British Actors Archives

Hannah Gordon

Hannah Gordon is a wonderful Scottish actress with a warm rich distinctive voice. She was born in 1941 in Edinburgh. She began making television appearances from the mid 1960’s. In 1967 she starred in the play “Spring and Port Wine” and played the same part on film in 1970 with James Mason replacing Alfred Marks. Her television series include “My Wife Next Door” and “Upstairs, Downstairs”.

Interview in “Mail Online”:
Lynda Lee-Potter

Last updated at 00:00 12 April 2003

HANNAH GORDON has just taken over the role of Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. She’s tiny, but in flowing costumes and sensational hats brings panache and wit to the role of the formidable mama of the irascible Professor Higgins. We meet at the historic theatre and walk across the vast stage where so many stars have performed. It’s a magical show full of glorious songs and Hannah is loving every minute of it.

She began her career at Dundee Repertory Theatre and has starred in many television series, including the legendary Upstairs Downstairs.

Unbelievably she’s been an actress for nearly 40 years, though she looks incredibly young, with the unlined skin of a teetotaller.

She’s known much tragedy in her life but she has a superficial calm which I suspect comes more from an iron self-control than a fundamental tranquillity. She learned from a very early age to keep any hurt to herself.

She retains her Scottish burr, and if she weren’t so immediately recognisable one would never suspect she was an actress.

She was born in the district of Newhaven on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and says she was a terribly plain child.

‘I had glasses at the age of five and then developed asthma, so had these thin high shoulders. I once showed an old photograph of me to a very camp friend. He looked at it for a long time and then said: “That is the picture of a child for whom there was no hope whatsoever.”

In fact, Hannah’s early life was chillingly bleak.

‘I didn’t know my father at all, because he had Parkinson’s disease and doctors didn’t understand much about the illness in those days. He was put in an asylum where soldiers suffering from shell shock after World War I were sent.

‘I only remember going there once and it was grim and depressing with grey walls. In those days people didn’t take children to hospitals very often.

‘I saw my father just three times as a child, and I think he came to the house only once. He was a complete stranger really, so my mother had a tough time.’ Her world seemed harsh enough but then, when Hannah was nine, her mother died. ‘Today’s nine-year-olds are nine going on 15,’ she says, ‘but children in those days stayed younger for much longer.

WE LIVED in my grandparents’ big Victorian house in Edinburgh. My grandfather was a great collector and I remember lovely old furniture. My uncle and his wife also lived there for a while and my mother had to look after my grandmother.7

‘Then, when she was 45, she was alone in the house one day and she had a heart attack and died.

‘I walked home from school, as one did in those days, and I couldn’t get in. I kept ringing the doorbell but my mother didn’t come, so I just thought: “Oh, she must have gone out.”

‘I went to play with a schoolfriend called Betty Darling, who lived next door. Then later, the rest of my family arrived home, discovered my mother and came and got me.

‘Nine is a rotten age to lose your mother when you haven’t got a dad.’ The grownups were so busy dealing with the tragedy that nobody seems to have spared much thought or compassion for Hannah. She felt frightened, devastated and isolated, but she was left to cope alone.

‘My mother was laid out in a coffin in the drawing room on the first floor and I was taken to look at her. The undertakers had put lace edging all round the edge of the coffin and I thought: “That’s not my mother.” ‘ Nobody cuddled Hannah or reassured her. She wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, or helped to grieve, and a year later, when she was ten, she was sent away to boarding school.

‘It was baptism by fire really,’ she says. ‘It was pretty rough.’ It’s a tragic story and two years later her father died. Then, when she was just 14, Hannah was told she was going to live on her own.

‘My second uncle was my guardian. He was a widower with a child of his own, so it was hard enough for him.

‘I boarded at school, but in the holidays I looked after myself. A flat had been left in trust for me, so I went to live in that and was self-sufficient from the age of 14. I bought my own clothes, my own food and cooked for myself.

‘The girls at school thought it was a marvellous way to live. They said: “Oh, aren’t you lucky. You can watch television till midnight if you want to.”

‘I used to think: “I’d rather have a mummy and a daddy.” ‘ She has a brother who is ten years older but he was away working at the time, though they have always remained close.

At school, Hannah poured all her emotions into acting, and when she left she went straight to the Glasgow College of Dramatic Art. There, she fell in love for the first time and told her boyfriend of her lonely upbringing.

‘I must have been whining a bit, because one day he suddenly said: “Oh, for goodness sake, stop complaining. What makes you think the world owes you a living?”

‘I began to realise that it’s not what happens to you but what you make of it that’s important.’ In her 20s she began to make her name in London as a powerful and beautiful actress. She then got a part in the film Spring And Port Wine with James Mason.

It was to be a life-changing role because on set she met lighting cameraman Norman Warwick. He’d been married before and was 20 years older but was understandably captivated and kept asking her out.

‘I always said no but we’d have little chats and smile at each other.

Then, on the last evening of filming, I agreed to have dinner and that was it.

‘He was strong but gentle and protective. When you haven’t had a family of your own, it’s wonderful to meet somebody who wants to look after you, which he always did.’ Six months later they married and had a son, Ben, who is now an actor. They were a close-knit threesome but nine years ago, just before their silver wedding anniversary, Norman was told that he had cancer. It was then discovered after a bone marrow test that he also had a form of leukaemia.

‘He was much more ill than we’d thought,’ says Hannah bleakly ‘and six weeks later he died. It was mercifully quick. He wasn’t going to recover, so it was best that it didn’t last long. That’s how I look at it and how I would feel if it were me.

‘Some people have rotten marriages with little happiness but we’d had so much. When he died I said to Ben: “We can’t give in. We’ve got to keep our lives together. Your father invested too much in both of us for us to let him down now.”

‘I took a year off work when Ben was born and I took a year off when Norman died. A lot of actresses find that throwing themselves into a play or film is the best cure for loss, but I couldn’t. I found it impossible to cope with anything stressful, however small.’ Despite her vow to her son that neither of them must be defeated, it was a terrible year and she thought she would never feel whole again.

‘It was utterly devastating but you can’t let yourself go completely to pieces. I believe that the spirits of those you love are still around.

‘I did have a strong sense of Norman being with me. He was such a gentle person and I felt if we grieved too much it would be upsetting and awful for him.

‘I didn’t want to work in the theatre but you need to do things and look after somebody else. When young women lose their husbands, having children to look after must be a lifesaver.

‘I’m not good at being on my own. I wish I were more self-sufficient but a lonely childhood makes you need people.

‘My brother and my friends were wonderful. Three of them in particular were extraordinary. I think they must have got together and said: “Right, I can do the mornings if you can do the afternoons.” They became my human water wings.’ Hannah determined not to lean on her son, though she now thinks that it might have comforted him if she had. ‘I just didn’t want to be a burden.

He was at Glasgow University doing a four-year English honours degree. He was due to go to the States for a year but he didn’t. He stayed in Glasgow, and I’m glad. ‘He’s so like Norman. People used to laugh because they were like peas in a pod, two halves of the same person.’ Having had one fulfilling marriage, it never occurred to Hannah that in her late 50s she would meet another soulmate. However, fate had another plan in mind.

She has the glow of a woman in love who knows she’s deeply loved in return. The lucky chap is Rob Leighton, who is a viola player with the Philharmonic Orchestra and is a few years younger than Hannah.

They were introduced by a mutual friend after a concert at the Festival Hall, and she can’t help smiling when she talks about him.

‘He has a lovely speaking voice and he was very interested in recording books for the blind. We were talking about this one evening and I said: “I’m a trained speech and drama teacher so if you ever want me to listen to your tapes I might be able to make a few suggestions.”

‘So he came to the house for lunch one day when I was making my Delia Smith Christmas cake. He knew that Norman had died and the last thing he was looking for was any involvement. In the beginning, we just had a wonderful friendship. I think people outside the theatre don’t understand that you can have blokes who are just friends.

‘Rob plays the piano like a dream and I used to go and have lunch or supper with him. Often he’d sit down and play and it was wonderfully therapeutic.

‘All my friends knew Norman and me as a couple. So meeting somebody new on different territory which wasn’t crowded with memories was very calming.’ The friendship grew and they were both falling in love but not admitting it – even to themselves. ‘Then Ben came with me to a concert at the Albert Hall and we all had a picnic with the friends who’d introduced Rob and me.

‘Afterwards Ben said: “Rob is very good for my mum.” If Ben hadn’t been happy that would have been it.

‘Rob is very interested in history and one day he took me to see some prehistoric stones.’ Away from London in the countryside, they both admitted how they felt.

‘Rob wasn’t married or involved, so nobody had to be got rid of, let down or upset, which was uncannily lucky. But my feelings were extraordinarily powerful to deal with.

‘It wasn’t like a love affair when you’re young. In some ways it was tinged with sadness because of the past. I found that you can experience piercing joy and grief at the same time.

BUT when you have been happy in one marriage I think you are more prepared to take a chance. If you’ve been hurt and wounded and had an awful time you’re probably much more wary and self-protective.’ Hannah also had to tell her adored mother-in-law that she had fallen in love again.

‘She died in her 90s but she was formidable, part Italian and part German, and very wise. She’d known me as the wife of her son for all those years, but she met Robert and it was fine.

‘She’d lost her son and to have your child die before you is a terrible thing, but she was intelligent and remarkably unsentimental. She actually said to me: “Things turn out for the best.”‘ Finally, Rob moved into the house where Hannah had lived with her husband for more than 20 years.

‘I said to Ben: “Whatever happens, this is your home.” He was 21 when Norman died and Rob was the same age when he lost his mother and his father remarried, so he was sensitive about how Ben might feel.

‘The house has become everybody’s home in three equal parts, and it’s never been a problem.’ One day soon, I suspect, Hannah and Rob will go quietly away for the weekend and come back married.

Wendy Craig was born in 1934 in Durham. Her feature films include “The Servant” with Dirk Bogarde and Sarah Miles and “The Nanny” with Bette Davis. She is known primarily for her many television series including “Butterflies”, “And Mother Makes Three” and “The Royal”. BFI page on Wendy Craig here.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Anne Gwendolyn Craig was born in Sacriston, County Durham the daughter of farmer George Craig and his wife Anne (née Lindsay).^[2] She attended Durham High School for Girls, initially as a day pupil and later as a boarder,^[ which she revisited on 13 October 2007 to open a new building that had been named after her. She passed theEleven Plus examination and went to Darlington High School.^[3] When she was twelve years old the family moved to Picton and she attended nearby Yarm Grammar School.^[2]She trained as an actress at the Central School of Dramatic Art.

From the mid-1950s Craig appeared in British films such as The Servant (1963) and The Nanny (1965) with Bette Davis, but it was her appearances in British sitcoms of the late 1960s/1970s which led to her becoming a household name, usually playing a scatty middle class housewife. She went from the BBC‘s Not in Front of the Children (1967) to ITV‘s…And Mother Makes Three (1971) (in which she played a single parent), which later evolved into …And Mother Makes Five. Then came Butterflies (1978), a comedy on BBC2.

Craig returned to drama with the series Nanny (1981–83), a series she created, and wrote some episodes herself as Jonathan Marr,^] a pseudonym she had used before when writing episodes of …And Mother Makes Five. Twenty years later, she played a hospital matron in ITV’s The Royal (2003–11). However, she has continued to be associated with comedy, having taken one of the leading roles as Annie in Brighton Belles (1993–94), the UK’s short-lived version of The Golden Girls. She appeared as Reggie’s mother in the BBC1 comedy Reggie Perrin (2009, Series 1 and 2010, Series 2), an update of the 1970s’ series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

In 2012 Craig appeared as a guest in Episode 12 of the Series Masterchef, along with many other 1970s sitcom stars. In January 2014 she appeared in an episode of the BBCpopular drama Waterloo Road.

In 2016 she appeared as Mary Goodman in the BBC TV series Death in Paradise episode

Angus Lennie has one terrific performance on film to his credit. It is surprising that he did mot mantain the momentum on film. His glory moment was as Steve McQueen’s buddy in “The Great Escape”. Angus Lennie was born in 1930 in Glasgow. He featured as a repertory player in theatres in England and Scotland. His many television appearances include “Crossroads”, “Z Cars”, “Rumpole of the Bailey” and “Monarch of the Glen”. He made quite a few war movies including “633 Squadron” and “Tunes of Glory”. He died in 2014

“Guardian” obituary by Anthony Hayward:

The actor Angus Lennie, who has died aged 84, found a new audience when he played the irascible, amorous motel chef Shughie McFee in the teatime soap opera Crossroads (1974-81). The role came after years of taking character parts on screen, most memorably in the 1963 prisoner-of-war film The Great Escape as Flying Officer Archibald Ives – known as the Mole – who is shot dead while scaling a German barbed-wire fence after the plot he has hatched with Steve McQueen’s US Army Air Force captain is uncovered.

Lennie’s appearance as a PR consultant in two 1972 episodes of Crossroads led Jack Barton, on being promoted from director to producer two years later, to create the role of Shughie for him. The actor joined when the ITV serial was at its height, watched by up to 18 million viewers, but panned by the critics for its wooden acting and wobbly sets.

Lennie simply decided to enjoy his time as Shughie. “I had great fun playing him as a Scottish comedian, very over-the-top, because many chefs are OTT,” he once said. The character, renowned for his tall stories, blagged his way into the job with a tale of having worked on a luxury cruise ship when, in fact, it was a workers’ ferry on the Clyde.

Although he did not leave until 1981, Lennie had plenty of time out of Crossroads, which allowed him to play other roles. This led to the soap again being criticised, this time for poor continuity, as on one occasion Shughie disappeared behind a fridge to get some ingredients and was not seen again for weeks. And he was not the only one: Paul Henry, as Benny, went to find a spanner and failed to reappear for six months.

Lennie was born and brought up in Shettleston, in Glasgow’s East End, where he attended Eastbank Academy. At the age of 14, while training as a stockbroker’s clerk, he joined the entertainer Jimmy Logan‘s parents, the music-hall act Short and Dalziel, as a dancer at the city’s Metropole theatre. He subsequently toured Scotland before the impresario Vivian Van Damm put him in his Revudeville variety performances in between the strippers at London’s Windmill theatre for two years.

At the age of 23, Lennie branched out into acting and gained repertory experience in Oxford and Birmingham. He also worked at theatres across Scotland during his long career. In 1957, he made his television debut in the Armchair Theatre play The Mortimer Touch. Two years later, he was cast as the cabin boy Sunny Jim in the BBC Scotland comedy series Para Handy – Master Mariner (1959-60)

Alongside many character roles in popular TV shows – and that of Able Seaman Murdoch throughout the sitcom HMS Paradise (1964-65) – Lennie played military types in the cinema, starting with Tunes of Glory (1960), before The Great Escape in 1963. That film’s story line of courageous servicemen was followed by real-life danger when Lennie played a flying officer in 633 Squadron (1964). “Cliff Robertson and I had to escape from a burning plane,” he said. “They used gas jets to simulate the fire, but they didn’t take into account that the Mosquito was made of wood and it went up in flames. Close-ups of us scrambling to get out of the plane were for real.” Lennie also had a small role in the screen musical satire Oh! What a Lovely War (1969).

On stage, he appeared in six pantomimes over 10 years with the comedian Stanley Baxter at the King’s Theatres in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and toured the Far East with Derek Nimmo‘s company.

After Crossroads, his television roles included the bakery worker Tom in the sitcom All Night Long (1994) and Badger, loyal valet to Earl Kilwillie (Julian Fellowes), on and off between 2001 and 2003 in the feelgood drama Monarch of the Glen. In 1994, he reprised the role of Shughie McFee alongside his fellow Crossroads stars Jane Rossington and Tom Adams for a send-up of the soap during BBC Two’s ATV Night.

The actor enjoyed travelling in Europe but reflected that he could never leave chef Mcfee behind. “It can be a little disconcerting to turn up at Barclays Bank in Paris and have the doorman greet you with, ‘Ah, bonjour, Monsieur Shughie,'” he said.

• Angus Wilson Lennie, actor, born 18 April 1930; died 14 September 2014

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

Interview with Angus Lennie at University of Glasgow in 2001 here.

Belita. Obituary in “The Independemt” in 2005.

Belita was a British Olympic figure skater who surprisingfly starred in a few film noirs in Hollywood in the late 1940’s. Belita was born Maria Jepson-Turner in Hampshire in 1923. As wellas ice figure skating, she was a classical trained ballet dancer. Her three film noir movies were “Suspense” in 1946, “The Gangster” and “The Hunted”. In 1953 she appeared in the British made “Never Let Me Go” with Clark Gable and Gene Tierney. She was married to the Irish actor James Kenney. Belita died in France in 2005. Article on Belita by Eddie Mueller here.

The “Independent” obituary by Tom Vallance:

The actress, dancer and ice-skater Belita had the distinction of starring in 1946 in the most expensive film ever made by the “Poverty Row” studio Monogram. It was called Suspense, and its novel mixture of ice-skating and film noir proved enormously popular at the box-office and more than repaid the studio’s investment.

Although the screen’s most famous and successful ice-skating star was undoubtedly Sonja Henie, there was a time in the early Forties when she had two rivals who appeared in more modest productions – Vera Hruba Ralston and Belita. Like Ralston, Belita was more lithe and statuesque than the diminutive Henie, but she won a following with her appearances in such escapist B-movie titles as Silver Skates (1943) and Lady, Let’s Dance (1944). A skilled dancer, too, she later had smaller roles in musicals .

A poster for Gordon Wiles’ 1947 drama ‘The Gangster’ starring Barry Sullivan and Belita. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)

Belita’s real name was Gladys Lyne Jepson-Turner and she was born in Nether Wallop, Hampshire, in 1923. She started skating as a child, encouraged by her mother, a former figure-skater, and in 1936 she was a competitor at the Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria – Henie was the winner, with Belita in 16th place. It was an experience she later recalled as “terrifying”. She told David Jacobs in 1980,

We were woken by the sound of the storm troopers marching, and we were made to do the “Heil Hitler” salute before we worked. Poor little Freddy Tomlin – I don’t know what he said to them but they threw him out in the snow for about two hours, locking the doors of the arena.

In 1937, the 14-year-old starred in the spectacular London show Opera on Ice, and the following year she and her mother, who had separated from Belita’s father, set sail for the United States, where Belita achieved great success as star of the touring revue Ice Capades. She made her screen début in 1941 as a guest skater in Republic’s film version, also titled Ice Capades, which added a slim plot as framework to showcase several of the show’s performers. Among them was Vera Hruba Ralston, who stayed at the studio (and married its boss, Herbert J. Yates).

Belita was given a contract by Monogram, and though her movies had slim plots, the lavish production numbers on ice made them popular fare, and in 1946 she was entrusted with the leading role in Frank Tuttle’s Suspense. “It was the film I most enjoyed making,” she recalled. “It was the first film in which certain camera angles were used, and it was photographed by Karl Struss, who was incredible.”

It was a steamy tale, scripted by Philip Yordan in James Cain fashion, of infidelity, deceit and murder, boosted by lavish skating routines (in the most suspenseful of which, Belita had to jump through a circle of knives). Her skating skill masked any deficiencies as an actress. Her co-star, Barry Sullivan, recalled,

I always had a fondness for Belita because she didn’t know what the fuck was happening! She was a great skater, but acting and particularly filmmaking were totally foreign to her.

The film’s success prompted another thriller, Gordon Miles’s moodily poetic The Gangster (1947) with the same co-stars, after which Belita returned to the UK, where she starred in ice shows including Babes in the Wood on Ice, and White Horse Inn on Ice, with Max Wall. Her film career continued sporadically. She was part of a fine cast in Burgess Meredith’s The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1950), one of the best Simenon adaptations, with Charles Laughton a superb Inspector Maigret.

The spy thriller Never Let Me Go (1953), starring Clark Gable and Gene Tierney, although a poor film, doubtless had pleasant resonances for her because she played a defecting ballerina, and her earliest ambitions had centred on the ballet (she always professed to hate ice-skating). She had further dancing roles in Gene Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance (1953), playing “The Débutante” in the “Ring Around the Rosy” sequence, and (unbilled) in the film version of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical, Silk Stockings (1957), starring Fred Astaire, in which she is part of the ensemble dancing “The Red Blues”.

In March 1957, she opened at the London Coliseum in the starring role in Damn Yankees, the Broadway hit with songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. In this reworking of Faust, in which an ageing baseball fan, Joe Hardy, sells his soul to the Devil in order to play baseball and help his favourite team win the World Series, Belita was Lola, the Devil’s assistant sent to earth to seduce Joe. It proved to be a misguided casting move, for Bob Fosse’s quirky choreography was alien to Belita. A few weeks into the run, she was replaced by Elizabeth Seal, whose gamine qualities were more attuned to the Fosse style.

Belita returned to New York to dance in an off-Broadway production of Ulysses in Nightgown (1958). To be in films with Kelly and Astaire, but get to dance with neither of them, plus the débâcle of Damn Yankees, probably contributed towards Belita’s decision to give up show business in 1959, though she made one more film, appearing as herself in Leopoldo Torre-Nillson’s beguiling tale of disaffected youth, La Terraza, in 1964.

She settled with her second husband, the former actor James Berwick, in Fulham, London, where they owned a garden centre, the Crabtree Gardens Nursery. After Berwick’s death in 2000, she retired to the south of France.

Tom Vallance

June Duprez was a lovely English actress who made some significent films in the 1940’s both in Britain and the U.S. She was born in Teddington, Middlesex in 1918. Her first film was “The Crimson Circle” in 1936. She won acclain for her performance as the Princess in the wonderful “Thief of Bagdad”. Due to the commencement of World War Two, the shooting of the movie was moved from England to Hollywood. June Duprez stayed on in America and made such films as “None but the Lonely Heart” with Cary Grant, “Bombay” with Alan Ladd and “And Then Tey Were None” with Barry Fitzgerald. She retired early from film acting and died in London in 1984.

Gary Brumburgh;s entry:

Glamorous June Duprez was born in Teddington, England, during an air raid on May 14, 1918. Her father, Fred Duprez, was an American vaudevillian who found stage and film work in England. She herself picked up an interest in performing and eventually joined the Coventry Repertory Company to gather the necessary stage experience.

June made her film debut as an extra in 1935. She married at a young age and her career was initially encouraged by her first husband, a Harley Street doctor. However, once she started flirting with stardom, he became increasingly envious and possessive and their marriage fell apart. Her sultry and exotic appearances in such British films as The Spy in Black (1939), The Four Feathers (1939) and, especially, Alexander Korda‘s The Thief of Bagdad (1940) made a star out of her and she was quickly ushered to Hollywood to capitalize on this newly-found fame. Although she stayed in America throughout WWII, both Korda and June’s agent set her price too high–at $50,000 per picture. This pretty much put her out of contention and she found herself working very little in the next few years. Her most notable American picture during that time was None But the Lonely Heart (1944) opposite Cary Grant.

June subsequently left Hollywood in 1946 and took a few roles on the Broadway stage. She retired altogether when she married for a second time in 1948 to a well-to-do sportsman. They had two daughters but divorced in 1965. June lived in Rome for a time, then returned to London to live out the remainder of her life. She died in 1984 at age 66 following an extended illness.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

The Thief Of Bagdad, poster, US poster art, top: John Justin, June Duprez; bottom: John Justin, Sabu, 1940. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Martin Shaw TCM Overview

Martin Shaw was born in Birmingham in 1945. At the age of sixteen he won a scholarship to a drama school in his native city. He declined the offerto work in the office of a brass manufacturing company. At the age of eighteen he came to London to attend the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He began acting on television in 1967 and played in “Coronation Street” for a time. He has made some films including “Love on the Dole” and “Operation Daybreak”. He has though become an icon on television. He starred in “The Professionals” from 1977 until 1982 followed by “Judge John Deed” and “Inspector George Gently”. He has often appeared on the stage including “A Streetcar Named Desire” in London in 1974 opposite Claire Bloom and “An Ideal Husband” which he took to Broadway where he nominated for a Tony. Martin Shaw interview with “MailOnline” here.

TCM Overview:

Though Martin Shaw started in classical theater, he is most known for acting in British television crime dramas as a benevolent figure of authority. Shaw got his start on television in a one-off role on the longest-running soap opera in England, “Coronation Street,” but had his first significant recurring role as soccer enthusiast and lovable alcoholic Huw Evans in the medical comedy series “Doctor in the House.”

A few years later, he was cast in the most significant film of his career, Roman Polanskiâ¿¿s “Macbeth”; Shaw played Banquo, the friend whom Macbeth murders and who later returns as a ghost.

After starring and costarring in numerous BBC productions of plays, and taking one-off parts in other shows, Shaw landed the role of Doyle in “The Professionals.” This action-packed crime drama, related to the 1960s series “The Avengers,” featured Shaw as one of a secret team of law enforcement agents who use unconventional methods to catch criminals. Through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Shaw continued to star in a number of television series playing law enforcers of different sorts.

Notable appearances in the 2000s include the longest-running BBC legal drama, “Judge John Deed,” in which he starred in the title role, as well as “Inspector George Gently,” again starring as the eponymous character. In both roles, Shaw played honest men struggling to serve justice fairly within the constraints of governmental bureaucracy.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

Marianne Faithful has had a career in music that spans 45 years. She has on occasion acted in film. She was born in Hampstead, London in 1946. She began singing in London coffee houses and had a major hit with her first recording “As Tears Go By”. Her relationship with Mick Jagger is reflected in song of the Rolling Stone’s songs including “Sympathy for the Devil”. Her film debut came in 1967 with “I’ll Never Forget What’s His Name” and then in 1968 she starred with Alain Delon in “Girl on a Motorcycle”. She was Ophelia in “Hamlet” with Nicol Williamson. She thne seemed to concentrate on her recording career with occasional acting appearances on television. Her next film came in 1995 with “Moondance”. Marianne Faithful has lived in Ireland for many years. Her website can be accessed here.

Irish times obituary in 2025.

Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, was one of the most photographed and talked-about female singers of the 1960s. But to her enduring frustration, her musical talents were eclipsed by her reputation as the pre-eminent It girl of swinging London and her four-year relationship with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. “I got out very quickly,” she would say of her Jagger years. “Much as I love The Rolling Stones, they’re not my life.”

With her trendy haircut and movie star looks, her image was of a Carnaby Street femme fatale. But her music could not have been further removed from that glitzy persona. Faithfull’s breathy singing voice brimmed with melancholy, and if early songs such As Tears Go By were disposable pop, in the 1970s, she matured into a thoughtful songwriter who looked back on her gilded past and saw only pain and loss.

This was more than just poetic licence. In 1967, her fame turned to notoriety when the police raided the home of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and found the Stones and hangers-on in a state of drugged debauchery. Faithfull was discovered naked, wrapped in a rug, and the infamy would haunt her for years. “It destroyed me,” she would say. “To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother.”

She split from Jagger in 1970 upon discovering he was having an affair with Richards’s lover, Anita Pallenberg. After a suicide attempt, and having become addicted to heroin, she also lost custody of her son Nicholas to her ex-husband, art dealer John Dunbar. “Suddenly, when I was living on the streets … I realised that human beings were really good. The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea stall gave me cups of tea

Music would prove her salvation. In 1976, while still a drug user, she released the mournful ballad Dreamin’ My Dreams. Ignored in the UK, in Ireland it became a huge hit after being championed by a young Pat Kenny, whom she would acknowledge in her 1994 autobiography. Encouraged by that song’s success, in 1979 she recorded Broken English – the LP widely regarded as her masterpiece

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“Dreamin’ My Dreams was released in Britain to a resounding silence. And then out of the blue a deejay in Ireland by the name of Patrick Kenny started to play it on his show and it went to number one in the Irish charts for seven weeks – the Irish love a waltz,” she wrote. “It was a fluke … I don’t know whether it’s the church in Ireland or the drinking, but these people do know how to forgive.”

She felt she needed forgiveness after years of addiction. She also believed that Ireland was the one place that would look past her faded glamour and her notoriety and see her for who she was: a broken, confused mother who wanted to do right by the world – and the world to do right by her.

Faithfull had visited Ireland on and off since the 1960s, initially with Jagger. In 1969, months before she and Jagger split, the couple were visiting Glin Castle in Limerick when they were introduced to Anglo-Irish peer Paddy Rossmore – who would later become her fiance (Faithfull would end the relationship in 1979). “He was so Anglo-Irish: long legs that curl up in that English aristocratic way, a bit like an old lady. In short, the sort of man my mother always wanted me to marry,” she recalled of Rossmore. “Flirtation becomes infatuation.”

The singer was born Marian Evelyn Faithfull in December 1946. Her father, Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British army officer and MI6 agent with a bohemian background to rival any 1960s rocker. His father was a pioneering sexologist, while Robert had helped establish an upmarket commune in Oxfordshire, which Marianne would describe as a “mixture of high utopian thoughts and randy sex”. Her mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch, was born in Budapest to Austria-Hungarian nobility: her great-uncle, Baron von Sacher-Masoch, was the author of the pornographic novel Venus In Furs and the creator of the term “masochism”.

The marriage was stormy, and Faithfull’s parents separated when she was six. She and her mother moved to a terraced house in Reading, where Faithfull was educated at the local Catholic school. Her life changed when she met Jagger at a party in 1964. She was only vaguely aware of The Rolling Stones – then just another up-and-coming blues band in London. But their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, thought she looked like an “angel” he could market as a pop star. A few months later, she had her first smash with As Tears Go By – a Rolling Stones original that Jagger and Richards had dismissed as a “terrible piece of tripe”. The public disagreed, and Faithfull’s’ recording became a top-ten hit. A pop icon was born.

If Faithfull’s relationship with the charts was a brief flirtation, her love affair with Ireland was more enduring. She lived for many years at the famous 18th-century Shell Cottage on Carton House near Maynooth – the interior of which is lined with seashells. She later moved to Dublin and Co Waterford before relocating to Paris, where she endured a difficult lockdown, coming close to death after contracting Covid.

She never stopped writing and recording. In 2021, released her final album, She Walks In Beauty – inspired by her love of the British romantic poets. In an interview with Hot Press that year, she was philosophical about her life and continuing association with the Stones. “I haven’t seen Mick for years. I did see him once or twice in Ireland and we just talked non-stop, as if there was no one else in the room. It was at a dinner party, so in a funny way, we’re still kind of close. But no, I don’t go out and I’m not in his world any more.”

She was married and divorced three times, to John Dunbar (1965-66), musician Ben Brierly, a musician (1979-1986), and writer and actor Giorgio Della Terza (1988-1991). She is survived by her son, Nicholas

Terence Stamp

In the Kink’s song “Waterloo Sunset”, the guys refer to Terry and Julie. Terence Stamp and Julie Christie were two of the icons of the 1960’s.

Stamp made an impact in “Billy Budd” in 1962 with Peter Ustinov and Robert Ryan.

Terence Stamp was born in Stepney, London in 1939. His second film was with Laurence Oliver and Sarah Miles in the Irish made “Term of Trial”.

William Wyler brought Stamp and Samantha Eggar to Hollywood to make “The Collector”. Terence Stamp stayed on in Hollywood to make “Blue”.

He was especially good as Captain Troy in “Far from the Madding Crowd” and Carol White’s boyfriend in Ken Loach’s “Poor Cow”.

By the end of the 60’s he seemed tired of movies and disappeared from acting to do some global travelling.

He returned to play the part of Zod in “Supeerman” and then continued to act frequently on both sides of the Atlantic. Recent films of note include “The Limey” and “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”.

TCM Overview:

Named by Empire Magazine in 1995 as one of the 100 Sexiest Film Stars of All Time, British actor Terence Stamp typically found himself cast as urbane, sophisticated bad guys throughout his career

. Breaking into show business in the early 1960s, Stamp landed his first leading role at the age of 23 in “Billy Budd” (1962), the acclaimed adaptation of Herman Melville’s dense novella.

An icon of British cinema’s wave of “angry young men,” Stamp’s portrayals – like those of his contemporaries Oliver Reed, Michael Caine and Albert Finney – inhabited shades of gray, walking the line between traditional protagonists and flawed anti-heroes. After his breathtaking early success, however, Stamp’s career entered into a significant slump in the late 60s.

But later Stamp emerged after a nearly decade-long sabbatical to play the megalomaniacal super-villain General Zod in “Superman: The Movie” (1978) and its sequel, “Superman II” (1980). Ever since, Stamp managed to turn himself into a respected character actor, consistently remaining busy at an age when most actors contemplate retirement.

Joan Greenwood

“The British cinema has nurtured so few talents of Joan Greenwood’s order that she was hugely missed during the latter part of her career. ‘That formidable enchantress’, Frank Marcus once called her. She was not, of course, of the stuff of which British stars were made . She had sex appeal, style and a striking individuality. She had a husky voice that liked to pounce on certain vowels, speaking her lines. as Karl Reisz said once,’as if she dily suspected some hidden menace in them which she can’t quite identify’ – ‘Variety’ ocne described it ‘as one of the wonders on the modern world’. She was of diminutive stature and moved like a cat – to watch her sit down is like watching a cat settle itself, as she wittily poses hands, feet and elbows. Obviously, she was mannered but her range was by no means narrow. With all the fasidousness, the strange enquiring stare, the voice and the exquisite postures this was an actress who played many parts, all of them beautifully”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972)

Joan Greenwood was a delightful actress with her own distinct individuality. She had a feline quality with a voice that was like a cat’s purr. She did not have a profilic film career but many of her films are very special indeed. She was born in 1921 in Chelsea, London. She trained at RADA and then toured with Sir Donald Wolfits theatre company during World War Two. Her first film “The Gentle Sex” was released in 1943. Her films of note include “Kind Hearts and Coronets”, “Whiskey Galore”, “The Man in he White Suit” and “The Importance of Being Ernest” where she was a delicious Gwendolyne. Joan Greenwood made two films in Hollywood, “Moonfleet” in 1955 which is a great period romp about pirates in Cornwall with Stewart Granger and Jon Whiteley and “Stagestruck” where she supported Henry Fonda and Susan Strasberg. She seemd to concentrate on the stage from the mid 1960’s on. She was married to the character actor Andre Morell. She died of a heart attack at the age of 65. Please watch out for her movies, you will not be disappointed.

Philip French’s “Screen Legend’s” in “The Guardian”:

Born in London, daughter of the painter Sydney Earnshaw Greenwood, she was trained at Rada and became one of the most enchanting stage, screen and TV actresses of her time. There were the quizzical eyes, the neat face with its provocative nose and the slight, firm body which looked good in off-the-shoulder dresses in such period movies as the elegant Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), the dire The Bad Lord Byron (1949) and Tony Richardson’s Oscar-winning Tom Jones (1963). Above all, there was that voice – husky, seductive, felinely purring.

Leslie Howard gave Greenwood her first significant film role in The Gentle Sex (1943), his Second World War, morale-boosting tribute to the gutsy ATS girls. Her first major performance, however, was in The October Man (1947), produced and written by Eric Ambler, where she protects amnesiac John Mills when he’s framed for murder.

Immediately after, she became a vital presence in three classic Ealing comedies that guarantee her immortality, playing provocative, teasing, manipulative women: the Scots girl mocking resident Brit Basil Radford in Alexander Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore! (1949), the minx blackmailing Dennis Price in Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and above all the cool, intelligent realist standing between her rich, industrialist father and the idealistic inventor Alec Guinness in Mackendrick’s The Man in the White Suit (1951).

She worked again with Hamer and Guinness as a kindly aristocrat in Father Brown (1954) and went to Hollywood to play the 18th-century femme fatale in Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet (1955), cast, according to the producer John Houseman, to give the movie a little style. She was also rather good as a diva in the drama of New York theatrical life, Stage Struck (1958), a remake of the 1933 Katharine Hepburn picture Morning Glory. But after Ealing, she only appeared in two movies of the first rank – as an utterly beguiling Gwendolen in Anthony Asquith’s perfectly cast The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) and as one of the English women who falls victim to the French visitor Gérard Philipe in René Clément’s downbeat, rarely revived tragicomedy of Anglo-French manners, Knave of Hearts (aka Monsieur Ripois, 1954).

Her best work thereafter was in the theatre. She was appearing at the Oxford Playhouse as Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in 1960 when she fell in love with André Morell, who was playing Judge Brack. They eloped to marry in the West Indies. She was 39, he was 51, it was the first marriage for both, and they were together until his death in 1978. They had a son, the actor Jason Morell. Her final film, Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit, opened in 1987; she died the same year.

Posthumous fameIn a 1995 Empire poll she was voted 63rd sexiest star in film history.

Two Greenwood firsts She starred in Ealing’s first colour movie, Saraband for Dead Lovers, and in Fritz Lang’s first widescreen film.

Essential DVDS Whisky Galore!, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, The Importance of Being Earnest, The October Man

“The Times” obituary from 1987:m

Miss Joan Greenwood: The voice that intrigued generations

Miss Joan Greenwood, the actress, died on February 27. She was 65. A strikingly attractive woman – diminutive and with blinding blond
hair -her portrayals were both bewitching and provocative. Her voice, likened to the sound of someone gargling with champagne, was intoxicating, although it led, to her occasional chagrin, to her being typecast in the role of dotty duchess.

Miss Greenwood was born in Chelsea on March 4, 1921, an artist’s   daughter. She was educated at St Catherine’s, Bramley, Surrey, and   studied for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.   She made her first appearance on the stage – in November, 1938, at the   age of 17 – at the Apollo as Louisa in “The Robust Invalid”. Next year   she was at the Strand in “Little Ladyship” and, two months later, at the Lyric as Little Mary in “The Women”, taking the same part when it
was revived at the Strand in 1940.   She played Wendy in “Peter Pan” at the Adelphi in December 1941, and   toured in the same part during 1942. A decade later she played the   title role at the Scala – one of the smallest Peters at just over 5
feet tall. “I got my pilot’s licence before we started rehearsals,”   she explained.

Earlier, in 1941, she braved the Blitz to go to the now defunct Q Theatre to appear in the revue “Rise Above It”, with Hermione Baddeley and Henry Kendall. When it went to the West End, however, she was dropped from the cast. Hurt though she was, she persevered and, two years later, succeeded Deborah Kerr as Ellie Dunn in “Heartbreak House”, followed by a spell of touring with ENSA. She also toured with Donald Wolfit’s Company, playing Ophelia in “Hamlet” and Celia in “Volpone”.

Joan Greenwood made her first appearance on the New York stage at the Morosco in 1954 as Lucasta Angel in T.S. Eliot’s “The Confidential Clerk”, which was later televised. Back in this country she took the title part, in 1957, in “Lysistrata” at the Royal Court, transferring with the production to the Duke of York’s the next year. And in 1959, her magnetism undiminished, she attracted pack houses to St Martin’s as Hattie in the comedy “The Grass is Greener”. At the Oxford
Playhouse in 1960, in the title part in “Hedda Gabler”, she played alongside Andre Morell, with whom she had previously worked. That summer they secretly took themselves off to Jamaica where, to everyone’s surprise (except their own), they married.

Four years later she was at the Lyric in another comedy – “Oblomov”. She left the cast, however, after seven months, announcing that enough is enough”. In “The Chalk Garden” at the Haymarket in 1971 she excelled as a tight-lipped governess, tiny and ruthless; and, in 1982she took over Celia Johnson’s role in “The Understanding” at the Strand following Dame Celia’s death.

Joan Greenwood made her film debut in the early years of the Second World War, and was at her peak in this medium from 1948 to 1955. She attracted a discriminating following with her witty and intelligent performances in such films as “Girl in a Million” (1946) and “Whisky Galore” (1949). That same year, in “Kind Hearts and Coronets”, with Alec Guinness, she played a thoroughly unpleasant young woman. This remained her favourite film. She enjoyed travel and went to New York several times to do work.

In 1955 she made her first visit to Hollywood to play in “Moonfleet”, and spent four months on a part that lasted about five minutes on the screen. But she had no time for the Hollywood lifestyle or for American men. “I couldn’t put up with the endless make-up sessions”, she later reflected. “All that palaver of keeping out of the sun, dyeing one’s hair and worrying about the size of one’s bossom. She found the sanity of Ealing much more to her taste. There “we used to wash our hair in buckets, and we survived on toasted sandwiches, chocolate and soup.” Later films included “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1952), in which she played Gwendoline, “Tom Jones” (1963), and “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1978).

Her most recent television appearances were in a comedy series called “Girls on Top”, as a romantic novelist just this side of certifiable; and in a BBC “Miss Marple” adventure, as an endearing, all-knowing society lady. “Now I’m an old hag I get to may much more interesting characters.” Her husband died in 1978. She is survived by their son.

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

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Hannah Gordon

Wendy Craig

Angus Lennie

Belita

Belita. Obituary in “The Independemt” in 2005.

June Duprez

Martin Shaw

Martin Shaw TCM Overview

Marianne Faithfull

Irish times obituary in 2025.

Terence Stamp

Terence Stamp

Joan Greenwood

Joan Greenwood

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