British Actors Archives - Page 116 of 131

Muriel Pavlow

Muriel Pavlow obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019

Although her father was a Russian émigré and her mother was Swiss-French, Muriel Pavlow, who has died aged 97, will be remembered as a quintessential British heroine on stage and screen. This meant being well spoken and standing by her man through thick and thin, particularly in the staid England of the 1950s. Not only did she fulfil these requirements admirably, but she established herself as a compelling presence.

As a J Arthur Rank contract player, Pavlow waited bravely for pilots Alec Guinness in Malta Story (1953) and Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky (1956) to return safely from missions during the second world war, and was the steadfast nurse who loves accident-prone Simon Sparrow (Dirk Bogarde), the medical student in Doctor in the House (1954) – the first in the popular series – and Doctor at Large (1957). In the theatre, Pavlow was generally a “nice gel” in well-made West End productions, often touring the UK and beyond.

Muriel was born in Lewisham, south-east London, to Boris Pavlov, a salesman, and his wife, Germaine. They changed their name to Pavlow to sound more British. She grew up in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, and went to school locally. She started acting at an early age and her first, brief, film appearance came at the age of 13 in the Gracie Fields morale-boosting musical Sing As We Go! (1934). Having co-starred three years later in Hansel and Gretel, a pioneer BBC television broadcast, she was able to claim, when in her 90s, that she had made the earliest TV appearance of anyone living.

This was followed by her being cast as a young girl in Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus (1938), with John Gielgud and Marie Tempest at the Queen’s theatre, London. “I was 17 or 18 and still playing children,” Pavlow recalled. “I was afraid I was going to play children for the rest of my career, until John Gielgud said to me while we were waiting in the wings, ‘I read a very good play today by John Van Druten and I said to Binkie [Beaumont, the theatre impresario], “You ought to cast Muriel as the girl.” It’s all right, it’s not a child, it’s an ingenue role!’”

The play was Old Acquaintance (1941), starring Edith Evans, at the Apollo. The Spectator critic at the time wrote: “This magnificent woman [Evans] is supported by a cast which has apparently been specially selected to stand up to her talent … A polished performance is given by Muriel Pavlow, who surmounts with astonishing skill even such lines as ‘God! How I dislike sherry!’”

While appearing in the play in the evenings, Pavlow was shooting Quiet Wedding (1941) during the day. However, the role in the latter was a small one, as a teenage bridesmaid. Directed by Anthony Asquith, the romantic comedy starred Margaret Lockwood and Derek Farr, whom Pavlow married in 1947, and with whom she often starred.

She had to wait until after the war, during which she joined the Wrens, to play adult roles. Her postwar career began with Terence Rattigan’s drawing-room comedy While the Sun Shines (1945), opposite Hubert Greggat the Globe, and in the spy film Night Train to Dublin (1946), as an Austrian helping secret agent Robert Newton track down a Nazi spy. Although, for purposes of the plot, they go through a mock marriage and share a flat, their relationship is rigorously chaste until the happy ending.

In 1947, after playing Ophelia to John Byron’s Hamlet on TV, Pavlow appeared as the sweet, musical daughter of shady antiques dealer Oscar Homolka in the blackmail thriller The Shop at Sly Corner. With Farr as her fiance, Pavlow had nothing much more to do than pretend to play the violin in long shot.

It was only in the 50s, with her Rank contract, that Pavlow’s film career blossomed with It Started in Paradise (1952), a piece of Technicolor froth about rival dress designers, which gave new meaning to the word “catwalk”. But, according to the New York Times critic, in contrast to the scheming Jane Hylton, “pretty Miss Pavlow is as straight and as neat as a well-stitched seam”.

Her next leading role was as a Maltese girl, working in the British war operations room, in love with Guinness’s RAF pilot in Malta Story (1953). Her hair darker than usual, and with what passed for a Maltese accent, she managed to reveal more emotion than hitherto.

More to Pavlow’s satisfaction was her sojourn with the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon for the well-received 1954 season during which she played Cressida to Laurence Harvey’s Troilus in Glen Byam Shaw’s production, as well as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Bianca in both The Taming of the Shrew and Othello.

Then it was back to British pictures with Doctor in the House. “It was my first experience of being in a smash-hit movie, and it was a very sweet experience,” Pavlow remembered. At the end of Doctor at Large, after three bungling amorous adventures, Bogarde seems to settle for Pavlow, now also a doctor.

She showed some fighting spirit and even some flesh in a bathing scene with her soldier boyfriend John Gregson in Conflict of Wings (1954), a likable sub-Ealing film about a rural Norfolk community which Pavlow leads in opposing the RAF’s plan to use a nearby bird sanctuary for target practice.

In the inspiring biopic Reach for the Sky (1956), Pavlow was Thelma, the supportive wife of the pilot Douglas Bader (Kenneth More). She meets him after he has had both his legs amputated, and is adapting to the artificial ones. One of the key scenes involves him taking a turn on the dance floor with her. Fearing he has been shot down by German aircraft, Thelma greets the news that he is alive and has been made a prisoner of war with: “I knew in my heart they’d never get him.”

In Rooney (1958), set in Dublin, Pavlow is a single woman secretly in love with a happy-go-lucky dustman (Gregson). She tells him: “I’m 28, but I feel 50.” Pavlow was actually 37 and nearing the end of her film career.

Having left Rank, Pavlow appeared in Murder She Said (1961), the first of four Miss Marple whodunnits starring Margaret Rutherford. In it, Pavlow played dictatorial James Robertson Justice’s long-suffering daughter. It was to be her last film, apart for her cameo in Stephen Poliakoff’s starry Glorious 39 (2009).

She and Farr had a long and happy marriage until his death in 1986. After this, she was semi-retired, occasionally popping up in television series such as The Bill (1993), The Rector’s Wife (1994) and House of Cards (1995).

She is survived by three nieces and two nephews.

• Muriel Lilian Pavlow, actor, born 27 June 1921; died 19 January 2019

Richard Leech obituary in “The Guardian”.

Richard Leech was born in Dublin in 1922. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, qualifying as a doctor in 1945. He then turned to acting as a career. Virtually all his career was in British film and television. Among his films are “The Dambusters” in 1955, “Night of the Demon” with other Irish actors, Peggy Cummins and Niall MacGinnis, “The Moonraker” in 1957 and “The Shooting Party” in 1985. Richard Leech died in 2004 in London at the age of 81.

Richard Leech’s “Guardian” obituary:

Richard Leech, who has died aged 81, practised as a doctor in Dublin for a year before deciding to try his luck as an actor. He never looked back – within two seasons he was a leading man on the West End stage.

His embodiment of military officers, police inspectors and, inevitably, doctors, not to speak of monarchs, politicians, conspirators, courtiers, butlers and philanderers, established Leech’s career on stage and screen as one of the most intelligent and cultivated character actors of the postwar generation.

With his sturdy build, snub nose, crinkly hair and intense gaze, Leech was not only a useful all-round player, but also one whose clarity of speech made him audible in the largest auditorium. At a time when stage diction was in decline, this was an asset.

So was his assumption of transatlantic accents. He was not the first Irishman whose voice could reproduce a transatlantic note with authenticity. It served him well in his first two plays for HM Tennent Ltd, London’s most influential management, in the British premieres of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1948) and John van Druten’s The Damask Cheek (1949).

Leech’s most notable West End performances ranged from the title-role in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1948) to Dr Emerson in Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1978-79). His numerous film credits included The Dam Busters, A Night To Remember, Ice Cold In Alex, Young Winston, Gandhi and The Shooting Party, and he appeared on television in Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, A Woman Of Substance, Dickens Of London, Edward VII, Occupations, Brassneck, and as Inspector Duval in Interpol Calling. From 1969 to 1971 he was one of the four GPs in the BBC’s twice-weekly drama serial The Doctors.

Born Richard McLelland in Dublin and educated at Haileybury College, Hertfordshire, and Trinity College, Dublin, he was intended for medicine. Having obtained three medical degrees, in 1945 he practised successfully in Dublin for a year. At 20 he began working semi-professionally at the Gate, Dublin, under its directors Michéal MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, for whom he made his debut as a Nubian slave in The Vineyard. He made his first appearance in London in 1946 with an Irish company in three plays at the Glanville, Walham Green, south-west London: Robert Collis’s drama, Marrowbone Lane, in which he played several small parts, including a surgeon; then in The White-Headed Boy and Drama At Inish.

In 1947, Leech spent a year with a repertory company in Hereford before being put under contract by a London management company. His first role was in an Irish country house play, Elizabeth Bowen and John Perry’s Castle Anna; and in Arthur Miller’s first work to reach the West End, All My Sons, in which he played Chris Keller, the surviving brother in a family headed by a parent responsible for the faulty design of wartime aircraft.

Leech’s voice came into its own in 1948, when he partnered Flora Robson in Shaw’s Captain Brasshound’s Conversion. As a philanderer in The Damask Cheek (1949), Leech was, according to Harold Hobson, “good in the honest ruggedness of a factory hand and farmer”.

Later that season, Leech won more plaudits as the somewhat pompous Humphrey Devize in the West End premiere of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning, in which he later transferred or the first time to Broadway. But in between he acted with Gladys Cooper in Thomas Browne’s The Hat Trick (1950); and on returning from New York played Robert Catesby in a try-out, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot (Ipswich, 1951).

In Noël Coward’s Relative Values (1951), Leech played an all-knowing butler, who according to a critic, “talks like Shaw with the accents of Coward and rolls out the syllables as though the part were entirely new: indeed he and Coward between them make us believe that it is”.

Back in the West End in 1954, Leech appeared in Jack Roffey’s No Other Verdict as a man wrongfully accused of murder; and in Charlotte Hastings’s Uncertain Joy (1955), he was the cruel father of a problem child befriended by a schoolmaster.

One of his best remembered roles came as Henry VIII in the premiere of Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons (1960). In another long run, The Right Honourable Gentleman (1964-65), Leech first played the husband of a woman who accused the statesman Sir Charles Dilke of adultery; and when Anthony Quayle left the cast, Leech took over the lead from him. He was a friend of Alec Guinness, and returned to the West End in 1968 in Guinness’s revival of TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.

Leech was never able to forget his days as a doctor, and in 1968 resumed his association with the medical world by becoming a regular columnist in the periodical World Medicine. His articles were headed Doctor In The Wings.

Leech’s first wife Helen Hyslop Uttley predeceased him. He is survived by his second wife, Margaret, and his actress daughter, Eliza.

· Richard Leeper McLelland (Leech), actor, born November 24 1922; died March 24 2004

His Guardian obituary can be accessed here.

Ronnie Carroll was born in 1934 in Belfast. He sang for the U.K. in the 1963 Eurovision Contest with the song “Say Wonderful Things”. The same year he was featured in the film “Blind Corner”.

“Telegraph” obituary:

Ronnie Carroll, who has died aged 80, was a Belfast-born plumber’s son who became the only singer to represent Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest twice in a row; in later life he stood as a fringe candidate in several general and by-elections, during which he begged voters not to put a cross against his name in a bid to enter the Guinness Book of Records. Carroll first represented Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1962. His jaunty entry, Ring-A-Ding Girl ( “Ring-ding-a-ding-a-ding Ding-ding / She’s my ring-a-ding girl”) was not quite ludicrous enough to win the competition, though it came a creditable fourth out of 16. The following year he returned with the slightly better Say Wonderful Things but still managed to come fourth.

The first song only reached No 46 in the British pop charts, though the latter made No 6, and Carroll had one more hit, Roses are Red, which peaked at No 3 in 1962. But then, for all but the most dedicated Carroll fans, the trail went cold. After his showbiz career ended, a nightclub venture in Grenada, and drinking and gambling habits, combined to ruin him. At one point Carroll was reduced to running a hot food stall in Camden. He resurfaced as the Emerald Rainbow Islands Dream Ticket Party candidate for the 1997 Uxbridge by-election when, despite his determined efforts to score “nul points”, singing what he hoped would be a new hit single: “Don’t Vote for Me, Reg and Tina!”, 30 spoilsports put their cross against his name. “There’s nothing more demoralising than aiming low and missing,” he reflected.

He was born Ronnie Cleghorn on August 18 1934 in Roslyn Street, East Belfast, and first hit the big time when he won a “Hollywood doubles” competition at the Belfast Hippodrome, after switching from impersonating Frank Sinatra to the gravel-voiced Nat King Cole, fully blacked up, having contracted a bad chest infection. “I kept listening to Nat’s records until I got it right, and when I was introduced at the Hippodrome as Nat King Cole in the final, after doing Sinatra in the heat, it brought the house down,” he recalled. His success led to a place on the Hollywood Doubles touring stage show and in 1956 he had his first big hit with Walk Hand in Hand, which reached No 13 in the charts and earned him an appearance on the BBC programme Camera One. In 1959 he helped to launch the pop programme Oh Boy! with a 17-year-old Cliff Richard and Marty Wilde. By this time Carroll was something of a teen pop idol. “It might seem hard to believe,” he said in 2008, “but … screaming girls would climb on to trains as I was pulling into stations and they’d come in droves for me backstage. Droves. I had as much sex as any man could wish for.”

By the early 1960s he had married his first wife, the singer and actress Millicent Martin. But by the middle of the decade a youthful addiction to “pitch and toss” had developed into something more serious. On one occasion he flew to Las Vegas and blew £5,000 on the craps table in 20 minutes. “I walked out and had only enough for my cab fare,” he recalled. “I got back on a plane and flew to London. When I arrived home Millie said: ‘Did you have a good night?’ I replied: ‘Yes.’ ” The end of his marriage to Millicent Martin in the mid-1960s signalled the beginning of the end of his performing career . To console himself, Carroll hit the bottle.

When Sean Connery called round, he recalled, “I gave Sean a bottle of scotch and I had a bottle of vodka and after a few hours he said: ‘There’s a woman I fancy in Paris.’ But he couldn’t get off the floor so I phoned her and said: ‘Sean wonders whether you’d come over for a drink.’ Then I phoned a girl I liked, but she told me where to go.” After marrying his second wife, the Olympic runner June Paul, Carroll headed to the island of Grenada in 1972, to run a nightclub. But “there was a revolution in Grenada when we were there and we had sunk every penny we had into the nightclub,” he recalled. “There were no tourists left and we had no money to carry on.” Back in Britain Carroll continued to perform occasionally at holiday camps,ut eventually abandoned singing for a more profitable hot sausage stall at Camden Market. This he later combined with helping to run the Everyman Cinema and Jazz Club in Hampstead. When his second marriage ended, Carroll married and divorced a third wife, South African-born Glenda Kentridge.

His motivation for entering the political arena stemmed from a promise made to the raconteur and wit Peter Cook shortly before he died. “He told me: ‘Ronald, you must stand, promise me you will stand.’ Soon after that I thought, what have I done? Then he went and died on me. But a promise is a promise.” From 1997 he stood in several elections for “anti-politics” parties of various names, founded by the veteran environmental campaigner “Rainbow George” Weiss. In the 2005 general election he stood for the Vote For Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket Party in Belfast, and released a “comeback” album, Back on Song, which he described as “a soup bowl of feelings I’ve had for women – and family and animals – going back decades”. He had been planning to stand as a candidate in next month’s general election in the marginal Hampstead & Kilburn constituency as the “Euro-visionary” candidate. In a quirk of electoral law his name will still appear on the ballot paper which means that he could, theoretically, still win on May 7. Ronnie Carroll is survived by three sons and a daughter.

The above “Telegraph” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Barry Foster was a very popular British television actor. He is chiefly known for his playing of the title character in the series “Van der Valk” which began in 1972. He has though done some great work on film e.g. “Ryan’s Daughter” in 1970, “Robbery”, “The Family Way”, “Heat and Dust”, “Maurice” and Alfred Hitchcock’s penulimate film “Frenzy”. He was born in 1927 and died in 2002 at the age of 74.

Philip Purser’s obituary of Barry Foster in “The Independent”

The sudden death of Barry Foster at the age of 70 robs the acting profession of one of its most adaptable stalwarts, equally at home on stage or screen, just as content to play in a difficult or experimental production as to star in a popular television series – and, indeed, unhappy if he couldn’t continually be switching from one to the other.

As Nicolas Freeling’s stolid Amsterdam detective Van der Valk, Foster carried 25 hour-long episodes in the Thames Television version over the years 1972-73 and 1977, quietly eclipsing a rival German series with the same hero, then in 1991 resumed the role in a batch of two-hour stories.

In the interim, he made an appearance, invariably on the wrong side of the law, in almost every other respectable detective saga on the air. The great interrogator was himself interrogated by Inspectors Morse and Dalgleish, and by Detective Sergeant Bergerac. He turned up in John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People, and played Elliott McQueen, the dazzling villain of Sweeney! (1977), the first movie spin-off from the TV series of approximately the same name.

Born in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, but brought up in Hayes, Middlesex, where his toolsetter father had moved to find work during the depression, the young Foster was all set for a career in industry when, secretly hankering for something more creative, he won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama. There his fellow students included Harold Pinter, with whom he went on to tour rural Ireland in a fit-up company whose members also included Kenneth Haigh and Alun Owen.

His stocky frame, bristly curls and rank-and-file origins brought him a stream of bit parts in the second world war films that were still being churned out, including Battle Of The River Plate (1956), Sea Of Sand and Dunkirk (both 1958), and better roles in the plays about service life which figured prominently in the new TV drama of the 1950s and 60s. He was a young officer in Incident At Echo Six (1959), by Troy Kennedy Martin, set in Cyprus during the troubles, and a soldier again that year in the film Yesterday’s Enemy, harking back to the war in Burma.

From shooting wars he stepped deftly to the class war, and a part in David Mercer’s first – and seminal – script, Where The Difference Begins (1961). Now the credits jostle to demonstrate his versatility. He starred as Cornelius Christian in Fairy Tales Of New York in the West End at the Comedy Theatre (1961). At the National Theatre in 1983 he played Ulysses in Jean Giraudoux’s 1935 play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, directed by his old mate Pinter; and he appeared in several works from the same man’s pen.

In 1994-95 he was Inspector Goole in Stephen Daldry’s fabled production of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls at the Aldwych, which went on to tour in Australia. And until he was taken ill last Friday, he was appearing in the stage show Art, written by Yasmina Reza and translated by Christoper Hampton, at the Whitehall.

Foster’s notable film credits included Ryan’s Daughter (1970), Frenzy (1972) and The Whistle Blower (1986). But perhaps his best – and worst – role in any medium was as the legendary bundle of paradoxes, Orde Wingate. Epic movies had been planned to tell the story of this extraordinary British soldier who founded the Israeli army before Israel existed, restored the Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne of Judah, and led the Chindit operations against the Japanese in Burma until he was killed in a plane crash in 1944.

None of these films was realised, but in 1976 the gifted producer Innes Lloyd finally persuaded the BBC to stump up enough for a stylised (ie cheap) studio production in three 75-minute instalments, entitled Orde Wingate. Written by Don Shaw, directed by Bill Hays and with Foster inhabiting the part, it remains a landmark in television drama. Alas, Foster went on to repeat the characterisation, to much less effect, in an inferior but infinitely more lavish American biography of Golda Meir (A Woman Called Golda, 1972).

Foster was married to the singer and former actress Judith Shergold, in one of show business’s happiest and most durable alliances. One of their recipes for its success was never to be apart for too long. If Barry was working on Broadway or in Hollywood, she would endeavour to join him. They had two daughters, Joanna and Miranda, who followed him into the theatre, and a son, Jason. His wife and children survive him.

Foster loved music, and acted as reciter in performances of such works as Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and – under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle – Berlioz’s rarely played sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique, Lélio. His favourite place, he once said, was Venice – “a jewel-encrusted treasure house built on water”.

· Barry Foster, actor, born August 21 1931; died February 11 2002

This “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Anthony Singleton is a British actor whose first film was “Sapphire” in 1959 with Nigel Patrick and Michael Craig. His other films include “Beat Girl”, “The Mindbenders” and “Masquerade” in 1966.

Annette Badland

Annette Badland was born in 1950 in Birmingham. She is a terrific actress who has distinguished each film and television show she has been in. She was part of the cast of “Bergerac”. Her films include “Jabberwocky” in 1977 and “Little Voice” in 1998.

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 obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.

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 Dawson (Florence Desmond), actress, singer, dancer and impersonator, born London 31 May 1905, married 1935 Tom Campbell Black (deceased), 1937 Charles Hughesdon, died Guildford 16 January 1993.FLORENCE DESMOND was not only the best impersonator of her generation, but by far the best. Television comics today try everyone from Eddie Murphy to George Formby; but some hope to get away with merely a famous catch-phrase. In Desmond’s day male impersonators could and would do James Cagney, Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh and Charles Boyer saying ‘Come wiz me to the Casbah’ at the drop of a hat. It was performers like these which Tony Hancock sent up in his gleeful impersonation of Robert Newton as Long John Silver.

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.