Jeremy Spenser (born Jeremy John Dornhurst de Saram;16 July 1937) is a British actor who is widely known for his work in film and television from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s. He made his screen debut aged 11 in Anna Karenina (1948).
In the 1960s, the role offers began to slow down. His last film role was in 1966’s Fahrenheit 451 directed by François Truffaut, after which Spenser retired from acting
JOHN FRASER OBITUARY IN ”THE INDEPENDENT” IN 2020.
John Fraser, who has died aged 89, was a Britishfilm star who captured the public’s imagination when he appeared in The Dam Bustersas Flight Lieutenant JV “Hoppy” Hopgood, taking part in a daring Second World War RAF operation – and offering a pint of beer to the beloved dog of his wing commander
He followed the 1955 box-office hit two years later by taking the role of Inigo Jollifant in The Good Companions, a screen musical version of the JB Priestley play. He and Janette Scott acted the romantic leads, with his schoolteacher-turned-songwriter joining her in a touring variety troupe.
The film, an attempt to compete with American musicals, flopped with cinemagoers but helped to give Fraser heart-throb status and launch a brief singing career. He released “Bye Bye Love” in 1957, but it failed to chart – in a year when several other versions were released, notably the Everly Brothers’ first hit.
Fraser’s star was on the rise again when he appeared in the biopic The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) as Lord Alfred Douglas, known as “Bosie”, poet lover of Peter Finch’s title character. One critic praised his “suitably vain, selfish, vindictive and petulant” portrayal of the Marquis of Queensberry’s son.
Fraser, who acted opposite Hollywood legends such as Sophia Loren over the years, believed his own homosexuality held back his career in an industry where discretion was paramount during the days when it was illegal.
In Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales, his 2004 autobiography, Fraser spilled the beans on his own sexual exploits and those of some of the film world’s most famous names.
He had a six-week fling with Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev that ended only when his agent told him: “If you don’t stop this madness instantly, your career will be over!”
Producer Jimmy Woolf had “taken a serious shine” to Fraser, according to the actor’s memoirs, and showered him with presents while considering who to cast in the title role of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the epic directed by David Lean. He resisted the advances and Woolf gave the part to Peter O’Toole.
Meanwhile, he wrote, Woolf was known to be the lover of Laurence Harvey, who “kept marrying to further his career”.
Living a lie like this made Fraser want to shun Hollywood and, while promoting The Good Companions in Los Angeles, he turned down an offer by an American producer to further his career.
He observed how having different private and public personas affected one major star’s life when, in the late 1950s, he was invited to supper at the mansion of Dirk Bogarde, who kept out of the public eye his long-term relationship with Tony Forwood, whom he simply described as his business manager.
“Do you and Tony still make love?” Fraser asked Bogarde, who replied: “We’ve been together a long time. Now, we’re like brothers.” So Fraser asked what the star did for sex – embark on casual affairs, perhaps? “God, no,” said Bogarde. “How could I possibly in my position? I can’t go anywhere without being recognised.”
Then, Bogarde took Fraser to the loft to reveal his pride and joy, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle standing on a plinth – his substitute for sex.
Fraser confronted his own sexuality by visiting a brothel and consulting a psychiatrist with the idea of changing his sexual orientation but eventually resigned himself to being what was then described euphemistically as a “confirmed bachelor”.
He saw his career out in television and brought his intelligent insights to print as the author of several novels and autobiographical books.
John Alexander Fraser’s life began in poverty on a Glasgow council estate in 1931. At the age of 11, he was sexually abused by a soldier.
Two years later, the death of his father, John, an alcoholic who ran an engineering business until being hospitalised, was followed within six months by that of his mother, Christina (née MacDonald). He and his two sisters were brought up by an aunt.
On leaving Glasgow High School aged 16, he joined the city’s Park Theatre company as an assistant stage manager and was soon landing acting parts.
Following national service as a lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals on the Rhine, he became a member of the new Pitlochry Festival Theatre company, set up by the director of the Park Theatre after its closure.
In 1952, Fraser made his television debut by starring as David Balfour in a BBC serialisation of Kidnapped.
It led to a seven-year contract with the Associated British Picture Corporation, which thrust him into the spotlight in Valley of Song (1953), romancing Maureen Swanson, a fellow Glaswegian who later became a lord’s wife.
Fraser’s other significant film roles included a Scottish piper in Tunes of Glory (1960), alongside Alec Guinness and John Mills; Prince Alfonso in El Cid (1961); and Catherine Deneuve’s ill-fated suitor in the psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), directed by Roman Polanski.
On stage, he gained valuable experience in the classics during two seasons at the Old Vic, London (1955-57), with parts that included Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.
There were also starring roles in the West End, but Shakespeare became his lasting love. In 1976, he was a founder member of the London Shakespeare Group, directing the actors on annual tours abroad, funded by the British Council.
His 1978 book The Bard in the Bush recounted a tour of Africa, when costumes and props for five plays were typically carried in one trunk, which doubled as the set.
Fraser also devised his own one-man stage show, JM Barrie: The Man Who Wrote Peter Pan, performed at the National’s Olivier Theatre in 1998.
His TV roles included Julius von Felden in A Legacy (1975), Lieutenant Commander “Monty” Morgan in Thundercloud (1979) and Dr Lawrence Golding in The Practice (1985-86).
By the middle of the 1990s, he had retired to Tuscany and La Contadina, the 10-room mountain-top house near Cortona that he bought in 1971, having fallen in love with Italy while playing Hedy Lamarr’s young lover in the 1954 film L’Amante di Paride (Loves of Three Queens).
“I loved the paintings, the towns, the soupy music of Puccini and Verdi and, above all, the people,” he said.
Fraser, who returned permanently to the UK in 2010, is survived by Rodney Pienaar, an artist and his partner of 42 years.
John Fraser, actor and author, born 18 March 1931, died 7 November 2020
David McCallum was born in 1933 in Glasgow. He began his career in British films in the 1950’s usually as a skinny sullen juvenile deliquent.In the early 1960’s he went to Hollywood and very soon became enourmously in the television series “The Man from Uncle”. He has since gone on to have a very lenghty career on television in the United States. His films include “A Night to Remember”, “Robbery Under Arms” and “The Great Escape”. Interview with David McCallum here.
TCM Overview:
A thoughtful, intense presence on television in America and his native United Kingdom, David McCallum was a pop culture sensation in the mid-1960s as the suave spy, Illya Kuryakin, on “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” (CBS, 1965-68) and later as the avuncular Donald “Ducky” Mallard on “NCIS: Naval Criminal Service Investigation” (CBS, 2003). The Scottish-born McCallum worked his way up the ranks in British film and television before bursting onto the American scene with “U.N.C.L.E.” His cool charm and blonde good looks made him an immediate TV idol, but failed to translate into stardom after the show left the air. McCallum settled into a steady diet of TV appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, frequently essaying mellowed professorial types or pensive government figures, before scoring his late-inning smash with “NCIS.” The rare performer with two major hits to his credit, McCallum’s image and talent ensured his fame for generations of TV fans.
Born David Keith McCallum, Jr. in Glasgow, Scotland on Sept. 19, 1933, he was the son of David McCallum, Sr., the famed principal violinist for numerous orchestras in the United Kingdom, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and cellist Dorothy Dorman. Both parents encouraged McCallum and his brother Iain, who later became a novelist, to pursue their chosen fields; for McCallum, this was initially the oboe, which he studied at the Royal Academy of Music. But when a performance from Shakespeare’s “King John” at a local theater group yielded a positive response from its audience, he switched his focus to acting while keeping music as a secondary interest. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he made his debut in a 1946 BBC Radio production of “Whom the Gods Love, Die Young.” Bit and supporting roles in British features and on television soon followed, often as troubled youth, as benefiting his brooding intensity. Among his more notable turns during his period was in 1958’s “Violent Playground,” where his psychotic gang member is spurred by poverty and rock and roll to take a classroom of school children hostage
McCallumâ’s American film debut came as the mother-fixated Carl von Schlosser in John Huston’s “Freud” (1962), with Montgomery Clift as the pioneering analyst. The following year, he played Royal Navy Officer Ashley-Pitt, who devised the method of dispersing the dirt from tunnels dug under a POW camp in “The Great Escape” (1963). His co-star in the film, Charles Bronson, later became entangled in a headline-grabbing relationship with McCallum’s wife, actress Jill Ireland. McCallum and Ireland eventually divorced in 1967, which allowed her to marry Bronson. An early American television appearance on “The Outer Limits” (CBS, 1963-65) became one of his most enduring, thanks to the eye-popping makeup applied to McCallum. His character, a bitter Welsh miner, agreed to take part in an evolutionary experiment, which turned him into a hyper-intelligent mutant with a massive domed cranium. The image was memorable enough to make McCallum a go-to for numerous science fiction efforts in the ensuing decades.
In 1964, McCallum was cast as Illya Kuryakin, a minor character on the spy series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Despite having only two lines, the producers saw that McCallum and star Robert Vaughn had considerable chemistry together, and boosted the character to co-star status. The move changed McCallum’s career forever. Kuryakin’s cool demeanor, physical proficiency with any weapon, and passion for art, music and science not to mention his wealth of blonde hair made him an immediate favorite among female viewers, whose fan mail to the actor was the most ever received in the history of MGM, which produced the show. For the series three years on the air, McCallum was at the apex of television stardom, and netted two Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe nod, as well as major roles in several films. He was the tormented Judas in George Stevens’s epic Biblical drama “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), and took the lead in a number of minor features, including 1968’s “Sol Madrid” and “Mosquito Squadron” (1969), many of which traded on McCallum’s popularity in “U.N.C.L.E.” by casting him in action-oriented roles. During this period, McCallum also orchestrated and conducted a trio of lush, sonically adventurous records that put unique spins on some of the period’s more popular songs
In the 1970s, McCallum was a fixture on television in both America and England. In the States, he was a staple of science fiction and supernaturally-themed TV features, including “Hauser’s Memory” (NBC, 1970), as a scientist who injected himself with a dying colleagues brain fluid to preserve defense secrets from foreign agents, while “She Waits” (CBS, 1972) cast him as the husband to a possessed Patty Duke. He also briefly returned to series work with “The Invisible Man” (NBC, 1975-76) as a scientist who used his invisibility formula to aid a government agency against evildoers. His work in England hewed more towards dramatic fare: in “Colditz” (BBC, 1972-74), he was an aggressive RAF officer who put aside his anger towards the Nazis to help organize an escape from a notorious German war prison, while in “Sapphire & Steel” (ITV, 1979-1982), he and Joanna Lumley played extraterrestrial operatives who investigated strange incidents involving the time-space continuum. In 1983, he reunited with Robert Vaughn for “The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (CBS), which saw Illya retired from espionage to design womenâ¿¿s clothing in New York. The escape of a top enemy spy brings both U.N.C.L.E. men back into action, albeit with other, younger agents. The TV-movie was intended as the pilot for a new version of the series, but the show was never greenlit.
After logging time on countless, unmemorable series like “Team Knight Rider” (syndicated, 1997-98) and “The Education of Max Bickford” (CBS, 2001-02), McCallum found his next hit with “NCIS,” a police procedural drama about Navy investigators. McCallum played Chief Medical Examiner Donald “Ducky” Mallard, an eccentric but highly efficient investigator with a knack for psychological profiling. A close confidante to Mark Harmon’s Jethro Gibbs, he served as father confessor and paternal figure for the show’s offbeat cast of characters. The show’s slow-building popularity brought McCallum back to a television audience made up in part of the children of viewers who sent him fan letters back in the “U.N.C.L.E.” days, granting him a rare burst of second stardom
British film institute obituary in 2023
At one point in the 1960s, David McCallum, who has died at the age of 90, was the hottest British actor in Hollywood. Nicknamed ‘The Blond Beatle’, he had become a pop culture phenomenon for playing a Russian spy on an American TV show at the height of the Cold War. According to MGM, McCallum received more mail from female fans than any other actor in the studio’s history, including Clark Gable and Elvis Presley. Not bad for someone who only had two lines in the pilot.
Born in Glasgow on 19 September 1933, McCallum was the son of classical musicians who settled in Hampstead when his father became leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936. He became so proficient on the oboe that he took classes at the Royal Academy of Music. However, the thrill of being applauded as Prince Arthur in an amateur production of King John convinced the eight year-old that his future lay in acting.
In 1946, McCallum secured his Equity card after making his radio debut in Whom the Gods Love, Die Young. Several juvenile roles followed at the BBC before McCallum became an assistant stage manager at Glyndebourne on leaving school. Following National Service with the Royal West African Frontier Force, he trained at RADA from 1949 to 1951, where Joan Collins was a classmate.
Repertory stints in Frinton-on-Sea and Oxford ensued before McCallum made his television bow in The Rose and the Ring (1953). More in hope than expectation, he sent photographs to the Rank Organisation and was cast by debuting director Clive Donner as a leather-jacketed James Dean wannabe in the crime drama The Secret Place (1957). Next, he hobbled on crutches as Stanley Baker’s younger brother in the gritty realist thriller Hell Drivers, and married co-star Jill Ireland shortly after the shoot. They were paired as lovers down under in Robbery Under Arms (both 1957) before headlining the seedy crime saga Jungle Street (1960) as a mugger and a stripper.
The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961)
Reuniting with Baker, McCallum impressed as another delinquent in Basil Dearden’s problem picture Violent Playground (1958). His Scouse accent was patchy, although as a gang leader he oozed surly charisma. But two parts as radio operators, in the Titanic drama A Night to Remember (1958) and war story The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961), signalled a shift towards more mature roles, and McCallum left to try his luck in Hollywood.
Although he had been cast as Judas Iscariot in the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), delays meant that McCallum was already established by the time it was released. Having suffered from an Oedipus complex in John Huston’s Freud and shown sailor Terence Stamp kindness as a gunnery officer in Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (both 1962), McCallum guaranteed his place in cult movie folklore as Eric Ashley-Pitt, the POW who earns the nickname ‘Dispersal’ for devising an ingenious way of shifting tunnel soil in The Great Escape (1963).
Yet it was television that proved McCallum’s métier. He gave notice as a time-tweaking inventor and a mutating Welsh miner in two episodes of the sci-fi series The Outer Limits (1963/64). And it was as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964 to 1968) that he became a superstar. Having only been a minor character in the feature-length 1963 pilot Solo, the Russian with a blonde mop and a penchant for black turtlenecks became equal partners with Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn), as the agents of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement sought to confound the nefarious schemes of the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity, or THRUSH.
Although Kuryakin was intense, introverted and intellectual, McCallum played him with such cool charm and enigmatic wit over 105 episodes that he earned a Golden Globe and two Emmy nominations. He and Vaughn also made eight spin-off features, as well as The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair (1983), a teleplay that started with Kuryakin as a fashion designer.
A comeback series didn’t materialise, but McCallum had exploited his peak fame to record four instrumental albums with producer David Axelrod, one of which contained ‘The Edge’, which was sampled by Dr Dre and resurfaced in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017). His own excursions as an big-screen action man, Sol Madrid (1968) and Mosquito Squadron (1969), underwhelmed, however, and McCallum retreated back into television.
Sapphire & Steel (1979-82)
Following the neglected TV horror movies Hauser’s Memory (1970) and She Waits (1972), McCallum returned to Blighty to play a short-fused RAF officer in Colditz (1972 to 74), Jacobite warrior Alan Breck Stewart in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1978), and an impassive extra-dimensional detective alongside Joanna Lumley in Sapphire & Steel (1979 to 1982). He would later team effectively with Diana Rigg in the miniseries Mother Love (1989) and steal scenes as a gambler in Howard’s Way follow-up show Trainer (1991 to 1992), during a period in which he trod the US guest star circuit following the short-lived sci-fi series The Invisible Man (1975 to 1976).
However, a cameo in the legal series JAG (2003) turned into a 20-year gig, as McCallum reached a new audience as medical examiner Dr Donald Mallard in spin-off show NCIS (2003-). Sporting a bow-tie and dispensing offbeat avuncular wisdom over 457 episodes, ‘Ducky’ so caught McCallum’s imagination that he studied pathology and attended so many autopsies in order to appear credible in the role that he became something of a forensics expert.
David McCallum, 19 September 1933 to 25 September 2023
Gary Raymond was born in 1935 in London. His first film was the swashbuckler “The Moonraker” with George Baker and Sylvia Syms in 1958. He went on to star with Richard Burton in “Look Back in AAnger” and with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in “Suddenly Last Summer”. He played the title role in “The Playboy of the Western World” in 1962 with Siobhan McKenna as Pegeen Mike. In 1965 he went to Hollywood to play St. Peter in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and stayed to make the cult television series “The Rat Patrol”. By the late 1960’s he was back in England again where he has had a long career on the stage and in movies and television.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Born in Brixton, England in 1935, robust and good-looking Gary Raymond came from an acting family. Born Gary Barrymore Raymond, the youngest of three sons (one brother is a twin), his parents were music hall entertainers. Gary won a scholarship at the age of 11 to Gateway School in Leicaster, then graduated five years later and took on assorted odd jobs as a furrier and clerk while studying drama through the auspices of the London County Council.
He was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and trained there until he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-50s. Amid the wealth of his Shakespearean repertoire include the roles of “Horatio”, “Claudius”, “Macbeth”, “Oberon”, “Benedick”, “Orlando” and “Antonio
Richly variegated and utterly plausible, with a distinctively weak “r”, the voice of the actor John Shrapnel, who has died aged 77 after suffering from cancer, was instantly recognisable on stage or screen over the past 50 years. He was therefore much in demand for voiceover work on documentaries or television adverts. He always sounded warm and urgent.
But his glory was on the stage, often with the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre, for whom he played leading and prominent supporting roles from 1968 onwards, including a clutch with Laurence Olivier’s NT company at the Old Vic – Banquo in Macbeth, Pentheus in the Bacchae and Orsino in Twelfth Night – between 1972 and 1975.
His NT debut came as Charles Surface in Jonathan Miller’s remarkable, grimily realistic 1972 production of The School for Scandal. He worked well and often with Miller: as a notable, sweating Andrey in Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Cambridge theatre in 1976; and in Miller’s BBC television Shakespeare series of the 1980s, when he played Alcibiades opposite Jonathan Pryce’s Timon of Athens, Hector in Troilus and Cressida and Kent to Sir Michael Hordern’s gloriously distracted King Lear, saddled with the equally senescent Fool of Frank Middlemass.
Shrapnel was always interesting in these “solid” roles because he played them with such force and intelligence. He oozed gravitas and could make dullness seem virtuous, as he did with Tesman in a 1977 Hedda Gabler with Janet Suzman at the Duke of York’s theatre in 1977, or, late on, as a tremendous Duncan in the Kenneth Branagh Macbeth for the 2013 Manchester international festival.
Unusually, he was marvellous as both Brutus (Riverside Studios, 1980) and Julius Caesar (for Deborah Warner, at the Barbican, 2005) in the same play. And he made a final indelible impression as an archbishop in the 2017 televised version of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, starring his friend Tim Pigott-Smith in his last TV appearance, too.
Shrapnel was born in Birmingham, the elder son of the Guardian’s parliamentary correspondent Norman Shrapnel and his wife Myfanwy (nee Edwards). One of his ancestors, Lt Gen Henry Shrapnel, invented the exploding cannonball and gave his name to the
Manchester, and, when the family moved south, the City of London school, where he played Hamlet.
He took a degree at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and made a professional debut as Claudio in Much Ado Nothing at the new Nottingham Playhouse in 1965.
His major film debut was in Franklin J Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) starring Suzman and Michael Jayston, and he scored a string of big successes on television as the Earl of Sussex in Elizabeth R (1971) with Glenda Jackson – he would be Lord Howard to Cate Blanchett’s Gloriana in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007 – as Sir Percival Glyde in The Woman in White (1982) with Diana Quick and Ian Richardson, and as Semper in Tony Palmer’s Wagner (1983) alongside Richard Burton in the title role and the great German actor Ekkehard Schall as Franz Liszt.
An intensity of presence on the stage, as well as a forbidding authority, made him a natural Claudius in Hamlet, but he added something else in Miller’s production of that play (with Anton Lesser) at the Donmar in 1982: a moving and almost sympathetic study of a man seriously under-endowed with imagination.
This ability to convey psychological layers in powerful figures served Shrapnel well both in John Barton’s 10-play epic, The Greeks, at the Aldwych in 1980, when he doubled a laconically wry Agamemnon with an imperious Apollo; and, especially, as the monstrously unflinching King Creon in Sophocles’ Oedipal Theban trilogy, a role he played twice – first, in Don Taylor’s BBC television adaptation in 1986 (Juliet Stevenson as Antigone, John Gielgud as Tiresias), and then for the RSC in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s version directed by Adrian Noble in 1992.
In the second of these his purple-suited tyrant, with a face of granite and a voice of liquid gravel, became strangely battered and susceptible to emotional pleading. Creon does not cave in, and nor did Shrapnel, but he always found colour and humanity in his inhumanity.
He played a jovial Samuel Pepys in Palmer’s television film England, My England (1995), written by Charles Wood and John Osborne, and starring an unlikely duo of Michael Ball as Henry Purcell and Simon Callow as King Charles II; a non-speaking, dog-hunting taxidermist in the 101 Dalmatians film (1996) starring Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil; Julia Roberts’s British press agent in Roger Michell’s Notting Hill (1999); and another Greek worthy, old Nestor, in Wolfgang Petersen’s all-action, highly enjoyable Troy (2004) starring Brad Pitt as Achilles.
He was a Russian admiral in K-19: The Widowmaker (2001), Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping movie, with Harrison Ford, about the Russian nuclear submarine malfunction.
One of Shrapnel’s sons, Lex, also appeared in that film, but their blood relationship was more fruitfully and indeed movingly mined in a 2015 Young Vic revival of Caryl Churchill’s A Number, a poignant, poetic piece about cloning and parenting in which John played Salter, the crazy scientist meddling with genetic material, and Lex his son Bernard.
Later in the same year Shrapnel rejoined Branagh in his season at the Garrick, playing a powerful Camillo in The Winter’s Tale and a mutinous old actor laddie in Terence Rattigan’s Harlequinade. He was the sort of actor any manager or producer wanted in his company; first name on the team sheet.
Outside his work, Shrapnel loved mountaineering, skiing and music.
He is survived by his wife, Francesca Bartley, a landscape designer (and a daughter of Deborah Kerr), whom he married in 1975, by their three sons, Joe, Lex and Thomas – and by his younger brother, Hugh.
In 2011 and 2012, she toured Ireland again with Druid, playing the titular character in Big Maggie by John B. Keane and was consequently nominated for Best Actress in the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards.
She played the grieving mother who commits suicide in Six Shooter, playwright Martin McDonagh‘s Oscar-winning short film.[3]
She is familiar to Irish television audiences as Dr. Cathy Costello from Series 1 to Series 5 in the drama series The Clinic, a role for which she has won an Irish Film and Television Awards best actress award in 2008.
She had a leading role in the Channel 4 thriller Shockers (1999). She starred in Seasons 2 through 5 in Raw, an RTÉ drama portraying the lives of a restaurant staff, playing manager Fiona Kelly.
Eric Porter obituary in “The Independent” in 1995.
When television producers were casting demons and po-faced characters in the Sixties and Seventies, Eric Porter seemed to be on all their shortlists, becoming a star as Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga in 1967, after more than 20 years in acting.
The role of the brutal lawyer in John Galsworthy’s story of a family of London merchants at the turn of the century catapulted Porter to world- wide fame – and infamy. “They buttonholed me in Detroit, in Malta and on a Spanish beach”, Porter once said. “There was no hiding place. Even in Budapest this large lady with dyed hair came beaming over, placed a plump hand on my chest and said, “Aaaach, Soooames Forsyte”.
Porter was born in London in 1928, the son of a bus conductor. His parents wanted him to qualify as an electrical engineer, so he went to Wimbledon Technical College at the age of 15 and, a year later, started work for the Marconi Telegraph and Wireless Company, solderingjoints. But he had acted in school plays, and was soon trying to get into the theatre.
Although Porter failed to get a scholarship to RADA, a district schools drama organiser obtained an interview for him with Robert Atkins, director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company at Stratford-upon-Avon, which later became the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was signed up, in 1945, aged 17, and made his stage debut carrying a spear, at £3 a week. He then joined Lewis Casson’s theatre company in a revival of Saint Joan, making his London debut in 1946 at the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith (now the Lyric), as Dunois’s page.
After nine months’ National Service as an engine mechanic in the RAF, Porter toured with Sir Donald Wolfit, acted in repertory theatre in Birmingham, Bristol and at the London Old Vic, and appeared in Sir John Gielgud’s Hammersmith season and in the West End.
He made his first Broadway appearance as the Burgomaster in The Visit at the opening of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre and, back in Britain, played Rosmer in Rosmersholm at the Royal Court Theatre, which won him the London Evening Standard Drama Award as Best Actor in 1959.
Porter’s television career began with The Physicist and he later appeared in The Wars of the Roses (1965), before fame came with the part of the brutal Soames Forsyte, in 1967. The Forsyte Saga, adapted from John Galsworthy’s novel, was an instant hit, featuring Porter as a monster who is incredibly cruel to his first wife, Irene (played by Nyree Dawn Porter), but who became loved by female viewers throughout the world. However, the scene where Soames rapes Irene shocked everyone – including the cast and crew. ”I tugged and pulled at her bodice,” Porter recalled, ”and to everyone’s horror, there was blood all over the place. I had gashed my hand on a brooch she was wearing.”
His role in the 26-part series, screened initially on BBC2 but repeated on BBC1 the following year, and enjoying another two repeat runs, won him Best Actor awards from Bafta and the Guild of Television Producers and Directors. The programme would have become a long-term best-seller for the BBC, but suffered from being the last important television drama series to be made in black and white.
Having made his name, Porter took the title roles in television productions of Cyrano de Bergerac (1968) and Macbeth, appeared in The Winslow Boy, Man and Superman – opposite Maggie Smith – Julius Caesar and Separate Tables. He and Nyree Dawn Porter played man and wife one more time in an episode of Love Story called “Spilt Champagne”. Ten years after The Forsyte Saga made waves, Porter teamed up again with its producer, Donald Wilson, and reprised his viciousness in a BBC adaptation of Anna Karenina, in which he played the dull government official Karenin, who throws his pregnant wife Anna (Nicola Pagett) across the bedroom into a chair.
His subsequent television roles included Neville Chamberlain in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981), a po-faced deputy governor in The Crucible, an ageing playwright in A Shilling Life, Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Fagin in Oliver Twist. He also played the elderly, silver-haired Russian aristocrat Count Bronowsky in the 1984 blockbuster series The Jewel in the Crown as well as appearing more lightheartedly in The Morecambe and Wise Show. Porter’s last small-screen appearance was as Player in a new production of Dennis Potter’s Message for Posterity. It was completed earlier this year.
Anthony Hayward
Eric Porter was one of those actors often thought to be on the brink of greatness, rather than actually great at any time, writes Peter Cotes.
He was always compelling in whatever he tackled, and could claim at one time to be one of the most versatile players in Britain who seriously made each role he enacted true. Few tricksy tactics were resorted to; the actor was there to serve the play.
In the 1950s, he emerged as an actor to be watched and capable when young of playing middle-aged and even old men without resorting to the heavy make-up, that look and smell of glue, and the obligatory facial greasepaint lining that can look artificial and at times absurd.
Porter enjoyed playing classical roles in the theatre best of all and was unusually happy, in a way that few other actors were, when touring with Sir Donald Wolfit. He found both the Birmingham Rep and Bristol Old Vic much to his liking and the regular audiences attending those playhouses admired this highly dependable actor who was capable of making small roles big without ever stepping out of line and “hogging the limelight”. His Bolingbroke to Paul Scofield’s Richard II in 1952 at the Lyric, Hammersmith, was a case in point – he repeated the character in Henry IV at the Old Vic three years later. Before that time he had done more than his fair share of touring since making his debut in 1945. Seasons with the Travelling Repertory Theatre Company took him to the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, before he did National Service with the RAF (1946-47).
After stints with the extrovert Wolfit, travelling the “sticks” in the Forties, and the shy introvert Barry Jackson at Birmingham, learning about “attack” from the former and “taste” from the latter, Porter found himself in Hammersmith again playing Jones at a moment’s notice in Galsworthy’s The Silver Box at the Lyric Theatre there. He caught the critical eye and there was no looking back.
Chekhov followed at the Aldwych, in the West End, when he made an arresting Solyoni in The Three Sisters in the early Fifties. He joined Gielgud’s Company in a “season” and I saw him at the Lyric Hammersmith as Bolingbroke,in February 1953, followed by such costume pieces as The Way of the World and Venice Preserv’d, both in the same season, before he returned to play leading roles. He was accorded leading-man status at the Bristol Old Vic, where he made an impressive Becket in Murder in the Cathedral and Father Browne in The Living Room, before returning to the Old Vic, in London, playing featured roles.
Since the 1960s he had been one of the leading players at the RSC, for whom his characters had included an outstanding Antonio in The Duchess of Malfi, a striking Barabas in The Jew of Malta, and such “friendly villains” as Shylock and Macbeth as well as a majestic Lear (on Wolfit lines caught from watching that grand Lear play the role). And a Captain Hook in Peter Pan in the 1970s not only of “Eton and Balliol” but as Barrie’s play demands “of green-light melodrama” also.
After such a succession of hits, Porter was hardly ever away from plum parts in England, and made appearances on Broadwaybefore returning to London for his award-winning Rosmer in 1959. Although now recognised as a star by his fellow actors, he found that the world-wide stardom associated so often with the playing the great parts eluded him, despite a Malvolio of wit and pathos and a Leontes in The Winter’s Tale of depth and poignancy at Stratford.
Porter injected more into the theatre than he ever took out of it considering the parts he so finely portrayed and the dignity he gave to the roles he embellished with his out-of-the- ordinary talent – mostly in the theatre classics which he loved best but also in such “moderns” on television as Separate Tables.
Porter used to say he was “lucky” in his parts and accepted philosophically the fact that many a lesser actor than himself caught the stardom which is often accorded to the ordinary rather than the great.
But who can doubt that Eric Porter had more than a modicum of greatness in his talent?
Eric Porter will always be part of television history for his performance in The Forsyte Saga, in 1967. But his work in films was also more than appreciable, writes Tom Vallance.
Though his cinema work included classic roles familiar from his stage career, he is best remembered for two Hammer films, The Lost Continent (1968) – adapted from Dennis Wheatley’s Uncharted Seas, in which he was top billed as the captain whose tramp steamer wanders into an unknown civilisation – and Peter Sasdy’s Hands of the Ripper (1971), in which he co-starred with Angharad Rees as a doctor using Freudian theories to try to cure the murderous daughter of Jack the Ripper.
His authoritarian demeanour led to his frequent casting as military men or aristocracy in such films as Charlton Heston’s ponderous Antony and Cleopatra (1973 – he was Enobarbus), Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), The Heroes of Telemark (1965) and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). In Fred Zinnemann’s gripping thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973), Porter is the fanatical head of a secret military organisation who believes General de Gaulle has betrayed France by giving Algeria independence, and hires a professional killer to assassinate him. It was not a large role but a pivotal one to which Porter brought typically chilling conviction.
Eric Porter, actor: born London 8 April 1928; died London 15 May 1995.
Dublin-born, he moved with his family to London at the age of ten. He is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and was also a successful property developer during the 1980s. He is the owner of the public house, the Lion and the Lobster, in Brighton and known for roles in television programmes Michael Collins, Dracula Untold and Beyond the Sea.
