Binnie Barnes was born in Islington, North London in 1903. She began her career as a ballroom dance and then went into revue. Her first major film role was as Catherine Parr in 1933 in “THe Private Life of Henry 8th”. By 1936 she was in Hollywood where she met and married the film producer Mike Francovitch. Her last film was as Liv Ullmann’s mother in “40 Carats”. She died in 1998.
“New York Times” obituary:
Binnie Barnes, an English actress who was lured to Hollywood after her role as Catherine Howard in ”The Private Life of Henry VIII,” the 1933 film starring Charles Laughton, died on Monday at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 95. After a stint as a milkmaid at 15, the auburn-haired beauty, who was born in London, flitted through a series of jobs — nurse, chorus girl, dance hostess — before becoming a partner of Tex McLeod, a rope-spinning vaudeville entertainer of the Will Rogers school, eventually assuming the name ”Texas Binnie Barnes,” though she had never met an American cowboy.
In 1929, she made her stage debut in ”Silver Tassie,” which featured Laughton. After a year of dramatic training, she made her film debut in the 1931 English movie ”Night in Montmartre,” starring Heather Angel. Later, in a series of 26 Stanley Lupino comedy shorts, she played vampish character roles. The producer Alexander Korda then signed her to a contract to appear in his films, including ”The Private Life of Henry VIII” and ”The Private Life of Don Juan,” opposite Douglas Fairbanks. After seeing her in ”Henry VIII,” Carl Laemmle Jr., son of the founder of Universal Studios, brought Miss Barnes to Hollywood in 1934 to star opposite Frank Morgan in ”There’s Always Tomorrow.” More than 75 movies followed, including ”Diamond Jim” with Edward Arnold, ”The Adventures of Marco Polo” with Gary Cooper and ”The Three Musketeers” with Don Ameche, in which she typically played a tart-tongued ”man’s woman” — an image she often maintained in public in her earlier years.
”I’m no Sarah Bernhardt,” she once said. ”One picture is just like another to me,” as long as ”I don’t have to be a sweet woman.” In 1940, she married Mike Frankovich, a Columbia studio executive and former football star at the University of California at Los Angeles. He died in 1992. At the end of World War II they moved to Italy, where she made several films, including ”Fugitive Lady” with Janis Paige and Eduardo Cianelli.
She resurrected her career in the 1960’s for a role on ”The Donna Reed Show.” She appeared in ”The Trouble With Angels,” starring Rosalind Russell, in 1966 and in the sequel two years later. In 1973 Miss Barnes appeared in her last film, ”40 Carats,” with Liv Ullmann and Gene Kelly.
She is survived by two sons, a daughter and seven grandchildren.
Binnie Barne’s minibiography on the IMDB website can be accessed here.
Call Out The Marines, poster, from left: Victor McLaglen, Binnie Barnes, Edmund Lowe on window card, 1942. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)In Old California, poster, John Wayne, Binnie Barnes, 1942. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
TCM Overview:
The delicately beautiful Binnie Barnes displayed a versatility and talent that was equally at home in comedies or dramas. While her heyday was primarily from the 1930s to the mid-50s, younger audiences may recall her as Sister Celestine in the genial romp “The Trouble With Angels” (1966) and its 1968 sequel “Where Angels Go… Trouble Follows” (The former was directed by Ida Lupino, whose father Stanley co-starred in several shorts with Barnes in the late 1920s.)
Although Billy Idol is known primarily as a rock singer, he has made anumber of acting appearances on film and television. He was born in 1955 in Stanmore, Middlesex. His films include “Mad Dog Time” and “The Doors”. Billy Idol’s website here.
Geraldine McEwan was born in 1932 in Windsor. She began her threatical career at the age of fourteen. She has worked for many years on the stage and played opposite Laurence Oliver in “The Dance of Death”. In 1965 she appeared with Kenneth Williams in “Loot”. She has had three very succesful television series, “The Prime of Jean Brodie”, “Mapp and Lucia” and “Marple”. Her film career is not extensive but it does include “There Was a Young Lady” in 1953 and “The Magdalene Sisters” as Sister Brigid.
She died in 2014.
“Guardian” obituary
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Geraldine McEwan, who has died aged 82, could purr like a kitten, snap like a viper and, like Shakespeare’s Bottom, roar you as gently as any sucking dove. She was a brilliant, distinctive and decisive performer whose career incorporated high comedy on the West End stage, Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, and a cult television following in EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1985-86).
She was also notable on television as a controversial Miss Marple in a series of edgy, incongruously outspoken Agatha Christie adaptations (2004-09). Inheriting a role that had already been inhabited at least three times “definitively” – by Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury and Joan Hickson – she made of the deceptively cosy detective a character both steely and skittish, with a hint of lust about her, too.
This new Miss Marple was an open-minded woman of the world, with a back story that touched on a thwarted love affair with a married man who had been killed in the first world war. Familiar thrillers were given new plot twists, and there was even the odd sapphic embrace. For all her ingenuity and faun-like fluttering, McEwan was really no more successful in the part than was Julia McKenzie, her very different successor.
Although she was not easily confused with Maggie Smith, she often tracked her stylish contemporary, succeeding her in Peter Shaffer roles (in The Private Ear and The Public Eye in 1963, and in Lettice and Lovage in 1988) and rivalling Smith as both Millamant and Lady Wishfort in Congreve’s masterpiece The Way of the World in 1969 and 1995.
And a decade after Smith won her Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, McEwan scored a great success in the same role on television in 1978; Muriel Spark said that McEwan was her favourite Miss Brodie in a cluster that also included Vanessa Redgrave and Anna Massey.
McEwan was born in Old Windsor, where her father, Donald McKeown, was a printers’ compositor who ran the local branch of the Labour party in a Tory stronghold; her mother, Nora (nee Burns), came from a working-class Irish family. Geraldine was always a shy and private girl who found her voice, she said, when she stood up in school and read a poem.
She had won a scholarship to Windsor county girls’ school, but she felt out of place until she found refuge in the Windsor Rep at the Theatre Royal, where she played an attendant fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1946. After leaving school, she joined the Windsor company for two years in 1949, meeting there her life-long companion, Hugh Cruttwell, a former teacher turned stage manager, 14 years her senior, whom she married in 1953, and who became a much-loved and influential principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1965.
Without any formal training, McEwan went straight from Windsor to the West End, making her debut in Who Goes There? by John Deighton (Vaudeville, 1951), followed by an 18-month run in For Better, For Worse… (Comedy, 1952) and withDirk Bogarde in Summertime, a light comedy by Ugo Betti (Apollo, 1955).
Summertime was directed by Peter Hall and had a chaotic pre-West End tour, Bogarde’s fans mobbing the stage door every night and in effect driving him away from the theatre for good; McEwan told Bogarde’s biographer, John Coldstream, how he was both deeply encouraging to her and deeply conflicted over his heartthrob star status.
Within a year she made her Stratford debut as the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost and played opposite Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, replacing Joan Plowright as Jean Rice when the play moved from the Royal Court to the Palace. Like Ian Holm and Diana Rigg, she was a key agent of change in the transition from the summer Stratford festival – playing Olivia, Marina and Hero in the 1958 season – to Peter Hall’s new Royal Shakespeare Company; at Stratford in 1961, she played Beatrice to Christopher Plummer’s Benedick and Ophelia to Ian Bannen’s Hamlet.
Kittenish and playful, with a wonderful gift for suggesting hurt innocence with an air of enchanted distraction, she was a superb Lady Teazle in a 1962 Haymarket production of The School for Scandal, also starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, that went to Broadway in early 1963, her New York debut. She returned to tour in the first, disastrous, production of Joe Orton’s Loot, with Kenneth Williams, in 1965, and then joined Olivier’s National at the Old Vic, where parts over the next five years included Raymonde Chandebise in Jacques Charon’s landmark production of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, Alice in Strindberg’s Dance of Death (with Olivier and Robert Stephens), Queen Anne in Brecht’s Edward II, Victoria (“a needle-sharp gold digger” said one reviewer) in Somerset Maugham’s Home and Beauty, Millamant, and Vittoria Corombona in The White Devil.
Back in the West End, she formed a classy quartet, alongside Pat Heywood, Albert Finney and Denholm Elliott, in Peter Nichols’s Chez Nous at the Globe (1974), and gave a delightful impression of a well-trained, coquettish poodle as the leisured whore in Noël Coward’s broken-backed adaptation of Feydeau, Look After Lulu, at Chichester and the Haymarket.
In the 1980s, she made sporadic appearances at the National, now on the South Bank, winning two Evening Standard awards for her fresh and youthful Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (“Men are all Bavarians,” she exclaimed on exiting, creating a brand new malapropism for “barbarians”) and her hilariously acidulous Lady Wishfort; and was a founder member of Ray Cooney’s Theatre of Comedy at the Shaftesbury theatre.
In the latter part of her stage career, she seemed to cut loose in ever more adventurous directions, perhaps through her friendship with Kenneth Branagh, who had become very close to Cruttwell while studying at Rada. She was a surprise casting as the mother of a psychotic son who starts behaving like a wolf, played by Will Patton, in Sam Shepard’s merciless domestic drama, A Lie of the Mind, at the Royal Court in 1987. And in 1988 she directed As You Like It for Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, Branagh playing Touchstone as an Edwardian music-hall comedian.
The following year she directed Christopher Hampton’s under-rated Treats at the Hampstead theatre and, in 1998, formed a fantastical nonagenarian double act with Richard Briers in a Royal Court revival, directed by Simon McBurney, of Ionesco’s tragic farce The Chairs, her grey hair bunched on one side like superannuated candy floss.
She was a brilliant but controversial Judith Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever (1999), directed as a piece of Gothic absurdism at the Savoy by Declan Donnellan; McEwan tiptoed through the thunderclaps and lightning like a glinting harridan, a tipsy bacchanalian with a waspish lust and highly cultivated lack of concern (“My husband’s not dead; he’s upstairs.”)
Other television successes included Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990), playing Jeanette Winterson’s mother, and an adaptation of Nina Bawden’s tale of evacuees in Wales, Carrie’s War (2004). Her occasional movie appearances included Cliff Owen’s The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1975), two of Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptations – Henry V (1989) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) – as well as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); Peter Mullan’s devastating critique of an Irish Catholic education, The Magdalene Sisters (2002), in which she played cruel, cold-hearted Sister Bridget; and Vanity Fair (2004).
McEwan was rumoured to have turned down both being appointed OBE and a damehood, but never confirmed this.
Hugh died in 2002. She is survived by their two children, Greg and Claudia, and seven grandchildren.
The “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
Brian Bedford was born in Morley, West Yorkshire in 1935. His first film role was “Miracle in Soho” in 1957. He had a good supporting role as a thug menancing Richard Attenborough in “The Angry Silence”. He has though spent the majority of his career on the U.S. stage with just the occasional film role. Article on Brian Bedford in “The New York Times” website here. He died in January 2016.
“New York Times” obituary:
Brian Bedford, the British-born actor, reared in working-class misery, who became a stellar portrayer of the princes, kings, fops and faded aristocrats of Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov, died on Wednesday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 80.
The cause was cancer, said one of his agents, Richard Schmenner.
A dapper, handsome man with a comfortingly resonant speaking voice, Mr. Bedford was an understated and perhaps undersung star. He was a protégé of John Gielgud and a theater-school classmate of Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole, sharing their elaborate gifts but not their celebrity, probably because he performed only occasionally in movies and on television.
Sylvan Barnet, Scholar, Is Dead at 89; Edited Signet Shakespeare PaperbacksJAN. 13, 2016 His stage career, however — in England, in the United States (Off Broadway as well as on) and in Canada, where he was a mainstay at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival for nearly four decades — had few equals. Playing comedy or tragedy, pathos or hilarity, Mr. Bedford was known for controlled and layered performances, and for finding the depth and subtlety in monumental characters, from King Lear to Tartuffe.
Mr. Bedford, left, as Lady Bracknell and Charlotte Parry as Cecily Cardew in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” a 2010 production at the American Airlines Theater. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times He won only one Tony Award, in 1971, for playing Arnolphe, the desperately jealous and insecure spouse-seeker in Molière’s “School for Wives,” but he did it against especially formidable competition; Gielgud and Ralph Richardson were among the other nominees.
In 2011, Mr. Bedford, who appeared in 18 Broadway productions, earned his seventh Tony nomination for his drag performance as Lady Bracknell, Oscar Wilde’s often-wrong, ever-certain social arbiter, in “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
“With his long jaw and listening eyes, Bedford, now 75, uses his physiognomy to tell the stories that no playwright or director can prefigure; that is, he allows himself to be transformed by the theatrical moment,” Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker in a brief, admiring article about the show.
He added: “As a kind of magistrate in a tall wig and a false front, Bracknell lives for her younger charges’ attempts to contradict her. But how can they scale the wall of imperiousness that Bedford builds with his silences and his disapproving glances? Life doesn’t stand a chance in the face of such brutally honest artifice.”
Mr. Bedford was also the director of “Earnest,” a production that originated at Stratford (now simply called the Stratford Festival) and was itself nominated for a Tony as best revival. And though his career as a director was consequential — Mr. Bedford staged more than 20 shows at Stratford — he craved performing most of all.
“I’m most alive when I’m acting,” he said. “I can’t deny it, it’s where I belong.”
His résumé was vast. His Shakespearean roles included Hamlet, Brutus, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Shylock, King Leontes, Timon of Athens, Benedick, Ariel and Dogberry. His Chekhov included Astrov in “Uncle Vanya,” Tusenbach in “The Three Sisters” and Trigorin in “The Seagull.”
In more modern roles he was Elyot in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” Vladimir in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” Henry in “The Real Thing” by Tom Stoppard, Martin Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” Salieri in Mr. Shaffer’s “Amadeus” and the title character in Simon Gray’s “Butley.”
A student of theater history, Mr. Bedford played not just the roles that the great writers wrote, but also the writers themselves in one-man shows about them.
“He is perhaps the finest English-language interpreter of classical comedy of his generation, and he seems to pick up a Tony nomination every time he steps on a Broadway stage,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times in 2011. “Yet he is as likely to be found on a cruise ship performing a one-man show about Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde, or in Prague, in high summer, appearing in a supporting role in a traveling musical production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ starring Kelsey Grammer.” For an actor who became known for interpreting classic works, his background might be considered surprising.
Mr. Bedford was born on Feb. 16, 1935, in the mill town of Morley, near Leeds and Bradford, in Yorkshire — “a pretty awful place,” he told The New York Post in 1971, comparing it to Lawrence, Mass., another city that played a grim role in his family history. “Only much dirtier. Chimneys belching smoke night and day.”
His father, Arthur, was a postal worker; his mother, the former Eleanor O’Donnell, was a factory weaver. Two of his three older brothers died of tuberculosis. Sometime after Brian left home and began his acting career, his father took his own life.
“Suicide runs in the family,” Mr. Bedford said in a Times interview in 1971. “My father’s brother also committed suicide. He got a girl into trouble when he was 22, and in order to save face for both families, he emigrated to America, took a boat to Boston, went to a tiny place — Lawrence, Mass. — booked into a hotel and shot himself in the mouth.”
The austerity of his upbringing fostered a lively fantasy life. “I used to spend all my time pretending to be a radio,” Mr. Bedford said. He attended a Roman Catholic school in Bradford but left at 15, working in a warehouse by day and performing in amateur theater at night. At 18, he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
“I did a bit of Romeo and a bit of ‘Boy With a Cart’” — a verse drama about a saint by the 20th-century playwright Christopher Fry — “and I got a scholarship,” he recalled. “That was the beginning of my life. I moved to London.”
At RADA, as the academy is familiarly known, Mr. Bedford joined a generation of actors who came of age at a turning point on the British stage, when class conflict and the lives of young people in hardscrabble circumstances became central subjects, realism displaced escapism, and gentility was no longer a watchword for writers or performers.
The shift was given impetus with the first performance, in 1956, of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” about life in a cramped city flat. It propelled a movement of playwrights and novelists, joined by Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, Kingsley Amis and David Storey, who became known as the angry young men.
Alan Bates, who was Mr. Bedford’s roommate in their own cramped flat, appeared in Osborne’s play; to do so he had to give up a role in another play, based on stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, called “The Young and the Beautiful,” and Mr. Bedford took over for him.
From there, Peter Brook cast him as Rodolpho, the young swain, in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” and as Ariel in “The Tempest,” which starred Gielgud, whom Mr. Bedford had met while at school and who had counseled him when, at 21, he played Hamlet at the Liverpool Repertory Theater.
Gielgud later directed him in “Five Finger Exercise,” Peter Shaffer’s play about an imploding family, which brought him to New York for the first time in 1959; the play ran for 10 months on Broadway.
Mr. Bedford appeared again on Broadway in the early 1960s — in “Lord Pengo,” a comedy by S. N. Behrman, and in an evening of one-acts by Mr. Shaffer, “The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye.” He also appeared Off Broadway in “The Knack,” a frisky bachelor-pad comedy directed by Mike Nichols (fresh from his triumph with Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park”), after which he decided to move to New York.
“I found England dreary,” Mr. Bedford later explained. “I suppose it’s understandable if your childhood was as mean as mine.”
In the movies, Mr. Bedford appeared in “Grand Prix” (1966) with James Garner, and as Clyde Tolson, associate director of the F.B.I., in “Nixon” (1995), whose title role was played by his fellow Briton Anthony Hopkins.
His best-known film role may be the voice of the title character in the Disney animated feature “Robin Hood” (1973), who was portrayed as a fox. On television he made occasional guest appearances on prime-time series, including “Ben Casey,” “Judd for the Defense,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Cheers,” “Frasier” and “The Equalizer.”
In 1975, after his debut performance at Stratford as Malvolio in “Twelfth Night,” the festival became his artistic home. He performed in more than 50 productions there, taking on many of his grandest and most celebrated classic roles.
He also displayed a wide range as a director at Stratford, staging not just Shakespearean tragedies like “Titus Andronicus,” “Othello” and “King Lear” but also 20th-century classics, including “Waiting for Godot” and “Blithe Spirit,” and Michael Frayn’s contemporary farce “Noises Off,” not to mention “Earnest.”
He toured internationally in one-man shows of his own creation; in a tour of Shakespeare’s life and works called “The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet”; and in “Ever Yours, Oscar,” drawn from the letters of Oscar Wilde.
Mr. Bedford is survived by his partner of 30 years, the actor Tim MacDonald. They married in 2013.
In 2013, illness forced Mr. Bedford to withdraw from a Stratford production of “The Merchant of Venice,” in which he was cast as Shylock.
“We were hoping he would bounce back,” Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director, said in an interview on Wednesday. “He was a great actor, a brilliant comedian, a tragedian and comedian of equal measure. For many of us here, he was the reason we went into the theater, an inspiration and a mentor.”
“Onstage he was luminous,” Mr. Cimolino added. “You could feel he was a theater animal — he had such a sense of ease. He was like a fish in water on that stage.”
The above “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Brian Murray was born in South Africa in 1937. He began his acting career in Britain and had a prominent supporting role in “The Angry Silence” as one of the thugs menancing Richard Attenborough. His career though has been primarily on the stage in the U.S.A.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
This wonderfully witty, enormously talented, classically-trained theatre actor has yet to find THE film project to transition into twilight screen stardom; yet, at age 70 plus, there is still a glimmer of hope for Brian Murray if one fondly recalls the late-blooming adulation bestowed upon such illustrious and mature stage stars Judi Dench, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.
Born Brian Bell in September of 1937 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Shakespearean titan attended King Edward VII School, while there. It must have been a sign. He made his stage bow in 1950 as “Taplow” in “The Browning Version” and continued on the South African stage until 1957. Though he made his film debut fairly early in his career with The League of Gentlemen (1960) and showed strong promise and presence in The Angry Silence (1960), his first passion was, and is, the theatre and instead chose to join the Royal Shakespeare Company where his impressively youthful gallery of credits included those of “Romeo”, “Horatio” in “Hamlet”, “Cassio” in “Othello”, “Edgar” in “Lear” and “Lysander” in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
Eventually Broadway (off- and on-) took notice of this mighty thespian and utilized his gifts quite well over the years. A three-time Tony nominee (for “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, “The Little Foxes” and “The Crucible”), not to mention a recipient of multiple Obie (“Ashes” and “The Play About the Baby”) and Drama Desk (“Noises Off”, “Travels with My Aunt” and “The Little Foxes”) awards, this lofty veteran continues to mesmerize live audiences with a wide range of parts, both classical and contemporary. Two of his later roles, that of “Sir Toby Belch” in “Twelfth Night” and “Claudius” in “Hamlet”, were taken to TV and film. A more recent movie project was a nice change of pace — voicing the flamboyant role of “John Silver” in the animated feature, Treasure Planet (2002).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Roy Kinnear was one of Britains best and busiest character actors. He was born in Wigan, Lancashire in 1934. In 1951 he began studying at RADA. One of his first feature films was “Sparrows Can’t Sing” with Barbara Windsor. He also starred in the television satirical revue “That Was the Week That Was”. His many films include “The Bed Sitting Room” and “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” with Gene Wilder. In 1988 while filming “The Return of the Musketeers” in Spain, he fell off his horse and was killed.He was 54 years of age when he died. His son Rory Kinnear is a popular actor. His obituary in “The New York Times” can be accessed here.
TCM Overview:
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Portly, sometimes mustached, stage-trained British character actor of film and TV of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Kinnear first gained notoriety on British TV as a regular on the groundbreaking weekly topical satire series, “That Was the Week That Was” in the early 60s. With his large, round face and often bulging eyes, Kinnear sweated and flustered his way through many a frantic comedy, as well as dramas and period fare, playing characters both sympathetic and not. Children of a certain age may best recall him in “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) as Mr. Salt, the pompous, indulgent father of the bratty Veruca Salt. His non-comedy credits include “The Hill” (1965), director Sidney Lumet’s hard-hitting military prison drama starring Sean Connery, and the Hammer horror entry, “Taste the Blood of Dracula” (1969).
Kinnear had a rather broad performing style which some reviewers quickly found tiresome. In contrast he seemed to positively enchant American expatriate director Richard Lester who cast him in eight features including the Beatles vehicle “Help!” (1965) as the bumbling assistant to mad scientist Victor Spinetti, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966), “How I Won the War” (1967) and “The Four Musketeers” (1975) and “Return of the Musketeers” (1989). Kinnear died during the shooting of the latter when he fell off a horse.
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
There was a time in ther sixties when it looked that Barbara Ferris was going to have a major film career. It di not happen to the level it should have but she did have the lead in three good movies. John Boorman cast her in “Catch Us If You Can” with the Dave Clark Five, “Interlude” with Oskar Werner and “A NIce Girl Like Me” in 1969. Since then she has worked regularly on the stage and television in the UK. Her “Wikipedia” page can be read here.
TCM Overview:
t the tender age of 16, Barbara Ferris began her entertainment career as an actress. Ferris kickstarted her acting career in various films such as the drama “Children of the D*mned” (1963) with Ian Hendry and the Laurence Olivier dramatic adaptation “Term of Trial” (1963). She was nominated for a BAFTA Award for “Having A Wild Weekend” in 1965. Ferris also brought characters to life with her vocal talents in the adaptation “Tom Thumb” (1958) with Russ Tamblyn.
She continued to work steadily in film throughout the sixties and the eighties, appearing in “Interlude” (1968) and “A Nice Girl Like Me” (1969). She also worked in television around this time, including a part on “The Strauss Family” (ABC, 1972-73). Film continued to be her passion as she played roles in “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and “A Chorus of Disapproval” (1989). Ferris more recently acted in “The Krays” (1990) with Billie Whitelaw.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
David Royle was born in 1961 in Salford, Manchester. He spent three years in the British army (Royal Artillery)before studying acting at the Drama Centre in London. He is best remembered for featuring in 29 episodes of “Dalziel & Pascoe”. The series was not the same since he left the show. Sadly David Royle died of MS in 2017. His IMDB page can be accessed here.
Googie Withers obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.
Googie Withers was one of the great stars of the Golden Age of British Cinema. She was born in 1917 in Karachi in now Pakistan. Her father was British and her mother Dutch. She acted on the London stage and made her film debut in 1935 in “The Girl in the Crowd”. She was one of Margaret Lockwood’s chums in “The Lady Vanishes”. Some of her best remembered films include “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing”,””Pink String and Ceiling Wax”, “It Always Rains On Sundays” and “Miranda”. She married the Australian actor John McCallum and went to live there with him. However they acted on the stage in Britain and were acting on Broadway when they were in their eighties. John McCallum died in 2010. Googie Withers died at the age of 94 in her home in Sydney, Australia in July 2011.
“Guardian” obituary:
Dead Of Night, poster, bottom left from left: Ralph Michael, Googie Withers, right top to bottom: Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, 1945. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers’s striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. A bored wife, she gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, played by John McCallum, soon to be her real-life husband. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards.
What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped, she acquired great skill at playing wives in various states of dissatisfaction because of the implied sexual shortcomings of their husbands.
She was especially effective as the not entirely unsympathetic wife of a judge in the stage version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952). “Respectable” but emotionally unsatisfied, she throws herself at a weak and irresponsible ex-RAF wonderboy.
Another Rattigan creation that might have gone to Withers was the part of the wife of the dried-up and professionally despised schoolmaster in the film of The Browning Version (1951). In the event, Jean Kent provided one of the most harrowing moments to that date in British cinema when she tried to destroy her husband’s remaining hopes with such vicious hatred that the scene was often booed and hissed in 1950s cinemas. Withers, while making the cause of the wife’s frustration just as plainly sexual, might well have conveyed a certain residual warmth and humanity that would have transformed melodrama into drama.
Withers was a loss to the British stage and screen when she followed her husband to his native Australia in the late 1950s. They had married in 1948, and had two daughters, Joanna and Amanda, and a son, Nicholas. From 1955 onwards, she alternated between productions in the southern and northern hemispheres, including Broadway. But while her touring work focused more on Australia and New Zealand, she still made the first three seasons of a British TV series, Within These Walls (1974-75), as the governor of a women’s prison, which provided her biggest national and international audience.
Georgette Lizette Withers was born in Karachi, in pre-partition India, to a British naval captain who hated the thought of his daughter going on the stage and a Dutch mother who quietly encouraged her. The captain, who tried to run a Birmingham foundry after leaving the Royal Navy through poor health, was a high-handed man who clashed with fellow directors whom he openly despised, and lost his job. His daughter inherited his imperious inability to keep his opinions to himself, but in her case it was softened by her feminine humour.
At 12, while a boarder at Fredville Park private school near Dover, she took dancing lessons, initially to straighten bandy legs. At the same age she made her first professional appearance, in the chorus of a children’s show at the Victoria Palace, London. She persuaded her parents to send her to the Italia Conti school after she had worked her normal school day at the Convent of the Holy Family in Kensington.
A fall during dancing class permanently weakened an arm and indicated a less arduous form of dancing. She did cabaret in Midnight Follies at the Mayfair hotel and the Kit Kat Club. At 16 she was the youngest member of the chorus of Nice Goings On and was soon appearing in other popular musicals.
From 1935 onwards, she appeared in more than 60 films and television productions, including some of the finest movies of their time: One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), They Came to a City (1944, from the JB Priestley novel); Miranda (1948), in which Glynis Johns played the mermaid and Withers the all-too-normal woman; and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), with Richard Widmark.
On the stage she was a beguiling Beatrice in Stratford-upon-Avon’s production of Much Ado About Nothing (1958), and though her move to Australia often brought her under the umbrella of her husband’s theatre management, she continued to play in adventurous work in Britain, including Ionesco’s Exit the King for the Edinburgh Festival and the Royal Court theatre. A production of Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the Chichester Festival theatre in 1976 was so successful that it went to the West End, Canada and on tour in Britain. Withers’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1979) at Chichester managed to step out of the shadow of Edith Evans’s high-camp shadow without losing impact.
In the 1970s, when traditional leading ladies were less in demand, Withers’s career became more variable. In 1971 she starred in a film produced and directed by her husband, and featuring her daughter Joanna, called Nickel Queen, otherwise known as Ghost Town Millionairess, an examination of socialites and riff-raff in an Australian town dominated by nickel production. It was not well received, one comment being that it was an appalling bit of Australiana that made Barry Humphries’s film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) look like a refreshing can of Foster’s.
The role of Faye Boswell in Within These Walls three years later proved to be a sounder vehicle. Giving her formidability a greyer hue, Withers played a prison governor striving to be, as well as a disciplinarian, as sensitive as possible to the problems of the prisoners. The series led to further successes in the 1980s, when on television she appeared in distinguished productions including adaptations of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up.
She continued to be active in the 1990s, appearing in two highly praised films. Country Life (1994), directed by Michael Blakemore, was a version of Uncle Vanya set in Australia in 1919, showing what was on the collective mind of one part of the British Empire as Chekhov had shown what was on the minds of a fading Russian social class.
Shine (1996) was based on the career of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, beset by struggles against family pressures and mental instability. His real-life interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto was used in the film and became a controversial attraction in the concert hall. Withers played the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, who helped Helfgott in his ambition to get away from his possessive father and to London for his higher musical training, but died before she could enjoy his success.
Withers was a great trouper of the old school who, coming back to England in 1967 to play the forceful mayoress in Shaw’s Getting Married, found the country “changed and lacking in energy”. The woman who was once called “the best bad girl in British films” was always prepared to help make up any deficiency in that respect. At 85 she was still commanding attention on the West End stage, in Lady Windermere’s Fan.
In 1980 she was appointed AO, and in 2001 CBE. Her husband died last year, and she is survived by her children.
• Googie (Georgette Lizette) Withers, actor, born 12 March 1917; died 15 July 2011
The “Guardian” obituary on Ms Withers can also be accessed here.
