Sally Thomsett was born in 1950 in Sussex. She will be best remembered for her key role in “The Railway Children” in 1970. She was also featured the following year in “Straw Dogs”. Between 1973 and 1976 she starred in “Man About the House”.
Interview on the making of “The Railway Children” with Anne Tims:
I was 20 when I was cast as Phyllis, and the director called me back at least four times to be sure I looked young enough. My contract forbade me to reveal my age; I was not allowed to be seen with my boyfriend, to drink in public or drive the sports cars that were my passion. I’d always played girls, so acting 11 was no particular challenge; the Edwardian smocks usefully concealed any bust line.
Even the film crew didn’t know how old I was and treated me as a kid, which was frustrating. They’d ask Jenny how she thought a take had gone, even though she was three years younger than me, and they’d give me sweets. But actually Jenny was as motherly as the character she played and looked after me. I’ve always had a childish side. Bernard Cribbins liked to go fishing, and I’d creep up on him and say, “Boo!”
They put us all in a remote hotel near Haworth in north Yorkshire so we couldn’t stray into any nightclubs. One evening I got fed up and dragged a reluctant Jenny along for a night out in Leeds. We crept out of a back door and went to a club where a girl was dancing in a bird cage, and sitting on a mezzanine above us we saw Lionel Jeffries and the producerRobert Lynn dropping sixpences on her head.
The scariest scene to shoot was the landslide, which took a whole day to set up. There were explosives hidden in the trees, and I was petrified. After the film was released, Lionel rang to congratulate me on being nominated for a Bafta. I didn’t believe him because he was a joker. We thought it was a little film for kids: we had absolutely no premonition of the success it would have.
The above 2013 “Guardian” interview can also be accessed online here.
Geoffrey Bayldon was born in 1924 in Leeds. He is best known for his role in the children’s television series “Catweazle” in 1971 and also for “Worzel Gummidge”. His films include “A Night to Remember” in 1958, “The Camp on Blood Island” and “To Sir with Love” in 1967 with Sidney Poitier and Patricia Routledge.
IMDB entry:
Born Leeds, England and trained at Old Vic Theatre School, 1947-1949. First stage appearance in “Tough at the Top” (C.B. Cochran’s last musical) in 1949, followed by seasons at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; Glasgow Citizen’s and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. First in London’s west end in “The Happy Time” (1952) and more recently in “Worzel Gummidge”, “A Month of Sundays” “Maria” and “Unfinished Business”. Overseas: played Caesar in “Caesar and Cleopatra” (International Festival, Paris, 1956); Ravinia Shakespeare Festival (Chicago, 1964); Pickering in “My Fair Lady” (Houston, 1991). In 1998 he was nominated as “Best Actor” for the Royal Midland Television Awards for his role as Alby James in an episode of Peak Practice (1993).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gordon Lilley <glilley@magma.ca>
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Obituary in “The Telegraph” in 2017.
Geoffrey Bayldon, who has died aged 93, was an austere-looking actor with a penchant for absent-minded or eccentric types, none more so than Catweazle, the bungling medieval wizard he played in the children’s television series of the same name, which ran on ITV from 1970 to 1972; he then delighted young viewers as the Crowman in Worzel Gummidge (ITV, 1979-81).
In the first episode of Catweazle, the deliciously bewhiskered and bedraggled old magician (played with convincing battiness by the 46-year-old Bayldon) has time travelled from the 11th to the 20th century after jumping into a moat to escape Norman invaders.
Bayldon as Catweazle CREDIT: ITV/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Having woken up in a pond, he finds himself on a farm and is soon befriended by a teenage farmer’s son, Edward “Carrot” Bennett (Robin Davies). Their first conversation begins with Catweazle saying: “Art thou Norman?”, to which Carrot replies: “No, my name’s Edward.”
An amusing feature of the pair’s subsequent adventures is Catweazle’s need to have modern technology explained to him – he calls the telephone the “telling-bone” and electricity “electrickery”; another is Carrot’s need to prevent the jumpy Catweazle from pulling his dagger on strangers.
Catweazle was created by the screenwriter Richard Carpenter, who wrote the series with Bayldon in mind, although the actor was initially sceptical about the project.
Bayldon in 2011 CREDIT: TONY KYRIACOU/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
“I knew he was writing something for me,” Bayldon recalled, “and I thought, ‘Poor dear, he must be hard up. It’s going to be dreadful.’ But my agent rang and said, ‘Geoffrey, I’ve read the first page and I’ve never read anything so magical in my life. I tingled with joy. I’m sending it to you straightaway.’ I read the first page and … I thought it was wonderful.”
Part of the appeal of the series lay in the gentle friendship forged between Catweazle and Carrot, but Bayldon, a fine stage actor, stole the show as the eccentric and endearing wizard. At a time when, as Bayldon later observed, “everything was serious, working-class” Catweazle had “magic, comedy and a little tinge of tragedy”. More than 40 years on Catweazle continues to have a cult following and a loyal and active fan club.
The son of a tailor and a headmistress, Geoffrey Bayldon was born in Leeds on January 7 1924 and educated at Bridlington School and Hull College of Architecture. He began acting in amateur theatricals, and spent his war years stationed with the RAF in Yorkshire before moving to London in 1947 to train at the Old Vic Theatre School. His first professional role was in C B Cochran’s last production, Tough at the Top (1949).
Catweazle: an eccentric and bumbling wizard CREDIT: ITV/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Bayldon then joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (appearing, in 1950, in Measure for Measure and Julius Caesar with John Gielgud) before moving to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre.
By the late 1950s he was working regularly in television and he had roles in the ITV Play of the Week, as well as in The Avengers (1961, 1967) and Z-cars (1963, 1968). In 1963 he was offered the role of the first Doctor Who, but turned it down thinking – erroneously, as it turned out – that he was not suited to playing an eccentric old man. (In 1979 he did eventually appear in three episodes of the show, playing Organon the astrologer.)
After the success of Catweazle, he was offered the part of the mysterious Crowman, the scarecrow maker in Worzel Gummidge. This time Bayldon was the straight man to Jon Pertwee’s delightfully bonkers Worzel, whose antics are kept in check by the wise Crowman (“I am the Crowman, Worzel, and I know when you’re telling the truth”) and of whom Worzel is more than a little nervous, calling him “Mr Crowman, sir, your worship, sir, your holiness”.
Bayldon in The Avengers, 1961
Bayldon continued to work regularly on the small screen in shows such as Tales of the Unexpected (1980 and 1983), All Creatures Great and Small (1983), Blott on the Landscape (1985), Rumpole of the Bailey (1987) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1989). He was also involved in a number of BBC Schools programmes.
He played memorable character parts in countless films including Dracula and A Night to Remember (both 1958), To Sir, with Love (1967), Casino Royale (1967, in which he played “Q”, opposite Peter Sellers), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), Porridge (1979) and Bullshot (1983).
His later theatre work included, in 1986, a performance described by The Daily Telegraph’s John Barber as “beautiful”, opposite George Cole in Bob Larbey’s A Month of Sundays. Bayldon played one of two old codgers manfully resisting dehumanisation in an old people’s home.
In 1986, he recorded the vocals for the synth-pop composer Paul Hardcastle’s The Wizard. Among his later television appearances were the role of the Professor in the Channel Five game show Fort Boyard (1998-2001), and in Waking the Dead (2004), Heartbeat (2004) and several episodes of Casualty. He recorded a number of audiobooks, including Doctor Who, and worked on several radio plays.
Geoffrey Bayldon lived for many years in Putney, where he enjoyed gardening, walking and painting.
In the late 1940s he was briefly married, to Joan, and the marriage was dissolved; he is survived by a brother.
Geoffrey Bayldon, born January 7 1924, died May 10 2017
Peter Grenville obituary in “The Guardian” in 1996.
Peter Glenville was born in 1913 in London. His father was the Irish actor Shaun Glenville. He was both an actor and director. On film he acted in “His Brother’s Keeper” in 1940, “Madonna of the Seven Moons” in 1945 and “Good-Time Girl” with Jean Kent, Diana Dors and Flora Robson. As a directed, he directed “The Prisoner”, “Me and the Colonel”, “Summer and Smoke”, “Term of Trial”, “Becket”, “Hotel Paradiso” and “The Comedians”. He died in 1996.
“Independent” obituary by Derek Granger:With his dark, Celtic matinee-idol looks, Peter Glenville was a glittering figure in the post-war London theatre. He had made promising beginnings as a young actor in the Thirties and Forties, but achieved his greatest success as a director of West End plays for the management of H.M. Tennent. Under Binkie Beaumont, the head of that prolific firm, Glenville became one of a select team of young directors who could be relied on to give a Tennent production the immaculate standards prized by Beaumont – starry casting, high visual impact and a veneer of conspicuously polished taste. A natural flair, gave the authentic Tennent stamp to a large number of important London productions. Among them were five plays by his friend Terence Rattigan, including The Browning Version and Harlequinade (both 1948), Adventure Story (1949) – Rattigan’s extravagant reworking of the life of Alexander the Great starring Paul Scofield – and Separate Tables (1954), with a cast led by Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman.
In 1948, he directed John Gielgud in a revival of St John Hankin’s witty Edwardian morality play The Return of the Prodigal, with sets by Cecil Beaton, and in 1951 a delicately judged presentation of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke with Margaret Johnson as the wistfully ill-adjusted Southern heroine. A broodingly thoughtful study of domestic decay and lost faith provided the theme for Graham Greene’s The Living Room (1953), with a cast headed by Eric Portman and the 23-year-old Dorothy Tutin.
He directed Alec Guinness (who was to become a lifelong friend) in Sam and Bella Spewack’s 1951 version of Karel Capek’s Insect Play, entitled Under the Sycamore Tree; the production was designed by another friend, Oliver Messel. Guinness had also appeared for Glenville in 1950 in The Prisoner by Bridget Boland, playing the Cardinal tortured for his faith in a Communist state. In 1952, Glenville directed an adaptation from Henry James’s The Reverberator, Letter From Paris, again with decor by Messel.
From 1949, Glenville frequently directed plays in New York. Among them were another Henry James adaptation, The Innocents (from The Turn of the Screw); The Island of Goats; Romeo and Juliet, with Olivia de Havilland; and his own adaptation of the Feydeau farce Hotel Paradiso, starring Angela Lansbury and Bert Lahr, which he co-presented in 1957 and later produced in London.
His greatest Broadway success was Jean Anouilh’s Becket, which he directed in 1960 with an outstanding cast in which Anthony Quinn played the mercurial and exasperated Henry II and Laurence Olivier his troublesome prelate. Olivier was later to change roles and play the King. Becket was filmed by Glenville four years later with Richard Burton as Becket and Peter O’Toole as Henry II.
The choice of Glenville’s theatre work was eclectic, reflecting his own enquiring taste and his well-articulated belief that a good director should be a true interpreter of the playwright, intuitive and delicate when the nature of the work required an unobtrusive approach, but ready to use all the broad and colourful strokes of theatrical magic if the material so demanded.
Peter Glenville was the son of the Irish comedian Shaun Glenville and the musical star Dorothy Ward, the tall, beautiful, thigh-slapping Principal Boy of innumerable pantomimes, who often appeared with her husband playing the Dame. Glenville liked to boast that he came from a line of Irish vaudevillians (his grandmother, Mary Glenville, was a frequent player at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin), but the older Glenvilles were actually a prodigiously successful theatrical couple and it was Glenville’s luck that their success gave him financial independence, a fact which did nothing to quench either his application or ambition.
Educated by Jesuits at Stonyhurst College (he retained his strong Catholic faith throughout his life), he went on to study Law at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became President of Oxford University Dramatic Society. His many roles for them included Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Max Reinhardt.
It seemed inevitable that Glenville would swiftly become a major young actor. Between 1934 and 1947 he played professionally a succession of leading roles – classical, romantic and invariably showy – ranging from Tony Pirelli in Edgar Wallace’s gangster drama On the Spot and Stephen Cass in Mary Hayley Bell’s horror thriller Duet For Two Hands to Romeo, Prince Hal and an intense Hamlet in a production which he also directed for the Old Vic company in Liverpool, where in 1946 he had been appointed a director. Here, at the age of 34, his experience confirmed that he had probably reached his limits as an actor and that his future career lay in direction.
After the mid-Fifties, Glenville lived and worked chiefly in New York. The varied productions he directed there included the Japanese Samurai revenge drama Rashomon, the French comedy Tchin-Tchin, a musical version of Tovarich starring Vivien Leigh, John Osborne’s A Patriot For Me and Dylan, a study of the last days of Dylan Thomas, with Alec Guinness as the disintegrating poet.
In 1970, he returned to London to direct his last play there, Rattigan’s Bequest to the Nation, about Emma Hamilton. His last production in New York was the ill-fated two-hander Out Cry (1973) by Tennessee Williams.
Glenville directed several films but his touch was never as sure as for his work for the stage, and even with stars like Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret (in Term of Trial, 1962) and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (in Graham Greene’s The Comedians, 1967) his films leave one with a sense of expectations unfulfilled.
Glenville retained into old age his youthful appearance and zest; he had a seductively engaging manner, an air of brilliance and worldly assurance, lightened by an infectious sense of mischief and irony, when stories and gossip would tumble forth in gleeful, swooping bursts of emphasis.
He had always lived in style, first as a young man in his thirties in a fine house, complete with butler, in Brompton Square, and afterwards for more than three decades in New York in a vast, grand apartment in the town house he owned in the East Sixties, decorated in sombrely impressive style by Geoffrey Bennison.
Within this somewhat Proustian context Glenville was eagerly embraced by New York society and it came to seem that no gossip column or social event was complete without him. Recently he had created a second delectable haven, a house in the picturesque Mexican town of San Miguel. In the last two decades, although he had given up directing, the grand, the smart and the beautiful still flocked to his East Side drawing-room where it probably seemed to him that the human comedy provided almost as much stimulation as the theatre.
Peter Glenville, theatre and film director: born London 28 October 1913; died New York 3 June 1996
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Jane Merrow was born in 1941 in Hertfortshire. “Don ‘t Bother to Knock” in 1961 was her movie debut. Her other other films include “The Wild and the Willing”, “The System” and “The Lion in the Winter”. In the 1970’s she went to Hollywood and acted there for a number of years. She is now back living in England.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
British actress Jane Merrow studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the onset of her career and became a classical heroine in the 1960s on both stage and TV. Portraying such soulful lasses as “Lorna Doone” and “Jane Eyre” on TV, she mixed in a few Shakespearean ingénues and brought forth a gift for bringing a noticeable fragility and honesty to her roles. A trendy presence on all the swinging spy shows of the time including The Saint (1962), The Prisoner (1967), Secret Agent (1964) and The Avengers(1961), the last for which she was once entertained a leading role. Best known to film-goers for her Golden Globe-nominated role in the classic costume drama The Lion in Winter (1968) as “Alais”, the young adoring mistress to “King Henry”, Jane moved to America in 1971 and enjoyed a transcontinental career for nearly two decades. Here, she appeared on such stalwart series as Mission: Impossible (1966) and Hart to Hart (1979), among others. She also starred as Vivien Leigh in a one-woman stage tribute that opened in, of course, Atlanta. She divides her time between homes in London and Boise, Idaho.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Patti Clare is currently to be seen as the hilarious Mary Taylor in “Coronation Street”.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Clare was born in the city of Manchester. Her stage acting credits include playing Edith in a production of Noël Coward‘s Blithe Spirit at the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow in 2000 and the role of Mrs. Micawber in a 2005 production of the stage play David Copperfield at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.[2] Having built up extensive experience in theatre, Clare subsequently expressed interest in transitioning to television.[1]
“I was told I had to take a gamble for a year and turn theatre work down and sit it out. It was terrible. I didn’t do any acting for nine months so I worked in an office and the job [on Coronation Street] came in the September.”
Clare was told that to achieve her goal in working in television it would be in her short-term interest to turn down theatre work. In September 2008, whilst working as an office receptionist, she was offered the part of Mary Taylor in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street.[1] She made her first appearance on 26 November 2008. The character was initially only meant to appear in five episodes.[1] After an initial stint which ended in 2009 Clare was offered a new contract and returned to the serial in January 2010.[4] Television roles prior to and between her appearances as Mary included small roles in the children’s fantasy seriesYoung Dracula, a 2008 episode of the science-fiction series Torchwood, an episode of the historical medical drama Casualty 1909 and an episode of the BBC daytime soap opera Doctors.
Clare has been recognised for her comic scenes on Coronation Street. She was nominated for ‘Funniest Performance’ at the 2011 Inside Soap Awards and won ‘Best Comedy Performance’ at the 2013 British Soap Awards.
Jessie Evans was born in 1918 in Mountain Ash. In 1952 she made her movie debut in “Stop the Merry-Go-Round”. Other films include “The Extra Day”, “Doctor in Distress”, and “Countess Dracula” in 1971. She died in 1983 at the age of 64.
Kenneth J. Warren was born in 1929 in New South Wales, Australia. Most of his acting career was based in the U.K. His film debut was in 1954 in “Long John Silver”. His other films include “I Was Monty’s Double” in 1958, “The Navy Lark” and “Doctor Blood’s Coffin”. He died in 1973.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Balding (later shaven-headed) Australian character actor Kenneth J. Warren (the “J” stands for John) was a reliable performer on both stage and films, his imposing, beefy frame and darting, sliver-eyed presence almost a tell-tale sign of peril yet to come. Born in New South Wales in 1929 (some sources indicate 1926), he was best known for his sinister heavies yet was quite comfortable playing moral-minded men. He began his theatrical career in his native Australia during the early 1950s and also found an obscure film part to play in the Robert Newton classic of – Treasure Island (1950). Catching fire after appearing on the London stage with a superb performance in an Australian touring production of “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,” he made a major career move by settling in England. A wise choice in the end for his film career started up almost immediately with able supports in Hell, Heaven or Hoboken (1958) starring John Mills,Concrete Jungle (1960) with Stanley Baker, _Informers, The (1964)_ with Nigel Patrick, and A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) opposite Anthony Quinn and James Coburn.
Billed early in the game as Kenneth Warren (without the middle initial), the actor returned to the stage from time to time in such plays as “Luther” (1963) and “Canterbury Tales” (1968). On TV he was a worthy antagonist in a number of popular spy series such as “The Avengers,” “Secret Agent” and “The Saint.” An emphatic presence in horror films, his gallery of films in this genre included _Dr. Blood’s Coffin (1961)_, I, Monster (1971),Demons of the Mind (1972) and The Creeping Flesh (1973). One of Warren’s final roles came in another typical form, that of a military hi-ranker, in the comedy Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World (1973). His untimely death in 1973 robbed the acting community of a vital character support. His film S*P*Y*S (1974), which reunited M*A*S*H cohorts Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, was released posthumously. In his private life, Warren belied his on-camera tough-guy image as he was a talented artist and gourmet cook. His son Damian Warren is also an actor.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.ne
Leigh Lawson was born in 1945 in Warwickshire. He trained at RADA and first made an impact in Franco Zefferelli’s “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” in 1972. Other films include “Love Among the Ruins”, “Tess” in 1979 and “Being Julia”. He is the long term partner of Twiggy.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Percy’s Progress, poster, (aka IT’S NOT THE SIZE THAT COUNTS), US poster, Leigh Lawson, 1974. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
In 1976, Lawson and his first wife, Mondy, were divorced. He met actress Hayley Mills in 1975 when they performed in London’s West End in A Touch of Spring; and the following year, they had a son, Jason. Lawson also became stepfather to Crispian Mills, Hayley’s son with director Roy Boulting. During that time, he appeared alongside Hayley’s father Sir John Mills in the film The Devil’s Advocate (1977). The Lawson-Mills liaison ended in the early 1980s. He met model Twiggy in 1984. In 1988, they both worked in the film Madame Sousatzka and were married on 23 September that year in Tony Walton‘s back yard in Sag Harbor,Long Island.[5] The couple reside in West London, where Lawson looks after his wife’s business affairs and her involvement with Littlewoods catalogue. Lawson and Twiggy also own a home in Southwold, Suffolk.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
The longevity of Gwen Ffrangcon Davies was remarkable. She was born in 1891 and began her acting career in 1911 on the stage.Her film career was not extensive and her movie debut was in 1936 in “Tudor Rose”. Her other films included “The Witches” in 1966 with Joan Fontaine and “The Devil Rides Out”. She died at the age of 101 in 1992.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Dame Gwen Lucy Ffrangcon-Davies, DBE (25 January 1891 – 27 January 1992) was a British actress and centenarian. She was born in London of a Welsh family; the name “Ffrangcon” originates from a valley in Snowdonia.
She retired from the stage in 1970, but continued to appear on radio and television. In the 1980s, well into her 90s, she appeared on the Wogan chat show, in which she recited, word for word, the famous death scene of Juliet. She made her final acting appearance in a teleplay of the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Master Blackmailer at the age of 100. Her films included The Witches (1966) and The Devil Rides Out (1968), both for Hammer Films. She lived for many years in the village of Stambourne, Essex.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
