British Actors Archives - Page 62 of 138

Jean Simmons

Jean Simmons obituary in “The Guardian” in 2010.

Jean Simmons has always been taken for granted, As a child player in Britain she was expected to be one of the best child players and she was: she was expected to become a big international name and she did. In Hollywood for over 20 years she was given good roles because she was reliable and she played them, or most them, beautifully. But she was never a cult figure, one of those who adorn magazine covers, or someone the fan magazines write about all the time. It was not or is not that she simply did or does her job – she is much better than that, she is not a competent actress, she is a very good one – by Hollywood standards a great one, if you take the Hollywood standard to be those ladies who have won Oscars. She was not even nominated for Best Actress Oscar till 1969. She not even nominated for “Elmer Gantry” (and that year Elizabeth Taylor won). Maybe it does not help to have been so good so young” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – 2 The International Years” (1972)

Jean Simmons was a major star actress in British movies of the late 1940’s with important roles in such films as “Great Expectations” in 1946, “Hungry Hill”, “Black Narcissus” and The Clouded Yellow”. She went to Hollywood in 1950 and was a major international star for over ten years starring in “The Robe” opposite Richard Burton in 1953, “Young Bess” with Spencer Tracy”, “Guys and Dolls” with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra and in 1960, “Elmer Gantry” opposite Burt Lancaster. She continued acting in film, television and on the stage up to her death at the age of 80 in 2010.

David Thompson’s “Guardian” obituary:

Jean Simmons, who has died aged 80, had a bounteous moment, early in her career, when she seemed the likely casting for every exotic or magical female role. It passed, as she got out of her teens, but then for the best part of 15 years, in Britain and America, she was a valued actress whose generally proper, if not patrician, manner had an intriguing way of conflicting with her large, saucy eyes and a mouth that began to turn up at the corners as she imagined mischief – or more than her movies had in their scripts. Even in the age of Vivien Leigh andElizabeth Taylor, she was an authentic beauty. And there were always hints that the lady might be very sexy. But nothing worked out smoothly, and it is somehow typical of Simmons that her most astonishing work – in Angel Face (1952) – is not very well known.

At first, she was a schoolgirl given her dream. Born in north London, she grew up in the suburb of Cricklewood, and was swept from dancing classes to the studio to be Margaret Lockwood’s younger sister in Give Us the Moon (1944). Several other films followed, with modest roles: Mr Emmanuel; Kiss the Bride Goodbye; Meet Sexton Blake; a singer in The Way to the Stars; and a slave girl for Leigh in Caesar and Cleopatra.

But then David Lean cast her as Estella in Great Expectations (1946); Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger chose her to be the temple dancer with a jewel in her nose for Black Narcissus (1947); and Laurence Olivier borrowed her away from her J Arthur Rank contract so that she could be a blonde Ophelia in his Hamlet (1948). It was noted at the time that an anxious Leigh, Olivier’s wife, chose to be on set whenever Simmons was working – just in case.

Hamlet won the Oscar for best picture, and Simmons was nominated for best supporting actress; in fact, she lost to Claire Trevor in Key Largo. However, she was by then an expert at the Oscars, for she attended the previous year and four times was on stage to accept awards on behalf of Great Expectations and Black Narcissus. Cecil B DeMille, in the audience, was so impressed that he offered her the female lead in his upcoming Samson and Delilah (the Hedy Lamarr role). She had to decline – for Hamlet’s sake – but no young actress was being talked about more.

For a while she remained in Britain. She was also in the Daphne du Maurier tale of an Irish feud, Hungry Hill (1947); and she was suitably preyed upon by Derrick DeMarney in Uncle Silas, adapted from the Sheridan Le Fanu novel. Then, in 1949, with Donald Houston, she was one of two young people shipwrecked on a desert island in The Blue Lagoon. Showing a good deal of flesh for its day (Brooke Shields took her role in the 1980 remake), this was reckoned as a rather daring film – and it was almost certainly viewed, and re-viewed, by Howard Hughes. Then, in the same year, she played the adopted daughter of Stewart Granger in Adam and Evelyne. In fact, the handsome Granger was 16 years her senior, and married once, having divorced Elspeth March in 1948. But the couple fell deeply in love, married and would soon set out together for Hollywood as a kind of middleweight Olivier and Leigh.

25th August 1956: British-American actress Jean Simmons (1929 – 2010) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 72 No 8 – pub. 1956. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Getty Images)

But that was not before three 1950 films – So Long at the Fair, a period thriller in which she was romantically paired with Dirk Bogarde; Cage of Gold; and The Clouded Yellow, in which she established a fascinating mood with Trevor Howard. And so, aged only 21, she went to Hollywood. But whereas Granger was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (and would play Allan Quartermain, the Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche), she was the oblivious dream child of Hughes at RKO, which had bought her contract from Rank. The strange tycoon was obsessed with her personally, and he laid siege to her romantically and professionally so that she did not work for over a year. Only one thing emerged from the stand-off, Angel Face, in which she is a spoiled child and lethal temptress who seduces nearly everyone she meets (most notably Robert Mitchum). The brilliant picture was directed by Otto Preminger and photographed by the great veteran Harry Stradling. Thus it contains – and she sustains – some of the most luminous close-ups ever given to a femme fatale. How far she understood the picture is unclear. One can only say that it is a rare tribute to unrequited love.

Hughes yielded in the courts in 1952, and Simmons was able to begin a run of costume films, some of them important productions (such as The Robe), but many of them giving her too little to do: in Androcles and the Lion; as Elizabeth I in Young Bess (with Granger, Deborah Kerr and Charles Laughton); very good, though too pretty, as the young Ruth Gordon in George Cukor’s The Actress – she worked especially well with Spencer Tracy. But then the films grew more routine: Affair With a Stranger (with Victor Mature); with Richard Burton and CinemaScope in The Robe – there may have been a fling with Burton; She Couldn’t Say No – she should have; the dreary The Egyptian; A Bullet Is Waiting, in which she was expected to take Rory Calhoun as co-star; Désirée – ruined by the languid mockery of co-star Marlon Brando; and Footsteps in the Fog (with Granger).

She took a risk, singing If I Were a Bell and The Eyes of a Woman in Love, to be Sister Sarah in the movie of Guys and Dolls (1955). The producer, Sam Goldwyn, had wanted Grace Kelly for the part. But director Joseph L Mankiewicz was more than happy with Simmons: “An enormously underrated girl. In terms of talent, Jean Simmons is so many heads and shoulders above most of her contemporaries, one wonders why she didn’t become the great star she could have been.” No one argued, though many observers noted that Mankiewicz was also deeply in love with his actress. Still, it is worth speculating, and noting that nothing sounds wrong or unpromising about this schedule – Jean Simmons in Roman Holiday, in Vertigo, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?

• Jean Merilyn Simmons, actor, born 31 January 1929; died 22 January 2010

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

When one considers that she was barely past 25 in 1955, it is all the stranger that her films slipped so far in quality: Hilda Crane; as secretary to gangster Paul Douglas in This Could Be the Night; with Paul Newman in Until They Sail; with Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston in the big western, The Big Country; This Earth is Mine. One notable exception to this trend was Home Before Dark (1958), where Simmons was outstanding as a woman who has had a nervous breakdown.

By then, her marriage to Granger had come apart. But in 1960, she married again, the writer-director Richard Brooks, and he immediately raised her horizons by casting her as the evangelist opposite Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry. Lancaster and Shirley Jones won Oscars in that film, but Simmons was not even nominated. Thereafter, she sportingly played the female lead in Spartacus, and had some overlong, giggle-making love scenes with its star, Kirk Douglas – “Put me down, Spartacus, I’m having a baby!”

That would prove to be her last big picture, for the slide was now evident: The Grass is Greener (1960, a rather middle-aged comedy); All the Way Home, adapted from James Agee’s novel, in which she was very good, but which went unnoticed; Life at the Top (done back in Britain); Mister Budd- wing; Divorce American Style and Rough Night in Jericho. Then Brooks did all he could to revive her fortunes in The Happy Ending (1969), about a miserable wife whose dreams of marriage, based on the movie Father of the Bride, have turned to disillusion. She got an Oscar nomination for it (she lost to Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), but rather more out of respect than conviction. In truth, she always seemed too strong-willed and amused for weepy material. Indeed, she might have done Jean Brodie.

More or less, in the early 1970s, she seemed to retire. The marriage to Brooks came to an end in 1977, and there were stories that she was drinking too much. In the early 1980s she checked herself in to the Betty Ford clinic and spoke publicly about her addiction.

Then she started to work in television, and sometimes it was only the end credits that told one that that had been Jean Simmons. She was in The Thorn Birds (1983); she did a TV version of Great Expectations where she was Miss Havisham (1989); was an admiral called in for an investigation in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991); and was in How to Make an American Quilt (1995). She went into semi-retirement and was often too shy to accept invitations to film festivals. But around 75, she changed: she did a wonderful voice performance in Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), and she was deeply touching as a dying poet in Shadows in the Sun (2009). She attended the Telluride Film Festival, Colorado, in 2008 and she was interviewed at a Lean centenary celebration in Los Angeles where she was still as pretty, seductive and mischievous as she had been as Estella in Great Expectations.

The recollection of those early years brings out the paradox of her career, for if she had made only one film – Angel Face – she might now be spoken of with the awe given to Louise Brooks. She is survived by her daughters Tracy, from her marriage to Granger, and Kate, from her marriage to Brooks.

Don Henderson was born in Leytonstone in 1932. His first television credit was in a production of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” in 1968. His movies include “Brannigan” in 1975 and “Voyage of the Damned”. He died in 1997.

Anthony Hayward;s “Independent” obituary:

One of television’s most enduring detectives of the Seventies and Eighties was the eccentric George Bulman, who was first seen in the thriller series The XYY Man, before moving on to fight crime under cover in the long-running Strangers and then retiring to work as a clockmaker in Bulman, but finding that he could not entirely give up his past.

Perfectly at home as the quirky character, who enjoyed music, reading and playing with his electric trainset. Just as Inspector Morse was later to indulge a love of opera, Bulman would quote Shakespeare and other classics. It was Henderson’s portrayal of the detective that helped to raise the programme to a level above the run-of-the-mill police series. By the time he had taken Bulman into semi- retirement, Henderson made the character memorable for the plastic shopping bag that was always with him, gold-rimmed Edwardian reading glasses and a generally scruffy image.

This was, in fact, a reflection of the actor in real life, who admitted to owning just one suit and wore jeans for his second wedding, to the actress Shirley Stelfox, in 1979. This came two years after the death of Henderson’s first wife, Hilary, from a mystery lung disease. In 1980, Henderson underwent treatment for throat cancer that left him with burns that he often hid with a scarf. The cancer, which he overcame, also meant that he spoke in a whisper. Another of the unmarried Bulman’s trademarks was his pair of grey woolly gloves, worn by Henderson to cover up the wedding ring he could not remove from his finger.

The only son of a carpenter, Henderson was born in London in 1932 and brought up in Epping, Essex. Having grown up in a working-class environment, he was embarrassed by wealth in later years and said: “I could never have a chauffeur or servants because I’d be so bad at telling them what to do. I dislike giving orders. It isn’t me.”

Henderson did not become a professional actor until his thirties, after working in amateur theatre and spending almost 20 years of his working life as a dental technician in the Army, a CID officer with Essex police and a salesman. Then, he accepted a “dare” from a friend to audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, was taken on and stayed for six years, from 1966 to 1972, taking parts that included Perolles in All’s Well That Ends Well, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the title-role in Peer Gynt and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Henderson later played Floyd in Sam Shepard’s Melodrama Play in New York.

He first became known to television viewers in the BBC drama series Warship (1973-77), which followed the adventures of the frigate HMS Hero and her crew. Many television roles followed, in programmes such as Poldark, Softly Softly, Dixon of Dock Green, Ripping Yarns, Dick Turpin and The Onedin Line.

But it was the character of George Bulman that made Henderson a household name. The XYY Man (1976-77), based on a novel by Kenneth Royce, introduced Bulman as a police sergeant in the story of a cat burglar, Spider Scott (Stephen Yardley), who was recruited to work with British intelligence services. Bulman progressed to his own series, Strangers (1978-82), in the rank of detective sergeant, serving in Unit 23, a police squad working under cover in the North of England.

From 1980, Bulman and his colleagues’ unit was renamed the Inter City Squad and attempted to solve crimes nationwide. Mark McManus, who later starred as the tough Glasgow detective Taggart, was their boss, Chief Superintendent Lambie. By the end of the final, fifth series of Strangers, Bulman had been promoted to the rank of detective inspector.

Henderson revived the character in two series of Bulman (1985, 1987), who by then had retired from the force but maintained a contact in the British Secret Service. He did freelance detective work while running a small antiques shop that specialised in repairing clocks. “You were born to be a detective, not a clock mender,” he was told by his assistant, Lucy McGinty (played by Siobhan Redmond), the criminologist daughter of a former colleague.

Teaming up with the former EastEnders actor Leslie Grantham, as Frank and Danny Kane in two series of the gangland thriller The Paradise Club (1989-90), Henderson played a defrocked priest reunited with his brother after the death of their tyrannical mother. He also appeared in the 1987 children’s fantasy series Knights of God, mixing religion and the Arthurian legend, and throughout the Eighties and Nineties – despite his star status – the prolific actor was happy to continue taking character roles in dozens of television programmes, such as Jemima Shore Investigates, Annika, Dead Head, Doctor Who, Minder, Dempsey and Makepeace, Last of the Summer Wine, Moon and Son, Look At It This Way, The New Statesman, Cracker, The Detectives, Harry, Medics and Casualty.

He also joined his friend Michael Elphick to present the cookery series The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Cookery, as well as acting in television films and plays such as Mavis, Squaring the Circle, Black and Blue and Pat and Margaret.

Henderson’s film appearances included roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968, with the RSC), Callan (1974), the Oscar-winning special- effects extravaganza Star Wars (1977, as General Tagge), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), Carry On Columbus (1992), As You Like It (1992), The Trial (1993), The Wind in the Willows (1996) and Preaching to the Perverted (1997, as yet unreleased).

Donald Francis Henderson, actor, writer and producer: born London 10 November 1932; twice married (one son, one daughter, one stepdaughter); died Warwick 22 June 1997.

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

Vernon Kay was born in 1974 in Manchester. He is known for his television work on such British shows as “All Star Family Fortune”. He is married to TV presenter Tess Daly.

Stephen Haggard was a British actor and poet who was born in Guatemala in 1911. He made his stage debut in Munich in 1930. His films include “Whom the Gods Love” in 1936, “Jamaica Inn” in 1939 and “The Young Mr Pitt” in 1942. He died in 1943 in Egypt during World War Two.

Bryan Ferry is the epitome of style and cool. He was born in Tyne & Wear in the North-East of England in 1945. He was part of the great rock band ‘Roxy Music’ who came to fame in the 1970’s with such classics as “Virginia Plain” and “Do the Strand”. In the 1980’s, ‘Roxy Music’ were eve better with hits like “Avalon” and “Same Old Scene”. On film, Ferry has acted with Cillian Murphy in Neil Jordan’s “Life On Pluto”.

Chris Harvey’s 2013 article in “Telegraph”:

By what strange conjunction of planets did Bryan Ferry find himself creating music for Baz Luhrmann’s spectacular 3D film of The Great Gatsby? The boy from a mining village who grew up to become one of the 20th century’s most impossibly glamorous figures supplying a soundtrack to Fitzgerald’s study of vaulting ambition and the invented self? The gods must appreciate irony, at least, for surely Ferry is Gatsby come to life.

It happened because of the album the former Roxy Music frontman created in 2012 with the Bryan Ferry Orchestra. The Jazz Age features instrumental versions of Ferry’s songs played in the style of Twenties jazz. Luhrmann had almost finished Gatsby when he heard it and got in touch. He persuaded Ferry to add daubs of music throughout the film, including a wonderful backdated update of Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love, with Emeli Sandé, and a recasting of the mournful, bluesy Love Is the Drug that appears on The Jazz Age as a stirring up-tempo number, with Ferry’s voice floating above it like the ghost of New Orleans.

We’re sitting talking about the film the night after Ferry has seen it for the first time. I ask him if Luhrmann’s riot of colour and sound captured the jazz age as he sees it in his imagination. “I kind of see it in black and white,” he laughs. He’s not really a fan of 3D and found himself wanting the odd slower sequence or passage amid the spectacle but looks forward to watching it in 2D, with a rewind button at hand. “I’m quite slow – younger audiences absorb images much faster than somebody of my generation,” he says.

Ferry is 67. It’s more than 40 years since he was beamed down from the Planet Glam to the Top of the Pops stage to sing Virginia Plain in glittery green eyeshadow. Yet even now when he lingers on a word, his eyelids flutter downwards and hover for a few moments before he pulls them up again, just as they did in that performance in 1972. He still has great hair. He’s wearing a blue shirt, darker blue tie, and leaning back on a comfortable sofa. He talks softly, in a voice that is oddly reminiscent of the Prince of Wales. I’m so surprised by this that afterwards I scour YouTube to try to trace the slow vanishing of his Tyne and Wear accent. But no, it seems he has always talked like this. Does he identify with Gatsby?

“Yes, who wouldn’t if you came from a very poor background like mine?” he says. But, as he points out, “it was rich in many ways”. Ferry grew up in Washington, five miles from Newcastle, at the time of the slum clearances in the city. “It’s a very unsophisticated world I grew up in. I would have fancied a house like Gatsby’s,” he adds, “big parties and the sea plane. He had it made really, but the obsession will always get you in the end.”

Ah, the obsession. Fitzgerald’s hero’s rise and his downfall are intimately linked to his obsessive love for the socialite Daisy, a woman he met and fell in love with when he was a penniless soldier. Has there been a Daisy in Ferry’s own life, I wonder.

“That’s a difficult one.” He pauses. “Well, yeah, I identify with his position, yeah.” This is followed by a long silence. “I think there are always things in your life that kind of slip away. Is it fate? Is it meant to be? I guess it’s like that. It’s a good reason, really, for making the most of everything that happens to you. If things in your life do go wrong you’ve got to move on to another thing.”

There have been many women in Ferry’s life. His four children, all boys, are from his 20-year marriage to a London socialite, Lucy Helmore, which ended in the early 2000s. In 2012 he married Amanda Sheppard, a former PR who is 36 years his junior.

Has he experienced Gatsby’s obsessiveness? “Yes, I once had this song, I didn’t call it ‘Slave to Obsession’ but that was one of the key lines. It’s called No Strange Delight, it’s on a Roxy album.” The song is on Flesh and Blood, recorded in 1980, roughly two years after Ferry’s girlfriend Jerry Hall, who had appeared on the cover of the 1975 album Siren, left him for Mick Jagger. The album also includes the delicate pop classic Over You (“Where strangers look for new love, I’m so lost in love – over you.”)

Ferry has written many eloquent songs about love over the years. What has experience taught him about it? “That it’s a bit of a riddle, really. The music that I write is generally quite emotional so it lends itself well to love songs, I don’t want to be singing particularly about wind farms or the war going on here, there or anywhere.

“A lot of the tunes are quite sad as well so without knowing it I get sucked into writing yearning, more intimate songs. Some of the lyrics I’ve done I’ve been very pleased with. It’s by far the hardest part of it but the music that comes out of me tends to be quite melodic, that’s what I think I’m best at, writing melody.” He smiles. “I’m trying to avoid your question as best I can. I don’t know anything about love at all.”

Gatsby, of course, is also about class, about the collision between old money and new. With his country house in Sussex, his house in London and his ability to flit between worlds, I wonder if Ferry feels that he has escaped the boundaries of class altogether. What class does he see himself as? “I’d say classless, definitely, I like to think. The class rigidity that some people still beat themselves up with in this country seems a bit old-fashioned to me now. I do think that standards should be high. I hate dumbing down and I hate political correctness. I identify with the Cavaliers rather than the Roundheads, I always have.”

In Sussex, does he move in aristocratic circles, with “old money”? “A little bit. I’m very private. I go out to dinner most nights when I’m in London, but when I’m in the country I like to stay in. I certainly know about country living and about town living. My music is very urban, I think. It’s always been about cities, people. My mother was very urban, my dad was very rural, and so I have a foot in both camps.”

He regrets that his parents weren’t around long enough to give his own children “the odd clip round the ear”. And he wishes his boys had worked in a factory at some point. What would they have gained? “Discipline maybe. Just the grind of it and knowing every day isn’t great, you know, that you can’t have what you want all the time. Just common sense, but they’ve learnt in other ways.”

Ferry is proud of his eldest son Otis’s progress “in his hunting world” – he’s a joint master of the Shropshire Hunt. It was Otis who in 2005 burst into the House of Commons to protest at the ban on hunting and received a jail sentence. How did it feel when his son was… “Locked up?” He finishes my question. “Very, very bad indeed, yeah, but I don’t like dwelling on it.”

Ferry’s father Fred, he says, was “very quiet, smoked a pipe, courted my mother for 10 years, walked the five miles through the fields to see her and go back again because he had to be up to milk the cows. He was essentially a farm labourer, a ploughman, with the horses. He was very proud of his medals for winning all these ploughing contests. They were opposites in a way, because my mother was very tuned in to the modern world.

“My mother would do all the organising, deal with the pocket money. As long as he had money for his tobacco and his racing pigeons he was fine. So he’d give her his 15 quid and get a pound back and that would last him the week, because he never drank. He would have one drink maybe on pigeon day. It was frugal beyond belief.”

How was it even possible to dream of an existence like his? “I didn’t think I was better than anyone,” he says, “but I didn’t want to be kept down. I didn’t want to work in the mine or the local steel factory, which were the two main sources of work in the area that I lived in.”

Ferry spent his holidays working in the factory, on building sites, then a tailor’s shop. All the while he wanted to be an artist, which then “kind of veered into music”. Encouraging him along the way were his primary school teacher – “dear Miss Swaddle” – who fed his imagination in a class of 50; teachers at his grammar school after he passed the 11-plus; the uncle he talked into taking him to see concerts when he was too young to go by himself (“Chris Barber, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald – whoever passed through Newcastle I’d try to save up to see them”); and then when he went to Newcastle University to study art, there was his lecturer, the artist Richard Hamilton, who once described Ferry as “my greatest creation”.

^{Bryan Ferry with Roxy Music, circa 1972 (Rex Features)}

Ferry continued to dream of being an artist and had moved to London to work as a ceramics teacher when he put together the fledgling Roxy Music. We talk about how the internet age has sparked renewed interest in rock’s most iconic figures, and many a high-profile reunion. Does Ferry feel that route is blocked to him, because of the tensions that forced the classic Roxy line-up apart? This is an oblique approach. I want to ask him about Brian Eno, who added the synthesised sounds that took Ferry’s classic songwriting into the art-rock beyond on Roxy’s first two albums. It’s no secret that Eno left Roxy Music in the summer of 1973 because of “musical differences” with Ferry. “I don’t want to damage Roxy [by talking about it],” Eno said at the time. “I mean, I really like the other members, and I (pause) really like Bryan in a funny way.”

Ferry leans forward. I can tell I’ve touched a nerve. “What would block it?”

There’s no turning back. There remains a perception that his relationship with Brian Eno, although cordial, means that they couldn’t work together again. Does that block it?

“Well, you know, Eno played on the first two albums but we did have a few albums after that and another eight years of our career. So it’s not just him and me, there are others, and we did get together again in 2001. We hadn’t played together in 18 years and we did a reunion tour. You didn’t see that one, then?”

Now I can tell he’s cross. No, I didn’t see it. “We played all round the world, it went incredibly well but it didn’t make me really want to go and record a group album again. It’s not that odd, though. Because it doesn’t seem natural to work with the same people for the whole of your life.”

“I’ve worked with Brian in the studio a couple of times since and that was really refreshing, but I wouldn’t want to work with him for a long period of time. We get on very well when we’re alone, it’s when other people start coming in with expectations and saying, part of you is missing…”

Ferry has continued to collaborate with others, he points out, noting that Nile Rodgers, who provides the guitar on Daft Punk’s recent number-one, Get Lucky, has played on all his solo albums since 1985. Of course, Eno, too, went on to collaborate extensively, including with Ferry’s equally enduring glam-rock rival David Bowie. I wonder if Ferry has been to the Bowie show at the V&A, just a couple of miles down the road from his west London studio. “I’m aware of it. I haven’t been, have you? I ought to go before it closes, actually.”

Like Bowie, Ferry grew up to be one of the iconic figures of his generation. He became one of the stars he idolised and dreamt of being. Is he ever surprised that he became one of those people, a Marilyn Monroe? “I always tell myself that the people I did idolise were just people,” he says. “Marilyn was a goddess of the screen, yet she’s just a poor lonely girl at the end of the day, sad. Even the Sun King, Louis XIV, he was just a guy. I don’t wake up in the morning and think I’m an icon or something, that’s kind of weird. I like going to work every day and trying to achieve something.” And with that Ferry has to leave for Cannes, where he’s performing at a party for The Great Gatsby. In my imagination, he arrives by seaplane, in glorious Technicolor.

The above “Telegraph” article can also be accessed online here.

Brief Ecstasy, poster, (aka DANGEROUS SECRETS), top from left: Paul Lukas, Linden Travers; bottom: Hugh Williams, 1937. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Linden Travers was a very attractive actress in British movies of the 1930’s and 40’s. She was the older sister of actor Bill Travers. She is particularly remembered for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” in 1938 and then ten years later in “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” opposite George Raft. She died in Cornwall in 2001. She was the mother of actress Susan Travers.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Among the many questions film-goers ask themselves while watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1939), the penultimate film of the director’s British period, is what on earth the exquisite brunette Mrs Todhunter sees in the pompous and pusillanimous Mr Todhunter (portrayed by portly Cecil Parker).

So passionate and sympathetic is the lovely Linden Travers, who has died aged 88, that we can only be pleased for her when Todhunter is shot by the Nazis as he tries to make a run for it. Travers’ performance in the Hitchcock picture, the best and most famous of her films, makes one wonder why she was not, at least, the equal of Margaret Lockwood, another “wicked lady” of British cinema. Perhaps she was a victim of the timidity of the British film industry in the 1930s and 40s.

The Lady Vanishes was Travers’ 10th feature, but her own favourite was No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948), in which she played the title role, repeating her stage performance of six years earlier in London. The British film, directed by St John L Clowes, based on the James Hadley Chase shocker, was considered such strong stuff – “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen,” screamed the Monthly Film Bulletin – that it was banned in England for many years. Despite most of the British cast struggling to convince as New York gangsters using unspeakable dialogue, Travers, as the sensual kidnapped heiress who falls for her psychotic captor, emerged with some credit.

She was born Florence Lindon Travers in Durham, and showed her talents at an early age. While still a pupil at the Convent de la Sagesse, she was engaged to teach younger classmates elocution, drama, painting and sketching. Her first professional stage appearances were in repertory at the Playhouse, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in 1933.

The following year, she played the ingénue lead in Ivor Novello’s Murder In Mayfair, at the Globe in London. There, she met her future first husband, Guy Leon, whose sister was in the cast. (Their daughter, Jennifer Susan, was born in 1939.) Travers was soon alternating between stage and screen, and between femme fatale roles and light comedies.

Carol Reed cast her in small, but sexy, parts in Bank Holiday (1938) and The Stars Look Down (1939), both starring Margaret Lockwood. Then, “I seem to have jumped out of being mistresses to playing with the comics,” she recalled later. She was an effective foil to Tommy Trinder in Almost A Honeymoon (1938), was withering towards Arthur Askey in The Ghost Train (1941) and was George Formby’s inamorata in South American George (1941).

In the latter, she is a press agent who talks posh, like all Formby’s leading ladies, though she drops into Lancashire dialect once or twice, much to George’s delight.

Travers again played second fiddle to Margaret Lockwood in Jassy (1947), and was Augusta Leigh, one of the many female witnesses in The Bad Lord Byron (1949) accusing poet Dennis Price of caddishness. Her last feature was Christopher Columbus (1949), in which she is chased around the Spanish court by King Ferdinand.

After her second marriage to James Holman in 1948, and the birth of their daughter, Sally Linden, the following year, Travers limited herself to occasional television appearances, allowing her much younger brother, Bill Travers, to continue the family acting tradition. She had, however, always continued painting and, with her sisters, Alice and Pearl, opened the Travers Art Gallery in Kensington in 1969.

In 1974, after her husband died of a heart attack, Travers spent some years travelling, before settling down to paint in St Ives, in Cornwall. She also studied psychotherapy, and qualified as a hypnotist. In the 1990s, she appeared at a showing of The Lady Vanishes at the National Film Theatre, and was seen in a BBC tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, instantly recognisable as the shamefully underused star of British pictures.

She is survived by her two daughters, her brother Ken and her sister-in-law, Virginia McKenna.

· Florence Lindon ‘Linden’ Travers, actor, born May 27 1913; died October 23 2001

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

Benedict Taylor was born in 1960 in London. He is the eldest of six children. He lived in Nigeria for the first few years of his life. He made his debut in “The Turn of the Screw” on television in 1974. His movies include “The Watcher in the Woods” with Bette Davis and Carroll Baker, “Every Time We Say Goodbye” with Tom Hanks and “Monk Dawson” with John Michie.

Jeremy Northam was born in 1961 in Cambridge. He made his U.S. movie debut opposite

Sandra Bullock in “The Net”. His other films include “Carrington” and “Gosford Park” where he played ‘Ivor Novello’.

TCM overview:

Tall and slender with dark good looks and a rich, plummy voice, Jeremy Northam was already established as a stage and television performer in his native Britain when he landed his breakthrough screen role as the suavely seductive villain stalking Sandra Bullock in the cyber thriller “The Net” (1995). The son of a professor and a potter, he spent his formative years in Bristol and Cambridge. After completing his college education, Northam enrolled at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School but left before completing the three-year program when he began landing TV roles like the soldier in the WWI drama “Journey’s End” (1988). The following year, the limelight shone on him briefly when he understudied and then replaced Daniel Day-Lewis in the National Theatre production of “Hamlet”. Additional stage roles followed, including an award-winning turn in “The Voysey Inheritance” and a supporting role in “The Gift of the Gorgon” (1992), starring married couple Judi Dench and Michael Williams as well as additional work at the Royal Shakespeare Festival. As his stage presence increased, Northam lent his presence to other small screen roles before landing his first major feature role, as Hindley Earnshaw in the uneven remake of “Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights” (1992). That film met with a derisive critical reaction in England and was relegated to TV in America (it aired on TNT in 1994).

After his strong performance in “The Net”, Northam seemed on the verge of being typecast as cads when he portrayed Beacus Penrose who beds and abandons the titular artist played by Emma Thompson in the biopic “Carrington” (1995). Switching gears, however, he excelled in the real-life role of a man with dual personalities, the reclusive composer Peter Warlock and his bete noir, the dyspeptic music critic Philip Heseltine in “Voices/Voices From a Locked Room” (also 1995). Further demonstrating his range, Northam cut a dashing romantic figure as Mr. Knightly to Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Emma” (1996) before stumbling a bit in both “Mimic” (1997), as a scientist, and Sidney Lumet’s remake of “Gloria” (1999), as a gangster. While his onscreen roles offered little challenges to the actor, he found success as a buttoned-up real estate agent who falls in with some free spirits in the British telefilm “The Tribe” (1998) and in his return to the London stage playing a gay obstetrician in “Certain Young Men” (1999). In fact, 1999 would prove to be a key year for the actor, with high profile, critically-praised performances in three films. The Sundance favorite “Happy, Texas” cast him opposite Steve Zahn as a pair of escaped convicts who seek refuge in the titular town where they are mistaken for a gay couple. In David Mamet’s remake of “The Winslow Boy”, Northam anchored the film as the wily barrister defending the boy accused of theft who also harbored unexpressed romantic yearnings for the Winslow daughter (Rebecca Pidgeon). Rounding out the trio of movies was Oliver Parker’s period adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband”, with the actor as a married politician who is haunted by a youthful indiscretion. Continuing to corner the market in period films, Northam joined the cast of the Merchant Ivory production “The Golden Bowl” (2000), playing an Italian prince. He followed up with a fine turn as actor-composer Ivor Novello in the Robert Altman-directed period mystery “Gosford Park” (2001) and as an 19th-century poet in Neil LaBute’s adapation of A S Byatt’s novel “Possession” (2002). After a much discussed stint playing Dean Martin opposite Sean Hayes as Jerry Lewis in the CBS biopic “Martin & Lewis” (2002) in which Northam ably captured the singer-actor’s suave charisma if not his naughty-boy appeal, Notham appeared in the Mel Gibson-produced adaptation of “The Singing Detective” (2003) and played a French army officer hounding Michael Caine in “The Statement” (2003). He next played Walter Hagen in the biopic “Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius” (2004), which told the story of the iconic golf champion (Jim Caviezel) who quit the sport on top at age 28.

The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.

Paul Nicholls was born in 1979 in Bolton, Lancashire. His movies include “The Trench”, “The Clandestine Bridge. He was seen in “Law & Order UK up to this year.

IMDB entry:

Born to a roofer and a psychiatric nurse, Paul was born on April 12, 1979, joining his sister, Kelly who was born in 1978. Paul started acting at an early age of 10, when he joined the Oldham Theatre Workshop, but had acted before that at Church Road Primary School, Bolton and then Smithhills Dean High School. Still at the age of 10, Paul had his first television role, in “Childrens Ward” on ITV, though only saying 3 lines.

Later, he started appearing in TV shows like The Biz (1995) and became UK teenage girls’ favourite pin-up when he joined the EastEnders (1985) cast as Joe Wicks. 12 record companies have reportedly offered Paul the opportunity to record a single but they have all been turned down. Paul has publicly stated that he will never record a single, adding that his cat, Gizmo, is better at singing than him.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Cezzie

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Jean Simmons

Jean Simmons obituary in “The Guardian” in 2010.

Don Henderson

Vernon Kay

Stephen Haggard

Bryan Ferry

Linden Travers

Benedict Taylor

Jeremy Northam

Paul Nicholls

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