Barbara Knox is one of the stalwart’s of the long running “Coronation Street”. She first made her appearance there as Rita Littlewood in 1964. She was featured in the 1969 remake of “Goodbye Mr Chips”,
Brittish Actors
Barbara Knox is one of the stalwart’s of the long running “Coronation Street”. She first made her appearance there as Rita Littlewood in 1964. She was featured in the 1969 remake of “Goodbye Mr Chips”,
James Booth was born in 1927 in Croydon, Surrey. His movie debut came in 1956 in “The Narrowing Circle”. In 1960 he gained favourable reviews for his role in “The Trials of Oscar Wlde” as Alfred Wood. In 1963 he won the leading role opposite Barbara Windsor in Joan Littlewood’s “Sparrrows Can’t Sing”.
He then had a series of leading roles in such films as “Robbery” with Stanley Baker and “The Bliss of Mrs Blossom” with Shirley MacLaine. He went to Hollywood to continue his career. Towards the end of his life he returned to England. His last film was “Keeping Mum” in 2005, the year he died at the age of 78.
His “Guardian” obituary by Eric Shorter:
It was amid the social and political upheavals of the postwar British drama – Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at Stratford East, George Devine at the Royal Court and Peter Hall in London and at Stratford-on-Avon – that James Booth, the character actor who has died at 77, burst on the scene.
Booth seemed to excite the theatre like a fountain of high spirits, with his cockney voice and his mischievous way of expressing himself, sometimes teasing, sometimes truly.
He appeared to conquer whatever he touched, and being at Theatre Workshop the plays could be difficult. Whether old Spanish marital discord in Celestina; Shavian argument (The Man Of Destiny), Irish high farce (Brendan Behan’s The Hostage), low English musical (Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be) or Dickens’ sentiment A Christmas Carol, they were a challenge to a small and largely untrained troupe.
But Booth’s manner with an audience, which he took into his confidence, was so personal. It proved the same in Royal Court revivals of the old British jokes, Box And Cox, or the European ironies of The Fire Raisers, or the call-up humour of Henry Livings’ Nil Carborundum at the Arts. The reason for Booth’s success lay simply with his personality.
His height also helped. He would loom over the footlights with a commandingly wide grin. And his unpretentious manner added to the ease with which these early performances were accepted.
Yet Booth was hardly experienced as an actor. After two years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art he did eight Shakespeare plays as an Old Vic sword carrier before joining Theatre Workshop at Stratford East. And as Tosher, the lead, in Lionel Bart and Frank Norman’s cockney musical, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (a Stratford transfer that had a long West End run), Booth landed one of his richest roles in 1959.
In 1962 he was in two plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Critic Kenneth Tynan reckoned that, for him, The Comedy Of Errors, directed by Clifford Williams, gave the company its first sign of “a house style”.
In Peter Brook’s production of King Lear, the arch-villain Edmund was perhaps literally beyond Booth’s technical reach in arguing the difference between Regan and Goneril. At any rate his treatment of Shakespeare’s verse defeated Tynan. His tangled liaisons struck the critic as handling the verse “with the finesse of a gloved pugilist picking up pins.”
Joan Littlewood remarked of Booth at the time: “At all hours you’d find him propping up the bar; a cynical, witty, impossible character, lanky and agile, with his own peculiar life, and acting.” Booth stood for the rebellious spirit of the age, its attitude to middle-class authority, and his nasal speech and clownish instinct usually put him on what he himself would have rated matey terms with his audience – if not the critics. And by failing to regard Shakespeare or Pinter, Behan or Livings, as cherished text, he was being himself.
After another spell with Littlewood as a cheery cockney Robin Hood in her ill-fated staging of a West End musical, Twang!, Booth returned to the classics, though he seemed a far from classical actor. He played Face in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist at Chichester, Osip in Gogol’s The Government Inspector for the Welsh Drama Company and Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer.
In 1974, he played Chief Supt Craddock in Ken Hill’s Gentleman Prefer Anything, the last of his shows at Stratford East. He returned to the RSC the following year, and appeared in Measure For Measure and David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come. He then went to the United States, and was James Joyce in the Broadway production of the RSC’s Travesties by Tom Stoppard. Booth then stayed in the US, writing film and television scripts.
Booth’s films included Littlewood’s screen version of Stephen Lewis’s Sparrers Can’t Sing (1962), opposite Barbara Windsor, Alfred Wood in The Trials Of Oscar Wilde (1960); Ken Russell’s French Dressing and, playing Private Henry Hook, Zulu (both 1964). He was a Scotland Yard inspector in Robbery (1967) and Shirley MacLaine’s secret lover in The Bliss Of Mrs Blossom (1968).
On television he featured in such shows as Minder (1985), Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1986) and Bergerac (1990), he also played the ex-convict Ernie Niles in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990).
Born David Geeves-Booth at Croydon, Surrey the son of a probation officer, Booth quit Southend Grammar School at 17 and joined the army, and left with the rank of captain. He was interested in amateur dramatics and, while working for a mining company, he won a place at RADA at 24. Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates and Richard Harris were his fellow students.
· Booth married Paula Delaney in 1960. They had two sons and two daughters. James Booth (David Geeves-Booth), actor, born December 19 1927; died August 11 2005The avove “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Florence Desmond was born in London in 1905. She was known prinarily for her stage performances but she did star also in films. Her first film in 1930 was “The Road to Fortune”. She made a film in Hollywood. Her last film was “Some Girls Do” in 1969. Florence Desmond died in 1993.
Her “Independent” obituary:
Florence Desmond certainly tackled the easy ones – Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo – but it was with a satirical talent which other impersonators lack. She could draw a whole portrait with just a few strokes. I was delighted to come across her some years ago at the National Film Theatre in a Will Rogers vehicle, Mr Skitch. She played an English actress called Florence Desmond whom Rogers and family encounter in a trailer-park. She was on her way to Hollywood, she said, hoping to break into movies as an impersonator – and she did a stunningly accurate and funny Garbo and Zazu Pitts. The film was made in 1933, and she was in it because someone at Fox had seen her on the London stage.
She had already appeared in New York. She had started her career as a child dancer at the age of 10. Just out of her twenties she was appearing solo and in cabaret with Naunton Wayne. In 1928 she appeared in the Cochran revue This Year of Grace, written by Noel Coward, and she went with it when Coward and Beatrice Lillie took it to New York, understudying Lillie and performing ‘Dance, Little Lady’ with Coward. Over the next dozen or so years she consolidated her position as one of the brightest stars of the London stage, also appearing in variety and doing several stints as principal boy in pantomime. She was among the stars of the Royal Variety shows of 1937 and 1951.
Eventually it had become clear that while she was equally efficient as singer or dancer she was unique as an impersonator. It was in that capacity that she took New York by storm in what was said to be her debut there, at The Blue Angel night-club in 1946. The New York World-Telegram noted that ‘(Her) name is as much a household word in England as Gracie Fields’ or Beatrice Lillie’s’ – names advisedly chosen since these were two of her most brilliant impressions. After only three days her engagement was doubled. What she did then was what she did in her music-hall act – play all the guests at a Hollywood party. She moved from one to the other, using the minimum of props – gloves, a scarf – and miming drinking, smoking or the removal of glasses. She was as witty as she was accurate. As James Gavin says in his book on the clubs of that era,
Her most celebrated impression was of Hildegarde. Desmond entered with an armful of dying zinnias, which she dumped on the piano as she took her place on the bench. Lowering her head with a perplexed look, she found enough correct keys to approximate a Rachmaninoff prelude. Then scooping up some crumbling flowers, she stepped to ringside and smiled at an elderly man seated with his wife: ‘Tell me, the man in the grey flannel suit, are you in love?’.
I saw Hildegarde on the stage for the first time just two years ago, but have known her since childhood because of Desmond; 50 years I had waited to see Hildegarde pull off her elbow-length gloves the way Desmond did. There was neither ridicule nor malice in Desmond’s art – though I will make one exception, her job on Elisabeth Bergner in the 1940 Max Miller movie, Hoots Mon] She exaggerated that lady’s affectations, already too much, so that had Bergner seen them she would have retired on the spot. In that film she also did Cicely Courtneidge (just before her appearance at The Blue Angel she had taken over from Courtneidge in the musical Under the Counter), Davis specifically in Jezebel and Syd Walker. She wasn’t afraid to take on the men, and did a delicious parody of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in Private Lives.
But she was mainly affectionate. In 1948 a packed house at the Palladium was waiting to see Betty Hutton, heading the bill and making a sensational success of it. Desmond closed the first half offering, as we expected, her Hollywood party. Suddenly and audaciously she changed herself into Hutton, something a lesser artist would never have dared or got away with. But that was why we cherished her: not for the Hepburns and Tallulah Bankheads, but for those the others never attempted – Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy.
Even so she was simply too good an actress and comedienne to limit herself. ATP – the forerunner of Ealing – cast her as George Formby’s leading lady in his first important movie, No Limit (1935), and again in Keep Your Seats Please] (1936). Also in 1936 she played a temperamental French singer in Accused, with Douglas Fairbanks Jnr – so temperamental, in fact, that she gets murdered in reel two. After a long absence from the cinema she played a serious role in Three Came Home (1950), produced and written from Agnes Newton Keith’s autobiographical book by Nunnally Johnson and directed by Jean Negulesco. Keith was played without glamour by Claudette Colbert, and Desmond made a handsome contribution as her best friend in the internment camp.
After her debut at the Blue Angel, Desmond was as much in demand in the US as in Britain. She was one of the handful of cabaret performers to be seen time and again – unlike, say, Marlene Dietrich – because she was very funny and seldom the same twice. The golden age of the New York night-club ended, if not as quickly and decisively as the British music hall. Desmond appeared occasionally on television for a while. In 1952 she was in a play at the Comedy, The Apples of Eve, in fact taking on seven different roles. A little later her name disappeared from the trade reference books. We supposed she had retired, which she confirmed in a radio interview only about five years ago. Yes, she said, she was happily married and she had nothing to prove to anybody any more.
Apart from two late film appearances – Charley Moon (1956) and Some Girls Do (1958) – she came out of retirement just once, in 1958, to appear in Auntie Mame, at the Adelphi, opposite Beatrice Lillie’s Mame, as her friend and rival Vera Charles. Doubtless she was paid a small fortune to do so, since, by Coward’s own account, Lillie was so undisciplined in 1928 that he wanted ‘to wring her neck’ and she didn’t improve with the years. This was noticeable on stage, if hilariously so, but she was more precise in her scenes with the needle-sharp Desmond.
The above “Independent” obituary can be accessed online here.
Edward Duke was born in 1953 in London. His first film was “Silver Bears” in 1978. His other films inclunding “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “Invitation to the Wedding”. Edward Duke died in 1994 at the age of 40.
The “Independent” obituary:
Half the art of acting English comedies of manners consists in making those manners seem normal; and it is because so few actors since the Second World War have been able to do so that drawing- room comedy has grown so scarce. Duke had it at his fingertips. Not that he had reached the heights of a form of theatre which may one day return to fashion if more players of his quality can be found to practise it; but he had made such steady progress by way of Wodehouse, Pinero and Coward that it seems sad indeed that his career should have been cut so short.
What could have been a truer sign of his value to the theatrical drawing-room than that he should have had a role as apparently vacuous as the bachelor house guest in the present West End revival of Relative Values and fill it with the kind of languorous charm and drawling speech rhythms that made Coward’s characters seem intolerably snobbish in their day (1951) but so funny now? All he had to do was to butt in on other people’s conversations, throw in a sardonic observation or two, and just be present when someone needed someone to talk to.
Older playgoers might have once cast Hugh Williams for such a part, or Ronald Squire; for it takes real skill on the stage to look at ease when one has nothing much to say and even less to do; and Duke, who played the part so ably at Chichester but was too ill to resume it for the transfer to the restored Savoy, conferred precisely the mixture of dry courtesy and amused disdain necessary to such a socially conscious occasion.
He had seemed to possess it from the start. It is certainly not easy for an actor to acquire it. No one was surprised to learn that his father had been a diplomat, that the family had lived abroad, or that the novels of PG Wodehouse had been among the favourite reading of the young actor to be during his days in rep. What did raise eyebrows was his monocled assumption, alone in his mid-twenties in the studio of the Lyric, Hammersmith, of Bertie Wooster and the rest of the Master’s chumps and blighters, squirts and coves, and good and baddish eggs in a show called Jeeves Takes Charge.
It took charge of him on and off for 12 years; and though Jeeves did not in fact take charge of the entertainment so much as all the uncles and aunts, schoolgirls and chums, of the redoubtable Wooster, it remained a clever adaptation of the story and it made an unknown actor famous.
Having begun it in a Putney pub one lunchtime in the late 1970s, he took it round the world – North America, Australia, Taiwan – winning, apart from prizes abroad, the Laurence Olivier Award as the West End’s most promising actor of 1980.
While such one-man shows give an actor something to fall back on as well as every chance to show his paces, Duke also knew how to revive with the correct kind of social poise and elegance Coward’s characters – Victor, for example, in Private Lives (Aldwych, 1990) – and Pinero’s people in Preserving Mr Panmure at Chichester and Trelawney of the ‘Wells’ in the West End.
Who can say what he might not have done had he been able to act in Lonsdale, Maugham, or William Douglas Home if their chance ever came round again?
The above “Independent” obituary by Adam Benedick cn also be accessed online here.
Clive Francis was born in 1946 in Eastbourne and is the son of the actor Raymond Francis. His films include “A Clockwork Orange” with Malcolm McDowell in 1971 and “Girl Stroke Boy”. He is married to actress Natalie Ogle.
IMDB entry:
Clive Francis was born on June 26, 1946 in Eastbourne, Sussex, England. He is known for his work on A Clockwork Orange (1971), Sharpe’s Company (1994) and Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman (2005). He is married to Natalie Ogle. They have two children.
Valerie French was born in London in 1928. Her first film was the Italian “Maddalena” in 1954. She subsequently went to Hollywood and made films such as “Jubal” opposite Glenn Ford in and “Decision at undown” with Randolph Scott. Her last major film was “Shalako” with Sean Connery. Brigitte Bardot, Stephen Boyd and Honor Blackman. Valerie French died in 1990 at the age of 62 in New York.
“New York Times” obituary:
Valerie French, who began her career as a much-publicized starlet for Columbia Pictures and became a screen, stage and television actress who specialized in playing a diverse collection of English characters, died Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 59 years old. She died of leukemia, said a friend, Tom Seligson, a television producer. Miss French was born in London and spent her early childhood in Spain, returning to England to attend Malvern Girls’ College in Worcestershire and then join the BBC drama department.
After several years in television production, she joined the Theater Royal Repertory Company in Windsor, where she played small parts. After a screen test and a role in the film “The Constant Husband” in 1955, she went to Hollywood and became a contract actress with Columbia Pictures. She starred opposite Glenn Ford and Rod Steiger in “Jubal” (1956) and with Lee J. Cobb in “The Garment Jungle” (1957). On Broadway she acted in “Inadmissible Evidence” (1965) and “Help Stamp Out Marriage!” (1966). In “The Mother Lover,” at the Booth Theater in 1969, she caused something of a sensation by appearing onstage nude with her back to the audience.
Miss French starred Off Broadway in Harold Pinter’s “Tea Party” and “The Basement” in 1968, in a 1980 revival of Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” and as the mother, Helen, in a production of “A Taste of Honey” in 1981. Her television credits include roles in “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “The Prisoner,” “The Nurses,” “Edge of Night” and “Brighter Day.”
Miss French was twice married and twice divorced. In a 1981 interview she said that she and her second husband, the actor Thayer David, had been planning to remarry when he died in 1978.There are no immediate survivors.
Her obituary in “The New York Times” can also be accessed here.
Christopher Guard was born in London in 1953. He is perhaps best known for his role in the television series “Casulty” on BBC. His films include “Vienna 1900”, “A Little Night Music” in 1977 amd “Memoirs of a Survivor” with Julie Christie in 1981.
Danny La Rue was born Daniel Carroll in Cork in 1927. When he was six, his family moved to London. He served in the British Royal Navy as a young man. He began performing in nightclubs in the late 1950’s and soon had built up a following for his a female impersonations. He was very popular in the 1960’s and had his own nightclub. In 1972 he starred in his only film “Our Miss Fred”. Danny La Rue died in 2009 at the age of 81.
His “Guardian” obituary:
Danny La Rue, who has died aged 81, flouted the usual showbusiness rule that, to be funny, every female impersonator needed to have an obvious suggestion of –hobnailed boots beneath a long frock. In a variation on this tradition, he appeared attired in sequinned dresses, but immediately said “wotcher, mates!” in a gruff voice. Yet what La Rue achieved was to replace a traditionally derisive mocking of women, that showed them as faintly grotesque, with glitter and elegance. He did it to such an extent that, apart from his height of over 6ft, he might easily have been a beautiful woman trying her luck with saucy jokes and sentimental songs. He became the first performer for many years to base his entire career on impersonating women.
“Vulgar, yes, but there is nothing crude about me,” was his guiding maxim, as he flounced around variety stages, clubs, pierheads and pantomimes, doing a dozen changes a show, sometimes with stylish but over-the-top dresses which cost £5,000 each. At his peak, in the 1970s, he was earning the equivalent of £2m a year, and had four homes, a Rolls-Royce and an entourage of 60. La Rue was never a gay icon, nor a butt of the feminist movement, which sometimes surprised him. His core audience was, in fact, blue-rinsed ladies of a certain age who sent gushing letters congratulating him on his awards: showbusiness personality of the year in 1969, theatre personality of the year in 1970, 25 years in show business award in 1976 and entertainer of the decade in 1979. They wrote saying how much they admired his legs or his self-manufactured rubber bosom, presumably because they identified with him and were comfortable with his act – though it sometimes included raucous jokes which, coming from anyone else, might have caused deep offence. He got away with it, he claimed, because everyone knew that everything he did and said was just a pretence: he regarded himself as an actor.
Although Paul Scofield tried to –persuade him to act in “legitimate” –theatre, and Laurence Olivier wanted him to play Lady Macbeth, La Rue did not risk trying to escape his limitations. He would explain that taking off –Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Bette Davis and Joan Collins, or Sophie Tucker singing My Yiddisher Mama, was acting enough. As a cabaret perfomer, he could be decidedly risqué, earning himself the nicknames Danny La Rude and Danny La Blue. Offstage, he could also be reckless and get away with it. Once, he was appearing at a London club and in a –Coventry pantomime simultaneously. At the same time, the royal family were asking for an increase in the civil list. When the Duke of Edinburgh, visiting La Rue’s show, asked him if he was doing it for the cash, La Rue replied that it seemed to be all the fashion. A Guardian critic said in the 1960s that La Rue’s material was “dirty night-club jokes for drunks and bored people and other actors, and yet it is truly cleansing and cathartic”. To which a reader from Hampstead – not usually regarded as the centre of La Rue’s core audience – inquired acidly whether the critic was “going through a period of severe mental strain”. The reader –obviously regarded La Rue’s material as neither filthy nor psychologically significant, just funny. This was the received opinion throughout a long career which, he said, was sustained by discipline and application.
Born Daniel Patrick Carroll in Cork, Ireland, La Rue was the youngest son of a Roman Catholic cabinet-maker, who had five children. La Rue never knew him. His father went to New York in the 1920s with the idea of bringing his family over later, but died before this could happen. Danny was then 18 months old. His mother, whom he described as his life’s inspiration, decided to compromise by seeking the family’s fortunes in England. She lived in Soho, central London, struggling on her widow’s pension and wages as a seamstress to provide for the large family, while young Danny attended schools in London and then, evacuated from London during the blitz, in Exeter. One day he found his mother in tears because she didn’t know where the money for his new school uniform was going to come from. On leaving school, he earned £1.50 a week in a –bakery; wartime rationing was in place and he was allowed to take cakes home as a perk. He got a job in Exeter as a window-dresser, then moved back to London, doing the same job for an Oxford Street store.
Called up for the Royal Navy, he made his first stage appearance, aged 18, as a native girl in a comic send-up of the serious play White Cargo. John Gielgud saw it in Singapore and told La Rue that he should take his ability to make people laugh more seriously. Once he left the navy, he did so. An old naval friend told him about auditions for an all-male chorus in the show Forces Showboat. Harry Secombe was in the same show.
Forces Showboat went on tour for months, but La Rue saw little point in dressing up as a woman in the –provinces. It didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere, so he returned to the Oxford Street store and initiated lunch-time fashion shows. Then the promoter Ted Gatty persuaded him to do a West End revue in drag. He would do it, said La Rue, as long as it were not under his real name. When he arrived for rehearsals he found that Gatty had already given him the name Danny La Rue. The producer Cecil Landau saw the show and got La Rue a two-week slot at Churchill’s club in Mayfair, which turned into a three-year engagement as top of the bill. La Rue spent the 1950s appearing on stage, often in –pantomimes staged by the impresario Tom Arnold. He also appeared in cabaret in clubs with such success that, in the early 1960s, he opened Danny’s, his own club in Hanover Square, which lasted nine years.
This was in contrast to a later business venture, in the 1970s: restoring the derelict stately home Walton Hall near Stratford-upon-Avon, which he had bought for £500,000 – much of his considerable savings. He poured the rest into restoration and turning it into a hotel and arts centre, only to find that the two Canadian managers were conmen who had left him with a pile of unpaid bills, for which La Rue was legally responsible. The day after his 56th birthday, La Rue’s company went into voluntary liquidation and he was forced to sell his home in Henley to pay off the debt. It got worse. In 1984 he took the lead in Hello, Dolly! which was critically panned and closed soon after. Later that year, his manager of 30 years, Jack Hanson, whom he described as “the love of my life”, died of a stroke. La Rue drank himself to sleep every night until a –psychic told him that his pet dog was the reincarnation of Hanson. Taking –further comfort from his Catholic religion – he kept a little shrine by his –bedside – La Rue resumed his disciplined routine of personal appearances at pierheads and in pantomime, rationing his television appearances as always. Why, he asked, should people pay to see him on stage when they could see him for free on TV?
He never married and was angry at those who called his announced, but later called-off, engagement to an American millionairess in 1987 a publicity stunt. In 2000, his companion Wayne King, an Australian pianist, died aged 46, of Aids. Two years later, in recognition of the thousands of pounds he raised for Aids charities, La Rue was appointed OBE (the Queen was said to be a great admirer of his act). Suffering from the eye condition macular degeneration, in 2006 he also suffered a stroke, though even then his agent said that La Rue was “dying to get his old frocks out, dust them off and get back in the limelight”. Shortly afterwards, in poor health and receiving financial assistance from an actors’ charity, he moved in to the home of his former dresser and longtime friend Annie Galbraith, who cared for him until his death.
• Danny La Rue (Daniel Patrick Carroll), female impersonator and actor, born 26 July 1927; died 31 May 2009
The above Dennis Barker obituary on Danny La Rue can also be accessed online here.
Danny La Rue (1927–2009) was a transformative figure in British entertainment, credited with moving drag from the fringes of “seedy” underground clubs into the heart of mainstream family variety. Born Daniel Patrick Carroll in Cork, Ireland, he became the highest-paid entertainer in Britain during the 1960s and 70s, famously describing himself not as a drag queen, but as a “comic in a frock.”
La Rue’s career was built on a foundation of rigorous theatrical discipline and high-glamour artifice.
The Naval Beginnings (1944–1947): Like many performers of his generation, La Rue discovered his talent for female impersonation while serving in the Royal Navy. He appeared in concert parties to entertain troops, notably playing a “native girl” in a spoof of the film White Cargo.
The Nightclub King (1950s–1960s): After the war, he worked as a window dresser while performing in all-male revues like Forces in Petticoats. His big break came in London cabaret, leading him to open his own nightclub, Danny La Rue’s, in Hanover Square in 1964. It became a legendary celebrity haunt, attracting everyone from Princess Margaret to Judy Garland.
West End and Television Dominance: La Rue successfully transitioned to the West End in hits like Come Spy with Me (1966). He became a staple of The Good Old Days and numerous Royal Variety Performances, often standing over seven feet tall due to his massive plumed headdresses and platform heels.
The “Hello, Dolly!” Experiment (1984): In a historic move, La Rue became the first man to play the lead female role in a major West End musical production of Hello, Dolly!. While a personal milestone, the production was critically panned and short-lived.
Critically, La Rue’s success relied on a specific psychological contract with his audience. He was a master of “the wink.”
Maintaining Masculinity: He would frequently break the illusion of his glamorous gowns by dropping his voice into a baritone “Wotcha mates!” or referring to his “self-manufactured rubber bosom.”
The Safety Valve: By constantly reminding the audience he was “just a bloke in a dress,” he made drag “safe” for conservative, middle-class audiences (particularly his large female fan base, the “blue-rinse brigade”). This distinguished him from later, more subversive acts like Lily Savage, who stayed in character to challenge societal norms.
Before La Rue, British drag was often rooted in the “Ugly Sister” tradition—grotesque, messy, and mocking of femininity. La Rue revolutionized the form through extravagance.
Aesthetic Elevation: He invested thousands of pounds in couture gowns, ostrich feathers, and high-quality wigs. His act was a tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood (impersonating Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor) rather than a parody of womanhood.
Technical Precision: Critics often noted his “courageous trouperism.” Even in his later years, his movements remained elegant and his comic timing surgical, proving that drag could be a high-technical art form rather than just a comedic gimmick.
In the 1960s, as Britain navigated the “permissive society” and the decriminalization of homosexuality, La Rue acted as a cultural bridge.
Conservative Modernity: He thrived in the “casino economy” of Soho but maintained a devoutly Catholic and conservative personal image.
The Master of Innuendo: His humor was “naughty” but never “filthy.” He utilized the British Music Hall tradition of double entendre, which allowed him to be risqué without being offensive. This “clean-dirty” balance was the key to his longevity on BBC television.
The later years of his career provide a critical look at the shifting tastes of the British public.
The Decline of Variety: As the traditional variety circuit faded, La Rue’s style—which relied on artifice and sentimentality—began to feel dated to younger audiences.
The Tragic Element: His later life was marked by financial loss (losing a fortune to a hotel scam) and the death of his partner and manager, Jack Hanson. Critics noted that his later one-man shows, where he appeared mostly out of drag, lacked the protective “glitter” of his prime, revealing a more vulnerable and sometimes embittered performer.
Daniel Massey was born in 1933 in London. He was the son of actors Adrianne Allen and Raymond Massey. He made his film debut in 1942 in “In Which We Serve”. His other films include “Mary, Queen of Scots”, “The Cat and the Canary” and “Vault of Horror”. His best remembered film role was in “Star” where he played Noel Coward. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. Daniel Massey died in 1998 at the age of 64.
“Independent” obituary:
The son of the famous Canadian actor Raymond Massey and the actress Adrienne Allen, and the godson of Noel Coward, he was born in London in 1933 and educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge (where he acted with the university’s Footlights Club). After two years in the Scots Guards he decided to follow in his parents’ footsteps, appearing at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. He made his London debut at the Cambridge Theatre in 1957 with an outstanding performance as a gauche young American aristocrat in The Happiest Millionaire, a delightful comic portrayal which earned the cheers of first-nighters and rave reviews.
The same year, he made his adult screen debut (as a boy he had had a role in Coward’s In Which We Serve) in Girls at Sea and the following year he displayed his song and dance ability in the revue Living for Pleasure starring Dora Bryan (who named her oldest child, adopted during the run, after him). One of the show’s highlights was Massey’s smooth rendition with Janie Marden of the Richard Addinsell/Arthur Macrae duet “Love You Good, Love You Right”, and it led to the starring role in the Wolf Mankowitz musical Make Me An Offer (1959). With a stylishly witty performance as Charles Surface in John Gielgud’s revival of The School for Scandal at the Haymarket in 1962, Massey demonstrated his versatility, and throughout his career would prove equally adept in musicals, dramas, comedies and classics.
In 1963 in New York he created the role of Georg, the young salesman conducting a pen-pal romance with, unknowingly, his own shop assistant colleague (Barbara Cook), in the musical She Loves Me, now regarded a classic though it initially ran for only nine months. “When we came to the last performance,” said Massey later, “I cried right through the show . . . perhaps because it is so rare in one’s work that one can persuade oneself you say, ‘Hey, that was good.’ “
He returned to London to play Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (1964) at the Royal Court, then starred in Neil Simon’s comedy Barefoot in the Park (1965), as Captain Absolute in The Rivals (1966) and Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest (1967).
He returned to musicals with Popkiss (1972) in London and a stage version of the film Gigi (1973) in New York, though neither was a great success. Sporadic film appearances included The Entertainer (1960) and Moll Flanders (1965), and in 1968 his performance as his own godfather Noel Coward in Star!, the film biography of Gertrude Lawrence, was indisputably the best thing about the film, winning him a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actor, plus an Oscar nomination. Coward himself wrote after seeing it,
Daniel Massey was excellent as me and had the sense to give an impression of me rather than try to imitate me. He was tactless enough to sing better than I do, but of course without my special matchless charm!
In fact, Massey both sang well and purveyed a lot of charm, and had the film been more successful it might have led to more prolific screen work. Instead, he concentrated on the theatre where his Lytton Strachey in Peter Luke’s Bloomsbury (1974), and Othello in Birmingham (1976) and a memorable Rosmer in Rosmersholm (1977) found him successfully tackling weightier roles. Joining the National Theatre, he played in The Philanderer (1979), The Hypochondriac (1981) and won the Swet award as Best Actor for his John Tanner in Shaw’s Man and Superman (1981). Two seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company (1983-84) included works by Shakespeare, Saroyan (The Time of Your Life) and Granville Barker (Waste). “The Shaws, the Shakespeares and the Chekhovs are meat and drink to me,” Massey stated. “It’s the ambiguities in roles that are so important.” In 1987 he played the tortured hero Ben in the London production of Follies, introducing a new song written for the character by Stephen Sondheim, “Make the Most of Your Music”.
Massey’s own private life had its share of anguish. His parents divorced when he was six, and his mother, a noted beauty and a major star, gave glittering parties but was cold to him. Massey later described her as “an evil woman, a psychopath”, comparing her emotionally with Myra Hindley; such criticism totally estranged him from his actress sister Anna. (“It’s not Anna’s, it’s my problem,” he would admit.) Massey did not see his mother for the last 10 years of her life and did not go to her funeral.
In the mid-Fifties he married the actress Adrienne Corri (his mother refused to attend the wedding). “We were agonisingly incompatible but we had an extraordinary physical attraction,” he stated. The tempestuous marriage ended in 1968, and after another relationship which produced a son, Paul, he married the actress Penelope Wilton, with whom he had a daughter Alice. After his divorce from Wilton, he formed a relationship with her younger sister Lindy in 1984, the same year he started an ultimately successful course of psycho-therapy to combat acute depression. Later he and Lindy married, but in 1992 Massey was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. With typical wit and charm he joked about it: “If you’ve got to have a serious illness, that’s the one to get, because it’s get-at- able”. And he successfully fought it off with chemotherapy, returning to the stage with an acclaimed performance as Wilhelm Furtwangler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third Reich, in Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides (1995), which raised the question of the ambivalent conductor’s motives in playing for Hitler’s regime.
After the London run, Massey want to Broadway with the play, for what was sadly to be his last theatrical triumph.
Daniel Raymond Massey, actor: born London 19 October 1933; married first Adrienne Corri (marriage dissolved 1968), (one son), second Penelope Wilton (one daughter; marriage dissolved), third Lindy Wilton (two stepdaughters); died London 25 March 1998.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.