me dead.”[11]
By his mid-20s, this burly, multi-faceted talent had achieved considerable success in both theater and cinema directing, writing and acting in cultivated, witty comedies. Peter Ustinov later won international acclaim and reached the peak of his fame in the early 1960s for his appearances in sweeping epics and lighthearted romps. He won two Best Supporting Actor Oscars, for his clown in “Spartacus” (1960) and his engaging con man in “Topkapi” (1964). Ustinov has also earned critical praise for his directorial efforts (which he also produced, starred in and wrote): “Romanoff and Juliet” (1962), a biting Cold War satire based on his own play, the bracing “Billy Budd” (1962) and the “Faust”-inspired Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton vehicle “Hammersmith Is Out” (1972). The spotlight fell on Ustinov as a personality, too. Throughout the 60s and early 70s, he was a favored raconteur on talk shows whether or not he was publicizing a film. Yet his increasing girth often made his screen work seem either effortless or as if he were holding back and only giving a lazy indication of what he could muster.
Ustinov was only 17 years old when he made his stage debut in “The Wood Demon” in the provinces. The following year, he made his London debut in the title role of “The Bishop of Limpopoland”, a sketch at the Players Club, which he also wrote. His first play to reach NYC was “The Loves of Four Colonels” (1953) but it was not until 1957 that he made his Broadway acting debut as The General in “Romanoff and Juliet”, which he wrote. (He later toured the USA and the Soviet Union with the show.) By the time of his American debut, Ustinov was a top draw in England, having either written or starred in numerous stage productions. He continued playing roles on stage well into the 80s and in 1990 performed internationally in the one-man show “An Evening With Peter Ustinov”. Proving to be a true man of the theater, Ustinov has not only performed in and written shows but also has directed (e.g., “Fishing for Shadows” 1940) and designed sets and costumes (for the 1973 London production of “The Unknown Soldier and His Wife”). Among his successes as playwright are “Who’s Who in Hell” (1974), and “Beethoven’s Tenth” (1984).
Moving to the big screen in 1940, the portly, often mustachioed actor was featured in the British propaganda film “Mein Kampf, My Crimes”. He went on to play the title role in “Private Angelo” (1949), a deserter from the Italian army who accidentally becomes a hero, and garnered kudos for his turn as Emperor Nero in the costume epic “Quo Vadis” (1951). Some critics claim he stole the show as Lentulus Batiatus in “Spartacus” as he unquestionably did in “Topkapi”, as the duped con man turned mole. (The scene in which he is asked to hold the rope during the crime is alone worth the price of admission.) “Romanoff and Juliet” (1961) was adapted from the stage play, with Ustinov recreating his role. “Viva Max!” (1969) found him playing a Mexican general retaking the Alamo, and in 1978, he began his impersonations of Agatha Christie’s master detective Hercule Poirot in “Death on the Nile”, a role he again essayed in “Evil Under the Sun” (1982) and in three TV-movies produced in the 80s. More recently, he was a stuffy expert in “Lorenzo’s Oil (1992).
On the small screen, Ustinov’s work has often tilted towards the high brow, or substantive or prestige projects. He appeared in numerous installments of NBC’s “Omnibus” series in the late 50s, including an Emmy-winning portrayal of Dr Samuel Johnson, and was a regal Herod the Great in Franco Zeffirelli’s miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977). Mostly, Ustinov is remembered for several remarkable Emmy-winning performances in “Hallmark Hall of Fame” specials: as Socrates in “Barefoot in Athens” (1966) and as a Jewish deli owner who takes in a black youth in “A Storm in Summer” (1970). he also was “Gideon” (NBC, 1971), the Israelite who defeats the oppressors only to have his own vainglory defeat himself. Ustinov has frequently hosted and/or narrated reality-based shows, such as “Omni: The New Frontier” (syndicated, 1981), and numerous specials. Although very British in manners, he was outwardly proud of his Russian heritage, speaking of it often and creating and hosting: “Peter Ustinov’s Russia: A Personal History” for the BBC in 1986.
The above TCM biography can also be accessed online here.
The group was composed of three brothers who first performed together professionally in the 1950s on the children’s television show All Your Own.[1] Initially performing as The King Three, they appeared on the BBC Television early in their career on Six-Five Special,[2] and by 1957 had been named “top vocal group” in the reader’s poll of NME.[1] Their first hiton the UK Singles Chart was their cover of “A White Sport Coat“, which hit #6 in 1957. In October 1960, they were again voted “top vocal group” in the NME reader’s poll.[3] They had a string of successful singles through 1961, after which time they continued recording but found their popularity waning.
Tony Rohr is an actor, known for Les Misérables (2012), Leap Year (2010) and High Spirits(1988). Made his television debut in “Adam Adamant Lives” in 1966.
Has a daughter Louise with Pauline Collins. Pauline gave her up for adoption when she was penniless and a single mother at the age of 23. The pair were reunited 22 years later. Pauline’s book, Letter To Louise, documented these events. Tony Rohr died in 2023 at the age of 84.
The Guardian obituary in 2023:
Tony Rohr obituary
Actor known for screen roles in The Long Good Friday and Harry’s Game, and as a stalwart of the Joint Stock Theatre Group
The character actor Tony Rohr, who has died of prostate cancer aged 84, was frequently cast as villains on screen. In the lauded 1980 British gangster film The Long Good Friday, he played O’Flaherty, one of the IRA members on London’s streets posing a threat to an underworld property developer, Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins.
Rohr appeared in only one scene of the writer Barrie Keeffe’s thriller, but it was particularly memorable for its brutality. The besuited O’Flaherty and his boss believe they are being bought off with £60,000 in a briefcase by the East End crime overlord, but end up being blasted by a double-barrel shotgun, their bodies crashing through plate-glass windows.
Two years later, in the taut, three-part TV thriller Harry’s Game, based on Gerald Seymour’s novel, Rohr was a cool, calm IRA brigade commander behind the murder of a British cabinet minister. When the assassin (played by another Long Good Friday actor, Derek Thompson) returns to Belfast, he tasks him with getting rid of an undercover English agent (Harry, played by Ray Lonnen) sent to track him down.
He had a rare starring part in Bill Morrison’s 1982 BBC play Potatohead Blues as Stan McVay, who discovers that his frozen-chip business is collapsing and his teenage daughter is having an affair with a married man.
Tony Rohr, front, in a production of Norman Rodway’s play Translations at the Donmar Warehouse, London, 1993. Photograph: Alastair Muir/Shutterstock
Although Rohr was able to demonstrate his versatility on television, he displayed his acting skills most effectively on stage.
As a founding member of the touring Joint Stock Theatre Group in 1974, he showed himself to be adept at interacting with an audience in its first production, The Speakers, based on Heathcote Williams’s book about orators at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. The New York Times declared the “most riveting” to be Rohr’s portrayal of MacGuinness, an Irish “buffoon” talking about his life and inventing “outrageous tales about his sexual adventures”.
The company was part of the counterculture theatre revolution, developing plays through its actors in workshops initially led by the directors Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Gaskill, alongside writers such as David Hare and Howard Brenton. Stafford-Clark said he had spotted Rohr’s “eccentric, individual” qualities when seeing him play Lucky in the Samuel Beckett classic Waiting for Godot at the 1969 Edinburgh festival fringe. He was particularly impressed by the way the actor “played the nonsense as wisdom and the wisdom as nonsense” in the character’s keynote 700-word-plus monologue.
Rohr frequently returned to Beckett’s plays and was a founder member of the Godot Company, a theatre cooperative formed in 2004 to take the writer’s works to a wider audience. Its notable touring productions included Waiting for Godot in 2006, with Rohr this time playing Estragon, one of the two vagrants – his chatting with Vladimir (William Hoyland) sounding “as melodious as a symphony”, according to the Stage – and Endgame, which Rohr directed in 2009. Over the years, Beckett sometimes requested that he play certain roles.
Rohr was born in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, to Margaret (nee Walsh) and Arthur Rohr, a confectioner, and attended the town’s Christian Brothers school, which he hated. He entered acting after service in the Irish army.
In 1963, while performing with the New Irish Players in Killarney, Rohr had a relationship with Pauline Collins, another actor in the repertory company. After it ended, she became pregnant. The couple decided not to marry and their baby daughter was given away for adoption. Collins, who in 1969 married the actor John Alderton, wrote movingly of being reunited with her daughter after 22 years apart in her 1992 book Letter to Louise. Rohr also then established a relationship with Louise.
He first worked with Stafford-Clark in the Traverse Theatre Workshop company, Edinburgh, from 1971, which resulted in his being asked to join Joint Stock, whose notable productions included the premiere of Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine (1979).
Tony Rohr as Juanete in an RSC production of The Painter of Dishonour at the Barbican Pit theatre, 1996. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Stafford-Clark also directed him with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre (1978-85), cast him as both the hangman and Major Robbie Ross in its production of the penal colony play Our Country’s Good in the West End (Garrick theatre, 1989-90), and recruited Rohr to his Out of Joint company in 1993.
Rohr’s other memorable theatre roles included the old man whose face hangs almost motionless in the darkness of an empty stage while listening to his own reminiscences in a spellbinding production of Beckett’s one-act play That Time (RSC Fringe on TOP Festival, 1996) and a drunken hellfire priest in the political farce Dying for It (Almeida theatre, 2007).
On TV, Rohr played Solomon Featherstone, the land-owning relative of the wealthy widower Peter Featherstone, in Middlemarch (1994); a detective in Prime Suspect: The Lost Child (1995); a drunk priest in a bar in the 1996 Father Ted Christmas special; a grandfather in Jimmy McGovern’s drama The Lakes (1997-99); and the father of the care assistant played by Ricky Gervais in Derek (2013-14).
In 1981, Rohr married Janet Revell; she died in 2003. He is survived by their daughters, Ailise, Alana and Lily, and by Louise.
Tony (Harold Anthony) Rohr, actor and director, born 21 May 1939; died 29 October 2023
