George Lazenby born in New South Wales, Australia in 1939. He had a career as a model before he was selected to play James Bond in 1969 in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”. Although the film was a major success, Lazenby did not continue as 007.
His IMDB entry:
George Lazenby was born on September 5th, 1939, in Australia. He moved to London, England in 1964, after serving in the Australian Army. Before becoming an actor, he worked as an auto mechanic, used car salesman, prestige car salesman, and as a male model, in London, England. In 1968, Lazenby was cast as “James Bond”, despite his only previous acting experience being in commercials, and his only film appearance being a bit-part in a 1965 Italian-made Bond spoof. Lazenby won the role based on a screen-test fight scene, the strength of his interviews, fight skills and audition footage. A chance encounter with Bond series producer Albert R. Broccoli in a hair salon in 1966, in London, had given Lazenby his first shot at getting the role. Broccoli had made a mental note to remember Lazenby as a possible candidate at the time when he thought Lazenby looked like a Bond. The lengths Lazenby went to to get the role included spending his last pounds on acquiring a tailor-made suit from Sean Connery‘s tailor, which was originally made for Connery, along with purchasing a very Bondish-looking Rolex watch.
Lazenby quit the role of Bond right before the premiere of his only film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), citing he would get other acting roles, and that his Bond contract, which was fourteen pages thick, was too demanding on him.
In his post-Bond career, Lazenby has acted in TV movies, commercials, various recurring roles in TV series, the film series “Emmanuelle”, several Bond movie spoofs, TV guest appearances, provided voice for several animated movies and series, and several Hong Kong action films, using his martial arts expertise.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Geoffrey Keen was born in Oxfordshire in 1916. He is the son of stage actor Malcolm Keen. Geoffrey was a most profilic character actor during the 50’s and 60’s. His films include “Treasure Island” in 1950, “Cry, the Beloved Country”, “A Town Like Alice”, “Yield to the Night”, “Sink the Bismarck” and “The Angry Silence”. Geoffrey Keen died in 2005 at the age of 89.
Anthony Hayward’s obituary in “The Independent”:
One of the screen’s leading character actors for four decades, Geoffrey Keen was forever typecast as dour authority figures. After 20 years perfecting the type in British films, he landed a starring role on television in Mogul (1965), a topical drama about an oil conglomerate, at a time when drilling was just beginning in the North Sea.
Keen played the shrewd and ruthless Brian Stead, one of the company’s bosses, in a 13-part series that gained increasing popularity – and sales to more than 60 countries, as well as many awards – after it was retitled The Troubleshooters (1966-72) and ran for a further 123 episodes. The BBC’s initial publicity hailed:
Exciting stories about oilmen and the world they work in. The oilmen are everywhere. They walk in the corridors of power, drill wells in the desert, serve on the motorways. They sustain governments, dominate the Exchange, alter the face of the Earth, and keep most of the human race on the move. Oilmen are prospectors, tearing across rugged country in huge trucks; they also work in offices and have pension schemes. Some are scientists, some politicians, some are engineers, and some are very rich – and every oilman with a major company like the Mogul corporation is a subject of a vast feudal kingdom.
Over seven years, filming took place in glamorous locations as far-flung as Venezuela, Antarctica and New Zealand. Although Keen did some location shooting, he was often stuck at Mogul’s head office in London, where he would be seen stepping in and out of his Rolls-Royce.
Stead, a widower who had to battle health problems – including two heart attacks – rose from his position as the company’s deputy managing director and director of operations to become managing director, but the actor was frustrated at playing what he considered to be a dictator. So merciless was Stead that Keen’s own daughter, Mary, refused to watch her father on television and would sit on the stairs with her hands over her ears. The actor also found the grind of making a weekly programme very hard. “At present, I have no domestic life at all – you have to give yourself completely to a series,” he said at the time.
Keen soon switched back to films to play his most enduring screen role, as the Minister of Defence, Sir Frederick Gray, in six James Bond pictures. At the end of the first one, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), set at the Polaris submarine base in Scotland, he is seen peering into an escape pod to discover 007 under the sheets with a naked “Bond girl”, Barbara Bach. “Bond, what do you think you’re doing?” he asks. “Keeping the British end up, sir,” Roger Moore retorts.
The sight of an embarrassed minister occurred several times over the following 10 years, as the dignified, by-the-book, upper-class Sir Frederick wrestled with Bond’s playful attitude to his job and refusal to take missions seriously, in Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985) and The Living Daylights (1987, in which Timothy Dalton took over as Ian Fleming’s secret agent).
Born Geoffrey Knee in London in 1916, he had a difficult childhood. His mother and father, Malcolm – a stage actor also seen in films as doctors, detectives and aristocrats – split up before his birth. (Father and son both changed their surname to Keen by deed poll.)
He and his mother moved to Bristol, where he attended the city’s grammar school and worked briefly in a paint factory, before joining the Little Theatre there and spending a year in repertory productions, making his stage début as Trip in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1932) at the age of 16.
Briefly unsure about acting as a career, Keen started studying at the London School of Economics but left after two months and was awarded a scholarship to Rada, where his father was teaching, and won the prestigious Bancroft Gold Medal (1936).
He then joined the Old Vic Theatre, playing Florizel in The Winter’s Tale (1936) and Edgar in King Lear (1936), and continued on stage until fighting with the Royal Army Medical Corps as a corporal during the Second World War and performing with the Stars in Battledress concert party. During that time, he made his film début, directed by the legendary Carol Reed, as a corporal in The New Lot (1943), an army training film that starred Bernard Lee (later to play 007’s boss, M, in the Bond films).
After the war, Reed cast Keen in two thrillers, as a soldier in Odd Man Out (starring James Mason, 1947) and a detective in The Fallen Idol (written by Graham Greene and featuring Ralph Richardson, 1948). Once he played an MP in The Third Man (another Reed-Greene collaboration), the actor was on the way to becoming typecast.
“It got around the studios that I only played the type of character who scowled and thumped tables,” he explained, adding:
I accepted any role that came my way. This is a tough profession. You can’t be too choosy – you may never get another chance.
As a result, he was seen as policemen in The Clouded Yellow (1950), Hunted (1952), Genevieve (1953), Portrait of Alison (1955), The Long Arm (1956), Nowhere to Go (1958), Deadly Record (1959), Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and Lisa (1962), soldiers of all ranks in Angels One Five(1952), Malta Story (1953), Carrington V.C. (1954) and The Man Who Never Was (1955), the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff in Sink the Bismarck! (1959), a doctor in Storm Over the Nile (1955), priests in Yield to the Night (1956) and Sailor Beware!(1956), a solicitor in A Town Like Alice (1956), headmasters in The Scamp (1957) and Spare the Rod (1961), a prison governor in Beyond This Place (1959), the Prime Minister in No Love for Johnnie (1961), a magistrate in The Cracksman (1963) and a British ambassador in The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (1980).
So prolific was Keen as a character actor, at the height of British film- making, that in one year, 1956, he appeared in 12 pictures. The following year, he and his father both acted together in Fortune Ii a Woman, playing the Young and Old Abercrombie in the crime drama starring Jack Hawkins.
Keen’s starring role on television in Mogul and The Troubleshooters came as British cinema was passing its heyday. He had already acted many character parts on the small screen, including a short run as Detective Superintendent Harvey in Dixon of Dock Green during 1966, and later took the role of Gerald Lang, the managing director of a merchant bank, in The Venturers (1975). But he was less happy acting on television and, by the 1980s, was working little except for in the Bond films. He retired in 1987, after making The Living Daylights.
His first wife was the actress Hazel Terry and his third the actress Doris Groves, who died in 1989.
Anthony Hayward
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Patricia Hitchcock is the actress daughter of Alfred Hitchcock. She was born in London in 1928. When her father went to Hollywood in 1939 to make “Rebecca”, she and her mother went with him. She was featured in such Hitchcock classics as “Stage Fright” in 1949, “”Strangers on a Train” and “Psycho”. She died in 2021 aged 93.
Patricia Hitchcock, the only child of the film director Alfred Hitchcock, who has died aged 93, was an accomplished actress in her own right, taking supporting roles in three of her father’s best-known films as well as appearing on television in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
She made her screen debut as a jolly acting student called Chubby Bannister in her father’s Stage Fright (1950), because cast and crew were rehearsing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she was a student. She would also feature in the film as Jane Wyman’s double in a stunt involving a speeding car: “I drove right into the camera and had to stop at a plate-glass window.”
But she was best known for her role in Strangers on a Train (1951) as Barbara Morton, the inquisitive and chubbily bespectacled younger sister of Ann (Ruth Roman), the woman Guy Haines (Farley Granger) wants to marry, who witnesses the psychopathic Bruno (Robert Walker) attempting to strangle a woman at a cocktail party.
Pat Hitchcock with her father on set in 1950 during filming of Strangers on a Train based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith CREDIT: Alamy
Favourable reviews might have marked the beginning of a career as a character actress. But within a year she had met her husband, Joseph O’Connell, and married him, and a year after that had the first of three children. Though she had a small role in Psycho (1960) as the office worker who offers to share her tranquillisers with Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, she gave up thoughts of a serious acting career to devote herself to her family.
Alfred Hitchcock, reflecting years later on his daughter’s marriage in 1952, said that he and his wife Alma had been “relieved, in a way” when Pat decided that “being a mother of sticky-fingered children required all her creative attention.”
Pat Hitchcock had a small role in the film as a witness in spectacles CREDIT: Moviepix/Getty
After her father’s death in 1980, the job of upholding his memory and protecting his reputation largely fell to Pat. She also co-authored a biography of her mother, Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man (2003), in which she maintained that her father would never have achieved such acclaim without the contribution of his wife of 54 years and mostly silent professional partner.
Patricia Alma Hitchcock was born in London on July 7 1928. Her mother, Alma Reville, had been a respected film editor, first at Twickenham Studios, and then at Islington Studios, where in 1923 she met Hitchcock, then little more than a script assistant. They had married in 1926.
Pat would relate that her father was so stricken by anxiety when her mother went into labour that he immediately left their Cromwell Road flat to go for a long walk, explaining afterwards: “Consider my suffering. I nearly died of the suspense.”
She attributed her early interest in acting to being brought on the set by her father if she remained very quiet: “I have a picture of me, with Margaret Lockwood and my dog, on The Lady Vanishes. I was absolutely fascinated.”
When she was eight, she was dispatched to boarding school, where she played Rumpelstiltskin: “It never occurred to me that I’d do anything else but act.”
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1939 when Pat was 10, but she recalled that she was brought up as an English child: “I knew what was expected, and I pretty much always did it. You didn’t speak unless spoken to, but it didn’t bother me or have any repercussions. I didn’t know anything else.”
She was very close to her father, who would take her out every Saturday, shopping and to lunch, and to (Catholic) church every Sunday. She attributed her lifelong religious faith to him.
She played teenage leads in two short-run Broadway plays, Solitaire (1942), and Violet (1944), the latter written and directed by Whitfield Cook, whom Hitchcock would later engage as a screenwriter on both Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train.
When she was 18 Pat was sent back to England to train at Rada, where her contemporaries included Lionel Jeffries and Dorothy Tutin, and in 1950 played a palace maid in the Jean Negulesco drama The Mudlark (1950), starring Irene Dunne and Alec Guinness.
Back in the US, she had an uncredited part in Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). She also appeared in television productions and was cast in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “whenever they needed a maid with an English accent”, as she put it.
She felt, however, that being Hitchcock’s daughter had been a “minus” in her career. “I wish he had believed in nepotism,” she told an interviewer. “I’d have worked a lot more. But he never had anyone in his pictures unless he believed they were right for the part. He never fit a story to a star, or to an actor. Often I tried to hint to his assistant, but I never got very far. She’d bring my name up, he’d say, ‘She isn’t right for it’, and that would be the end of that.”
Pat Hitchcock described her father as “very quiet. Incredible sense of humour. Very loving. He put his family first before everything else, and we led a very quiet life.”
Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell (daughter of Alfred) speaking to fans of Alfred Hitchcock during a DVD signing in Hollywood, 2005 CREDIT: Matthew Simmons/Getty Images
On Alma’s death in 1982, two years after her husband, Pat and her family inherited her father’s estate.
She was angered by later suggestions that Hitchcock had been a sadistic and manipulative director who tried to control his leading ladies in real life and made sexual overtures toward some of them. “I know a lot of people insist that my father must have had a dark imagination,” she said. “Well, he did not. He was a brilliant film-maker and he knew how to tell a story, that’s all.”.
Yet even by her account the director had a bizarre sense of humour. When she was a child, he would creep into her bedroom late at night and paint a clown’s face on her sleeping features so that she would be surprised when she woke up and looked in the mirror. Returning from a wartime visit to England, he brought back an empty incendiary bomb as a present for his young daughter.
If she did have a criticism (though she denied it was any such thing) it was that he was content that her mother was never given the credit that Pat believed was her due.
Alfred Hitchcock with his wife Alma Reville and their daughter Pat Hitchcock aboard the Queen Mary at Southampton, before departure to America in March 1939 CREDIT: AFP/GettyImages
Alma was credited with screenplay or continuity work on almost half of Hitchcock’s films until 1950, and she continued her role as collaborator for 25 years after that, advising Hitchcock on “script material, casting and all aspects of the production” and working with other directors. But during the period of her husband’s most sustained creative activity, 1951-1960, Alma’s name disappeared.
Among other things Pat claimed that her mother had saved Psycho from an embarrassing faux pas after noticing, at a screening, that Janet Leigh was still breathing after having been killed off in the shower.
In later life Pat Hitchcock did volunteer work with a cystic fibrosis charity, her eldest granddaughter having been diagnosed with the disease
Her husband Joseph O’Connell, who was in the transportation business, died in 1994. She is survived by their three daughters
Patricia Hitchcock. Wikipedia.
Pat Hitchcock was born in 1928 and is an English actress and producer. She is the only child of English director Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville, and had small roles in several of his films, starting with Stage Fright (1950).
Patricia Hitchcock
Hitchcock was born in London in 1928, the only child of film director Alfred Hitchcock and film editor Alma Reville. The family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1939. Once there, Hitchcock’s father soon made his mark in Hollywood.
As a child, Hitchcock knew she wanted to be an actress. In the early 1940s, she began acting on the stage and doing summer stock. Her father helped her gain a role in the Broadway production of Solitaire (1942). She also played the title role in the Broadway play Violet (1944).
In early 1949, her parents arrived in London to make Stage Fright, Hitchcock’s first British-made feature film since emigrating to Hollywood. Pat did not know she would have a walk-on part in the film until her parents arrived. Because she bore a resemblance to the star, Jane Wyman, her father asked if she would mind also doubling for Wyman in the scenes that required “danger driving”.
She had small roles in three of her father’s films: Stage Fright (1950), in which she played a jolly acting student named Chubby Bannister, one of Wyman’s school chums; Strangers on a Train (1951), playing Barbara Morton, sister of Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), Guy Haines’s (Farley Granger) lover; and Psycho (1960), playing Janet Leigh‘s character’s plain-Jane office mate, Caroline, who generously offers to share tranquilizers that her mother gave her for her wedding night.
Patricia had a small uncredited role as an extra in her father’s 1936 Sabotage. She and her mother, Alma Reville, are in the crowd waiting for, then watching, the Lord Mayor’s Show parade.
As well as appearing in ten episodes of her father’s half-hour television programme, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock worked on a few others, including Playhouse 90, which was live, directed by John Frankenheimer. Acting for her father, however, remained the high point of her acting career, which she interrupted to bring up her children. (Hitchcock has a small joke with her first appearance on his show – after saying good night and exiting the screen, he sticks his head back into the picture and remarks: “I thought the little leading lady was rather good, didn’t you?”)
She married Joseph E. O’Connell, Jr., 17 January 1952, at Our Lady Chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. They decided to have their wedding there because Hitchcock had many friends on the East Coast and O’Connell had relatives in Boston. They had three daughters, Mary Alma Stone (born 17 April 1953), Teresa “Tere” Carrubba (born 2 July 1954), and Kathleen “Katie” Fiala (born 27 February 1959). Joe died in 1994.She currently lives in Solvang, California.
For several years, she was the family representative on the staff of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She supplied family photos and wrote the foreword of the book Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal, which was published in 2002. In 2003, she published Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man, co-written with Laurent Bouzereau.
Ray Winstone was born in Hackney, London in 1957. He was nominated for a BAFTA as Best Newcomer for his performance in “That Summer” in 1939. He has become one of the best of British actors and his films include “Nil By Mouth”, “The War Zone”, “Sexy Beast” and “Ripley’s Game”.
IMDB entry:
Ray Winstone
Ray Winstone was born on February 19, 1957, in Hackney Hospital in London, England, to Margaret (Richardson) and Raymond J. Winstone. He moved to Enfield, at age seven, where his parents had a fruit and vegetable business. He started boxing at the age of twelve at the famous Repton Amateur Boxing Club, was three times London Schoolboy Champion and fought twice for England, UK. In ten years of boxing, he won over 80 medals and trophies.
He married Elaine Winstone in 1979, and the couple have three children: Lois Winstone(born 1982), a singer with the London-based hip-hop group “Crack Village” who also played his on-screen daughter in Last Orders (2001) and got a part in four episodes ofThe Bill (1984), Jaime Winstone (born 1985) also an actress with ambitions to be a director, and Ellie Rae Winstone (born 2001).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Alys-2 <acarter@dhac.prestel.co.uk>
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Keith Drinkel was born in 1944 in York. His films include “A Bridge Too Far” in 1977 and “Ghandi” in 1982. He has been featured in many television dramras including a stint in “Coronation Street”.
Richard Wyler (also known as Richard Stapley) was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex in 1923. He began his career on the London sstage but in the late 1940’s he went to Hollywood with a Hollywood contract. He was featured in “The Three Musketeers” in 1948, “Little Women” “King of the Khyber Rifles” with Tyrone Power and “D-Day 6th of June” with Robert Taylor and Dana Wynter. Richard Wyler died in 2010 at the age of 86.
His “Independent” obituary:
Richard Stapley belonged to a generation of movie actors who plied their trade during the halcyon days of Hollywood – when stars were great and dalliances were discreet. Although predominantly an actor, he had polymath qualities ranging from writer and motorcycle racer to courier.
lamorous world of Hollywood. Born on 20 June 1923 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, he was the son of a bank manager. He grew up in Brighton and from an early age fell in love with the silver screen. Stapley attended Varndean College in Brighton; one of his contemporaries there was Paul Scofield, with whom he remained friends.
Stapley remembered spending a lot of time at Varndean practising his autograph; destiny would make him a movie actor. However, he did also have a love of writing which would endure throughout his career; he had his first novel published at the age of 17.
After serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Stapley got into repertory theatre and decided at an early age that if he was going to make it in movies he would have to go to the US. Slim, charming, and graced with diamond blue eyes and a deep, educated English accent, Stapley soon caught the eye of the movie-makers – and a number of actresses as well.
Gloria Swanson rented a temporary house in Palm Springs which she shared with Stapley while she was filming the musical Sunset Blvd (1950). Whether it was a practical arrangement or something more was not revealed by Stapley when he reminisced about his days in Hollywood.
The movie breaks soon came, including in 1948 The Three Musketeers, starring Gene Kelly and Lana Turner, Little Women, where he starred alongside Elizabeth Taylor, King of the Khyber Rifles, appearing with Tyrone Power, and the 1956 film D-Day the Sixth of June, playing David Archer alongside Richard Todd and Robert Taylor. Stapley had an uncredited role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; another small part was in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 film Frenzy.
The early 1960s saw him in the TV series Man from Interpol, playing Agent Anthony Smith; for this role he adopted the name Richard Wyler. Some of the scripts for Man from Interpol were penned by Brian Clemens, later the doyen of The Avengers and The Professionals. Man from Interpol ran for 39 episodes between 1960 and 1961; after it ended, Stapley never quite made it back to Hollywood films.
He starred in a number of European films, including El Precio de un Hombre, playing bounty hunter Luke Chilson. He also starred with Jack Palance in The Barbarians, and then in 1969 The Seven Secrets of Sumuru (aka The Girl from Rio) alongside Shirley Eaton and George Sanders. In 1970, Stapley co-starred with Bette Davis and Michael Redgrave in Connecting Rooms.
A follow-up series to Man from Interpol did not follow. Around the same time as he was filming that programme, Stapley had auditioned for the TV series of Ivanhoe, the part of which went to his comrade Sir Roger Moore. Stapley regaled the story of being driven by Roger Moore in his Rolls Royce. Stapley asked Moore what would have happened if he had got the part of Ivanhoe instead – and Moore responded by saying, “You’d be driving this Rolls Royce instead of me… “
Stapley had a steady stream of character parts in many of the mainstream TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Baron, Z Cars, The Saint and Return of the Saint. His work also included appearing in a number of the legendary Imperial Leather soap TV adverts, exuding a sybaritic lifestyle and attaining what can only be described as a lifetime achievement of sharing a bath (on set) with his co-star, namely one Joanna Lumley.
If acting was a love, motorcycles were Stapley’s passion and it is no surprise that he counted among his friends the stunt rider from The Great Escape responsible for the death-defying jump made by Steve McQueen. Stapley himself partook in motorcycle stunts, although one went horrendously wrong and he severely broke his leg – but determined to ride again, he made an ultra-quick recovery.
Stapley rode motorcycles in professional races, including dices with the likes of Mike Hawthorn. He wrote a regular column for Motor Cycling magazine, Richard Wyler’s Coffee Bar Column, recounting tales of his acting exploits or thrills on the race track. He received praise from the Metropolitan Police for dissuading young motorcyclists at the famous Ace Café on London’s North Circular Road from indulging in the potentially lethal dare of “dropping the coin right into the slot” and racing to a given point and back before the record on the jukebox finished.
During the 1960s he also opened one of the first coffee bars near Streatham Ice Rink in south London.
Stapley, using his nom de plume, Richard Wyler, had his own dispatch riders company in London and used his race-track experience on one occasion to get a very important package from central London to Northolt Airfield through heavy traffic in about 30 minutes.
His acting career on slow burn, he tended to write. His work included a novel called Naked Legacy, co-written with Lester Cook III and published in 2004. The story tells of a young man inheriting a manuscript from the father he never knew, which then sends him on a voyage of discovery. He devoted much of his remaining days to working on film scripts that he was determined to see come to fruition, including Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled. Stapley was also completing his autobiography, To Slip and Fall in L.A.
Some unfortunate business deals meant that Stapley’s finances were not good and the last decade of his life was dependant on the generosity of acquaintances.
Stapley had enthusiasm and talent to spare, but the constant money worries and failing health at times shadowed the charming and heroic side of his character. He was married to Elizabeth Wyler; the two were estranged, but never divorced. He has one surviving sister.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Richard O’Callaghan was born in 1940 in London. He is the son of actress Patricia Hayes. He made his film debut in 1968 in “The Bofors Gun”. He made some Carry On films and became a staple in quality British television dramas. He is married to American actress Elizabeth Quinn.
John Cairney was born in Glasgow in 1930. He came to prominence in the late 50’s on British films. His films include “Ill Met by Moonlight” in 1957, “Miracle in Soho”, “Windom’s Way”, “A Night to Remember” and “Shake Hands With the Devil”. His website here.
His IMDB entry:
John Cairney made his stage debut at the Park Theatre, Glasgow, before enrolling at the RSAMD in Glasgow. After graduation, he joined the Wilson Barrett Company as Snake in “The School for Scandal”. A season at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre followed before going on to the Bristol Old Vic where he appeared in the British premiere of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”. He returned to the Citizens from time to time, most notably as Hamlet in 1960. He also appeared in the premiere of John Arden’s “Armstrong’s Last Goodnight” in 1964. Other stage work until 1991 included King Humanitie in “The Thrie Estaites” for Tyrone Guthrie at the Edinburgh Festival, Archie Rice in “The Entertainer” at Dundee (1972), Cyrano de Bergerac at Newcastle (1974), Becket in “Murder in the Cathedral” at the Edinburgh Festival of 1986 and Macbeth in the same Festival in 1989. He also wrote and appeared in his own productions of “An Edinburgh Salon”, “At Your Service”, “The Ivor Novello Story” and “A Mackintosh Experience” while continuing to tour the world in his solo “The Robert Burns Story”.
His association with Burns began in 1965 with Tom Wright’s solo play “There Was A Man” at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and at the Arts Theatre, London. The solo was televised twice nationally and was also an album recording for REL Records, Edinburgh, as well as a video for Green Place Productions, Glasgow. From Burns he moved on to other solos on William McGonagall, Robert Service and Robert Louis Stevenson until he worked with New Zealand actress, _Alannah O’Sullivan_, at the Edinburgh Festival of 1978. They married in 1980. As Two For A Theatre they toured the world for P&O Cruises and the British Council as well as the Keedick Lecture Bureau, New York, with programmes on Byron, Wilde and Dorothy Parker until 1986. Cairney’s first film was Night Ambush (1957) for the Rank Organisation, followed by Windom’s Way (1957), Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), Victim (1961)and many more including Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Cleopatra (1963), The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) and A Study in Terror(1965). His many television parts include Branwell Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert, the Bruce and he has featured in all the main series: _”Dr. Finlay’s Casebook” …. Tim O’Shea (1 episode, 1963)_, Secret Agent (1964),The Avengers (1961), “Jackanory” (1971)_, Elizabeth R (1971), _”Taggart”(1969)_ etc. He also starred in BBC2’s “This Man Craig” …. Ian Craig (52 episodes, 1966-1967) In addition, he wrote and recorded his own songs for EMI at Abbey Road.
As a writer, Cairney has published two autobiographies and a novel, “Worlds Apart” as well as “A Scottish Football Hall of Fame” and “Heroes Are Forever” for Mainstream Publishing (Edinburgh) and “A Year Out In New Zealand” for Tandem Press, NZ. He wrote three Burns books for Luath Press in Edinburgh as well as biographies of R.L. Stevenson and C.R. Mackintosh and a book of essays on Glasgow entitled “Glasgow by the way, but”. His second novel, “Flashback Forward”, was published for Random House, NZ, and his book on acting, “Greasepaint Monkey” is due for publication by Luath Press, Edinburgh in 2010.
Dr Cairney gained an M.Litt from Glasgow University for a “History of Solo Theatre” in 1988 and, in 1994, a PhD from Victoria University, Wellington, for his study of Stevenson and Theatre. Having spent the last seventeen years in New Zealand, John and Alannah have now returned to live again in Scotland.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: John Cairney
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Susan Stephen was born in 1931 in London. Her film debut was in 1952 in “His Excellency”. She starred with Diana Dors in “Value for Money” in 1955, “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” with Jennifer Jones and “Carry on Nurse” with Shirley Eaton in 1959. She was at one time married to the film director Nicholas Roeg. She died in 2000.
Her “Independent” obituary:
A WIDE-EYED beauty with a demure yet lively personality, Susan Stephen was a star of British cinema in the Fifties, appearing as leading lady to such stars as Alan Ladd and Dirk Bogarde. Though her career diminished towards the end of the decade, she provided a welcome dash of sparkle and vivacity to the films in which she appeared.
Born in London in 1931, she was the daughter of the civil engineer Major Frederick Stephen, MC, who built railroads in South America and bridges across the Blue Nile – he was given the Order of the Nile by King Farouk. Susan’s mother died when she was very young, and she was raised by her father (plus nannies and housekeepers). She spent much of her childhood in Egypt, where her father was working, and on their estate in Scotland, but returned to England to study at Moira House in Eastbourne.
She then trained at Rada in London, and when appearing in a graduate class show was discovered by Cecil Madden, then controller of BBC television. He cast her in a television adaptation of Little Women in 1950 (the Laurie was David Jacobs) and other television shows, which led to her being signed in 1951 to make a movie in Italy, Fanciulle di lusso (Luxury Girls), the story of four girls from different countries at a finishing school – Marina Vlady was the French girl. Also in the cast was the handsome actor Lawrence Ward, who became Stephen’s first husband. Later, he was successful (as Michael Ward) in a second career as a photographer for the Sunday Times.
Her first British film was His Excellency (1951), an adaptation of a West End hit starring Eric Portman as a former union leader who is appointed governor of a British island colony. Stephen played Portman’s daughter, and though the film was not very successful, she attracted favourable comment.
After supporting roles in the melodrama Stolen Face (1952) with two Hollywood stars, Paul Henried and Lizabeth Scott, and two more stage adaptations, Treasure Hunt (1952) and Father’s Doing Fine (1952), Stephen was given the part of a parachute-packer who provides romance for a paratrooper (Alan Ladd) in The Red Beret (1953). The film was produced by Irving Allen and Albert Broccoli, and Stephen used to laugh in later years about the advertising they devised which put the drawing of a voluptuous body underneath her face on the posters.
The following year Stephen had one of her best roles, as a young girl who marries a jobless university graduate (Dirk Bogarde) to the dismay of her parents (Cecil Parker and Eileen Herlie) in For Better, For Worse. It was a charming domestic comedy with accomplished performances from its fine cast (which also included Athene Seyler, Dennis Price and Thora Hird). Stephen and Bogarde became firm friends, and in later years she would be a frequent guest at his home in the South of France.
In As Long As They’re Happy (1955), a satire on the teenage hysteria for the “crying” singer Johnnie Ray, Stephen was one of Jack Buchanan’s three daughters who were all mad about an American crooner, and in Value For Money (1955) she was a North Country lass whose rag millionaire boy- friend (John Gregson) goes off for a fling in London after they quarrel.
Stephen’s last good starring role was in Pacific Destiny (1956), based on Sir Arthur Grimble’s book A Pattern of Islands, which recounted his early experiences of serving in the South Seas. Stephen played Grimble’s wife, who starts a baby clinic for the natives. One of her co-stars, Michael Hordern, later suggested that the book’s more specific title might have given the excellent film the popularity it deserved.
Shot in Samoa, it was later cited by Stephen as her favourite film, possibly because during its making she fell in love with the assistant cameraman, Nicholas Roeg, who later became a film director. In 1957 she and Roeg were married. Stephen and Roeg had four sons during their 20- year marriage, and though they divorced in 1977 because, said Roeg, of professional pressures and the long periods spent apart, they remained close friends and would usually spend Christmas together with their children.
After Pacific Destiny Stephen had good roles as the flirtatious Belle in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957) and as an enterprising nurse who makes audacious use of a daffodil in Carry On Nurse (1959), but they were supporting parts, and her leading roles were in B movies such as The Court Martial of Major Keller and Return of the Stranger (both 1961) produced by the low- budget specialists the Danziger Brothers. Stephen told the historian Jim Simpson, “That was about as low as you could go, so I decided to retire from films.”
Though she had a town house, she loved country life and spent most of her time in Sussex, where she raised her children, kept four dogs and indulged a passion for riding – she was a fine horsewoman. When I mentioned to Nicholas Roeg that Michael Hordern once confessed that during the shooting of Pacific Destiny, he had developed a hopeless passion for Stephen, Roeg commented, “Everybody fell in love with Susan. She was hugely popular within the profession and charmed everybody who came into contact with her.”
Susan Stephen, actress: born London 16 July 1931; married first Lawrence Ward (marriage dissolved), second 1957 Nicholas Roeg (fours sons; marriage dissolved 1977); died 24 May 2000.
Tom Vallance The Independent 29 May 2000
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Born 1931 in London, 50s film actress Susan Stephen made her film debut with His Excellency (1952). Her demure, slightly elfin loveliness seemed to coincide with the duteous daughters and/or faithful wives she played. Although mainly confined to “B” level films, Susan’s more noticeable co-star roles occurred with Cocktails in the Kitchen(1954) and Value for Money (1955). Her movie career took a back seat in 1957 following her marriage to director Nicolas Roeg in 1957, which gently phased itself out within a few years. The couple later divorced in 1977 and he subsequently married Hollywood actressTheresa Russell. Susan died in England in 2000.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
