Tim Seely was born in 1935 in England. He has featured in numerous television productions. He had a major role in the Irish made feature film “Sally’s Irish Rogue” with Julie Harris.
Gladys Henson was an Irish born actress whose career was on the British stage and in character parts in movies. She usually played careworn housewives. Her films include “The Captive Heart” and “The Blue Lamp”. She was especially good in Sidney Furie’s “The Leather Boys” in 1964. She died in 1982 at the age of 85. Her “Wikipedia” page can be viewed here
Patrick Malahide was born in Berkshire, England the son of Irish parents in 1945. He made his television debut in 1976 in “The Flight of the Heron”. His many television appearances including “Middlemarch”, “The Singing Detective”and the title role of “Inspector Alleyn” in the 1993 series. His films include “Comfort and Joy” “and the James Bond thriller “The World Is Not Enough”. His website can be accessed here.
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Eric Portman was born in 1901. He started work in 1922 as a salesman in the menswear department at the Marshall & Snelgrove department store in Leeds and acted in the amateur Halifax Light Opera Society.
He made his professional stage debut in 1924 with Henry Baynton‘s company. In 1924, Robert Courtneidge’s Shakespearian company arrived in Halifax. Portman joined the company as a ‘passenger’ and appeared in their production of Richard II at the Victoria Hall, Sunderland which led to Courtneidge giving him a contract. Portman made his West End debut at the Savoy Theatre in London, in September 1924, as Antipholous of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors. He was engaged by Lilian Baylis for the Old VicCompany. In 1928, Portman played Romeo at the rebuilt Old Vic. He became a successful theatre actor. In 1933, Portman was in Diplomacy at the Prince’s Theatre with Gerald du Maurier and Basil Rathbone.
He went to the US and played in Madame Bovary on Broadway for the Theatre Guild of America. He also had a small role in The Prince and the Pauper (1937), but disliked Hollywood and did not stay long.
In 1941 he had his first important film role playing a Nazi on the run Hirth in Powell and Pressburger‘s 49th Parallel, which was a big hit in the US and Britain. Portman was established as a star and signed a long term contract with Gainsborough Pictures.
In 1945, exhibitors voted him the 10th most popular star at the British box office. He maintained that ranking the following year.
He played the bogus Major in Terence Rattigan‘s play Separate Tables in 1956–57 on Broadway. For this performance, he was nominated for a Tony Award (Best Actor (Dramatic)). In 1958 he appeared on Broadway in a short-lived production of Jane Eyre as Rochester. Portman had better luck the following year in a production of Eugene O’Neill‘s A Touch of the Poet, which had a long run. In contract, Flowering Cherry by Robert Bolt, with Portman in the title role only lasted five performances on Broadway.
Portman was homosexual, although newspapers never reported this during the mid-1950s when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Newspapers refrained from identifying his sexuality throughout the 1960s when it could still have damaged his career. His partner was actor Knox Laing.
Portman died at age 68 at his home in St Veep, Cornwall on 7 December 1969 from a heart disease. He was buried in St. Veep parish church, Cornwall, UK.
Catherine Woodville was born in London in 1938. She featured in many television series in Britain in the 1960’s. In the late 60’s she went to Hollywood and made the terrific Western “Posse” with Kirk Douglas. She has guest starred in several of the U.S. television series. She was at one time married to the actor Patrick Magee of “Avengers” fame and was married for several years to the late actor Edward Albert. She died in 2013.
Her “Times” obituary:
The actress Catherine Woodville was an attractive presence on television and in the cinema. She was in the first episode of The Avengers in 1961 and made a glamorous one-off appearance as the priestess Natira in Star Trek.
She was born in London in 1938 and started acting at the age of 16 in a touring production of T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. Her first important television role was Helena Landless in the 1960 adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and she appeared with Ian McShane, John Hurt and Samantha Eggar as university students in the 1962 film, The Wild and the Willing.
In 1961 she was in the first episode of the secret agent spoof, The Avengers, opposite the bowler-hatted Patrick Macnee, and her character’s death helped to launch the series. She had a small part in a later episode and in 1965 she became Macnee’s second wife, though the marriage lasted barely a year and ended in divorce after four.
She was busy in television through the 1960s. She played Estelle opposite Harold Pinter (one of his occasional acting roles) in a BBC adaptation of Sartre’s In Camera and had guest spots in popular series including Z-Cars, Danger Man, The Saint and No Hiding Place. Her other films included the thriller, The Informers, the political drama The Crooked Road, with Robert Ryan and Stewart Granger, and the frontier adventure, The Brigand of Kandahar.
During her British career she was credited as Catherine Woodville and on moving the US in 1967 she changed her professional name to Kate Woodville. She made an early mark on American television playing Natira, the priestess who rules the people of the asteroid Yonada and falls in love with Dr McCoy, in the 1968 Star Trek episode, For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.
Other American television credits included Mission: Impossible, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Little House on the Prairie and Wonder Woman. She played Betty Gow, nurse to the family, in the TV movie, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, with Cliff de Young as the aviator and Anthony Hopkins as Bruno Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. In 1975 she returned to the cinema in the western Posse, starring and directed by Kirk Douglas. She became a life member of the Actors Studio.
In 1979 she married the actor and environmentalist, Edward Albert, son of the actor Eddie Albert. She gave up acting and started a business breeding and training horses.
Edward Albert died in 2006, aged 55, and she is survived by their daughter, Thaïs, a poet and songwriter.
Katherine Woodville, actress, was born on December 4, 1938. She died of cancer on June 5, 2013, aged 74
THE SCOTTISH actor Ian Bannen, who just three years ago received a lifetime achievement award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, was a versatile performer who did notable work in plays by Shakespeare and O’Neill, made over 50 films, winning an Oscar nomination for one of them, and also worked often on television where he successfully played Dr Cameron, the seasoned Highland medical practitioner, in a revival of the popular series Dr Finlay’s Casebook. His career was currently enjoying a resurgence after his acclaimed performance last year of an Irish con-man in the hit comedy Waking Ned.Ads by Googl
Born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, in 1928, the only son of a lawyer, he was educated at Ratcliffe College, Leicestershire. A lover of films as a boy – he later confessed he would sneak out of school to watch Jean Gabin movies – he served as a corporal in the Army before making his stage debut at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1947 as the Emperor’s son in the play Armlet of Jade.
In 1951 he joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford-upon-Avon and remained with them for four seasons which included in 1953 a year’s tour of Australia and New Zealand. His London stage debut came in 1955 when he played in Prisoners of War at the small Irving Theatre, but he first attracted important notice the following year with his portrayal of the virile Marco, the older of two immigrant brothers in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, presented at the Comedy Theatre which had been turned into a club in order to mount three plays banned at that time by the Lord Chamberlain (the other two were Tea and Sympathy and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). – The Guardian obituary.
In 1958 he made the first of several appearances in the works of Eugene O’Neill with a highly praised portrayal of Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. Kenneth Tynan called Bannen “perfect” as “the manic salesman, driving his friends to destruction with the enthusiasm of a revivalist” in this fondly recalled production directed by Peter Wood. Later the same year Bannen was in O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night, playing Jamie, based on the older brother of Eugene (called Edmund in the play) at the Edinburgh Festival and subsequently at the Globe in London. Tynan wrote, “Ian Bannen gets easily to the heart of the elder brother, especially in the last-act debauch when he confesses to Edmund how much he hates and envies him.” (Twenty-five years later Bannen was to play the same character at a later stage of his life in O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten.)
Bannen made his screen debut in 1956 in the Boulting Brothers’ hit comedy Private’s Progress and served as a reliable supporting player in many subsequent films, including Yangtse Incident (1957), A Tale of Two Cities (1958), and Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959). In a 1960 version of Macbeth made for American television but subsequently released to cinemas, he played Macduff, and the following year he went back to Stratford to play several pivotal roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company including a flinty Iago in Othello, Orlando in As You Like It (with Vanessa Redgrave), Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and the title role in Hamlet.
It was after a performance of Hamlet that he met Marilyn Salisbury, a Ministry of Agriculture assistant, who had inadvertently parked in his reserved space. Unable to start her van, she was trying to fix it when Bannen appeared. “I had on the only French dress I ever possessed, cream silk,” she later related, “and I was grease from head to foot.” The couple became close friends, but it was 17 years before they married.
At the Dublin and Venice Festivals in 1962 Bannen returned to O’Neill with an acclaimed portrayal of Cornelius Melody in A Touch of the Poet. He was given his first leading screen role in Seth Holt’s Station Six- Sahara, as one of five men fighting over a glamorous blonde (Carroll Baker) who crash-lands at their desert oasis.
Bannen himself played the survivor of a crashed aeroplane in Robert Aldrich’s Flight of the Phoenix (1965). The film had a strong line-up of stars headed by James Stewart, but Bannen’s performance was distinctive enough to win him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. The actor afterwards stated that he, Peter Finch and other actors would go to a different bar every night during the film’s location shooting. Bannen was later to be a regular drinking companion of Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, but after a spell of hepatitis was forced to give up alcohol.
He played Natalie Wood’s husband in Arthur Hiller’s comedy Penelope (1966), co-starred with Jeanne Moreau in Sailor from Gibraltar (1967) and worked with Robert Aldrich again in the grim war film Too Late The Hero (1969). Sidney Lumet’s intense thriller The Offence (1973), in which a frustrated detective (Sean Connery) beats a suspect to death, was also grim but Bannen won praise for his uncompromising portrayal of the ill-fated suspect who, in a taut cat-and-mouse game, causes the detective to acknowledge the darker side of his own character.
In 1983 Bannen returned to the role of Jamie Tyrone, this time in O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten, with Frances de la Tour as his co-star. The play was a success, and the following year transferred to Broadway, though the experience was not a happy one for Bannen. He did not get along with his new co-star Kate Nelligan, and her intense performance, though greatly praised by the New York press, created what the critic Benedict Nightingale described as an “emotional unbalance” compared to that of de la Tour. “There must have been times,” he wrote, “when Bannen felt like a flashlight battery expected to match the voltage of forked lightning.”
The actor’s many television credits include the betrayed agent who kills the mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), the secret service agent “R” in Ashenden (1991) and Dr Cameron in the revival of the popular series Dr Finlay’s Casebook (1993). Among his later films was John Boorman’s affectionate portrait of life in wartime Britain, Hope and Glory (1987), in which Bannen made an indelible impression as the flamboyant grandfather, and Braveheart (1995), Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning film in which Bannen played the leper Lord Allendale.
In Waking Ned (1998), he was the lovable pensioner Jackie O’Shea who persuades his village to claim a big lottery win after the ticket’s owner dies of shock. The film was a hit in both Britain and the United States and won Bannen international approval.
Tom Vallance
Ian Bannen, actor: born Airdrie, Lanarkshire 29 June 1928; married 1976 Marilyn Sainsbury; died Knockies Straight, Inverness-shire 3 November 1999.
To also view “The Independent” Obituary of Ian Bannen, please click here.
Ann Bell was born in 1938) and is a British actress, best known for playing war internee Marion Jefferson in the BBCSecond World War drama series Tenko (1981–84).
She was married to character actor Robert Lang from 1971 until his death in 2004. The couple had two children. Bell appeared on screen with Lang in Tenko Reunion, in which he played Teddy Forster-Brown. They also appeared together in an episode of Heartbeat (“Bread and Circuses”, 2002).
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.
