Anne Shelton was after Vera Lynn, the most popular female vocalist in Britain during World War Two. She was born in 1923 in Dulwich in London. She began singing in military bases in 1942. She sang with Glenn Miller and his orchestra in Europe. Among her more popular songs were “I’ll be Seeing You”, “Galway Bay”, “Isle of Innisfree” and “Lay Down Your Arms”. Anne Shelton made some films including “Jeannie” in 1941 followed by “King Arthur Was A Gentleman” and “Bees in Paradise”. Anne Shelton died in 1994 at the age of 70.
Her “Independent” obituary:
Patricia Sibley (Anne Shelton), singer: born Dulwich, London 10 November 1973; OBE 1990; married 1953 David Reid (died 1990); died Herstmonceux, East Sussex 31 July 1994.
ANNE SHELTON was, with Vera Lynn, one of Britain’s best-loved popular singers of her generation. She is chiefly remembered as a ‘Forces sweetheart’, who regularly entertained the troops during the Second World War, and who sustained a loyal following that continued well into peacetime. Although she never achieved Lynn’s prominence and popularity, Shelton became a well-loved icon of the period, a promoter of wartime comradeship and tenacity.
She was born Patricia Sibley in Dulwich, south London, in 1923. When only 12 she sang ‘Let the Curtain Come Down’ on the BBC radio evening show Monday Night at Eight. The dance-band leader Albert Ambrose heard her performance, and persuaded her to sing with his prestigious and popular ‘Ambrose Orchestra’. Instead of becoming a child evacuee with her friends, Shelton was given a regular spot (still in her school uniform) in Ambrose’s radio shows. She continued to work for Ambrose during the war, but also enjoyed considerable success in her own right, and with other major bands. On the occasions that Glenn Miller visited Britain she regularly appeared with his band.
Introducing Anne, her own radio show, became highly popular amongst troops. The programme was primarily devised for soldiers serving in the North African desert and ran for over four years. She also presented, with Ronald Shiner, Calling Malta, a show that was a lifeline to troops serving on the island, particularly during the 1942 air bombardment and siege. As with many of her other shows and material, Calling Malta, served as a perfect platform for a style of music that captured the pathos and tone at the time. She had a strong melodious voice which had a dynamic presence. The sentiments and subject-matter of her songs became a ‘bonding’ medium which carried with it its own special nostalgia.
This ‘nostalgic’ quality carried over into her recordings. She had adopted ‘Lili Marlene’ as a signature piece (previously only heard on the radio). An English lyric was added by Tommy Connor and her recording, released in 1944, became an immediate success. She was constantly in demand by this time and appeared in a crop of films which were mainly a fixture of musicals and comedy: King Arthur was a Gentleman (starring the comedian Arthur Askey), Miss London Ltd (1943) and Bees in Paradise (1943).
Immediately after the war, Shelton capitalised on her success as a wartime radio personality, touring Britain extensively. She made numerous guest appearances, including singing alongside Bing Crosby. My parents, who performed in variety, toured with Shelton on many occasions. These included appearances at the London Palladium and with the Royal Commission (which had previously been ENSA). My mother danced with Anne Shelton’s show and remembers her appearance for the army of occupation at the Garrison Theatre, Hamburg. Shelton’s show-stopping number was a little-known song, ‘My Tenement Symphony’, which never failed to evoke audience reaction, usually with the entire front stalls of soldiers cheering and stamping.
In 1949 she recorded an updated version of ‘Lili Marlene’ with ‘The Wedding of Lili Marlene’ and subsequently became the first British artist to cover the entire United States, coast to coast with a tour that lasted a year. Shelton had a degree of early success as a recording artist in America, which was unique for a British artist, recording versions of ‘Galway Bay’ and ‘Be Mine’. Back in Britain in the early Fifties she continued to court the sentimental and nostalgic with ‘My Yiddisha Momma’, ‘I Remember the Cornfields’, ‘Arriverderci Darling’ and ‘Seven Days’. However, in the later Fifties, finding the right material became increasingly difficult for her. It was still the military association which worked best and a Swedish song with English lyrics by Paddy Roberts topped the British charts in 1959 – ‘Lay Down Your Arms’. Her last British success was a cover version of Petula Clark’s hit ‘Sailor’ in 1961 (again – an armed forces connection). She sang ‘You’ll Never Know’ for the Queen Mother (reputedly her favourite song) on her 80th birthday. In the same year 1980, Shelton performed ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ in Yanks, John Schlesinger’s film about GIs in wartime Britain.
Anne Shelton toured extensively, appearing in cabaret, television and world-wide variety. She devoted an increasing amount of her time to charity work and reunion projects for the British Legion and the British Services organisations. In 1990 she was appointed OBE for services to the Not Forgotten Association, a charity which provides care and support for disabled ex-service personnel. Her husband Lieutenant- Commander David Reid died in the same year.
Last November Anne Shelton was invited to record a commemorative album for EMI, Wartime Memories, which was released in April. This was recorded with Dennis Lotis and the Royal Airforce Squadronaires – the band which emerged from Albert Ambrose’s Orchestra in 1939, her first backing.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Angela Down was born in 1946 in Hampstead, North London. Her movies include “Mahler” made in 1974 and “Emma” in 1996 directed by Ken Russell. She and her husband have two daughters, Daisy (born 1978) and Emilia (born 1981). Turned down a major cameo in Doctor Who: Attack Of The Cybermen.
Mr Michael Wilding, one of the most popular film stars of the late 1940s, died in hospital on July 9 after a fall at his home near Chichester. He was 66.
His fame rested principally on a series of romantic comedies — The Courtneys of Curzon Street, Spring in Park Lane and Maytime in Mayfair — which, set in an artificial world inhabited by earls and dukes, provided perfect escapism for British cinema-goers suffering the deprivations of rationing and austerity. Enormously successful at the box office, these films teamed Wilding, usually cast as the elegant aristocrat with Anna Neagle, and they were directed by her husband Herbert Wilcox.
In 1949 Wilding was voted the top British star and he was in the leading 10 each year from 1947 to 1950. His stay at the top however proved to be a brief one and he later confessed surprise that his limited talents had taken him so far and brought him the sort of adulation that was later reserved for pop singers. But while he never pretended to any great range or depth, he managed to radiate a certain romantic charm which for a time, at least, millions of film-goers found irresistible.
Wilding was born in West-cliff, Essex, on July 23, 1912, and educated at Christ’s Hospital School. He studied art, and it was as a designer that he first entered the cinema. He established himself in films in notable pictures of the early war period, such as Convoy, Kipps, Cottage to Let, the Big Blockade and Noel Coward‘s In Which We Serve. He married for the first time, in 1937, Miss Kay Young. The marriage was dissolved in 1952.
He joined the Neagle-Wilcox team in 1946 to make Piccadilly Incident, the story of a wartime romance, and though Maytime in Mayfair was the summit of the partnership it was to continue through until 1952 with The Lady with the Lamp — a biography of Florence Nightingale — and Derby Day. In between Wilding was in Sir Alexander Korda’s lush production of An Ideal Husband and made two films for Hitchcock, Under Capricorn and Stage Fright. In 1952 he gave his numerous fans the chance to share a real-life romance when at the age of 40 he married the 20-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. The marriage produced two sons but both it and Wilding’s film career foundered. The marriage was dissolved in 1957 and he spent an unhappy time trying to establish himself in Hollywood, returned to Britain for a succession of mostly undistinguished pictures, and in 1963 announced that he was giving up acting to become an agent.
He did this for three years, but later made a partial comeback in the cinema, playing General Ponsonby in the 1969 picture, Waterloo, and other supporting roles in Lady Caroline Lamb and Dr Frankenstein. He married, in 1958, Mrs Susan Nell. This marriage was dissolved.
Wilding’s fourth marriage, in 1964, was to the actress Margaret Leighton, who died in January, 1976.
Iain Gregory was in British films and television series in the 1960’s. His first film role was in “Konga” in 1961. Among his other films are “Lancelot and Guinevere” and “The System”. His last known credit was in “In the Shadow of the Tower” on television in 1972.
Paul Barber was born in Liverpool in 1951. He is best known for his part of Denzil in television’s “Only Fools and Horses” and as Horse in “The Full Monty” in 1997. Article on Paul Barber here.
It was thought that Anna Kashfi was from India but she was in fact born Joan O’Callaghan in 1934 in Cardiff in Wales. Her entire career was in movies and television shows in Hollywood. Her major films were “The Mountain” in 1955 with Spence Tracy and Robert Wagner, “Cowboy” with Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford and “Battle Hymn” with Rock Hudson and Martha Hyer. Her career seemed to stall after her short lived marriage to Marlon Brando. She died in 2015 at tyhe age of 80.
Her obituary in the ” Telegraph”:
Anna Kashfi, who has died aged 80, was an actress of exotic appearance who was the first wife of Marlon Brando, and the mother of his first child, Christian; she played “foreigners” in several Hollywood films of the 1950s. Her origins were never clarified beyond doubt: when she was thrust into the spotlight there were suggestions that she had invented her Indian ancestry, with one newspaper offering the theory that she browned her skin by bathing in coffee. She insisted that she was Indian, the daughter of Devi Kashfi, an architect, and a woman called Selma Ghose. But the day after she married Marlon Brando in late 1957 – she wore a sari for the ceremony – one William O’Callaghan from Cardiff and his wife Phoebe emerged claiming to be her parents. Her real name, they said, was not Anna Kashfi but Joan O’Callaghan. The truth may be that, as the actress explained in her memoirs, she was the result of an “unregistered alliance” and was subsequently adopted by O’Callaghan.
Her films included, most notably, her debut The Mountain (1956), a thriller starring Spencer Tracy in which she played a Hindu woman who survives an aeroplane crash in the French Alps. Edward Dmytryk, the director, told reporters at the time that he was aware of Anna Kashfi’s “real” name, but assumed she was Anglo-Indian. It was during production that she met Marlon Brando in the Paramount studio commissary. Recalling the meeting years later, the actress wrote: “The face, with an incipient heaviness about the jawline, reflected a wistfulness, an open sensuality, and an ineffable indifference.” She was pregnant by the time she married the star and they were divorced within two years. Their relationship had been violent and tempestuous while they were together – Anna Kashfi was reported to have thrown a tricycle at Brando – and it remained difficult. For 15 years a painful dispute rumbled on over custody of their son Christian, whom Anna Kashfi preferred to call by his second name Devi. During legal proceedings it was claimed that she had been emotionally unstable and at times reliant on alcohol and barbiturates. Christian was also troubled: he dropped out of school, failed to make a career out of acting, and was sent to prison after shooting dead the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne. He died at the age of 49 of pneumonia.
Anna Kashfi was born Joan O’Callaghan on September 30 1934 in Darjeeling, where her father was a traffic superintendent on Indian state railways; she was brought up there until she was 13, when the family moved to Cardiff, where William O’Callaghan worked in a factory producing steel. Anna attended St Joseph’s Convent School then the Cardiff School of Art. Early on she had jobs in a butcher’s shop in the city and in an ice cream parlour at Porthcawl. She soon started modelling and in 1952 was spotted by an MGM talent scout. Her flourishing as an actress was brief. After The Mountain she played a Korean woman in Battle Hymn (1957), opposite Rock Hudson as a Christian minister turned fighter pilot; then the daughter of an over-protective Mexican cattle baron whom Jack Lemmon has fallen for in Cowboy (1958); the next year she had a small part in Night of the Quarter Moon. Anna Kashfi published a “tell-all” memoir, Brando for Breakfast, in 1979.
Latterly she lived in California and then in Washington state. In 1974 she married James Hannaford, a salesman. He died in 1986.
The above “Telegraph” obituary can also be accessed online here.
IMDB mini biography:
Anna Kashfi has appeared in a number of films including The Mountain (1956) (withSpencer Tracy) and Battle Hymn (1957) (with Rock Hudson) but is best known for beingMarlon Brando‘s first wife. Kashfi is often thought of as being Indian but is, in fact, the daughter of a Welsh factory worker, William Callaghan, and simply reinvented herself to increase her screen appeal. She met Brando in 1955 in the Paramount commissary and after an on-off relationship (mainly due to Brando’s relentless womanizing) married him in 1957. (Brando claimed that he married her only because she had become pregnant.) She gave birth in May 1958 to their son, Christian, who became notorious in 1990 for shooting dead Dag Drollet, a crime that earned him a ten-year jail sentence. Kashfi divorced Brando in 1959.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Charles Lee < charleslee@tinyworld.co.uk
“Valerie Hobson was- to her disadvantage- ineffably ladylike. The British film industry of the 30s and 40s was a man’s world and the female stars got short shrift. Those British stars who did go to Hollywood were criticized back home for resubmitting to that town’s despised glamour treatment. Hobson’s time in Hollywood was not at all worthwhile, and she might have made no stronger mark in the British industry had not she managed to assert her distinctive personality from time to time. ” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars” (1970)
Valerie Hobson obituary in “The Guardian” in 1998.
Valerie Hobson has two distinct phases to her acting career. She was born in 1917 in Larne in Northern Ireland. She started her career in British films but by 1935 when she was only 18 she was acting in Hollywood. She starred in two classic Universal horror movies “”The Werewolf of London” and the magnificent James Whale directed “The Bride of Frankenstein” with Boris Karloff and Colin Clive. By the late thirties she was back in Britain and and continued her career there. Her second period of fame was with a series of films she made from the mid 1940’s onwards in the U.K. including David Lean’s “Great Expectations”, “KInd Hearts and Coronets”, “The Years Between” and “The Card”. In 1954 after a period playing Mrs Anna in the West End production of “The KIng and I”, Valerie Hobson retired from acting. Her name came into the headlines nine years later when her husband MP, John Profumo got involved in a scandal with Russian diplomats and Christine Keeler. Valerie Hobson and John Profumo remained together and weathered the storm and spent their remaing years involved in many charitable causes especially in the East End of London. She died in 1998 at the age of 81. Her son David has written a terrific book about his remarkable parents entitled “Bringing the House Down” which was published in 2006.
“Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:LIKE MANY British female film stars of the Thirties and Forties, Valerie Hobson exuded breeding and class, but she also brought to her performances a delightfully sophisticated sense of humour and a refreshing element of spunk, whether as the wise-cracking heroine of Q Planes, the resourceful double agent of The Spy in Black, the haughty Estella of Great Expectations, the shrewd widow in Kind Hearts and Coronets, or, on stage, the dignified but determined governess Anna Leonowens in The King and I.
She was to display similar grit in her real life when her husband, the politician John Profumo, became notorious for his relationship with a call-girl who was also involved with a Russian official. In an admirable display of stoicism and loyalty, Hobson stood by her husband and they were to remain married until her death.
She was born Valerie Babette Louise Hobson, in Larne, Northern Ireland, in 1917, the daughter of a British naval officer who was serving on a minesweeper at the time. She was educated at St Augustine’s Priory, London and started dancing lessons at three:
When we moved to Hampshire and I was five, I was taken to London twice a week to be taught ballet by Espinosa. These lessons were intended to “give me grace”, but were precious training for the stage, which I’d been heading for ever since I grabbed a bath towel and pretended to be the Queen of Sheba, with nanny for an audience.
After training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she made her stage debut at the age of 15 in Orders Are Orders. Oscar Hammerstein II, who saw her in the show, spotted her lunching with her mother at Claridge’s, went over to their table and offered her a small part in his production Ball at the Savoy, starring Maurice Evans, at Drury Lane. While appearing in the show, she made her first film, a minor thriller Eyes of Fate (1933).
Evans then asked her to appear with himself and Henry Daniell in the film version of L. DuGardo Peach’s radio play The Path of Glory (1934), a satire on war so biting that it was taken out of distribution after one day. Hobson had a small stage role in Noel Coward’s Conversation Piece, during the run of which she played the romantic lead in a popular screen adaptation of R.C. Sherriff’s play Badger’s Green. As the daughter of a developer whose plans will wreck a village’s beloved cricket green, she complicates things by falling in love with the son of a protestor.
Her performance in the film led to tests for Hollywood and the offer of a contract by Universal Pictures. With her mother, the 17-year-old Hobson departed for the US, but was disappointed with the parts she was given. Ironically her first role, that of Biddy in the studio’s version of Dickens’ Great Expectations (1934) was eliminated from the final print – years later Hobson was to have notable success as Estella in David Lean’s masterly version of the same tale.
The studio started her in B films (briefly as a platinum blonde), and though one of Hobson’s subsequent American films is a true classic, James Whale’s baroque Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the actress was unhappy with the other horror films and minor thrillers she was offered. Even in the best, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935) and Werewolf of London (1935), her roles were colourless. “I’d been there 18 months and learnt a great deal, but I was getting tired of horror pictures and doing nothing but scream and faint . . . In The Bride of Frankenstein, I was
carried by Boris Karloff over almost every artificial hill in Hollywood.” Universal in fact kept her screams in their sound library to use in subsequent horror movies.
Hobson returned to England in 1936, where in such films as the intriguing thriller No Escape (1936) she quickly established herself as a stylish leading lady. In this pre-war period Hobson reputedly also made more television appearances than any other actress. The producer Alexander Korda, after seeing Hobson’s performance opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr in Raoul Walsh’s Jump For Glory (1937), tested her for the role of a colonel’s wife on the North West Frontier in his production The Drum (1938).
Her next film, the comedy-thriller This Man Is News (1938), was the first to display Hobson’s innate flair for comedy and was favourably compared by critics to America’s “Thin Man” films, with Hobson and Barry K. Barnes as a pair of wise-cracking, cocktail-drinking married sleuths. “It had an extraordinary success,” Hobson told Brian McFarlane a few years ago. “As a nation we hadn’t made a high comedy successfully until then. When they put it on at the Plaza there were queues literally round the block to see it.”
A sequel, This Man in Paris (1939), was even better than the first. Both films were produced by Anthony Havelock-Allan, with whom Hobson fell in love, and they were married in 1939. Meanwhile the Korda production Q Planes (1938) had consolidated Hobson’s stardom. As the sister of Ralph Richardson and sweetheart of Laurence Olivier, Hobson brought infectious sparkle to a lively and witty espionage thriller, and she followed this with two more highly entertaining thrillers, The Spy in Black (1939) and Contraband (1940), both co- starring Conrad Veidt, scripted by Emeric Pressburger and directed by Michael Powell, who was to recall, “Valerie was a tall, strong, intelligent girl with glorious eyes and a quick wit (too quick a wit, some people thought, but I had suffered too many English ladies to complain about that).”
The Spy in Black opened in London the week that war was declared, was a great hit in both England and the US, and prompted the second pairing of the two stars in Contraband, aptly retitled Blackout in the US since a great deal of the film’s action takes place in a blacked-out West End. During the war years Hobson’s career faltered after she turned down David O Selznick’s offer of a Hollywood contract because she did not want to leave her husband.
She was off screen for three years after The Adventures of Tartu in 1943, and other actresses became more popular, notably those of the Gainsborough pictures, such as Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, Jean Kent and Patricia Roc, all of whom could play earthier roles than Hobson, who was becoming increasingly patrician.
She returned to the screen as an MP who finds it difficult to adjust to life with a husband returned from the war in The Years Between (1946), then was cast as Estella in Great Expectations (1946), regarded by many as the finest screen adaptation of a Dickens novel. The film was produced by Cineguild, a company formed by Hobson’s husband along with Ronald Neame and David Lean, and the same group produced Hobson’s next film, a lavish costume melodrama Blanche Fury (1947).
In this gloomy tale, Stewart Granger was the illegitimate but rightful heir to the Fury estate who murders Hobson’s husband and father-in-law. He is hanged for his crimes and Hobson dies giving birth to his son. An attempt to appeal to the audience who had flocked to Gainsborough melodramas, it was too sombre for popular acceptance. Said Hobson, “I had just had our son, who was born mentally handicapped, and Tony meant the film as a sort of `loving gift’, making me back into a leading lady.”
The film’s beautiful production values and stunning colour photography prompted critic Richard Winnington to comment: “Let’s have some bad lighting and some bad photograph and perhaps a bit of a good movie.” More highly thought of today, the film remains Hobson’s own favourite.
In 1949 she starred in a film unanimously praised as a classic comedy, Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets. Hobson stated:
I have always thought that the main reason for the success of Kind Hearts was that it was played absolutely dead straight. I think they were very clever and cast two such contrasting types as Joan Greenwood and myself as the women.
Hobson had an unsympathetic role as a selfish mother in The Rocking Horse Winner (1948) and played the Countess in The Card (1951), again co-starring with Alec Guinness (“a wonderful film actor with the most subtle integrity”). In 1952 she and Havelock-Allan were divorced.
Good film roles were becoming scarce again when Hobson was offered the starring role of Anna in the Drury Lane production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The Kind and I. The show’s original Broadway star, Gertrude Lawrence, had planned to recreate her part in London prior to her untimely death. (Hobson had studied singing at RADA, and during her Hollywood stay had sung on Bing Crosby’s radio programme.)
With Herbert Lom playing the King the show was a smash hit and a great personal success for Hobson. It opened in October 1953 and Hobson stayed in it for a year and a half, announcing that at the end of the run she would retire since she doubted anything in her career could top this. Her last film was Rene Clement’s witty comedy, Knave of Hearts (Monsieur Ripois) (1954) in which she was the accommodating wife of a philanderer (Gerard Philipe). She had married an MP, John Profumo, and stated that she would devote the rest of her life to being his wife.
When in March 1963 her husband admitted his affair with Christine Keeler and resigned from his post as Secretary of State for War, Hobson’s name was again in the headlines. “Of course I am not leaving Jack because this ghastly thing has happened,” she said at the time. “I hope to spend the rest of my life with him and my family – the rest of my life.” She continued to deal with the matter with restraint and dignity but did not flinch from the facts.
A few weeks after the headlines dozens of reporters and photographers rushed to Dymchurch in Kent where Hobson was making her first public appearance since the scandal, opening a home for mentally handicapped children. Before the ceremony, she told the crowd of over 1,000 people:
I hope you will forgive me if I start on a more private note. The personal affairs of my family have been so greatly in the limelight recently that it has not been quite easy for me to decide whether or not I should have fulfilled this engagement. The invitation which I accepted with great joy last October, has turned out to be a little of an ordeal. But when I see you all and know how friendly and kind you always are I know that, in fact, it is one of my great joys. There are occasions when all personal circumstances come secondary.
At the end of the ceremony the actress received a prolonged ovation. Her involvement with the mentally handicapped started after one of her two sons by Havelock-Allan was born with Downs Syndrome and she also devoted time to Lepra, a leprosy relief organisation. John Profumo, after his resignation, worked tirelessly for charity, notably at Toynbee Hall, a welfare organisation for the poor and victims of alcohol and drugs, and his wife assisted him in this. In 1975 he was appointed Commander of the British Empire and Hobson, who accompanied him to Buckingham Palace, made evident her great pleasure that her husband’s public service had been recognised.
Tom Vallance
Valerie Babette Louise Hobson, actress: born Larne, Co Down 14 April 1917; married 1939 Anthony Havelock-Allan (one son and one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1952), 1954 John Profumo (one son); died London 13 November 1998.
This “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER, from top: Valerie Hobson, John Howard Davies, John Mills, Ronald Squire on insert poster, 1950DRUMS, (aka THE DRUM), British poster art, from left: Raymond Massey, Valerie Hobson, Roger Livesey, Sabu, 1938Contraband, poster, (aka BLACKOUT), Valerie Hobson, Conrad Veidt, 1940. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Chinatown Squad, poster, Valerie Hobson (center), Lyle Talbot (right), 1935. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Valerie Hobson (1917-1998), British film actress, on a Blend-Rite hair grips card.
circa 1940s
TCM Overview:
Upper-crust beauty who established herself on the British stage and made her film debut in “Moulin Rouge” (1952). Bennett appeared in several plays written by her then-husband John Osborne, including “A Patriot for Me”, “Watch It Come Down” and “Time Present,” for which she won the London Evening Standard Award and Variety Club of Britain awards
Dictionary of Irish Biography:
Hobson, Valerie (1917–98), actress, was born 14 April 1917 at Larne, Co. Antrim, daughter of Commander Robert Gordon Hobson (1877–1940), naval officer, and Violette Hobson (née Hamilton-Willoughby). Educated at St Augustine’s Priory, London, she was stage-struck from a young age. Starting ballet at three, she was taught by Espinosa in London from the age of five. However, she was too tall to be a ballerina and settled instead on acting, enrolling in RADA. Her stage debut, at the age of 15, was in Basil Foster’s ‘Orders are orders’, where she was spotted by Oscar Hammerstein, who cast her in his West End show ‘Ball at the Savoy’ in Drury Lane. This showcased her talents as a comedienne and led to a series of appearances in British B movies, including Two hearts in waltz time, The path to glory, and Badger’s Green, all in 1934. Still a minor, she had to be accompanied to the studio by her nanny. At 18 she won a contract with Universal Studios; however, Hollywood proved a disappointment. After appearing in a succession of farces and thrillers, of which only The bride of Frankenstein (1935) is remembered, she fell victim to the reorganisation of the studios in the mid 1930s, following a financial crisis, and her contract was not renewed, though her marked prowess as a screamer meant that Universal filed her top decibels in the studio sound library.
Back in England she was cast opposite Douglas Fairbanks, jr, in Jump for glory (1937), in which she caught the eye of Alexander Korda, who signed her to a long-term contract. She made, however, only two films for Korda: The drum (1938), about the North-West Frontier, and Q planes (1939) with Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. During this period she also worked twice for Michael Powell: in The spy in black (1939) and Contraband(1940), both with Conrad Veidt. In 1939 she married Anthony Havelock-Allan, her former co-star in Badger’s Green and now a producer. Three years later she was offered a second Hollywood contract by David O. Selznick, who wanted her for Jane Eyre. However, with the war at its height she was unwilling to leave her husband. He subsequently founded, with David Lean and Ronald Neame, the Cineguild production company, of which he was eventually head. Cineguild provided Hobson with some of her strongest roles, including Estella in David Lean’s Great expectations (1946) and the title role in Blanche Fury (1948), a period melodrama with Stewart Granger. Excellent as Estella, a part that suited what the Daily Telegraph (14 Nov. 1998) called the ‘slightly smug, lecturing strain in her on-screen personality’, she was not in general convincing as the love interest. Although beautiful, with long auburn hair, she was upper-crust and aloof and seemed too prim and ladylike to appear opposite matinée idols such as Granger and Gérard Philippe.
Havelock-Allan left Cineguild in 1947, taking Hobson with him. Together they made The small voice (1948), about an ordinary family held to ransom by escaped convicts. Her subsequent career consisted of minor melodramas and comedies, of which the most celebrated is Kind hearts and coronets (1949) opposite Alec Guinness. The part of the prudish, aristocratic Edith D’Ascoyne suited her talents perfectly, as did that of the governess in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical ‘The king and I’, which she played in Drury Lane in 1953 after a long absence from the stage. Though not musically trained, she made a success of the part and the play ran for a year. Remarking that she was unlikely to be offered as good a role again, she retired at the age of 37. Her last screen appearance was in Knave of hearts (1954). That year she married (31 December) the wealthy tory MP for Stratford (1950–63), Jack Profumo, having divorced Havelock-Allan in 1952.
A life as socialite, MP’s wife, and mother was disrupted by the ‘Profumo scandal’ of 1963. Her husband, secretary of state for war since 1960, denied in the house of commons (22 March 1963) having had an affair with Christine Keeler, the lover of a Soviet official. Subsequently proved to have lied, he had to resign both from his ministry and his seat three months later. Hobson told Lord Denning, who conducted an inquiry, that stress, exhaustion, and sleeping pills contributed to her husband’s making his false statement to the commons. She stood by him and joined him in his later career as charity worker. He established the Toynbee Hall centre in east London for people experiencing alcoholism and drug addiction (for which he received a CBE in 1975) while she put her energy into working for children with intellectual disabilities (with whom she had an affinity, as her eldest son from her first marriage had Down’s syndrome). For Lepra, a leprosy relief organisation, she dreamed up the ‘ring appeal’, which encouraged wealthy people, including members of the royal family, to hand over rings to raise money. She died 13 November 1998 in England, and was survived by both husbands and a son from each marriage: Mark Havelock-Allan and the writer David Profumo
Brenda Bruce was born in Manchester in 1918. She acted with the Brimingham Repertory Company from 1936 until 1939 and then went on to act with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her first film was “Laugh With Me” in 1938. Her other films include “Millions Like Us” with Patricia Roc, “I Live in Grosvenor Square” with Anna Neagle and “Night Train to Dublin”. In 1985 she had a major role in Joseph Losey’s “Steaming ” with an all female cast including Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles and Diana Dors. She was acting until shortly before her death in 1996 at the age of 77.
Her “Independent” obituary by Adam Benedick: Brenda Bruce was one of the most seasoned interpreters of the classics on the post-war stage. Whether in comedy or tragedy, fantasy or farce, she could be counted on to give a performance to relish.
Her career was so long and rewarding that to the generation that thinks of her mainly as one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s leading lights – as a marvellously galvanised Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor (from 1964 to 1975), a witty but eerie witch in David Rudkin’s Hansel and Gretel (1980) or a hilarious Mrs Groomkirby in N.F. Simpson’s One Way Pendulum (Old Vic, 1988) – it is worth recalling her earlier days when her West End career in Rattigan, Shaw, Maugham, T.W. Robertson, Anouilh, Arthur Macrae and John Mortimer made it seem as if she must become a star.
Who, for example, who had the luck to see it, could forget her Mabel Crum – in Rattigan’s While the Sun Shines (Globe, 1944)? Did we not hang on every word uttered in that lovely husky voice and every look from those huge blue eyes and enchanting snub nose? The performance should have set her on the path to fame and fortune; but Bruce did not set great store by such banalities.
Her pre-war training at Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Rep had made her a serious-minded actress. It was to Shaw rather than Hollywood that her young affections were drawn; and as Eliza to the actor-manager Alec Clunes’s Higgins in Pygmalion (Lyric, Hammersmith), a jolly Dolly Clandon in You Never Can Tell (Wyndham’s), and Vivie Warren in Mrs Warren’s Profession (Arts Theatre, 1950), she proved a real Shavian when that guru was still in vogue.
She followed Clunes to the Arts Theatre which he ran as a miniature national theatre for his festival of one-act Shaws. But her range had already begun to extend itself through authors like Aldous Huxley (The Giaconda Smile), Somerset Maugham (Home and Beauty), Eric Linklater (Love in Albania), and as Peter Pan (Scala, 1952).
Even so her talent never looked as if it would lie outside comedy in roles as dear little things, charming or irritating, asserting her fluffy, chubby femininity through that warm and always human personality.
Then, in 1962, came the turning-point. As Winnie in Happy Days (Royal Court) by Samuel Beckett, up to her waist, then her neck, in earth, she gazed out at the audience under the bright stage lights with her big eyes and in a slightly Scottish voice as if she had found a new authority.
It was the play’s first English performance and for her a nightmare. Having replaced Joan Plowright who had withdrawn, pregnant, she had had to get up the part in a hurry, studying it until the early hours every night; and the author himself turned up while she was still struggling with her words.
Easily awed, George Devine, the director, promptly withdrew as the author came up with more and more changes to his text; and Miss Bruce ended up being directed by Samuel Beckett, who had never directed a play before in his life. Beckett demanded from just one line as many as 11 different inflections. The performance was a triumph. “Peaked and wan but resilient to the last” (as Tynan put it), “she sustains the evening with dogged valour and ends up almost looking like Beckett.”
Both on and off stage, Brenda Bruce was “resilient to the last” – the landlady in Michael Frayn’s Here (Donmar 1993); though it was as characters of more consequence – like the pert and very funny Mistresses Quickly and Page in the Merry Wives of Windsor which she seems to have made her own from the 1960s, or the bald, cruel Duchess in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1966-67), or as the wailing Margaret in Richard III (1975) while her own first husband was dying – that her acting reached its highest charge.
She worked more often in television than in the cinema and in 1962 was nominated television actress of the year. Her credits included the series Rich and Rich, Girl in a Birdcage, A Chance to Shine, Death of a Teddy Bear and Hard Cases.
Brenda Bruce was twice married, first to the theatre manager, director and broadcaster Roy Rich, who died in 1975, and then to the actor Clement McCallin who died two years ago.
Adam Benedick
Brenda Bruce, actress: born Manchester 7 July 1918; married firstly Roy Rich (two daughters; died 1975), secondly Clement McCallin (one adopted son deceased; died 1994); died London 19 February 1996.
The above obituary can also be accessed on “The Independent” online here.
Brian Deacon was born in Oxford in 1949. He trained with the Oxford Youth Theatre. In 1972 he made his film debut with a leading role with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed in “The Triple Echo”. Other films include “Vampyres”, “Jesus” and “A Zed and Two Noughts” in which he appeared with his brother Eric.
TCM Overview:
A successful actor, Brian Deacon lent his talents to the big screen, most notably in drama.
Deacon began his career with roles in “The Triple Echo” (1973) and the Marianne Morris horror movie “Vampyres” (1974). He then acted in “Jesus” (1979), “Separate Tables” (HBO, 1982-83) and “Nelly’s Version” (1983).
Later in his career, Deacon acted in “A Zed and Two Noughts” (1988).
