June Thorburn was born in Karachi in Pakistan in 1931. She was an exceptionally pretty actress and a popular cinema star in the 1950’s. She came to London at the age of twenty. She made her first film “The Pickwick Papers” in 1952. Among her other major films ” The Cruel Sea”, “Touch and Go”, “Rooney” and “tom thumb”. Sadly she was killed in an airlane crash in 1967. She was expecting her third child at the time of her death.
Wikipedia entry:
June Thorburn was born in Karachi, British India. She was the eldest of three children, including her sister Diana and her brother Keith. Her full name was Patricia June Thubron Smith. She spent most of her schooldays in boarding schools in India, since her father was a colonel in the Indian Army and therefore her parents travelled a lot. When he retired from the military, they moved back to Britain.
June began writing plays from about the age of seven. Her grandfather (Sydney Thubron) who had also spent many years in India as a design engineer, building many important bridges, made early ‘movies’ and she was the star in several, the first being “Her Second Birthday”, when she was only two years old.
When she was 20 she left home and moved to London to pursue her career, where she met and married her first husband, Aldon Richard Bryse-Harvey. During their short and stressful marriage she bore one daughter in 1953, named Heather-Louise June. The marriage ended in divorce and June moved back to Hampshire, close to her family, for a couple of years until her career started to take off.
In 1957 she moved back to London, where shortly thereafter she met Morten Smith-Petersen, who subsequently became her second husband. She was married to him until her death in 1967. Together with Morten, she had a second daughter named Inger-Sheleen Christabel.
14th May 1955: English actress June Thorburn (1931 – 1967) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 67 No 07 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
She appeared in her first commercial film in 1952, and began to win leading roles, in British costume dramas such as Fury at Smugglers’ Bay (1961) and The Scarlet Blade (1963). Her most notable film appearance was as the Forest Queen in Tom Thumb (1958). During the early 1960s, she also appeared regularly on British television.
Jessie Matthews was born in 1907 and was an English actress, dancer and singer of the 1920s and 1930s, whose career continued into the post-war period.
After a string of hit stage musicals and films in the mid-1930s, Matthews developed a following in the USA, where she was dubbed “The Dancing Divinity”. Her British studio was reluctant to let go of its biggest name, which resulted in offers for her to work in Hollywood being repeatedly rejected.
Jessie Matthews
Matthews was born in a flat behind a butcher’s shop at 94 Berwick Street, Soho, London, in relative poverty, the seventh of sixteen children (of whom eleven survived) of a fruit-and-vegetable seller. She took dancing lessons as a child in a room above the local public house at 22 Berwick Street.
Matthews was in the chorus in Charlot’s Review of 1924 in London. She went with the show to New York, where she was also understudy to the star, Gertrude Lawrence. The show moved to Toronto, and when Lawrence fell ill she took over the role and was given great reviews.
Matthews was acclaimed in the United Kingdom as a dancer and as the first performer of numerous popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s, including “A Room with a View” by Noël Coward and “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” by Cole Porter.
Matthews’ fame reached its initial height with her lead role in Charles B. Cochran‘s 1930 stage production of Ever Green, premiered at the Alhambra Theatre Glasgow. The musical by Rodgers and Hart was partly inspired by the life of music hall star Marie Lloyd and her daughter’s tribute act resurrection of her mother’s acclaimed Edwardian stage show as Marie Lloyd Junior. At its time Ever Green, which included the first major revolving stage in Britain,was the most expensive musical ever mounted on a British stage.
She was in the film version of Evergreen (1934) which featured the newly composed song Over My Shoulder which was to go on to become Matthews’ personal signature song, later giving its title to her autobiography and to a 21st-century musical stage show of her life.
She was in First a Girl (1935) as a cross dresser, then It’s Love Again (1936), where she had an American co-star Robert Young. Exhibitors voted her the sixth biggest star in the country that year.
Her warbling voice and round cheeks made her a familiar and much-loved personality to British theatre and film audiences at the beginning of World War II. She was one of many British-born stars in the Hollywood film Forever and a Day (1943) (in whose cast Matthews was virtually unique by virtue of not being an expat: while in New York City preparing for a Broadway role Matthews had been recruited to film a role intended for Greer Garson in Hollywood over three days). Her popularity waned in the 1940s after several years’ absence from the screen followed by an unsatisfactory thriller, Candles at Nine (1944).
Post-war audiences associated her with a world of hectic pre-war luxury that was now seen as obsolete in austerity-era Britain.[ In the late 1940s she ran an amateur theatre group at the Theatre Royal in Aldershot.
After a few false starts as a straight actress she played Tom Thumb‘s mother in the 1958 children’s film, and during the 1960s found new fame when she took over the leading role of Mary Dale in the BBC‘s long-running daily radio soap, The Dales, formerly Mrs Dale’s Diary.
Live theatre and variety shows remained the mainstay of Matthews’ work through the 1950s and 1960s, with successful tours of Australia and South Africa interspersed with periods of less glamorous but welcome work in British provincial theatre and pantomimes.
Jessie Matthews was awarded an OBE in 1970 and continued to make cabaret and occasional film and television appearances through the decade including one-off guest roles in the popular BBC series Angels and an episode of the ITV mystery anthology Tales of the Unexpected. She memorably played Wallis Simpson’s “Aunt Bessie” Merriman in the 1978 Thames TV series Edward & Mrs. Simpson.
She took her one-woman stage show to Los Angeles in 1979 and won the United States Drama Logue Award for the year’s best performance in concert.
In 1926 she married the first of her three husbands, actor Henry Lytton, Jr., the son of singer and actress Louie Henri and Sir Henry Lytton the doyen of the Savoy Theatre. They divorced in 1929.
Her second and longest marriage (1931–1944) was to actor-director Sonnie Hale; the third to military officer, Lt. Brian Lewis, both marriages ending in divorce.
With Hale she had one adopted daughter, Catherine Hale-Monro, who married Count Donald Grixoni on 15 November 1958; they eventually divorced but she remained known as Catherine, Countess Grixoni.
Matthews suffered from periods of ill-health throughout her life and eventually died of cancer, aged 74. She is buried at St Martin’s Church, Ruislip.
Tom Bell is one of my favourite actors. He carved out a distinguished career in stage, screen and television. This lean, long-faced actor was born in 1933 in Liverpool. He was tipped for major stardon after his performance with Leslie Caron in “The L Shaped Room” in 1962. However after an awards cermony in London where he was perceived to be rowdy, he found his cinema career stalled. After a number of years he excelled himself on television in a number of groundbreaking series such as “Holocaust”, “Out” and “Prime Suspect”. Sadly this great actor died in 2006.
Tom Bell obituary by Michael Coveney:
Tom Bell, who has died aged 73 after a short illness, was a naturally gifted and unusually reserved leading actor who never fulfilled the star promise of his breakthrough success as the unpublished writer in Bryan Forbes’ 1962 movie, The L-Shaped Room. Whereas Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960), Alan Bates (A Kind of Loving, 1962) and Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, 1962) all went on to careers in the new British cinema, and theatre, Bell drifted into television, where he became a fixture in the 1970s and 80s. But although his glory days were long gone, he never stopped working; he took a leading role in last night’s episode of Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire on BBC1.
Tom Bell enjoyed huge popularity in his signature role of armed robber Frank Ross in the late 1970s TV series Out, written by Trevor Preston and produced by Euston Films. As a single-minded avenger, lately released from prison, he cut a terrific swathe through the villains and bent policemen who put him away. Tough, good-looking, uncompromising, he was one of the great characters of British television in this period, and he cemented his relationship with the viewing public as the sneering Detective Sergeant Bill Otley in Prime Suspect, for which he was nominated for a Bafta, and as the unbending father of Clive Owen in Chancer (1990).
Tom Bell was famous for not mincing his words, and there are many who felt he scuppered his film career by heckling the Duke of Edinburgh at an awards dinner shortly after his first success. “Make us laugh, tell us a joke,” he cried, to the dismay of industry bigwigs such as John Mills and Richard Attenborough. Very much his own man, he even managed to get out of national service a fortnight after being called up. And he often compelled writers to cut long speeches with which he was loath to bore the audience.
With this week’s West End revival of Martin Sherman’s Bent, it is poignant to recall Bell’s performance in the original 1979 production at the Royal Court theatre, one of his rare, later stage appearances, in which he played Horst, the grimly saturnine companion to Ian McKellen’s Max in Dachau; the illicit sexual liaison between the two prisoners in the stone-breaking compound brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “getting one’s rocks off”. Bell’s quiet, mesmeric brand of acting was the perfect foil to McKellen’s more demonstrative emotional quivering.
The director Peter Gill, who joined the Swansea Rep when Bell, then in his mid-20s, was the leading man, said he represented a 1960s type before they existed. “In the theatre, Terry Stamp was the first, but Tom Bell had a Paul Newman quality that was rare – and still is – on the British stage. He had allure, and it was no wonder that he soon became the darling of the television producers of Armchair Theatre and so on. He was a troubled, smooth-skinned Liverpool boy, a more wholesome sort of John Lennon without the glasses.”
Bell was born into a large family, the son of a merchant seaman he hardly knew. As a child evacuee during the war, he lived with three different families in the Morecambe area. Tom Bell attended Euston Road secondary modern school in Morecambe, worked on the pier as a photographer during the holidays and later trained as an actor in Bradford with the legendary Esme Church, whose pupils then included Robert Stephens and Billie Whitelaw. After that, he went into weekly rep, with a fit-up, or temporary, company in Ireland and Britain, before becoming part of the “kitchen sink” movement in the 1960s, firstly as Paul in the film of Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen.
One unlikely brush with Hollywood put him off the bright lights for good – “a total madhouse,” he told this newspaper in 1987, in a staccato style that was patently tongue-in-cheek: “Kept trying to get me laid, brought these girls with big tits up to my room. No way, couldn’t relate to it at all.” In that same year he played Uncle Philip in a film of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, exuding a livid streak of self-righteousness that improved even on Carter’s character.
In 1978 he had come to worldwide attention as Adolf Eichmann in the Emmy award-winning series The Holocaust, but many viewers will also treasure performances such as Walter Morel in Trevor Griffiths’ television adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1981), or Jack “the Hat” McVitie in Peter Medak’s film The Krays (1990). It is the sort of career that needs a season at the National Film Theatre to do it justice, for Tom Bell never gave a performance that was not instilled with truth and a rare sort of inner beauty.
Although he did, in fact, play the Finney role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in the theatre, he never envied his friend’s move to the National: “I wouldn’t want to work there,” he said in 1978, “Albie climbs mountains there. I’d rather think in terms of films. I photograph quite well.” Indeed he did.
Tom Bell is survived by his son, Aran, from an early marriage, and by his partner of 30 years, the costume designer Frances Tempest, with whom he had a step-daughter, Nellie, and a daughter, Polly.
· Tom Bell, actor, born August 2 1933; died October 4 2006.
Article on Tom Bell in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:
Serious and thoughtful looking, Tom Bell was one of the UK’s finest actors to emerge in the early Sixties. Dark-haired and wiry with a rebellious streak and an unpredictability, he sadly never achieved the fame he could have once had.
Born in Liverpool on August 2nd 1933, Bell began in repertory before making his movie debut in Joseph Losey’s realistic prison drama ‘The Criminal’ (’60), starring Stanley Baker and Sam Wanamaker. A showy role soon followed in the exciting heist flick ‘Payroll’ (’61), as a loose-cannon crook, and he was then a brutal seaman in the Alec Guinness-Dirk Bogarde adventure ‘HMS Defiant’ (’62). A strong role came in Bryan Forbes’ excellent boarding house drama ‘The L-Shaped Room’ (’62). In it Bell played a young writer who briefly romances Leslie Caron’s lonely pregnant French girl. A big hit it garnered various awards including a Bafta, and an Academy Award nomination for Caron’s touching performance.
After playing an alcoholic in the Ray Charles drama ‘Ballad in Blue’ (’64), Tom had the lead role of a cat-burglar, in Charles Crichton’s interesting drama ‘He Who Rides a Tiger’ (’65) with Judi Dench. Later, Bell was very good as disillusioned IRA member Sean Rogan, who’s recruited by Ed Begley’s mastermind to blow up a British electronics factory, in Don Sharp’s ‘The Violent Enemy’ (’68). A rare comedy role followed when he played a sex-starved sailor in the bawdy farce ‘Lock Up Your Daughters!’ (’69). My favourite Tom Bell performance came in Gerry O’Hara’s excellent drama ‘All the Right Noises’ (’69), as a married electrician who falls for Olivia Hussey’s 15 year old actress. He gave a sensitive performance in what could have so easily been a sleazy picture, but was actually a nicely acted and engaging drama. Another interesting project was ‘Quest for Love’ (’71), a romantic Sci-fi sleeper which saw Tom as a physicist stuck in a parallel universe and falling in love with Joan Collins, who appeared in dual roles.
After playing a boutique owner in Hammer’s uneven shocker ‘Straight On till Morning’ (’72), Bell had a supporting role as one of Oliver Reed’s henchmen, in Richard Lester’s star-laden romp ‘Royal Flash’ (’75). This was followed by a strong turn in Jack Gold’s melodrama ‘The Sailor’s Return’ (’78), as a sailor returning home to the West Country, only to find himself ostracized by his community for marrying an African girl. It was a good performance in an interesting yet little-seen production. That same year Bell gained some worldwide exposure when he played Nazi chief Adolf Eichmann in the acclaimed mini-series ‘Holocaust’, alongside such stars as Meryl Streep, Michael Moriarty and James Woods. Another barely seen production was ‘Summer Lightning’ (’84), a mood piece which provided a rare screen outing for acclaimed actor Paul Scofield, but very few saw it.
A big hit came in 1987 with David Leland’s period comedy-drama ‘Wish You Were Here’, playing a dirty old man who sleeps with his friend’s bored young daughter (Emily Lloyd). A Falkland’s drama followed when Tom played the father of David Thewlis’s returning soldier in Paul Greengrass’s ‘Resurrected’ (’89). A real-life gangster part came next when Bell was cast as Jack “The Hat” McVitie, in Peter Medak’s violent biopic ‘The Krays’ (’90), which starred Gary and Martin Kemp as the notorious twins Ronald and Reggie Kray, with a standout turn from Billie Whitelaw as their beloved mum Violet.
Much seen on television, Bell had a good role opposite Helen Mirren in ‘Prime Suspect’ (’91), as Detective Sergeant Otley, and the part earned Tom a Bafta nomination in the third series. For cinema, Bell would play another Detective Sergeant that year, in the powerful and moving true-life drama ‘Let Him Have It’ (’91). The next few years saw fewer appearances although Tom did crop up in a handful of interesting productions, notably ‘Feast of July’ (’95) with Embeth Davidtz, a cameo in the Daniel Day-Lewis starrer ‘The Boxer’ (’97), and ‘Dead Man’s Cards’ (2006), a violent underworld flick with Paul Barber.
After a diverse 50 year career, Tom Bell died in Brighton, England on October 4th 2006, aged 73. A bit of a hell raiser in his time, he gave some powerful performances in a host of offbeat productions and, although I always see Tom as this unsmiling and serious character, I like the fact that he never took the easy route and was never afraid to be controversial.
Favourite Movie: ‘Let Him Have It’ Favourite Performance: ‘All the Right Noises’
The above article can aso be accessed online here.
Another notable stage role was that of the surgeon Treves in the National Theatre’s 1980 production of The Elephant Man.
His wife (whom he married in 1978) was actress Julie Peasgood. They met in 1975 when she played a maid called Ada in the Clayhanger television series in which McEnery starred. Their daughter Kate, born in 1981, is also an actress.
Peter Finch said once: ‘I’ve been lucky. My agent might have hoped that I’d be a bigger name – as they call it – in America but I’m very happy. I like what I do and I choose what I do’. He did not always choose wisely. He was marked for the heights of stardom when he made his forst film in Britain but for a while the real peaks eluded him – too many bad films and kiss of death, a long-term Rank contract.
In the right material he always looked good. He had a good actor’s voice and stance, a touch of arrogance, a touch of humour, some warmth, leading man’s looks and the same sort of gritty dependability that characterized the malestars of Hollywood’s golden age” – David Shipman’s “The Great Movie Stars- The International years”. (1972)
He won for his performance in “Network” in 1976. Peter Finch was born in London in 1916. He went to live in Australia when he was ten years of age. He made his first film in Australia in 1938, The film was entitled “Dad and Dave Come to Town”.
When Laurence Oliver and Vivien Leigh were touring that country with the Old Vic in 1948 they met Peter Finch and he was offered a role by Oliver in the play “Daphne Laureola” in London which he accepted.He made the film “The Miniver Story” in England and then went to Hollywood to make “Elephant Walk” with Elizabeth Taylor and Dana Andrews. Over the next few years he made many fine films including “A Town Like Alice”, “The Nun’s Story”, “The Girl With Green Eyes”, “No Love for Johnny” and “Far From the Madding Crowd”. He was enjoying the huge revival of his career when he died from a heart attack in 1977 at the age of sixty. Peter Finch was the first actor to win a Academy Award for Best Actor after his death
TCM Overview:
The Trials Of Oscar Wilde, poster, US poster art, Peter Finch, 1960. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Josephine And Men, poster, top from left: Glynis Johns and Peter Finch, Donald Sinden, Jack Buchanan, poster, 1955. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
A former vaudeville performer and popular radio actor in Australia, Peter Finch transitioned to film in his native England, where he rose from supporting actor to leading man in a number of emotionally charged dramas. While he delivered more than a few notable performances in his four-decade career, Finch was forever identified as the raving mad prophet Howard Beale in “Network” (1976), whose line “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” remained one of the most identifiable in all of cinema history. After supporting roles in several British-made films, he made the Hollywood transition with “The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men” (1952) and starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor in “Elephant” (1954).
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Finch went back and forth between films made in Hollywood and England, earning award nominations along the way for his performances in “The Nun’s Story” (1959), “The Trials of Oscar Wilde” (1960) and “No Love for Johnnie” (1961). Some time passed before Finch delivered another noteworthy performance, this time earning acclaim for his sympathetic and non-clichéd turn as a gay man in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971).
A few years later, he captured attention as the raving maniac Beale in “Network,” only to die from a heart attack two months before winning his one and only Academy Award, making him the first actor to win a posthumous Oscar.
Born on Sept. 28, 1916 in London, England, Finch was raised by his father, George, a research chemist from Australia who moved to England prior to World War I, and his mother, Alicia. His parents divorced when he was just two years old, leading to his father being given custody.
Decades later, Finch discovered that George was not his biological father and that his mother had carried on with an army officer named Wentworth Edward Dallas Campbell, leading to his parents’ divorce. After living for a time with his paternal grandmother in France, the 10-year-old was sent to live with his great uncle in Sydney, Australia.
After graduating from North Sydney Intermediate High School, Finch worked as a waiter, an apprentice on a sheep farm, and a copy boy for the Sydney Sun, but soon felt the pull of stage acting. He began appearing in sideshows and vaudeville, even serving as a stooge for American comedian Bert le Blanc before touring Australia with George Sorlie’s traveling company.
It was with Sorlie’s troupe that gained Finch notice with a producer from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, who served as his mentor and cast him in a children’s radio series. At the time, he also made his feature debut in “Dad and Dave Come to Town” (1938), which led to a more substantial part in the crime drama “Mr. Chedworth Steps Out” (1939). But with the world on the brink of war, Finch’s acting career was put on hold in order for him to enlist in the Australian army in 1941.
He served for a time in the Middle East and participated in the Bombing of Darwin as an anti-aircraft gunner, though he did continue to perform by appearing in the wartime propaganda film “The Rats of Tobruk” (1944), and directing plays for tours of army bases and hospitals. Following his discharge with the rank of sergeant in 1945, Finch established himself as one of Australia’s premiere radio actors and went on to co-found the Mercury Theatre Company with fellow actors Allan Ashbolt, Sydney John Kay, Colin Scrimgeour and John Wiltshire.
Named after Orson Welles’ own company, the Mercury put on a number of notable plays, including “The Imaginary Invalid” (1948), which starred Finch and attracted the attention of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who later invited the actor to London. He returned to films with supporting roles in British productions like “Train of Events” (1949), “Eureka Stockade” (1949) and “The Wooden Horse” (1950), before making the turn toward Hollywood films.
He played the Sheriff of Nottingham in “The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men” (1952) and starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor – who took over for an ailing Vivian Leigh – in the rather disappointing melodrama “Elephant Walk” (1954). His career took off as he approached middle age in the mid-1950s with films including the charming romantic comedy “Simon and Laura” (1955), “The Dark Avenger” (1955) co-starring Errol Flynn, and the somber war drama “A Town Like Alice” (1956). In “Robbery Under Arms” (1957), he played famed cattle thief Captain Starlight, while he earned critical acclaim and a BAFTA nomination for his turn as a crusty surgeon working with an attractive nun (Audrey Hepburn) in the Belgian Congo in “The Nun’s Story” (1959).
Finch was somewhat less busy during the 1960s, but early in the decade he delivered to acclaimed, award-winning performances, playing the title roles in the biopic “The Trials of Oscar Wilde” (1960) and the Parliament-set drama “No Love for Johnnie” (1961). Both roles earned him BAFTA Awards for Best Actor. He next starred opposite Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury in the drama about marriage and infidelity, “In the Cool of the Day” (1963), before playing the third husband of a restless Anne Bancroft in the domestic drama “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964).
After starring in another relationship drama, “Girl With Green Eyes” (1964), Finch had a supporting role as a captain in the action yarn “The Flight of the Phoenix” (1965), starring James Stewart, and settled into a series of smaller films like “Judith” (1966), “Far from the Maddening Crowd” (1966), “The Legend of Lylah Clare” (1968) and “The Red Tent” (1969). He went on to deliver a powerful performance as a homosexual doctor engaged in a love triangle with Murray Head and Glenda Jackson in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), a revolutionary drama for its frank and rather sympathetic perspective on homosexuality. His performance as the well-adjusted doctor seeking escape from his repressed upbringing earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
After his Oscar-worthy performance in “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Finch starred in a string of mediocre films like “Shattered” (1972), a psychological drama about the disintegration of a man’s life due to alcohol and a bad marriage, and “Lost Horizon” (1973), a disastrous remake of Frank Capra’s 1937 original of the same name. After playing real-life Cardinal Azzolino in “The Abdication” (1974), Finch played the one character that he would forever be indentified with, TV news anchor Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves whose mental breakdown on live television leads to a ratings bonanza for a struggling upstart station in Sydney Lumet’s searing satire, “Network” (1976). Also starring William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall, the film was a major critical and commercial hit, and received 10 Academy Award nominations. But just two months before the Oscar ceremony, on Jan. 15, 1977, Finch suffered a fatal heart in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was waiting to meet Lumet for breakfast. He was rushed to the UCLA Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead hours later. Finch was 60 years old. At the ceremony, he won the Oscar for Best Actor, which was accepted by “Network” writer Paddy Chayefsky and Finch’s third wife, Eletha Barrett. Soon after, he was posthumously nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance as Yitzhak Rabin in the television movie, “Raid on Entebbe” (NBC, 1977), which aired days before he died and was the last time Finch was seen on screen.
By Shawn DwyerThe above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Blog on Peter Finch in “Pop Matters” can be accessed here.
Shirley Eaton had a very busy career from the 1950’s. She seemed to be in every other British film and then suddenly in the late 1960’s her film career came to an end when she decided to spend time with her family and moved to live in the South of France. She was born in 1937 in London. By the late 50’s she was making her mark in such films as “Doctor in the House”, “Sailor Beware” and “Doctor at Large”. She starred in the first three of the “Carry On” series. In the early 1960’s she starred in several comedies. In 1964 she gained huge fame as Jill Masterson the girl painted gold in the Jame Bond movie “Goldfinger”. After her success in “Goldfinger” she went to Hollywood to make “Around the World Under the Sea” and “Eight on a Lam” in which an old Bob Hope amazingly was her boyfriend. Recently she has appeared at retrospectives for the “Carry On” series, looking as engaging and attractive as ever.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Long before Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty and company showed up in 80s TV households, Hollywood had, in effect, its own original “Golden Girl”…literally…in the form of stunning British actress Shirley Eaton. Although she found definitive cult stardom in 1964 with her final golden moment in a certain “007” film, Shirley was hardly considered an “overnight success”.
For nearly a decade, she had been out and about uplifting a number of 1950s and early 1960s British dramatic films and slapstick farce. Shirley became quite a sought-after actress internationally but, by the end of the decade, the dark-browed blonde beauty intentionally bade Hollywood and her acting career a fond and permanent farewell. She has never looked back.
Born in Edgeware, Middlesex, England on January 12, 1937 (some references incorrectly list her birth year as 1936), Shirley Jean Eaton began on stage as a youth, making her debut at age 12 in “Set to Partners” (1949) and following it up the following year withBenjamin Britten‘s “Let’s Make an Opera”. Her first on-camera work was on TV in 1951, but it didn’t take long before the pretty teen began to provide fleeting, decorative interest on film.
Upon Korda’s death in 1956, Shirley briefly joined the Rank Organization. Every once in awhile, she relished playing a fetching villainess in a drama, such as in The Girl Hunters(1963) when not playing it straight as the beautiful foil caught up in some of Britain’s finest madcap farces, which included the highly popular “Carry On” movies. Trained also in ballet and voice, Shirley was afforded a great chance to sing and dance with the film,Life Is a Circus (1960), and managed to grace the BBC as well in a few of their musical formats of the 1950s.
Shirley’s career hit international status, of course, when she played “Jill Masterson”, one of a bevy of beauties linked to titular archvillain Gert Fröbe in the film, Goldfinger (1964). And like many of the Bondian girls before and since, her character dearly paid for her furtive romantic clinches with Sean Connery‘s magnetic “James Bond”. Shirley’s memorable 24-karat gold death scene (she was found by Bond, painted head to toe in gold paint, and had “died of skin suffocation”), became the eye-catching draw for the movie.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATen Little Indians, poster, Shirley Eaton, Mario Adorf, Dennis Price, Fabian, Hugh O’Brian, Leo Genn, Daliah Lavi, Stanley Holloway, Wilfrid Hyde-White, 1965. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
The image was splattered everywhere — on movie posters, in press junkets and in publicity campaigns. Despite the formidable attention the movie received in the form ofHonor Blackman‘s high-kicking “Pussy Galore” character and Shirley Bassey‘s famous rendition of the title song playing the airwaves, it was Eaton’s gilded visuals that became THE iconic image of not only the movie but the whole “007” phenomena.
In its wake, Hollywood beckoned and Shirley immediately won a number of female leads in melodrama, crime yarns, war stories and rugged adventures. Adding to the mesmerizing Ivan Tors scenery in such movies as Rhino! (1964) and the underwater epic,Around the World Under the Sea (1966), she appeared opposite some of Hollywood best-looking and talented leading men, including Harry Guardino and Robert Culp of the afore-mentioned Rhino! (1964), and Hugh O’Brian in the classic whodunnit, Agatha Christie’s ‘Ten Little Indians’ (1965). During this highly productive time, her co-stars ranged from comedy legend Bob Hope in Eight on the Lam (1967) to horror icon Christopher Lee inThe Blood of Fu Manchu (1968). Shirley’s film career ended with her participation as “Sumuru”, the ambitious leader of an all-woman’s society called “Femina”, in both The Million Eyes of Su-Muru (1967) and Rio 70 (1969). Many of her movies remain interesting to the public today as they are a product reflective of their times, and a number of them, like she, have achieved cult status.
After Shirley’s self-imposed retirement, she, first and foremost, dedicated herself to her family. The widow of building contractor Colin Rowe (they were married in 1957; he died in 1994), she has two sons, Grant and Jason, and is the proud grandmother of five. She also developed a special knack for writing and, in 1999, published her autobiography entitled “Golden Girl”. In 2006, she marketed an “intimate diary” of poems. These days, the spectacular Shirley can be glimpsed from time to time at film festivals that very much appreciate her cult celebrity. She also enjoys painting and has made a return to the stage in recent years.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Nicol Williamson was born in Scotland in 1936. He made his stage debut with Dundee rep in 1960. He starred in John Osborne’s “Inadmissable Evidence” in 1964 in London in which he won rave reviews. He went with the play to London where he won a Tony Award for Best Actor. In 1968 he starred in a filmed version of “Hamlet”. He made a number of films including “The Bofors Guns”, “The Reckoning” and “Laughter in the Dark”. In the late seventies he appeared in some Hollywood films e.g. “The Goodbye Girl”. His last film credit seems to be “Spawn” in 1997. Nicol Williamson died in December 2011.
“The Independent” obituary:
Nicol Williamson was the notorious bad boy of the theatre, his unpredictable behaviour, unreliability and blunt rudeness to those he did not respect – which may well have been the majority of those he met in and out of the theatre world – having to be weighed by the theatres that employed him for his undoubted brilliance as an actor, and a star appeal that never fully flowered because of the reluctance of film producers and theatrical impresarios to engage him. Twin devils seemed to co-exist in his lanky body, one that drove his private life to frequent excess and public exhibitionism, and the other in which a creative genius seemed to be about to explode. He was quintessentially a model for the 19th century decadent romantic, a Byron, a des Esseintes or a Rimbaud. As an actor he could be electric: John Osborne declared him to be “the greatest actor since Marlon Brando”.
He was born and brought up in Hamilton outside Glasgow; it is difficult to imagine him as a boy in that quiet little town where the main cultural event of the year is the Salvation Army’s Christmas carol concert. He started his career at the Dundee Rep in 1960, stayed there two years, then went to the Arts Theatre in Cambridge and transferred to the Royal Court from there with That’s Us, staying on with the English Stage Company in a number of demanding roles. They included Jacobean and period drama and modern plays, the most successful of which was Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, a palpable hit that transferred to the West End and had several later revivals, about a complex London barrister, but he was also well cast as Sebastian Dangerfield in The Ginger Man.
One of his greatest performances was as Vladimir in the 1964 revival of Waiting for Godot. Anthony Page, Nicol’s preferred director, was in charge, but Beckett turned up at rehearsals and was unhappy about the way the production was progressing, the actor retaining his London barrister’s accent for the author’s reflective tramp. “Where do you come from? Is that your natural voice?” asked Beckett, and when told that Nicol was Scottish, asked if he could not use his natural non-London intonation. That evening Beckett looked pleased, more so as the days passed, and he commented, “There’s a touch of genius there!” The opening night was a triumph, the audience electrified by his trumpeted scream of “I can’t go on!” at the climax of the great final monologue.
From then Beckett was Williamson’s God. When I invited him in 1965 to take part in a Beckett reading at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford on a Sunday night, he insisted on Beckett’s personal direction, and we visited him at Ussy on the Sunday before. We had launched the previous day and Nicol’s single-minded enthusiasm was such that he cancelled both his Saturday performances of Inadmissible Evidence, then playing at Wyndham’s, next door to our restaurant, and sent on his understudy – who also had to play the whole week following, because Williamson, having returned from the rehearsal in France on the Monday, then disappeared for the whole week.
But the day before the Sundayperformance at Stratford, when I had made emergency changes in the programme, he appeared at my flat to rehearse, and took the audience by storm the next day, throwing the other readers into confusion by his innovations. Patrick Magee said that he would never again appear on the same stage as an actor so selfish.
With the RSC he performed Arden of Faversham at the New Arts Theatre and played Sweeney in the TS Eliot memorial production of Sweeney Agonistes. He became a charismatic actor in films as well, but his appearances, especially in commercial productions, became rarer because his temperament and arrogance did not appeal to directors.
His marriage to the actress Jill Townsend was of short duration, and problems rising from his divorce, his messy private life and his mounting debt to the Inland Revenue forced him to move to New York, where he quickly blotted his copybook by knocking down David Merrick, the most powerful man on Broadway at the time. There he repeated some of his British successes and performed in roles that included Hamlet and Macbeth, but always for short runs.
He was cast as the ghost of John Barrymore, appearing to help a young actor play Hamlet, commented voluably to the press on the weakness of the play and others in the cast, and at an early performance actually stabbed the other actor during a fencing episode. He strode to the footlights and announced, “Something’s gone wrong. You’d better bring down the curtain.” Most thought it was part of the play. The second act started after more than an hour’s interval with an understudy, and Williamson playing normally, but the actors had summoned Equity and the play closed a few nights later.
Williamson’s career was peppered with such incidents. He had a good natural tenor voice and could mimic any crooner perfectly, and if he heard an accent he could imitate it; years later he could still do Beckett’s voice perfectly. He devised a number of one-man shows, songs, patter and extracts from plays and other literature, but, in spite of brilliant moments, they were not successful, and while he could excite an audience, he had little critical judgement in choosing and interpreting a text without outside help.
His films included: Inadmissible Evidence (1967), The Bofors Gun (1968), The Seven Per Cent Solution (1975), The Human Factor (1979), Excalibur (1980) – the film for which he is probably best known, as Merlin – Black Widow (1986) and several others of varying quality, including The Exorcist III. Other plays in which he appeared include The Entertainer (1983), The Lark (1983) and The Real Thing (1985).
In person he was entertaining but often embarrassing company, carrying role-playing to extremes and needing to dominate every assembly at which he was present, especially in his manic moods. When depressive he was pitiable and usually stayed on his own. But whoever saw his Vladimir and heard that despairing scream, embodying the whole anguish of the human condition, which is then followed by a resumption of the human need to regain a vestige of dignity, will never forget it. Metaphorically it also encompassed his life.
Although Williamson’s death was only announced yesterday, his son Luke said that he had died on 16 December of oesophageal cancer.
John Calder
Nicol Williamson, actor: born Hamilton, Scotland 14 September 1938; married 1971 Jill Townsend (divorced 1977; one son); died Amsterdam 16 December 2011.
The “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Article on Nicol Williamson in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:
Once called the finest actor of his generation, and the best since Brando, the supremely talented Nicol Williamson is a somewhat forgotten face of British cinema. But for a while it seemed that both on stage and screen, he was untouchable. From his iconic Shakespearean roles to some incredible screen performances, Williamson dominated each scene with a magnetism rarely seen.
Born in Scotland on September 14th, 1936, Nicol’s screen career began in 1963 with a few brief TV parts and an uncredited bit in the 1964 Kim Novak remake; ‘Of Human Bondage’. Nicol’s noted stage career took off in 1964 with John Osborne’s ‘Inadmissible Evidence’, where he created the role of Bill Maitland, a solicitor despairing at his own life and existence. A little seen but excellent version of Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ was made for TV in 1968, and Nicol was quite astonishing as the simple-minded Lennie, with George Segal as his protector George.
A film version of his acclaimed stage performance ‘Inadmissible Evidence’ was shot in 1968, and he was just as terrific. He was also excellent, though wholly unlikable, in Jack Gold’s ‘The Bofors Gun’, as an Irish soldier and suicidal bully. My favourite performance of Nicol’s was in the 1969 social drama ‘The Reckoning’, which saw Williamson as Michael Marler, a no-nonsense bed-hopping businessman, seeking revenge for his father’s death. He was also good that year in Tony Richardson’s ‘Laughter in the Dark’. Based on the Nabokov novel, it had Nicol as a bored art dealer lusting after Anna Karina’s beautiful but scheming movie usherette.
Staying with Richardson, Williamson made the 1969 movie version of their acclaimed stage production ‘Hamlet’, which had Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia and Anthony Hopkins as Claudius. In 1972 Nicol was an archeology professor in the Political drama ‘The Jerusalem File’, with Donald Pleasence and Bruce Davison. Williamson reunited with director Jack Gold, this time to play President Nixon during the Watergate affair, in a ‘Late-Night Drama’ TV episode called ‘I Know What I Mean’. He made an endearing Little John in Richard Lester’s elegiac ‘Robin and Marian’ (’76), and was very good as Sherlock Holmes in Nicholas Meyer’s personal yet engaging drama ‘The Seven-Per-Cent Solution’ (’76). A guest spot in a 1978 episode of ‘Columbo’ led to a brief bit in the Peter Falk comedy spoof ‘The Cheap Detective’ (’78). Nicol was then a double-agent in Otto Preminger’s final feature, ‘The Human Factor’ (’79), a somewhat convoluted thriller but with a top-notch cast.
For many, Williamson’s best cinematic portrayal was that of Merlin, in John Boorman’s King Arthur tale ‘Excalibur’ (’81). Despite not getting on with co-star Helen Mirren, (they famously fell out during an earlier production of Macbeth) he was wonderful, and it remains one of cinemas most enjoyable portrayals. From here his career waned somewhat. He was a police commander in the entertaining horror flick ‘Venom’ (’81), slumming it but still giving a solid performance. Nicol was however, excellent as an alcoholic lawyer in the 1982 drama ‘I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can’ with Jill Clayburgh.
Nicol would dress up again, this time in dual roles, for the 1985 fantasy ‘Return to Oz’ (’85). Though it sank at the Box Office it has since gained a minor cult following. He was very good as a melancholic Lord Mountbatten in a 1986 mini-series, then was a philanthropist murdered by Theresa Russell in Bob Rafelson’s fun thriller ‘Black Widow’ (’87). A supporting role followed as Father Morning, aiding George C. Scott’s Lieutenant Kinderman, in the horror sequel ‘The Exorcist III’ (’90), which was better than it’s poor reviews suggested. He was then back on British screens in the BBC’s entertaining black comedy ‘The Hour of the Pig’, and was charming as the voice of Badger, in Terry Jone’s enjoyable 1996 version of ‘Wind in the Willows’. Nicol’s final movie was the woeful horror; ‘Spawn’, once again playing a magician.
Williamson had a son with actress Jill Townsend, whom he was married to from 1971 to 1977. Having lived abroad for many years, Nicol Williamson died on December 16th 2011, in Amsterdam, after a two year battle with oesophageal cancer. He was 75. From Broadway to screen, Nicol Williamson was a hard drinking, no nonsense actor, and a towering talent. Uncompromising and fearless, he was also an accomplished poet, singer and writer, and with so many great movie performances it’s surprising he never received an Oscar nomination. Though true to his character, I doubt he ever gave it a thought.
Favourite Movie: The Reckoning Favorite Performance: The Reckoning
Moyna MacGill was born in Belfast in 1995. She was the daughter of a solicitor. She acted on the London stage and in British films. In 1940 she was a widow and to protect her children from the London bombings she moved with them to New York. She then went to Hollywood where she worked as a sterling character actress in such films as “Green Dolphin Street”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and on many television programmes. She died in 1975. Moyna MacGill was the mother of Angela Lansbury. Blog on Moyna McGill can be accessed here.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Born in Belfast, she was the daughter of a wealthy solicitor who was also a director of the Grand Opera House in Belfast, a position that sparked her interest in theatrics. She was still a teen when she was noticed riding the London Underground by director George Pearson, who cast her in several of his films. In 1918, she made her stage debut in the play Love in a Cottage at the West End‘s Globe Theatre.
Encouraged by Gerald du Maurier to change her name to Moyna Macgill (which invariably was misspelled as “MacGill” or “McGill”, and on at least one occasion, the film Texas, Brooklyn and Heaven, as “Magill”), she became a leading actress of the day, appearing in light comedies, melodramas, and classics opposite Herbert Marshall, John Gielgud, and Basil Rathbone, among others.
Twenty-six-year-old Macgill was married with a three-year-old daughter, Isolde (who later married Sir Peter Ustinov), when she became involved romantically with Edgar Lansbury, a socialist politician, who was a son of the Labour MP and Leader of the Opposition George Lansbury. Her husband, actor Reginald Denham, named Lansbury as co-respondent when he filed for divorce. A year after it was finalized, Macgill and Lansbury married and with Isolde settled into a garden flat in London‘s Regent’s Park.
Macgill temporarily set aside her career following the birth of daughter Angela and twin sons Edgar, Jr., and Bruce (both went on to becomeBroadway producers, but Bruce is better known for his work on television, such as the series The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, and his sister’s Murder, She Wrote), although music and dance were prevalent in their upbringing. When they moved into a larger house in suburban Mill Hill, she turned their home into a salon for actors, writers, directors, musicians, and artists, all of whom left an impression on young Angela and were instrumental in directing her interests towards acting.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
Audrey Hepburn obituary in “The Independent” by David Shipman in 1993.
After so many drive-in waitresses in movies – it has been a real drought – here is class, somebody who went to school, can spell and possibly play the piano,’ said Billy Wilder. ‘She’s a wispy, thin little thing, but you’re really in the presence of somebody when you see that girl. Not since Garbo has there been anything like it, with the possible exception of Bergman.’ My generation knew Bergman. Garbo we had never seen. Old pictures were not easy to see in the 1950s. Older cinemagoers talked longingly of Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Margaret Sullavan and other enchantresses. From the moment Audrey Hepburn appeared in Roman Holiday (1953), we knew that we had one of our own.
She was born in Brussels to an English banker and a Dutch baroness – and when the war broke out had been trapped in Arnhem with her mother; there they spent the war years, while Hepburn trained as a dancer.
Curiously, several people recognised Hepburn’s particular magic, but few British producers were interested. The revue producer Cecil Landau saw her in the chorus of a West End musical – High Button Shoes (1948) – and engaged her for Sauce Tartare. He liked her so much that he gave her more to do in a sequel, Sauce Piquant. ‘God’s gift to publicity men is a heart-shattering young woman,’ said Picturegoer, ‘with a style of her own . . .’ The magazine mentioned that some people had been to see her perform a couple of dozen times, and among them was Mario Zampi, who was about to direct Laughter in Paradise (1951) for Associated British.
The company’s casting director was equally enthusiastic, but to no avail. She was cast as a hat-check girl: the studio reluctantly allowed her three lines, as against one in the original script. She was signed to a contract, and loaned to Ealing for a couple of lines in the final scene in Lavender Hill Mob (1951), when Alec Guinness is enjoying his ill-gotten loot in South America.
At this point, the producer-director Mervyn LeRoy was looking for a patrician girl to play the lead in Quo Vadis?, MGM’s biggest production in years, and he was excited by Hepburn’s test for him. MGM were not, and the role went to Deborah Kerr. But at last Associated British realised that they might have something in this odd little girl, and they made her a vamp in a parlour-room farce, Young Wives’ Tale (1951), starring Joan Greenwood. It is completely forgotten today, but if you can see it you are likely to be beguiled by two of the most individual actresses who ever appeared in films. They had in common voices with cadences which always alighted on the wrong word to emphasise – as did Sullavan, the other Hepburn, Ann Harding, Irene Dunne, even Judy Garland – turning a statement into a question. In a word, they were never ashamed of their vulnerability; they didn’t seem to be able to cope with life – except to laugh at it. Hepburn’s child-like laugh, deep-throated but tentative, was one of her most distinctive qualities.
But, obviously, it wasn’t unique. Jean Simmons also had it. And it was Simmons who inadvertently launched Hepburn’s screen career. After Young Wives’ Tale, Associated British loaned Hepburn to Ealing again, to play the sister of the star, Valentina Cortese, in a muddled spy drama, The Secret People (1951), and then to a French company for a minor B-movie, Monte Carlo Baby (1951). Hepburn was doing a scene in a Monte Carlo hotel lobby, when Colette happened by. Colette was then working with the American producer Gilbert Miller on a dramatisation of her novel Gigi, about an innocent youngster being trained to appeal – sexually – to men. This wasn’t a subject show-business wanted to know much about. It wasn’t something Hepburn seemed to know about when she played the role on Broadway in 1951.
Meanwhile, contractual obligations prevented Simmons from appearing in Roman Holiday, and Hepburn was successfully tested. The property had been brought to Paramount by Frank Capra and when he left it was inherited by another leading director, William Wyler. It was not a likely subject for either of them but then, like many of our favourite movies – All About Eve, Casablanca – there is no other like it; it resists imitation: the innocent alone in the big city. The innocent is the princess of an unnamed European country who escapes from the embassy to see Rome incognito. She is recognised by an American reporter, played by Gregory Peck, who sees in her a good news-story and doesn’t reckon on falling in love.
She doesn’t know that he’s a reporter till they are introduced formally at a reception, when by a flicker of an eyelid he indicates that he won’t be filing the story. Peck was not the most adroit of light comedians and the direction was rather academic: but Hepburn’s sheer joy at being free and in love was wonderful to experience. You could never forget her eating an ice- cream on the Spanish Steps or putting her hand in the mouth of the stone lion at Tivoli.
The acclaim that greeted Hepburn was instantaneous and enormous – to be matched only a year later by that for Grace Kelly in what became their decade. Simmons, whom she had never met, telephoned to say, ‘Although I wanted to hate you, I have to tell you that I wouldn’t have been half as good. You were wonderful.’ Hepburn was judged the year’s best actress by the New York critics, by the readers of Picturegoer and by the voters of the Motion Picture Academy. Paramount had Hollywood’s brightest new star – only it didn’t: she was under contract to Associated British, which came to a lucrative agreement by which Paramount had exclusive rights to her services.
Billy Wilder directed her in Sabrina (1954), in which she was the chauffeur’s daughter, moving from ugly duckling to glamour, which was a formula followed in several subsequent movies. The plot had her loved by two brothers, played by William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. Bogart got her at the end, establishing another pattern to follow, in which she was wooed by men twice her age: by Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), Paris fashions and the Gershwins’ music; by Gary Cooper in Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957), Paris again and a rather vulgar remake of Canner’s delicate Ariane; and Cary Grant in Donen’s Charade (1963), Paris yet again and Hitchcockian situations.
You could understand why these actors took the risk of being described as cradle-snatchers. Astaire said: ‘This could be the last and only opportunity I’d have to work with the great and lovely Audrey and I wasn’t missing it. Period.’ Leonard Gershe, who wrote Funny Face, described her as a joy to work with, ‘as professional as she was unpretentious’. Hollywood’s best directors also clamoured to work with her. King Vidor said that she was the only possible choice to play Natasha in the expensive Italo-American War and Peace (1956), causing William Whitebait in the New Statesman to observe, ‘She is beautifully, entrancingly alive, and I for one, when I next come to read (the book), shall see her where I read Natasha.’ But Tolstoy had done the job for him: physically, temperamentally Hepburn was Natasha.
About this time she might have played another literary heroine. James Mason knew that he would make a superb Mr Rochester, but 20th Century-Fox would only proceed with the project if he could persuade Hepburn to play Jane. He didn’t even try. As he explained: ‘Jane Eyre is a little mouse and Audrey is a head-turner. In any room where Audrey Hepburn sits, no matter what her make- up is, people will turn and look at her because she’s so beautiful.’ Of the many films she turned down the most interesting are MGM’s musicalised Gigi, in her old stage role (and the studio was prepared to pay her far more than Leslie Caron, who was under contract, and who did eventually play the role), and The Diary of Anne Frank, George Stevens’s version of the Broadway dramatisation. She said that that would have been too painful after her own experience of the Occupation (in the event the role was so disastrously cast that the film failed both artistically and commercially).
At the same time Hepburn accepted another difficult subject, with another fine director, The Nun’s Story, for Fred Zinnemann. Kathryn Hulme’s novel was also based on fact, about a novice who finds, in the end, that she doesn’t have enough faith to continue. The film remains Hollywood’s best attempt at playing Church, both because it regards it with respect and not piety, yet at the same time allowing us to make our own decisions about the dottiness of the convent system. She held her own against the formidable opposition of Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, both playing Mothers Superior with closed minds – and that was partly because the gentle Zinnemann was nevertheless able to blend their different acting styles, and partly because of Hepburn’s innate instinct for what the camera would allow her to do. Despite her voice mannerisms, here at a minimum, Hepburn was the one star of her generation to suggest intelligence and dignity – which is to say qualities which people, as opposed to actresses, have. Grace, beauty and the sine qua non of stardom made her as rewarding to watch as Garbo, and she can’t disguise them in playing this ordinary girl; but she also has gravity.
She was touching as Burt Lancaster’s half-breed sister in John Huston’s huge, vasty western The Unforgiven (1960), but Blake Edwards allowed the latent artifice of her screen persona to surface as Holly Golightly in his film of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Capote described the result as ‘a mawkish Valentine to Audrey Hepburn’ and George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay, criticised her for refusing to convey the fact that Holly was a tramp with no morals or principles. No one else seemed to mind.
She had committed herself to the film only after Marilyn Monroe had turned it down, and when there was an impasse with Alfred Hitchcock over No Bail for the Judge. He was desperate to work with her and had spent dollars 200,000 in preparation, when she had second thoughts about a scene in which she was dragged into a London park to be raped. Furious, Hitchcock abandoned the picture rather than go ahead with another actress.
Hepburn was a controversial choice to play Eliza in My Fair Lady (1964). Warners had paid a record sum of dollars 5.5m for the screen rights to the Lerner and Loewe musical version of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Everyone agreed that its extraordinary success was due to the starring trio of Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway. The last of these was the most expendable, but Jack Warner decided to go with Holloway when James Cagney wisely declined to come out of retirement to play Doolittle. No leading star was prepared to risk a comparison with Harrison’s definitive Higgins (‘Not only will I not play it,’ said Cary Grant, ‘I won’t even go and see it if you don’t put Rex Harrison in it’) which meant Andrews had to be replaced by a solid box-office attraction.
Warners had recently released The Music Man with its Broadway star Robert Preston, but the film’s reception was so spotty that they had not opened it in territories where he was an unknown quality. The irony of the My Fair Lady situation was that, as filming was under way, word was coming from the Disney studio that Andrews was sensational in Mary Poppins. She got an Oscar for it; Harrison got one for My Fair Lady, presented by Hepburn, and was thus photographed with his two Elizas. That Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed did not help her performance (her non-singing voice had done charmingly by the songs in Funny Face), but she brought a street-wise cunning to the role that Andrews lacked. This may not have been what Shaw intended, but George Cukor, who directed, observed that at the end of the film Hepburn fitted Shaw’s own description of Eliza as ‘dangerously beautiful’.
She made only two more successful films: Donen’s Two for the Road (1967), with Albert Finney, a study of a disintegrating marriage written by Frederic Raphael, and Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967), a thriller about a blind girl terrorised by some thugs because they thought there were some drugs stashed away in her apartment. Mention should be made of two other movies, because they were directed by Wyler: How to Steal a Million (1966), a comedy with Peter O’Toole, and The Children’s Hour (1962), a remake of his own These Three. The original Broadway play hinged on a lie told by a child, that two of her teachers have an unnatural affection for each other. The censor would not permit that in 1936, so the plot of the film depended on the child accusing one teacher of filching the other’s fiance. Wyler’s decision to remake the picture was to restore the lesbian element, but the result was flat, despite the fact that Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine were infinitely better actresses than Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, the stars of the 1936 version.
At the height of her career Hepburn made only one out-and-out stinker, Green Mansions, with Anthony Perkins. It may be that WH Hudson’s novel about Rima the Bird Girl is unfilmable (MGM had started shooting one a few years earlier before giving up), but matters here were made worse by the stodgy direction by Mel Ferrer, at that time married to Hepburn. They had met while appearing in Giraudoux’s Ondine in New York in 1954, and he accompanied her to Italy, to play Prince Andrei in War and Peace. When the marriage broke up in 1968 she married an Italian psychiatrist, Andrea Dotti, and announced that a career and marriage were incompatible; so she only intended to film again if she could do so near her homes in Rome and Switzerland.
She came out of retirement five times, and only the first time was worthwhile: to play an ageing Maid Marian to Sean Connery’s Robin in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976). She was an industrial heiress in Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, which was so badly received that she admitted that she had done it because she liked the director, Terence Young. She added that she wanted to go out on a good one – and Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed certainly didn’t provide it. Nobody laughed, including Time-Life, who financed it and dropped it after a few test showings. In 1987 she made a telemovie, Love Among Thieves, and although she herself was praised the press liked neither it nor her co-star, Robert Wagner. In 1989 she played a small role in Always, Steven Spielberg’s remake of A Guy Named Joe, in the role done in the original by Lionel Barrymore as an emissary of the Almighty. She was realistic enough to recognise that there were few meaty roles for actresses of her age – and with Spielberg’s box-office record she hoped to be in a success. She was wrong again.
3rd September 1955: British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 68 No 10 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
She was by now spending most of her time working voluntarily for Unicef and giving interviews to explain what she was doing and what was needed. Unlike some stars whose identification with charities always looked suspicious, as if they wanted to advance their careers, it was clear that in this case there was no career and she wanted to find something useful to do. She also appeared frequently at movie functions, to be awarded lifetime achievement awards or make the special presentation at the end of the evening. Many people had expected her to age badly, because she had been so scrawny as a young woman. The reverse was the case – for she still possessed in middle age what she had always had: radiance, dignity and, above all, style. This last quality may be summed up by a famous exchange of the 1950s, when her clothes were designed by one of the most celebrated couturiers in Paris. ‘Just think what Givenchy has done for Audrey Hepburn.’ ‘No, just think what Audrey Hepburn has done for Givenchy.’
