Kitty McShane was part of the famous British double bill “Old Mother Riley and her daughter Kitty”. She was born in Dublin 1897. She was the fourth of seventeen children. In 1913 she married Arthur Lucan (Old Mother Riley). They became a popular music hall act. They began making films together in 1937 with”Old Mother Riley”. Together they made 13 Mother Riley films together. Their off-screen fights were legendary. Kitty McShane did not appear in the final Mother Riley film. Kitty McShane died in 1964. Radio recording of Arthur Lucan & Kitty McShane can be heard here. Very good article on Arthur Lucan & Kitty McShane can be accessed here on the Britmovie website.
“In a long career, Kathleen Harrison was rigidly type-cast, kept firmly below stairs. On the few occasions she was not a maid or the daily, she was a nosy neighbour or a Cockney mum – clearly the British character actress par excellence. She has been loyal, cheeky, vague ( ‘I dunno, dear’ is one of her stock remarks) and chin-up cheerful -‘common’ to use a word she (the screen Harrison) uses about others but never herself. There have been other actresses of this vernacular – Thora Hird, Dandy Nichols and the more eccentric and divinely funny Irene Handl – but Harrison is the only one who achieved real film stardom. In her own modest way she was as accomplished a screen artist as any.” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972)
Kathleen Harrison was long a stalwart of British cinema. Her place was always firmly below stairs – a cook perhaps, or a cleaning lady often answering the door with a puzzled expression always fearful that trouble was just around the corner. She was born in 1892 in Blackburn in Lancashire. She studied at RADA and then went to live in Agentina for some time. On her return to Britain, she made her stage debut in 1926 in “The Constant Flirt”. Her first major film role was in 1931 in “Hobson’s Choice”. Kathleen Harrison made one film in Hollywood in Emlyn Williams “Night Must Fall” in 1937 as a maid (naturally). She achieved national fame as Mrs Huggett in four films about the Huggett family. In the mid 1960’s she starred in a very popular television series Mrs Thursday about a cleaner who won the football pools. She died in 1995 at the age of 103.
Her “Independent” obituary by Anthony Hayward:One of the greatest British film character actresses of the Forties and Fifties, the homely Kathleen Harrison made a career out of playing cockney mothers, maids and charwomen. After fame as the cleaner Ma Huggett in the series of Huggetts film comedies and a long-running radio serial, she found a new audience on television in the Sixties with the hugely successful comedy- drama Mrs Thursday.
She was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1892. Her family moved to London when she was five and the aspiring actress trained at RADA (1914-15), where she won the Du Maurier Bronze Medal. While playing Eliza Doolittle there in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the writer attended rehearsals and gave her a piece of advice that was to become the inspiration for many of the roles she would later play. “Go out into the Old Kent Road and just listen to the women talking,” he told her.
However, on graduation, she married and went abroad to live in Argentina and Madeira for eight years. On her return to Britain, Harrison made her stage debut as Mrs Judd in The Constant Flirt, at the Pier Theatre, Eastbourne, in 1926, and appeared in the West End for the first time the following year as Winnie in The Cage, at the Savoy Theatre. Her many subsequent West End plays included A Damsel In Distress, The Merchant and Venus, Lovers’ Meeting, Line Engaged, The Corn is Green, Night Must Fall – later repeating her role as the housekeeper in the 1937 film version – and Sailor Beware!, in which she took over the lead role of fearsome mother Emma Hornett that had made a star of Peggy Mount.
Harrison had already made her film debut with a small role in Our Boys, back in 1915, when she returned to the screen in the 1931 picture Hobson’s Choice, based on Harold Brighouse’s play set in her native Lancashire. Cast firmly in the mould of cockney domestics and mothers, she appeared in another 85 films, including The Man from Toronto (1932, as Jessie Matthews’ maid), The Ghoul (1933, with Boris Karloff), Home from Home (1939, as Sandy Powell’s wife), In Which We Serve (1942), Oliver Twist (1948, as Mrs Sowerby), The Winslow Boy (1948, repeating her stage role as the excitable maid), Scrooge (1951, with Alastair Sim), The Pickwick Papers (1952, as Miss Wardle), Lilacs in the Spring (1954, as Anna Neagle’s dresser), The Big Money (1956, as Ian Carmichael’s mother), Alive and Kicking (1958, with Sybil Thorndike and Estelle Winwood as three lively old ladies escaping from a home), On the Fiddle (1961, as Stanley Holloway’s wife) and West 11 (1963, as Alfred Lynch’s mother).
Harrison first played the London East End charwoman Ma Huggett in Holiday Camp (1947), a film featuring the fictional Huggett family and capitalising on a post-war leisure innovation. The public loved it and the actress continued in the role, alongside Jack Warner as her screen husband and, at various times, Jimmy Hanley and Petula Clark playing two of their children, when Rank tried to capitalise on the original’s success by making the sequels Here Come the Huggetts (1948), Vote for Huggett (1949) and The Huggetts Abroad (1949). When the series received a critical mauling, Rank axed it, but such was the Huggetts’ popularity that they switched to radio in Meet the Huggetts, a serial that ran from 1953 to 1962.
As her cinema appearances became less frequent, Harrison also turned to television, finding a large following as the star of Mrs Thursday, a role created for her by Ted Willis in 1966. Again, the series was panned by the critics, but viewers loved it and immediately made Mrs Thursday the most popular programme on television, even toppling the mighty Coronation Street from its No 1 slot in the ratings. In the programme, also featuring Hugh Manning – later to play the Rev Donald Hinton in Emmerdale Farm – Harrison acted a charwoman who inherits pounds 10m and the controlling interest in a multinational company.
Five years later, she turned down the title role in Jeremy Sandford’s acclaimed BBC play Edna the Inebriate Woman, which won Patricia Hayes a Best Actress on TV award. Harrison’s other television appearances included Shades of Greene, Danger UXB and two BBC serialisations of Charles Dickens novels, Our Mutual Friend and Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens was her favourite author). She made her final screen appearance in the 1979 Disney comedy chase film The London Connection in the small role of an elderly bystander.
In 1992, Harrison owned up to reaching the grand old age of 100 and received her telegram from the Queen, after a lifetime of making herself out to be six years younger. She was one of Britain’s oldest surviving actresses.
Anthony Hayward
Kathleen Harrison, actress: born Blackburn, Lancashire 23 February 1892; married 1916 John Henry Back (died 1960; one son, one daughter, and one son deceased); died 7 December 1995
Kathleen Harrison’s “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.
During the late 1960s Mills began performing in theatrical plays, and played in more mature roles. The age of contracts with studios soon passed. For her success with Disney she received the Disney Legend Award. Although she has not maintained the box office success or the Hollywood A-list she experienced as a child actress, she has continued to make films and TV appearances, including a starring role in the UK television mini-series The Flame Trees of Thika in 1981, the title role in Disney’s television series Good Morning, Miss Bliss in 1988, and as Caroline, a main character in Wild at Heart (2007–2012) on ITV in the UK.
Mills was born in Marylebone, London. She was 12 when she was discovered by J. Lee Thompson, who was initially looking for a boy to play the lead role in Tiger Bay, which co-starred her father, veteran British actor Sir John Mills. The movie was popular at the box office in Britain.
Bill Anderson, one of Walt Disney‘s producers, saw Tiger Bay and suggested that Mills be given the lead role in Pollyanna. The role of the orphaned “glad girl” who moves in with her aunt catapulted Mills to stardom in the United States and earned her a special Academy Award (the last person to receive the Juvenile Oscar). Because Mills could not be present to receive the trophy, Annette Funicello accepted it for her.
Disney subsequently cast Mills as twins Sharon and Susan who reunite their divorced parents in The Parent Trap. In the film, Mills sings “Let’s Get Together” as a duet with herself. The film was a hit around the world, reaching number 8 on a US TOP TEN list.
Mills received an offer to make a film in Britain for Bryan Forbes, Whistle Down the Wind(1961), about some children who believe an escaped convict is Jesus. It was a hit at the British box office and Mills was voted the biggest star in Britain for 1961.
Mills was offered the title role in Lolita by Stanley Kubrick but her father turned it down. “I wish I had done it,” she said in 1962. “It was a smashing film.”
Mills returned to Disney for an adventure film, In Search of the Castaways (1962) based on a novel by Jules Verne. It was another popular success and Mills would be voted the fifth biggest star in the country for the next two years.
In 1963 Disney announced plans to film I Capture the Castle, from the novel by Dodie Smith, with Hayley Mills in the role of Cassandra. However, Disney never produced the film.
Her fourth movie for Disney did less well though was still successful, Summer Magic (1963), a musical adaptation of the novel Mother Carey’s Chickens.
Mills had a change of pace with Sky West and Crooked (1965), set in the world of gypsies, written by her mother and directed by her father. It was not very popular. In contrast, her last film with Disney, the comedy That Darn Cat!, did very well at the box office.
During her six-year run at Disney, Mills was arguably the most popular child actress of the era. Critics noted that America’s favourite child star was, in fact, quite British and very ladylike. The success of “Let’s Get Together” (which hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, No. 17 in Britain and No. 1 in Mexico) also led to the release of a record album on Disney’s Buena Vista label, Let’s Get Together with Hayley Mills, which also included her only other hit song, “Johnny Jingo” (Billboard No. 21, 1962). In 1962 British exhibitors voted her the most popular film actress in the country.
For Universal, Mills made another movie with her father, The Truth About Spring (1965), co-starring Disney regular James MacArthur as her love interest. It was mildly popular. However The Trouble with Angels (1966), was a huge hit; Mills played as a prankish Catholic boarding school girl with “scathingly brilliant” schemes, opposite screen veteran Rosalind Russell, and directed by another Hollywood veteran, Ida Lupino. She then provided a voice for The Daydreamer (1966).
Shortly thereafter, Mills appeared alongside her father and Hywel Bennett in director Roy Boulting’s critically acclaimed film The Family Way (1966), a comedy about a couple having difficulty consummating their marriage, featuring a score by Paul McCartney and arrangements by Beatles producer George Martin. She began a romantic relationship with Roy Boulting, and they eventually married in 1971.
She then starred as the protagonist of Pretty Polly (1967), opposite famous Indian film actor Shashi Kapoor in Singapore.
Mills made another movie for Boulting, the controversial horror thriller Twisted Nerve in 1968, along with her Family Way co-star Hywel Bennett. She made a comedy, Take a Girl Like You (1970) with Oliver Reed, and made her West End debut in The Wild Duck in 1970. She worked for Boulting again on Mr. Forbush and the Penguins (1971), replacing the original female lead.
In 1981 Mills returned to acting with a starring role in the UK television mini-series The Flame Trees of Thika, based on Elspeth Huxley‘s memoir of her childhood in East Africa. The series was well received, prompting Mills to accept more acting roles. She then returned to America and made two appearances on The Love Boat.
Mills recalled her childhood in the 2000 documentary film Sir John Mills’ Moving Memories which was directed by Marcus Dillistone and written by her brother Jonathan. In 2005 Mills appeared in the acclaimed short film, Stricken, written and directed by Jayce Bartok. In 2007 she began appearing as Caroline in the ITV1 African vet drama, Wild at Heart; her sister Juliet Mills was a guest star in series 4 of the drama.
In 2010 Mills appeared in Mandie and the Cherokee Treasure, based on one of the popular Mandie novels of Lois Gladys Leppard.
Mills made her stage debut in a 1966 West End revival of Peter Pan. In 2000 she made her Off-Broadway debut in Sir Noël Coward‘s Suite in Two Keys, opposite American actress Judith Ivey, for which she won a Theatre World Award. In 1991 she appeared as Anna Leonowensin the Australian production of The King and I. In December 2007, for their annual birthday celebration of “The Master”, The Noël Coward Society invited Mills as the guest celebrity to lay flowers in front of Coward’s statue at New York’s Gershwin Theatre, thereby commemorating the 108th birthday of Sir Noel.
In 1997, Mills starred in the U.S. national tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I.
Mills later had a second son, Jason Lawson, during a relationship with British actor Leigh Lawson.
Mills’ partner since 1997 is actor and writer Firdous Bamji, who is 20 years her junior.
Mills had involvement with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishna” movement). She wrote the preface to the book, The Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking, published in 1984. However, in a 1997 article of People magazine, Mills stated that “she is ‘not a part of Hare Krishna’, though she delved into Hinduism and her own Christianity for guidance.”
In 1988 Mills co-edited, with Marcus Maclaine, the book My God, which consisted of brief letters from celebrities on their beliefs, or lack thereof, regarding God and the afterlife. Mills has been a pescetarian since the late 1990s.
On 18 April 2008, Mills was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery and started, but quickly abandoned, chemotherapy after only three sessions due to the severity of side effects. Mills credits her survival to the alternative treatments she tried out. She told Good Housekeeping magazine in January 2012 that she had fully recovered.
Mills is a trustee of the children’s arts charity Anno’s Africa.
References to Mills sometimes appear in fiction and music. The 1985 song ‘Goodbye Lucille’ by the British band Prefab Sprout refers in passing to Mills.
In 1949, he starred in the film Floodtide, along with actress Rona Anderson. He and Anderson married two years later on 2 June 1951. They had two sons, Graham and Roddy. The same year, he made his London stage debut, appearing in the play Seagulls Over Sorrento by Hugh Hastings.
Gordon Jackson became a household name playing the stern Scottish butler Angus Hudson in sixty episodes of the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs from 1971 to 1975. In 1976, he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Performance by a Supporting Actor for the episode “The Beastly Hun“. In 1974, he was named British Actor of the Year and in 1979 he was made an OBE. Jackson was cast opposite Bette Davis for the American television film Madame Sin (1972), which was released in overseas markets as a feature film.
His next big television role was in the hard-hitting police drama The Professionals from 1977.[1] He played George Cowley in all 57 episodes of the programme, which ended in 1983, although filming finished in 1981. He played Noel Strachan in the Australian Second World War drama A Town Like Alice (1981), winning a Logie Award for his performance.
After A Town Like Alice and The Professionals, Gordon Jackson continued his television work with appearances in Hart to Hart, Campion and Shaka Zulu and the films The Shooting Party and The Whistle Blower. He also appeared in the theatre, appearing in Cards on the Table, adapted from the novel by Agatha Christie at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1981 and in Mass Appeal by Bill C. Davis at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1982. From 1985 to 1986, Jackson narrated two afternoon cookery shows in New Zealand for TVNZ called Fresh and Fancy Fare and its successor Country Fare. His last role before his death was in Effie’s Burning, and this was broadcast posthumously. He died at the age of 66 in 1990.
Joseph O’Conor obituary in “The Guardian” in 2001.
Joseph O’Conor was born in Dublin in 1916. He made his professional stage debut in London in 1939 in “Julius Caesar”. His best known work was in the 1966 BBC series “The Forsyte Saga” which was hughly popular. He was also featured in the musical “Oliver” as kindly Mr Brownlow. He died at the age of 90.
“Guardian” obituary:
The actor Joseph O’Conor, who has died aged 84, appeared in 1966 in BBC Television’s last great success of the black-and-white era, The Forsyte Saga, playing the stern patriarch Old Jolyon.
On the big screen his career ranged from Stranger at my Door (1950) to Luc Besson’s Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) – taking in Mr Brownlow in the 1968 movie of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The latter was a role for which, with his authoritative, kindly demeanour, he was perfect casting.
Joseph O’Conor
But O’Conor’s natural home was the stage. His 60th and last Shakespearean role was as Duncan to Sir Antony Sher’s Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The production began at Stratford in 1999, then toured. O’Conor was flown home from Japan when his failing heart forced him to step down, but within weeks was back for the Young Vic run, his voice older but his presence still commanding. The production was screened on Channel 4 on New Year’s Day.
O’Conor was born in Seattle to Irish parents and, though almost all his life was spent in south-west London, he remained proudly Irish. He was educated at Cardinal Vaughan School in Kensington, and after the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art made his prewar debut in an Embassy Swiss Cottage production of Julius Caesar. At the end of the 1940s he joined the touring company of the last of the great actor-managers, Donald Wolfit, at the Bedford theatre in Camden Town. Wolfit valued his young protégé, giving him a string of Shakespearean parts. The pair alternated as Othello and Iago, and Wolfit vouchsafed his Gravedigger to O’Conor’s acclaimed Hamlet.
At the Bristol Old Vic in the late 1950s he played many leads – alongside Peter O’Toole among others – including the role of Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. There was also a production of his own early play, The Iron Harp, set in his beloved Ireland. That play gave a first important role to Richard Harris, and O’Conor wrote five others.
West End aside, his career took in an American tour, appearances in the York mystery plays, at the Glasgow Citizens’, and at reps such as Windsor and Guildford. As an incurable company man from the 1970s, he enjoyed several seasons with both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His years with the latter were especially happy, founded on great mutual respect and affection.
O’Conor enjoyed a fertile period acting for Jonathan Miller, most notably as the Duke in Measure for Measure in 1975. And the lure in the 70s and 80s of the actor George Murcell’s ill-starred Shakespeare company at the St George’s Theatre in Tufnell Park, London, proved irresistible.
There were many other film appearances, including Tom And Viv (1994) and Elizabeth (1998). A highlight was the festival favourite The Forbidden Quest (1993), directed by Peter Delpuit, which gave O’Conor a unique one-man vehicle as a polar survivor.
I was lucky enough to produce one of the very best of his many TV performances when he led the cast of Drew Griffiths’ and Noel Greig’s Only Connect (1979). As a devout Catholic, O’Conor had an intellectual objection to abortion, adultery and homosexuality, but in his life and work he was understanding and supportive. In Only Connect, he played a man who in extreme youth had had a sexual encounter with the writer and prophet Edward Carpenter. The play confronted a very thorny issue for gay men, that of ageism, and O’Conor embraced the theme with a generous heart.
The production coincided with his marriage to the actress Lizanne Rodger, who was young enough to be his daughter, and so O’Conor had a special connection to the material of the play, which informed his work on it.
In that play, as so often, he was cast older than he was. Kenneth More, who played his son in The Forsyte Saga, was actually two years older than O’Conor, to their shared amusement. Prematurely white-haired, but also unmistakably mature, wise and protective – and sometimes impish and whimsical – he was a natural Chebutykin in Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
He rewrote as novels some of his other plays, such as Inca (sadly eclipsed by Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt Of The Sun) and The Lion Trap. Among his children’s stories, he got to read King Canoodlum and the Great Horned Cheese on television’s Jackanory. In his last months, he completed his memoirs.
He was married first to Naita Moore; they had a daughter Rachel and a son Joseph. With Lizanne Rodger, he had two more children, Charlotte and Kit.
Joseph O’Conor, actor and writer, born February 14 1916; died January 21 2001
His obituary in “The Guardian” can be accessed here.
Her theatre roles include playing Kate in the original production of Dancing at Lughnasa in Dublin (1990). She was married to the musician Sting from 1976 to 1984.
On 1 May 1976, Tomelty married musician Gordon “Sting” Sumner – best known as the lead singer and bassist for the rock band The Police – after knowing him for two years.
They met on the set of a rock-musical called Rock Nativity. She played the Virgin Mary; he played in the band. They have two children together, Joseph (born 23 November 1976) and Fuchsia Katherine (“Kate”) (born 17 April 1982.
Jean Kent was one of the four Gainsborough Ladies made famous for a series of British period films made in the 1940’s. The other ladies were Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert and Patricia Roc. She was born in 1921 in London. Her first major role was as Calvert’s friend in “Fanny by Gaslight” in 1944. Other films of note are “2,000 Women” and “The Winslow Boy”. She died in 2013.
Her “Independent” obituary:
Jean Kent will be fondly remembered for the part she played in the success of the enormously popularity Gainsborough melodramas of the Forties.
She served a long apprenticeship, becoming a favourite of audiences for her supporting roles as scheming wenches in such films as 2,000 Women (1944), The Wicked Lady (1945) and Caravan (1946), until given her own starring vehicle, Good Time Girl, in 1948 and taking her place alongside such major names as Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert.
In 1949 she starred in a Technicolored musical, Trottie True, and had the challenging role of a woman seen from five totally different points of view in The Woman in Question. Underrated as an actress, she was splendid as the frustrated teacher’s wife, Millie Crocker-Harris, in the screen version of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1951), but afterwards worked more on the stage and television than in films.
kinopoisk.ru
An outgoing, frank and fearless lady, she was always good value, and buoyant company into her nineties. I last met her in 2003, when she launched The Encyclopaedia of British Film, and she declared herself ready to return to work “if only someone would ask.” Over lunch a few years earlier she stated that her chances of going to Hollywood were ruined by one of her colleagues, “a silly bitch who defied management by taking poor roles in the US, after which they would not let any of us go there.”
The daughter of music hall performers, she was born Joan Summerfield in Brixton, London, in 1921. Taught to dance by her parents, she made her theatrical debut at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 1932, and spent over a year (1934-35) at London’s Windmill Theatre, first as a dancer then as a soubrette, lying about her age and taking the name Jean Carr, though for her screen debut in The Rocks of Valpre (1935) she was billed as Jean Summerfield. After more stage work in revues she was in Apple Sauce (1941) at the London Palladium with Max Miller and Vera Lynn when spotted by a talent scout and offered a contract by Gainsborough, returning to the screen (as Jean Kent) with small parts in the Tommy Handley vehicle, It’s That Man Again (1943), in which she was part of a vocal trio, and with Arthur Askey in Miss London Ltd (1943), for which Val Guest wrote a cameo for her as an encyclopaedia salesgirl.
Director Anthony Asquith then gave her a major break when he cast her as the flashy, ambitious girlfriend of Calvert in Fanny By Gaslight (1944), which was followed by notable roles the same year in Champagne Charlie, 2,000 Women, set in an internment camp, in which she had a memorable physical fight with Nazi spy Betty Jardine, and Madonna of the Seven Moons, as gypsy Stewart Granger’s jealous mistress. She played further “doxy” roles in Waterloo Road, The Rake’s Progress and The Wicked Lady (all 1945). “I always said,” she later commented, “that if they opened a script and saw, ‘a girl appears in camiknickers’, they used to send for me.”
She was the ill-fated gypsy wife of adventurer Stewart Granger in the florid Caravan (1946), and had one of her favourite roles as the spoilt sister of Googie Withers in The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947). In 1946 she married the Austrian Jusuf Hurst, an actor in Caravan, and they bought a farm. Kent was now one of Britain’s top 10 stars, and Good Time Girl (1948) confirmed her status, though it was held from release for nearly a year due to censorship problems (a framing sequence was shot to make the tale a more cautionary one).
It was followed by leading roles in the brisk spy story Sleeping Car to Trieste and the portmanteau film Bond Street (both 1948). Kent then starred in her personal favourite film, Trottie True (1949), one of the few movies to employ her singing and dancing talents, in the tale of a Gaiety Girl who marries into the aristocracy. Asquith’s The Woman in Question (1950), a Rashomon-like tale of a murder victim (Kent) seen in flashback through the eyes of five people who had disparate conceptions of her, was the opportunity for a tour de force. “Asquith told me, ‘I will be quite frank with you. We originally wanted Bette Davis.’ To do five different versions of one person is very tricky – to get enough difference and for each to be near enough to the others.:
After two weak comedies, Her Favourite Husband and The Reluctant Widow (both 1950), Kent gave one of her finest performances in Asquith’s version of the masterly Rattigan play, The Browning Version. She managed to invoke some sympathy for the vicious school-master’s wife, but her performance was to be her last as star of a major film. In later years, Kent blamed her portrayal of an older woman in the film for the lack of subsequent screen offers, but it is unlikely. The British cinema was changing, and both Lockwood and Calvert were turning to the stage and television, as did Kent, who returned to the theatre in Frou Frou (1951). Subsequent roles included the Queen in a revival of The Eagle Has Two Heads (1953), a 1954 tour of South Africa in The Deep Blue Sea and a featured role in the musical Marigold at the Savoy in 1959.
Film roles included The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) with Marilyn Monroe (“Off-screen she was a totally insignificant little blonde, but on camera she was magic”), and she had her last prominent screen role in Please Turn Over (1960) with Leslie Phillips. She returned to the screen in 1976 for a small role in Shout at the Devil with Roger Moore. On television she was a feisty Queen Elizabeth in the series Sir Francis Drake (1961-62) starring Terrence Morgan, and guest appearances included Lovejoy. In 1979 she headed the cast of a successful production of Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced, and she made her last stage appearance in Monsieur Amilcar at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1995.
On her 90th birthday she attended a screening of Caravan at the National Film Theatre, receiving a standing ovation and signing hundreds of autographs. Her husband died in 1989; her death was the result of a fall at her home in the village of Westhorpe.
Joan Mildred Summerfield (Jean Kent), actress: born London 29 June 1921; married 1946 Jusuf Ramart (died 1989); died Bury St Edmunds 30 November 2013.
The “Guardian” obituary can be accessed on-line here.
John Leyton was born in 1939 in Frinton-on-Sea, England. He starred as Ginger in the TV series “Biggles” in 1960. He had a career as a pop singer in the early sixties, his most famous song being “Johnny Rememver Me”. He was among the large cat of “The Great Escape” appearing with James Garner, Steve McQueen and David McCallum. He went to Hollywood to make “Von Ryan’s Express”. His website can be accessed here.
IMDB Entry:
John Leyton was born on Feb. 17th 1939 at Frinton-On Sea, Essex, England, to parents of show business background. His father owned several cinemas and his mother acted under the name of ‘Babs Walters’ on the London stage. When John showed a desire to act, his parents tried to discourage him, wanting him to enter the family rope business as they felt it was too difficult to get a start in acting.
After working for a while with his parents he was drafted into the Royal Army Service Corps to do his National Service. On completion, John decided to join the Actor’s Workshop to study drama. To supplement his income, John turned to his love of singing and managed to get some work in night clubs imitating singers like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray.
On finishing drama school, John joined York Repertory Theatre as a juvenile lead and was signed byRobert Stigwood (his manager during the 1960’s) for television work in London. John’s first important break was in the Granada TV series Biggles (1960) and this brought him a huge following of fans. It was not long before his biggest break came when he played the part of singer Johnny St. Cyr in the ATV series Harpers West One (1961) where he performed the song Johnny Remember Me.
The fans loved it and demanded a record, which put John into the British Hit parade with a number one disc that held the top spot for seven weeks. His acting was placed on hold as his pop singing career took over, the follow up single, Wild Wind, reached number two. Further releases did not have the same impact. Eventually John found his way back to acting and appeared in two major Hollywood movies The Great Escape (1963) and Von Ryan’s Express (1965). Further movies followed but it seemed his star had faded. He drifted back to television work and eventual obscurity.
Joyce Redman was born in Co. Mayo in 1918. She was trained in acting in Londan at RADA. She had great success on the stage in the West End in such plays as “Claudia” and “Shadow and Substance”. In 1949 she was on Broadway in the very popular play about Anne Boylen, “Anne of a 1,000 Days” with Rex Harrison. She was nominated twice for an Academy Award for “Tom Jones” and “Othello”. She is the aunt of Amanda Redman. She died in 2012. Her “Telegraph” obituary can be accessed here.
Joyce Redman obituary in “The Independent” in 2012.
Her “Independent” obituary:
Joyce Redman was a talented and versatile actress who was equally at ease on stage, in films or on the small screen, during a career that lasted more than 60 years. She will probably be best remembered for her role in Tom Jones (1963), Tony Richardson’s adaptation of the novel by Henry Fielding. Here she played the servant Mrs Waters, opposite Albert Finney in the title role. In a deliciously sensual three-minute scene of amour gourmand, the pair sit facing one another at a tavern table and devour their way through a foreplay of soup, lobster, chicken, oysters and fruit before scuttling off to bed.Finney later said about the scene, “Joyce and I had done theatre together. We just played it for fun. It was filmed early in the morning and it took hours. They kept bringing more food – trying us out on different dishes. They’d say things like, ‘Bring more oysters. She’s very good on oysters.’ We weren’t sure the audience would get it at all. It seems they did.” The film won Oscars for best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Score. Redman was nominated as Best Supporting Actress.
Joyce Redman was born in 1915 in Newcastle in Ireland to a Protestant Anglo-Irish family. One of four girls, she grew up on Bartra Island in Killala Bay, Co Mayo. Following private home education and training at Rada, she made her first professional appearance as First Tiger Lily in 1935 at London’s Playhouse in Alice Through theLooking Glass. Audiences would have been charmed by the young actress, with her diminutive size, pale skin and bright red hair.
Her film debut was in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in which she played Jet van Dieren. Despite being made as a morale-boosting propaganda film, it was praised for its artistic values, the critic Edward Dolan describing it as among the “best of British films of the era”.
During the war she had a close escape when, on her way back from the theatre, a flying bomb exploded nearby. Her initial reaction to surviving the blast was a feeling of what she called “an almost supernatural confidence”. She did not experience the shock until several days later, when she collapsed, a combination of the incident and the stress of opening performances in Peer Gynt (as Solveig) and Arms and the Man (as Louka) within the same week.
Redman’s New York debut came in 1946 in Henry IV Part 2 as Doll Tearsheet, the prostitute who frequents the Boar’s Head Tavern. She followed this two years later with the role of Anne Boleyn opposite Rex Harrison’s Henry in Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson remarked admiringly that she “…scorches the pages of the drama, to the point where the play is not a good fire insurance risk.”
For the next decade she divided her time between Broadway and London. Then, when the National Theatre Company was formed by Laurence Olivier in 1963, Redman played at the Old Vic and toured with the company to Moscow and Berlin.
Following the tremendous success of Tom Jones, and emphasising her dedication to her family, she recalled, “After Tom Jones I was offered all kinds of things, and I could have named my price, but the children were still pretty young, and no way could I leave them.”
She received a second Oscar nomination for her role as Emilia, servant of Desdemona, in the film version of Othello (1965), starring Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for the same production. Also made for the cinema, Prudence and the Pill (1968) saw her in an entertaining farce about marriage and infidelity starring David Niven and Deborah Kerr. Redman’s character becomes pregnant after a deliberate switch of contraceptive pills for aspirin.
In 1979 Redman returned to the stage for Tolstoy’s The Fruits of Enlightenment, playing the wife of the landowner, opposite Ralph Richardson. Five years later she was in Clandestine Marriage, the first theatre production from Anthony Quayle’s innovative touring Compass Theatre Company. She continued with the same company, which produced a number of other plays, including Dandy Dick, Saint Joan and King Lear.
On television Redman played Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair and featured in several episodes of Ruth Rendell Mysteries and in Tales of the Unexpected. Her television movie roles included The Merry Wives of Windsor (1955), The Seven Dials Mystery (1981) and Prime Suspect: Scent of Darkness (1995).
Her last role was in 2001 for the TV movie Victoria & Albert, in which she played the elderly monarch and her son Crispin Redman played Mr Anson. Her niece, Amanda Redman, stars in the BBC crime series New Tricks.
“The Times” obituary:
One of the most dependable players on the London stage over more than 40 years, Joyce Redman was as warm-hearted as she was versatile. A small, 5ft tall, compact figure, with a direct gaze, a perpetually melting voice, and Irish inflections that she never lost, she could move untroubled from comedy to emotional drama, from Lear’s Cordelia to Dol in The Alchemist.
Although she began with the kind of parts to which she was physically suited as a girl — Lady Precious Stream, Alice in Wonderland — she soon developed in range and confidence. She is likely to be remembered most for her two largely classical seasons, one at the New Theatre during the Old Vic tenancy in the 1940s, another when the National Theatre company was at the Old Vic 20 years later.
Essentially a stage actress, she appeared in only a handful of films, though two of them brought her Oscar nominations. As the sexually ravenous Mrs Waters in Tony Richardson’s rollicking take on Tom Jones (1963) she appeared in the film’s most memorable scene, slobbering and slurping over a plateful of chicken’s legs and over-ripe fruit with Albert Finney. Her other nomination was for Desdemona’s servant Emilia in Othello (1965), a film of the National Theatre production with Laurence Olivier as the Moor.
She was born in 1915 at Newcastle upon Tyne, though her roots were in Co Mayo where she was brought up in a Protestant Anglo-Irish family. Her father was an engineer. Educated by private governesses, she moved to London to study at RADA and went at 17 to Nancy Price’s company, then at the Little Theatre in the Adelphi. Within 12 months she was appearing as Mrs Cricket in The Insect Play.
At the Piccadilly in 1940 she joined Robert Donat as the orphan Essie in The Devil’s Disciple and when Alec Clunes began his management of the Arts in 1942 she became, most cheerfully, Maria in Twelfth Night. That Christmas she was Wendy, one of the best of her generation, in Peter Pan at the Winter Garden.
She had her first general acclamation as the little maidservant Brigid in Paul Vincent Carroll’s Shadow and Substance (Duke of York’s, 1943) and from 1944 to 1947 she acted continuously with the Old Vic company under Olivier and Ralph Richardson at the New Theatre in some of the great productions of their time. In a first season she was Solveig in Peer Gynt, preserving the simplicity without edging into the sentimental; Louka in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, Lady Anne to Olivier’s famous Richard III and Sonya in Uncle Vanya.
Later she played Doll — which a critic called “one of the O’Tearsheets” — in Henry IV, Part II and Cordelia to Olivier’s King Lear. An Irish Dol Common, bouncing upstairs and down, in The Alchemist, followed during 1946-47. In 1946 she had appeared as Dol in New York, and she went back there in 1947 in Duet for Two Hands.
For a time she moved between New York and London. Her Anne Boleyn in the 1949 Broadway production of Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days “scorches the pages to the point where the play is not a good fire insurance risk”, according to the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson. She was Anouilh’s Colombe for Peter Brook (New London, 1951), and at Stratford-upon-Avon (1955) had the ill luck to act in a remarkable season’s two leastregarded productions, though her Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well was well received.
Her next major engagement was with the National Theatre at the Old Vic from 1964. Here, as Emilia facing Olivier’s Othello, and Elizabeth in The Crucible (a critic wrote of “quiet magnificence”), she was in her fullest emotional power, varied by the comedy of Mrs Frail in Love For Love, and the tragi-comedy of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Remarkably, this was only the second Irish play in which she had appeared; speaking with a compromise between the Dublin accent and her own softer tongue, she was memorable in the last challenge, “Take away this murdherin’ hate and give us Thine own eternal love.”
She later appeared in such West End plays as The Lionel Touch with Rex Harrison and Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, and, at Chichester, Dear Antoine. In 1979, with an amusing verbal bite, she was the wife of the landowner (Ralph Richardson) in Tolstoy’s The Fruits of Enlightenment at the National Theatre.
She was back in the West End playing Mrs Heidelberg in The Clandestine Marriage (1984) but as the years progressed she had fewer London parts. In 1997, in her eighties, she played Judi Dench’s senile mother-in-law in Amy’s View by David Hare at the National. She did not appear at the final curtain call, preferring to catch the 10.30pm train home from Waterloo. The play transferred to the West End.
She first appeared on television in the 1930s. She played a “seductive” Lady Macbeth in a 1949 American production and in Britain she was Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Becky Sharp, heroine of Vanity Fair. In 1976 she was the straight-laced Auntie Hamps in Clayhanger and there were later roles in Prime Suspect and The Ruth Rendell Mysteries. Her last screen part was the elderly Queen Victoria in the 2001 BBC drama, Victoria and Albert.
For some years she owned the island of Bartragh, a mile off the coast of Co Mayo, which had been in the family for several generations. But in 1984 she decided to sell it and she spent her later years in Kent.
She married Charles Wynne-Roberts, a former Army captain, in 1949. She is survived by three children, including the actor Crispin Redman. She was the aunt of the actress Amanda Redman.
Joyce Redman, actress, was born on December 9, 1915. She died on May 10, 2012, aged 96
