Tony Osoba was born in Glasgow in 1947. He has guest starred in most of the popular British television series since the 1970’s including “The Professionals”, “Dempsey and Makepeace”, and “Between the Lines”. He starred with Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale in TV’s “Porridge”. His films include “Game for Vultures” in 1979 with Richard Harris and Joan Collins and “Who Dares Wins” i 1982 with Richard Widmark and Lewis Collins. His website here.
IMDB Entry:
Tony Osoba was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and has become a familiar face to TV audiences in a career spanning more than 30 years. Tony joined the RSAMD at the age of 18 in Glasgow. His breakthrough role came in 1974 when he starred opposite Ronnie Barker in the popular BBC sitcom ‘Porridge’. Tony played in-mate Jock McLaren throughout the 3 seasons of the show, as well as appearing in the first episode of the follow-up series ‘Going Straight’ in 1978 and starring in the film version of Porridge in 1979.
During his career he has made more than 200 television appearances, including ‘Doctor Who’ opposite Tom Baker in the 1979 story ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’, and later in the 1987 story ‘Dragonfire’, with Sylvester McCoy. In 1985, Tony starred as Det. Sgt. Chas Jarvis in all three seasons of the Drama series ‘Dempsey & Makepeace’, and later joined the cast of ‘Coronation Street’ in 1990 as Peter Ingram. In the 1990s, he appeared in programmes such as ‘The Bill’, ‘Taggart’, ‘Bugs’ and ‘Holby City’. Tony has also had a successful career on the stage, and recently starred in a major UK Theatre Tour of Rodger & Hammerstein’s ‘The King & I’ in 2005.
Walter Fitzgerald was a distinguished British character actor. He was born in 1896 in Devon. His first film was in 1932 in “Murder In Covent Garden”. His cinema highlights include “In Which We Serve”, “San Demitro, London”, “The Fallen Idol” and “Treasure Island”. He went to Hollywood in 1959 to make “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” for Walt Disney. He died in 1976 in London at the age of 80.
Square-jawed, balding British character actor who usually played authority figures and men of integrity. In his youth, he was briefly active on the Stock Exchange before training at RADA for an acting career. Began on stage in 1922, in films ten years later. His best spell was from the mid-1940’s, notably as Dr. Fenton The Fallen Idol (1948) and Squire Trelawney in Treasure Island (1950).
By Steve Vertlieb: Yvonne Monlaur was the young, fabulously lovely, sweetly innocent French actress who co-starred with Peter Cushing in Hammer Films’ classic vampire thriller Brides Of Dracula (1960), directed by Terence Fisher, and appeared opposite Christopher Lee in Hammer’s Terror of the Tongs (1961).
She was a sweet, gentle lady who cherished her fans, and was ever grateful for the opportunities that she’d been given. Yvonne, and dear friend Veronica Carlson introduced me from the stage when I presented the posthumous “Laemmle” life achievement award to Bernard Herrmann (accepted by his daughter, Dorothy) at the wonderful Fanex monster film convention in Crystal City, Virginia in 2000.
She was always the most gracious, kind, and humble actress that you’d ever wish to meet. Yvonne passed away, sadly, this past week on Tuesday, April 18th, at age 77.
Her gentle presence will be missed by all of us who frequented these events, but her radiant beauty and generosity of spirit will live on in her many screen appearances, as well as in the joyful memories of those of us fortunate enough to have met, and known her. May God rest her tender soul.
Elton Hayes was a British guitarist/singer and actor. He was born in 1915 in Bletchley. He served in India during World War Two. After the War he began a career on radio principally on “Children’s Hour”. Two of his best-loved songs are Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” and”The Gypsy Rover”. His films include Walt Disney’s “The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men” in 1952 where he played Alan-a-Dale and “The Black Knight” which also starred Alan Ladd and Patricia Medina. Elton Hayes retired from performing at an early age and took up farming. He died in 2001.
Good article on Elton Hayes in “Films of the Fifties” can be accessed here.
Amanda Barrie has had a long and distinguished career in British theatre, cinema and television. She was born in Ashton-Under -Lyne in 1935. She trained at the Old Bristol Theatre School. Her first film was “Operation Bullshine” in 1959. She starred in many comedies in the early 1960’s and had the leading role in “Carry On Cleo” in 1964. She starred with Billy Fury in “I’ve Gotta Horse”. In 1988 she began her recurring role in “Coronation Street” as Alma Baldwin. She left the series in 2001 and went on to star in TV’s “Bad Girls”.
Her IMDB entry:
This feisty and very funny British comedienne and musical revue vet with the trademark 60s brunet page-boy haircut, pronounced jaw, and arguably the largest, Bette Davis-like eyes in London was born Shirley Anne Broadbent in Ashton-under-Lyne, Cheshire on September 14, 1935. The daughter of Hubert Howath Broadbent, an accountant, and wife Connie (Pyke) Broadbent, who greatly prodded her young daughter into becoming a performer, Amanda was named after the Depression-era child star Shirley Temple. Her grandfather was a theatre owner in Ashton-under-Lyne, and young Shirley made her very first appearance there at the age of 3 as a Christmas Tree Fairy.
Not long after this she began training earnestly in singing and in dance, particularly ballet. As a youngster she won a talent-judging contest singing “I’m Just a Little Girl Who’s Looking for a Little Boy”. She then went on to attend school at St. Anne’s College in St. Anne’s-on-Sea and later studied acting at the Cone-Ripman School.
After her parents’ divorce, the teenager ran away from home and off to London where she lived at the Theatre Girls Club and subsequently found work as a chorus girl. By 1958 she had changed her marquee name to “Amanda Barrie” and made her TV debut with the comedy team of Morecambe and Wise in which her skirt accidentally fell off on live TV. She then took her first West End curtain call in a 1961 production of “Babes in the Wood”. Eventually Amanada decided to set her sights beyond a dancing career, and moved more into musical revue work in the hopes for good comedy parts. Finding work as a dancer in cabaret shows and the revue “On the Brighter Side”, she also trained at the Bristol Old Vic but did not perform in repertory.
Throughout the 1960s Amanda focused on her musical talents in the West End, and sparkled in a number of comedy shows. In the early part of the decade she hit solid notices with the revues “Six of One” (1963) with Dora Bryan and “See You Inside (1963)”. Other stage work (which included occasional drama) came in the form of “Cabaret” (as Sally Bowles), “Private Lives”, “Hobson’s Choice, “Any Wednesday”, “A Public Mischief”, “She Loves Me” (replacing Rita Moreno in London), and “Little by Little”. She also worked as the TV hostess on “Double Your Money” with Hughie Green and appeared in a number of comedy films: Operation Bullshine (1959), her debut in an unbilled bit, A Pair of Briefs(1962), Doctor in Distress (1963)and I’ve Gotta Horse (1966). She appeared to very good advantage in two of the slapstick “Carry On…” film series. She played a female cabbie in the Carry on Cabby (1963) and Cleopatra herself (with a sexy lisp) in Carry on Cleo(1964).
After her film peak Amanda continued to show resiliency on stage and TV. Theatre endeavors included “Absurd Person Singular”, the musical “Stepping Out” with Julia McKenzie, “The Mating Game”, “Blithe Spirit (as Elvira) and “Twelfth Night”. Occasional movie work came in, including the addled comedy One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975) with Helen Hayes. Of the countless sitcoms Amanda has been involved in, she became a soap opera favorite beginning in 1981 with her participation as Alma Sedgewick inCoronation Street (1960). Her appearances were infrequent until the character became a regular in 1989. She retired the role after 11 years in 2001 in an effort to spread her wings once again and seek other work. The producers actually killed off her popular character in quick fashion with a rapid case of cervical cancer.
In 1967 Amanda married actor and theatre director Robin Hunter and the twosome appeared occasionally on stage together, including the pantomime “Aladdin” in late 1967 and 1968 in which Amanda had the title role. The couple separated in the 1980s, however, but remained good friends and never divorced. Hunter died in 2004. In 1997 Amanda battled a serious optic disease in which she eventually lost the sight of her left eye. She has continued to perform, however, and more recent work has included the pantomimes “Jack and the Beanstalk” (2006) and “Cinderella” (2007), in which she played the Fairy Godmother. In her popular and highly candid autobiography “It’s Not a Rehearsal,” a best seller published in 2003, Amanda opened up for the first time about her bisexuality.
Original Cinema Quad Poster; Movie Poster; Film Poster
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Craig Kelly is best known for two television series “Queer As Folk” and “Coronation Street”. He was born in 1970 in Lythams St Annes. His films include “When Saturday Comes” and “Titanic”.
Diane Cilento was born in 1933 in Queensland, Australia. Her parents were both distinguished medical doctors. She trained for the theatre in New York but made her acting career breakthrough in the U.K. Her first major film was “Passage Home” in 1955 with Peter Finch and Michael Craig. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Tom Jones” with Albert Finney. In the U.S. she made “Hombre” with Paul Newman. Diane Cilento returned back living in Australia, where she died in 2012. Jason Connery is her son from her marriage to Sean Connery.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary of Diane Cilento in “The Guardian”:
Such is the superficial nature of fame that the Australian-born actor Diane Cilento, who has died of cancer aged 78, was best remembered as the wife of Sean Connery from 1962 to 1973, during the height of his fame as James Bond. The attractive, blonde, husky-voiced Cilento would be more fittingly recalled for her roles in a dozen or so British films in the 1950s and 60s, to which she brought a dose of much-needed sexuality. However, her best-known part was in the cultish The Wicker Man (1973), her last British picture before returning to her homeland.
Born in Brisbane, she was the daughter of Sir Raphael and Lady Phyllis Cilento, both physicians. Much to their initial disappointment, Diane decided against following them into the medical profession. After winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, at the age of 17, she started to get film, theatre and television parts.
Cilento disliked the majority of her early films, which were quite anaemic, apart from the passion she injected into her roles, something she put down to her Italian ancestry. Her first leading part was in Roy Ward Baker’s murky J Arthur Rank drama Passage Home (1955), as the only woman on a cargo ship from South America to London. Her sultry presence naturally gets the crew all steamed up, especially the captain Peter Finch and first mate Anthony Steele. She again causes sexual tension in The Woman for Joe (also 1955), this time between a fairground owner (George Baker) and a dwarf working as one of his attractions. In the same year, Cilento married an Italian aristocrat, Andrea Volpe, with whom she had a daughter, Giovanna.
Her allure was almost enough to sustain the whimsical The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp (1956), in which she played the title role – she is sent on a goodwill mission to Earth, landing in the Angel, Islington. Much classier was Lewis Gilbert’s adaptation of the JM Barrie play The Admirable Crichton (1957), in which Cilento is winsome and poignant as the maidservant Eliza Tweeny, in love with the perfect butler (Kenneth More), who takes over his master’s role when his employer’s family are shipwrecked and marooned on a desert island.
It was back to morbid melodramas with The Full Treatment (1960), in which Cilento was the French wife of a disturbed racing driver (Ronald Lewis), and I Thank a Fool (1962), in which she pulls all the stops out as the mentally unstable wife of a barrister. Thankfully, the role of Molly Seagrim came along in Tom Jones (1963), for which she was Oscar-nominated (along with Edith Evans and Joyce Redman in the same picture). Cilento, in a dark wig, exudes vitality as the first of many young women to seduce the young hero, all in the spirit of Tony Richardson’s reduction of Henry Fielding’s great mock heroic “novel of manners” to a bawdy romp.
By now married to Connery – whom she had met in 1957 in an ITV production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, and with whom she had a son – Cilento made a brief sortie into Hollywood. It started with Carol Reed’s spectacular but half-baked The Agony and The Ecstasy (1965), in which, as the Countess de Medici, she kept her dignity while encouraging Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo to finish painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Martin Ritt’s Hombre (1967), a Stagecoach variation, gave Cilento a chance to shine as a widowed landlady in a western opposite Paul Newman as a blue-eyed white man raised by Apaches.
Back in the UK, Cilento made a few more films, culminating in The Wicker Man in 1973, written by Anthony Shaffer, whom she was to marry 12 years later. In this mixture of horror, eroticism and religion, set on a pagan Scottish island, Cilento had fun as the schoolteacher who upsets the repressed religious police sergeant by her teaching her girl pupils about phallic symbols.
After her divorce from Connery, Cilento returned to Australia and retired from cinema, but not acting. She also returned to her first love – the theatre. She had already appeared on Broadway in 1956 as Helen of Troy (for which she won a Tony award) in Tiger at the Gates, Christopher Fry’s adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s play on the Trojan war. Also on Broadway, she was Ellie Dunn in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1959-60), and in The Good Soup (1960), an adaptation from Félicien Marceau’s play.
Cilento had also been busy in the London theatre in the 1950s and 60s. Roles in The Changeling, The Big Knife, Miss Julie (perfect in the title role at the Lyric Hammersmith) and other plays at the Royal Court all gave her more satisfaction than her films.
In the 1980s, she settled in Mossman, Queensland, where she built her own outdoor amphitheatre called the Karnak Playhouse in the rainforest. She made one last film in Australia, the rather feeble The Boy Who Had Everything (1985), playing the mother of her real-life son, Jason Connery.
Shaffer died in 2001. Cilento is survived by her two children.
• Diane Cilento, actor, born 5 October 1933; died 6 October 2011
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN, British poster, Laurence Harvey center heads top from left: Diane Cilento, Julie Harris, Elina Labourdette, Mai Zetterling, heads bottom from left: Catherine Boyle, Eva Gabor, Jocelyn Lane, 1957 Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDTRAB EC101
David Daker was born in 1937 in the West Midlands. He is perhaps best known for his role of Harry Crawford in the popular television series “Boon” which ran from 1986 until 1995. His films include “O Lucky Man”in 1973 , “I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle”, “Stardust” and “Aces High”. Link to British Film Forum thread on David Daker here.
Daphne Anderson was born in 1922 in London. Her film debut came with “Trottie True” in 1949 which starred Jean Kent. Ms Anderson’s films include “Hobson’s Choice”, “A Kid for Two Farthings”, “The Prince and Showgirl” with Laurence Oliver and Marilyn Monroe and “No Time for Tears” with Anna Neagle. In 1965 she starred with John Gregson in the popular television series “Gideon’s Way”. She died in 2012.
Her obituary in “The Stage”:
Having taken dancing classes, she made her professional debut as a member of the chorus in Cinderella at the Richmond Theatre in 1937-38. Later in 1938, she appeared at the Windmill Theatre in Revudeville, the non-stop variety show that featured tableaux of nude young women whom the law prevented from moving while on stage.
Her first substantial role was Dora in a tour of the Gershwins’ musical Funny Face. During the Second World War, she worked for the Entertainment National Services Association, the organisation set up to entertain the troops. Towards the end of the war, she began a long association with the Players Theatre, the ersatz music hall club underneath Charing Cross station.
In 1943, she appeared in a musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, playing both Father William and the walrus at the old Scala Theatre. Two years later, she was in a rather more upmarket revue than Revudeville – Noel Coward’s Sigh No More at the Piccadilly, in which she played the clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, in the Blithe Spirit Ballet.
Coward was evidently sufficiently impressed with her to give her a small part in Pacific 1860, his musical about a British colony set in Victorian times, at Drury Lane (1946-47).
After a revue at Bolton’s, a small theatre club in South Kensington, she returned to the West End to appear in a long forgotten Eric Maschwitz musical, Belinda Fair (1949). More work at the Players and another small theatre club, the Watergate, followed. She then landed the best role of her career, playing Polly Peachum in the Brecht/Weill musical, The Threepenny Opera (1956), at the Royal Court. The Stage commended her for exhibiting “the right blend of coarseness and charm”.
Her cinema career, which began in 1949, included three films of note – The Beggar’s Opera (1953), Hobson’s Choice (1954) and A Kid for Two Farthings (1955).
Daphne Anderson, who was born Daphne Scrutton on April 27, 1922, died on January 15, aged 90.
“The Stage” obituary can also be accessed online here.
