British Actors Archives

Alec Guinness

“Apart from Oliver, none of the serious highly regarded top-drawer British actors has had such a successful career in films as Alec Guinness. He has been in many very popular films,most of them enhanced by his performance. His versatility has been a byword over the past 30 years and perhaps it is the diffidence in his character which has prevented him from being a really magical actor” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972).

Alec Guinness was one of the most distinguished British screen actors ever. His first screen role was as Herbert Pocket in “Great Expectations” and then went on to play Fagin in “Oliver Twist”. Both of these films were directed by David Lean and Guiness made several films with Lean over the years including “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, “Laurence of Arabia”, “Dr Zhivago” and “Passage to India”. He won an Oscar for his performance in “Kwai” but he was dreadfully miscast as an Indian in “A Passage to India”. He won critical acclaim for his performance on television in the series “Tinker, Tailor, Spy” as George Smiley. Alec Guinness was also an accomplished write and had several books published. He died in 2000 at the age of 86.

Tom Sutcliffe’s”Guardian” obituary:

Sir Alec Guinness, who has died aged 86, was one of the best known and loved English actors of the 20th century. He was also a profoundly unostentatious and reserved man, and although he undertook a great variety of roles, all were informed at heart with the wisdom of the sad clown. It was this spiritual severity, together with those cool, clear, wide-open eyes, capable of melting on screen to the most reassuringly serene of smiles, which lent his performances force and authenticity.

In his later career, Guinness became something of an icon of spirituality and enlightened human understanding – especially after playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, in Star Wars (1977), with a notable and profound emotional charge. Subsequently, he was bemused to find himself being consulted as an agony uncle by American students, as a sort of substitute for CS Lewis. More important for him personally, his Star Wars contract guaranteed 2% of the profits, though the role had been much reduced, and he had nearly left the production.

The resulting financial security made this already fastidious actor even choosier about live stage roles. After Star Wars he was in just two West End plays, and was an unusual and sensitive Shylock at Chichester in 1984.

But Guinness was not the first great actor to find the ability, and the inclination, to learn parts after 70 much reduced. He had already avoided the theatre for six years when he came to star as TE Lawrence in Terence Rattigan’s Ross in 1960. More than any other English star of his generation, he was equally at home on stage, in film and on television – where he had an Indian summer as John Le Carré’s spymaster, Smiley, in the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1981-82) .

Guinness had an impecunious childhood, with a modest boarding-school education at Pembroke Lodge, in Southborne, and Roborough, in Eastbourne. At 18, he got a job as a junior copywriter in Arks Publicity, an advertising agency.

In his discreet autobiography, Blessings In Disguise (1985), he describes how the acting bug had bitten him. On the recommendation of John Gielgud, who assumed he was related to brewing and money, he got in touch with the formidable and eccentric Martita Hunt. She was, he noted, the first woman he had met who wore silk trousers and painted her toenails, and she coached him to audition for a Leverhulme scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But Rada were not giving the award that year, so he enrolled at the Fay Compton studio for as long as his money lasted, and then rapidly went to work in the London theatre. He made his debut at 20, walking on in Libel! at the Playhouse.

In his unpretentious and beautifully written book, Guinness exorcised a long-suppressed anxiety about his origins. He was, he made clear, illegitimate – his name a mystery, his father probably called Geddes, the circumstances of his conception vague. His mother was Agnes Cuffe, and he was registered as Alec Guinness de Cuffe.

Finally, the question of his birth did not matter to him, but in the beginning it must have. A reluctance to expose himself, an almost neurotic discretion, was famously the mark of both his professional and his personal style. In a 1953 monograph about him, the critic, Kenneth Tynan, wrote: “Were he to commit a murder, I have no doubt the number of false arrests following the circulation of his description would break all records.”

While still only 20, Guinness was a flowery Osric, in Gielgud’s Hamlet at the New Theatre. Thereafter, until the outbreak of the second world war, his career alternated between working with Gielgud, or with Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic, where he impressed with a modern-dress Hamlet in autumn 1938. Even the Sunday Times’s formidable critic, James Agate, conceded that Guinness’s refusal to play the role in a traditional way had “a value of its own”.

Guinness always denied having any technique as an actor – or knowing what technique might be. Yet he was proud of his gift. A favourite story, which he told quite often, concerned his time in The Seagull, in May 1936, playing the small part of Yakov. The director Komisarjevsky, a big influence, was convinced that he was pulling a rope to open the little stage curtains for the play within a play in the first act. But, as Peggy Ashcroft pointed out to Komis’s chagrin, there was, in fact, no rope.

For Guinness, the purpose of acting was to make believe. The theatre was an act of faith, whose object was to tell the inner truth about situations and feelings, not to embroider falsehood with trickery and display.

He was a master of disguise, as he demonstrated in the Ealing comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949), with a multiplicity of roles. But the Kind Hearts gallery of family victims was consciously broad brush. Guinness was an actor, not an entertainer or vaudevillian like Peter Sellers, who specialised in pretence and adopting other personas. The spiritual core of his inner conviction remained the same – whatever game of actorish disguise he might play.

Guinness’s conversion to Roman Catholicism followed an episode in France during the 1954 filming of Father Brown, in which he was GK Chesterton’s cheery cleric-cum-detective. Walking back in the dark to the station hotel of a village near Macon, and still wearing his cassock, his hand was seized by a small boy, a complete stranger, who called him “Mon père” and trotted along beside him chatting in French. Despite his phony credentials as a cleric, Guinness felt strongly that the reality of this trust was important. When his 11-year-old son Matthew was temporarily crippled with polio, he had taken to dropping in on church and praying.

As an actor, Guinness had acute and particular tastes, an infallible instinct for the apt moment, the ideal tone, the canny strategy. When he was Fool, to Laurence Olivier’s unsuccessful King Lear (1947), he explained to me once, the irritating (to Olivier) fact that he, Alec, had the lion’s share of the reviewers’ favour was a direct consequence of Larry’s actor-managerish vanity.

“Every time Larry came on stage, the lights went up in his vicinity. All I had to do was just stay very close to him.” Guinness, of course, could not fail to be noticed – if only because he was doing so little so well.

He knew his own vulnerabilities and exploited them with courage. That lent the danger to his best performances. He had resented, for instance, the Oliviers’ assumption, in the mid-1930s, that he was Gielgud’s boyfriend. Not because he could not have been, or was ashamed or offended to be cast in that role, but because he was not, and they had no reason to assume it. In 1938, Guinness became a scrupulous husband and father – though his sexuality was complex.

Typically, he did not balk at playing the transvestite criminal Mrs Artminster in Wise Child (1967), with the then glamorous-looking Simon Ward. His Lawrence, in Ross, rang dangerously true to self. Being mixed-up, discreet, acutely intelligent and voraciously well-read fuelled the neurotic, but muffled, engine that drove him as an artist.

Being so private a personality let Guinness bring out the normally hidden interior aspects of Harcourt Reilly, in TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. He played this role at Chichester, Wyndham’s and the Haymarket in 1968 and 1969, as well as in Edinburgh and New York in 1950. His radio reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets were spellbinding. He was perfect material for Alan Bennett’s Old Country (1977) and Habeas Corpus (1973). In the latter, he devised – and performed alone – a typically self-revealing dance at the end.

Tynan’s fine portrait of him misinterpreted the diffidence and humility. Guinness, Tynan wrote, “never will be a star in the sense that Olivier is . . . He does everything by stealth . . . He will illumine many a blind alley of subtlety, but blaze no trails . . . His stage presence is quite without amplitude; and his face, except when, temporarily, make-up transfigures it, is a signless zero.” The suggestiveness, the wish to avoid being domineering, was a different sort of contract with the audience’s imagination. Guinness also wielded glacial fierceness and terror with unchallengeable authority.

His greatness did without Olivier’s showmanship, Ralph Richardson’s abandoned cussedness or Gielgud’s resonant lyricism. Tynan admired, but was inclined to patronise, Guinness’s poetry and versatility. At 24, in 1951, the critic was engaged by Guinness as Player King, in his second Hamlet. Guinness invested much amour propre in this production. Tynan called it “Hamlet with the pilot dropped”, and said it was cast with “exuberant oddness”.

Yet, ironically, its failure turned out to be a major factor in Guinness’s career, leading him away from the classics and Shakespeare into films, ultimately television, and new plays. Tynan found Guinness less potent in the classical arena because he expected actors to perform like concerto soloists.

I did not see Guinness’s inspirational Richard II, for Ralph Richardson’s Old Vic company, at the New Theatre (now Albery) in 1947. But his Macbeth at the Royal Court (1966) was certainly a quiet, clipped tragic victim, without the expected sexiness and physicality.

In fact, Guinness was an actor for a new theatrical style, subtle and undecorated. From the 1960s, in the West End, he mostly created roles in brand new plays, rather than challenging memories of Gielgud, Richardson or Olivier. He might have been a marvellous and unusual Lear, but, when he took the role on radio, it was underwhelming. Though his work in Alan Bennett’s plays was superb, he was far less inclined at the end of his career to accept risks as Gielgud – secure in a theatrical dynasty – famously did with Harold Pinter, David Storey and Julian Mitchell.

He was always a bit of a social upstart in an English theatre world full of great families, a self-made actor with no advantages, dependent on a very spiritual stillness and charisma. When I first met him in the mid-1970s, he had a slightly grand shyness off-stage. Yet, of all the great British stage actors, his was the busiest film career, for which his modest way of acting was flawless.

Guinness was not just an actor. He was good at drawing and did a really charming, diffident design for his own Christmas cards each year. Like Caruso, he was a natural at caricatures, especially of himself. His handwriting was beautiful. He was a very able author. Just before the war, his stage version of Great Expectations – later the basis of David Lean’s film – had been directed by George Devine.

His adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, directed by Peter Brook in 1946, marked his return to the stage, as Mitya, after war service in the Royal Navy. He had joined as a rating in 1941, been commissioned in 1942 and commanded a landing-craft ferrying supplies to the Yugoslav partisans. He also appeared in the West End during the war, in Rattigan’s Bomber Command play, Flare Path.

After playing Herbert Pocket, in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), and Fagin, in Oliver Twist (1948), Guinness went on to a series of glorious Ealing comedies – perhaps most memorably as the bankteller-turned-robber Henry Holland in Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and as the criminal Professor Marcus, in Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955).

His greatest film role was probably Colonel Nicholson, in Lean’s The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), where his quintessentially English stiff upper lip under dreadful Japanese maltreatment and, eventually, obsessive unreasonableness, won him a best actor Oscar and numerous other prizes.

Further work included the artist Gulley Jimson, in The Horse’s Mouth (1958) – another Oscar nomination – with his own screenplay based on Joyce Carey’s novel. In 1959, he starred in Carol Reed’s Our Man In Havana, and a year later gave a brilliantly unpleasant Scottish impersonation of an irascible soldier in Tunes Of Glory. It was not followed by many more good film starring roles, and Guinness settled mostly for lucrative supporting parts in films like The Quiller Memorandum (1966), The Comedians (1967) and Cromwell (1970).

Yet some of those supporting roles were distinguished – Prince Feisal, in Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), General Yefgrav Zhivago, in Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Professor Godbole, in A Passage to India (1984). In Anthony Mann’s The Fall Of The Roman Empire (1964), Guinness’s Marcus Aurelius was one of the film’s few redeeming features.

He was again nominated for an Oscar with Star Wars (1977), and six years later appeared in its sequel, Return Of The Jedi. Yet another Oscar nomination followed his appearance as Dorrit, in Christine Edzard’s epic adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1988).

At the end of the 1970s, he achieved a new fame with his television appearances in the BBC2 adaptations of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. These works were effectively his screen monument, and for which he achieved Bafta awards.

Guinness was a charming, fascinating and elusive companion. He did not enjoy playing the star, though he liked the respect he got when visiting famous restaurants. From the mid-1950s, he lived in a modest way outside Petersfield, in Hampshire, with a large garden that much occupied his wife, Merula, whom he had married in 1938.

He had a small circle of particular friends, many outside the theatre. For years, he and Merula were close to Rachel Kempson and Michael Redgrave. If one visited him in his dressing room in the West End in the 1970s, one might find a surprisingly broad collection of people there, many of whom were never destined to discover what the others’ link with the great actor might be. He preferred to keep his friends separate; he was a one-to-one person.

He liked good food and drink. His favourite London hotel was the Connaught, with its superb cuisine. He was not a club man. He was knighted in 1959 and made a Companion of Honour in 1994.

Anybody outside his immediate circle was intrigued by the Guinness enigma. But the reserve through which that attractive generosity and warmth powerfully shone was, for him, an impenetrable and necessary protection.

He is survived by Merula and his son, Matthew.

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

A “Guardian” article by Xan Brooks on Alec Guiness’sbest movies can be found here.

June Ritchie. TCM Overview

June Ritchie has one great role on film to her credit – ‘Ingrid’ opposite Alan Bates in “A Kind of Loving” in 1962. She was born in 1938 in Manchester. Her other films include “Live Now – Pay Later” and “Man in the Moon”. Details on her best known film “A Kind of Loving” can be found on the IMDB website here.

TCM Overview:

June Ritchie was a big screen film actress known for powerful performances.

Ritchie found her beginnings in film with roles in “A Kind of Loving” (1962) and “Live Now – Pay Later” (1962).

She went on to act in the Margaret Rutherford adaptation sequel “The Mouse on the Moon” (1963) and “Pere Goriot” (PBS, 1970-71).

Later in her career, Ritchie appeared in “December Flower” (PBS, 1986-87).

Evelyn Laye obituary in “The Independent” in 1996.

Evelyn Laye was a British musical comedy star who made her Boradway debut in 1929 in Noel Coward’s “Bitter Sweet”. She made a few films in Hollywood before returning to Britain to concentrate on stage and film there. One of her last roles was as Jean Simmon’s mother in “Say Hello to Yesterday”. She died in 1996 at the age of 96. Article about Evelyn Laye and Jessie Matthews can be accessed here.

“Independent” obituary:

“They don’t make them like that any more,” was the refrain of Evelyn Laye’s hit number in the 1969 musical Phil the Fluter at the Palace Theatre, and as she sang it audiences must irresistibly have related the sentiment to the singer herself – for, even 27 years ago, they were being enchanted by an artist who had been a major figure in the British musical theatre for over 50 years.That, if you think about it, was no easy feat. The musical part of Laye’s career belonged to the era long before the use of amplified sound had ruined the immediacy and charm of the naturally projected singing voice in the theatre, and when leading ladies were expected to give the full complement of eight performances a week in the identical large venues used by today’s miked singers, who can rarely be prevailed upon to manage more than five.

As for miming to a pre- recorded “click” track – another creeping disease afflicting the musical theatre – I once saw her at a rehearsal for a Royal Gala Charity performance refuse point blank to cheat the public in this way, with the result that, of all the many singers who took part, only she and Dame Vera Lynn actually sang their numbers live on the night.

I doubt if any artist has ever had a fiercer commitment to the “profession” than Evelyn Laye had – it was, without doubt, the ruling passion of her life. Her adored parents, Gilbert Laye and Evelyn Stuart, were minor touring actors forever struggling to make a living between their annual pantomime engagements (her mother was a respected provincial Principal Boy), and eking out their precarious existence either in theatrical digs, or, when there was no work, in a series of furnished rooms.

Nevertheless, they were the kind of old pros who would never even consider “giving it up” and changing their way of life, and it was this sense of dedication that they passed on to their daughter. No wonder that a theatre was the only place in which she really felt she was at home, and why she was still working in the theatre even in 1992, when she was 92 years of age.

She was only 15 when she made her debut at the Theatre Royal, Brighton (where her father was briefly manager of the pier), as a Chinese servant girl in a touring company of the London success Mr Wu. For three years she played the provinces in a variety of parts (including a revue, Honi Soit, and the Principal Girl in pantomime at Portsmouth), by which time her singing voice and emerging beauty had begun to be recognised.

She made her London debut in 1918 when she took over a supporting role in The Beauty Spot at the illustrious Gaiety Theatre in the Strand, still basking in the glory that its late manager, George Edwardes, had bestowed on it by mounting a long succession of glamorous musical comedies. She remained a “Gaiety Girl” for the next three years, appearing in such shows as Going Up (during the run of which she made the first of her many records), and The Kiss Call. Whilst playing in the theatre every night, it was typical of her determination to equip herself for stardom that she sought to add to her armoury all the techniques she might conceivably need to help her to gain it. So her days were filled with dancing, fencing and singing lessons, all paid for out of her meagre salary.

She did not have long to wait. Seymour Hicks and his wife, the exquisite Ellaline Terriss, had had an enormous success at the Gaiety in 1894 with The Shop Girl. Now it was to be revived under Hicks’s direction, and he chose the 19-year-old Laye to play the lead. Her reception was so rapturous that it made her a star overnight. As the applause roared over her, Ellaline Terriss, standing up in her box, threw her own bouquet down at the young girl’s feet, whilst in the dressing-room afterwards, Sir Alfred Butt, the manager, tore up her contract for pounds 20 a week and trebled it.

London was now hers to command, and the successes of the next 20 years consolidated her position as the undisputed leading lady of the English musical comedy stage. Among them were three shows for Charles B. Cochran, a revival of The Merry Widow, and, most ambitious of all, her assumption of the Fritzi Massary role in Leo Fall’s Madame Pompadour (Daly’s Theatre, 1924).

Massary was no less than a theatrical genius, and the arch-sophisticate of German operetta, so no one thought that Evelyn Laye would be able to touch the role. But her success in it was emphatic, and the critics wrote lavishly in praise of her perfomance, noting that, in addition to the “inventory of beauty which is Miss Evelyn Laye” (James Agate’s phrase) and the lovely quality of her singing voice, was now added the confidence and ease of an accomplished actress. Other musicals – The Dollar Princess, Cleopatra, Betty in Mayfair, Princess Charming, Lilac Time, and Jerome Kern’s Blue Eyes – soon followed.

In 1925 Laye fell in love with and married the light comedian Sonnie Hale, much against the wishes of her parents, who refused to attend her wedding or to give her a reception afterwards. Since she had never before been separated from them, her deep distress soon led to a reconciliation, but it may well have been the strain that this must have imposed on the marriage that led Hale to abandon her in 1928 for another emerging talent, Jessie Matthews. The break-up led to the greatest mistake of her career.

Noel Coward invited her to star in his new musical play Bitter Sweet – she refused out of pique because it was to be presented by Cochran, who at that time was employing both Hale and Matthews in a Coward revue at the London Pavilion. Only when she saw Peggy Wood playing Sari in Bitter Sweet at a matinee did she realise the extent of her folly, and, as she admitted in her autobiography Boo To My Friends (1958), “I had broken the great rule of the theatre; I had not put it first.”

It was a mistake I doubt she ever made again. She had the considerable guts to swallow her pride and ask them humbly if she could be considered for the part when it was produced in New York. Meanwhile she was appearing in Sigmund Romberg’s The New Moon at Drury Lane, in which, with the cruellest irony, she nightly had to sing the hit number of the show, “Lover, Come Back to Me”.

In his autobiography Present Indicative, Noel Coward, describing the Broadway opening of Bitter Sweet, paid her the tribute of a lifetime:

It was Evelyn’s night from first to last. She played as though she were enchanted . . . Early on in the ballroom scene she conquered the audience completely by singing the quick waltz song so brilliantly and with such a quality of excitement, that the next few minutes of the play were entirely lost in one of the most prolonged outbursts of cheering I have ever heard in a theatre . . . It was she, and she alone, who put the play over that night.

In a letter to his mother, he also wrote, “How right you were about Evelyn, she certainly does knock spots off Peggy.”

Laye’s tremendous success on Broadway led to a Hollywood contract with Sam Goldwyn, for whom she made just one film, One Heavenly Night (1932). Seeing it today, even an appalling script and mediocre songs do not entirely efface her charm and beauty. But the experience made her escape back home to play Bitter Sweet in London, where she was triumphantly received.

At the Adelphi Theatre in 1932, she starred in Helen!, for which Cochran had assembled an astonishing array of talent. The musical adaptation of Offenbach’s La Belle Helene was by Korngold, the translation by A.P. Herbert, the choreography by Massine, the designs by Oliver Messel (the revolutionary all-white bedroom scene with the bath shaped like a great white swan), and the production by Max Reinhardt, the most admired director in Europe. Reinhardt’s telegram to her read: “You are that rare and holy trinity of the stage, a great singer, a great actress, and a great beauty. If I have added to your splendour at all, I could not have given you anything that was not already in you.”

After Helen! she made several British films, among them Evensong (1935), based on Beverley Nichols’s bitchy novel about the supposed rivalry between the opera-singers Nellie Melba and Toti dal Monte, in which she played Melba to Conchita Supervia’s Dal Monte. By this time, she had become romantically attached to the charming actor Frank Lawton, and, after a protracted courtship, they were married in 1934 in Hollywood, where he was playing David in MGM’s all-star production of David Copperfield. She made her second Hollywood film there, The Night is Young (1936), with Ramon Navarro, and the score by Sigmund Romberg included one of the many songs which will always be associated with her, “When I grow too old to dream”. Eventually they stayed in the United States for three years, while Lawton completed his contract, and she played on Broadway and in Los Angeles. Their marriage, though childless, was a famously happy one.

On her return, Cochran mounted a lavish production of Lehar’s Paganini (Lyceum, 1937), in which she played opposite the great Austrian tenor Richard Tauber. When, early in the rehearsals, she confessed that she was terrified of ruining their duets by singing flat, he immediately reassured her by saying that, when it came to her top notes, he would slip his arm round her waist and support her diaphragm, and this he did at every performance that they gave. Unexpectedly, the production was not a success and, for the first time for years, she found herself out of work and with no offers coming in. Since she couldn’t abide idleness, she launched a new career in variety and pantomime, where she improved on the family tradition by becoming the most sought-after Principal Boy of her time, as well as being top-of- the-bill at all the best variety theatres.

On the outbreak of war, she immediately volunteered to sing for the troops, and, on the formation of Ensa, she was put in command of all entertainments for the Navy. She also did her last Cochran show, Lights Up, at the Savoy, as well as three musicals, all of which were adversely affected by the wartime bombing. When the war finished, she made a success, even if it was not a smash hit, of the Yvonne Printemps roles in Oscar Straus’s Three Waltzes (Prince’s 1945), and, for the next nine years, developed her acting skills, largely in a series of touring versions of West End successes.

In 1954 she accepted a smallish role in a new musical starring Anton Walbrook, Wedding in Paris. During rehearsals, however, her part was constantly being built up, so that when the production opened at the Hippodrome in April, she was co-starred, and found herself once again the toast of London. She stayed with the show for almost two years, just as she later did in 1959 when she had another smash hit with the comedy The Amorous Prawn at the Saville, and for the first two years of the long-running No Sex Please – We’re British at the Strand (1971). By this time she had become a highly accomplished comedienne. In 1973 she was appointed CBE for her services to the theatre. Astonishingly, and surely most unfairly, this was the only honour she was to receive.

In 1969, Frank Lawton died. Though never a star of her magnitude, he was a respected and much-liked actor whose love and support throughout their marriage was matched by her devoted nursing of him during the numerous illnesses he endured at the end of his life.

As Laye’s career gradually slowed down, she still responded to any challenge that came her way. She continued to work on the stage, in radio, films and television. Retirement was anathema to her and as recently as 1992 she had been appearing to sold-out houses on Sunday nights at theatres all over the country. Though her singing voice was by now little more than a husky croak, the authority, the charm, the projection and the star quality were still intact, and audiences responded to it with standing ovations at the final curtain. This culminated in a memorable Sunday night performance at the London Palladium (26 July 1992) given in aid of the Theatrical Ladies Guild, of which she was President. The packed house included many hundreds of her fellow actors, and they seized the opportunity to show their affection and admiration for her superb professionalism and courage.

The genres of musical and light comedy to which she devoted her life may be thought of as essentially lightweight and frivolous. The secret of Evelyn Laye’s triumphant career was the total dedication she gave to honing her talents to as near perfection as it was in her to achieve. She was adored by every company she ever led, but beneath the beauty, the charm and the glamour was an artist of deep seriousness and absolute commitment. She was indeed a very bright, particular star, and one of the great glories of the English stage has finally left the scene.

Elsie Evelyn Lay (Evelyn Laye), actress and singer: born London 10 July 1900; married 1926 Sonnie Hale (marriage dissolved 1931), 1934 Frank Lawton (died 1969), died London 17 February 1996

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

Mona Washbourne

Mona Washbourne was a terrific character actress who had acted on the stage since the 1920’s. She only hit her stride in the 1960’s when she herself was in her sixties. She was born in 1903 in Birmingham. She went to Hollywood to play the housekeeper Mrs Pearce in “My Fair Lady”. Other successes she had included the lion aunt to Glenda Jackson in “Stevie” about the poet Stevie Smith and the nanny to Anthony Andrews on TV’s “Brideshead Revisited”. She died in 1988.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Beloved round and roly-poly British character player Mona Washbourne was a natural symbol for the working-class as much of her early career was in playing midwives, barmaids, nannies, landladies and factory workers. Born November 27, 1903, in Birmingham, England, the daughter of Arthur Edmund Washbourne and his wife Kate (Robinson), the piano was to be her early passion and she initially trained at the Birmingham School of Music. Following concerting on the stage and broadcast playing on radio, she made her professional stage debut in 1924 with the “Modern Follies” concert party, as both pianist and soubrette. From this point, she delved herself completely into acting and went on tour with the “Fol-De-Rols” revue for three seasons, developing a special flair for bawdy, eccentric comedy. She performed in various repertory companies and earned her first major dramatic success on the London stage in 1937 with “Mourning Becomes Electra”. On the quirkier side, she won kudos for her “Madame Arcati” in “Blithe Spirit” (1945) and for her doting journalist in “The Winslow Boy” (1946). She went on to transfer her role in The Winslow Boy (1948) to film in the postwar years and saw a new avenue for her talents open up.

While most of Mona’s early film roles tended toward the small and dowdy, they were also quite colorful and seldom failed to make some sort of impression. They also grew in size as years passed. She played a midwife in Doctor in the House (1954); the older, ill-fated first wife to Bluebeard-like charmer Dirk Bogarde in Cast a Dark Shadow (1955); the protagonist’s mum in Billy Liar (1963) (another role she originated on stage in 1960); the no-nonsense “Higgins” housekeeper in My Fair Lady (1964); an aristocratic old shrew who employs psycho Albert Finney in the remake of Night Must Fall (1964); and a doddering aunt to another psychopath, Terence Stamp, in The Collector (1965).

ONE WAY PENDULUM, US poster, Erie Sykes (top), Peggy Mount (bottom right), 1964

Continuing to impress on the stage with roles in Noel Coward‘s “Nude with Violin” (1957) and “Present Laughter” (1958), she also appeared to great effect in “Misalliance” (1967) and was a natural for her perplexed aunt role in a madcap production of “Harvey” (1975). Here in the States, she earned a Tony nomination for her contribution in “Home” (1970). Mona crowned her career remarkably alongside Glenda Jackson as the dithery maiden aunt who lives with her eccentric niece, the poet “Stevie Smith”, in the play “Stevie”. A two-person show, she and Jackson won additional acclaim when they took Stevie (1978) to film. Mona won the top critics supporting awards, including New York, Boston and Los Angeles, but was surprisingly snubbed by the Academy at Oscar time. Her final career years (in the early 1980s) were spent on TV with roles as “Mrs. Higgins” in a version ofGeorge Bernard Shaw‘s Pygmalion (1981) starring Twiggy and Robert Powell; “Nanny Hawkins” in the epic miniseries, Brideshead Revisited (1981) and the “Queen Mum” inCharles & Diana: A Royal Love Story (1982). Long married to actor Basil Dignam, he died in 1979. Mona passed on slightly less than a decade later, in 1988, at age 84.

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

“Los Angeles Times” obituary:

Mona Washbourne, the self-described “silly and rather charming” character actress best known for her stage and film representations of bosomy old biddies, has died at the age of 84.

Robert Enders, the producer-director who directed her in “Stevie,” in which she played poet Stevie Smith’s loving maiden aunt, said Monday that he had just learned that she died in a London nursing home on Nov. 15.

One of the last of the “Dear Old Things” who once abounded in English stage productions, Miss Washbourne typically garnered second, third or fourth billing but often as not came to be the character audiences remembered most fondly and best.

The Daily Telegraph of London, in writing of her death, remembered her as a performer who “came to symbolize in post-war British films and plays all that is decent and decorous in middle- or lower-class aunts and mothers.”

Although cast often in lower socioeconomic roles, she brought to them “domestic security and concern,” the Telegraph said.

Enders said of her Monday that “of all the actors I have known she left a lasting impression.”

Not all of that impression was on stage or in front of a camera. Enders remembered the time she came to New York to accept awards from the New York Critics and the National Board of Review for her work in “Stevie,” opposite Glenda Jackson, and that “she cashed in a first-class ticket so she could afford to bring a companion.”

Or the mink coat she refused to take off during interviews because “I worked hard enough to get it.”

Or the call Enders made about a year ago to the nursing home where she died only to find that she couldn’t come to the phone because, an attendant said, “I believe she’s having her gin now.”

Over the years Miss Washbourne worked with such giants of the theater as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Albert Finney and director George Cukor.

She clucked her way through dozens of roles, always seemingly unaware of how funny she actually was.

In “Stevie,” for instance, she exits into the kitchen to see how a roast of lamb is progressing, saying to no one in particular, “I must go and prod the joint.”

In a 1978 interview with The Times, a writer called her a “truly dear old thing, like her characters, but a bit cleverer than her scripts allow her to be.”

‘Nymphomaniac With Bad Feet’

In “Home,” opposite Gielgud and Richardson, she played a woman she described as “a nymphomaniac with bad feet.” She was Tom Courtenay’s mother in “Billy Liar” and Rex Harrison’s housekeeper in “My Fair Lady.”

She played four roles in one film, “O Lucky Man” in 1973, and spouted Shakespeare in Disney’s “The London Affair,” made originally for television.

Born in Birmingham, she trained as a pianist at the School of Music there and came to support herself by accompanying silent pictures. Later she worked with small orchestras, playing what she called “cheeky songs.”

She joined a repertory company and made her stage debut in 1924. For the rest of her career she moved back and forth between theater and film.

John Stride obituary in “The Guardian” in 2018

John Stride, who has died aged 81, was a golden boy of the early years of the National Theatre – he was a founder member of Laurence Olivier’s company at the Old Vic, appearing as Fortinbras in Hamlet, the inaugural production starring Peter O’Toole in 1963 – and a television star of some magnitude, playing the promiscuous lawyer David Main in four series of The Main Chance between 1969 and 1975.

His pre-National breakthrough was as Romeo to Judi Dench’s Juliet at the Old Vic in 1960. Kenneth Tynan hailed Franco Zeffirelli’s production as “a revelation, perhaps a revolution,” in that the lovers’ passion was, for the first time, so young, immediate, contemporary and palpable. The play was re-born.

And Stride double-booked his place in the history books with the first professional performance of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1967, playing the garrulous, amiably philosophical Rosencrantz opposite Edward Petherbridge’s irritable and sarcastic Guildenstern; in the opening coin-tossing scene of a play that placed the attendant lords centre stage with the tragedy of Hamlet as its scenery, Stride had called 85 “heads” in a row – correctly. The show, said the critic Peter Lewis, came out of the dark like a spot-lit jewel full of vibrations.

Stride could be brusque off stage, said Petherbridge, but was always impeccable on. He was a strikingly good-looking juvenile, with cherubic features, fine bearing and a voice that was God-given, according to another friend and contemporary, the actor David Weston: “John spoke verse as well as anyone I’ve ever heard.” But after his great bulge of success in the 1970s, Stride’s career foundered in the 80s and petered out with a florid performance as an ageing actor trying to make a come-back in Melvyn Bragg’s King Lear in New York, at the Chichester Festival theatre in 1992.

It was as though, starting as Peter Pan, a “Tennant’s boy” in the West End – hired by the all-powerful Binkie Beaumont of HM Tennant – and then Romeo and a National Theatre star, he failed to adjust to an older, middle-aged model.

He was born into a working-class family in South Norwood, south-east London, one of the five children of Alfred, a gardener and mechanic, and his wife Margaret (nee Prescott). He won a place at Alleyn’s school, Dulwich, then a direct grant grammar school, where he played soccer and water polo to high standards; he had extremely large hands, which earned him the nickname “Navvy”.

The key figure in his early life was the Alleyn’s English and drama master Michael Croft, who would later found the National Youth Theatre, in 1956. In a school production in 1952, Croft cast Stride as Hamlet, followed by Macbeth, and then as Antony. As a result, Stride won a scholarship to Rada – to the disapproval of his parents – alongside Alan Bates and O’Toole. He did his national service for two years with the Royal Artillery before playing a season at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1957 and making his West End debut in 1959 in Peter Shaffer’s Five Finger Exercise, a role he took over from Brian Bedford.

He then joined the Old Vic where his roles, apart from Romeo, included Lysander, Prince Hal and Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice. With the Old Vic he made his New York debut in 1962 as Malcolm in Macbeth and as Romeo. With Olivier’s new National, he was a fine Cassio in Othello (with Olivier and Maggie Smith), Dunois in Joan Plowright’s Saint Joan, Valentine in an exquisite production of Congreve’s Love for Love, Andrei in Three Sisters and the title role in Brecht’s version of Marlowe’s Edward II.

As he eased away from the National, the film career he had started in 1963 as a sympathetic barman in Bitter Harvest (1963) – starring Janet Munro as a Welsh innocent abroad in London, and based on a Patrick Hamilton novel – picked up with roles as Ross in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), with Jon Finch in the title role and Francesca Annis as a stunning, nakedly sleep-walking Lady Macbeth, John Wayne in Douglas Hickox’s Brannigan (1975) and with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick in Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), in which he played a psychiatrist.

But in none of these films did he make the same impact as in The Main Chance on television, and that is where he stayed, with a couple of significant sorties into the commercial theatre: co-starring with Eileen Atkins in Marguerite Duras’ Suzanna Andler in 1971 at the Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford; and with Vanessa Redgrave and Jeremy Brett in Michael Blakemore’s superb 1973 West End revival – retrieval, really – of Noël Coward’s Design for Living at the Phoenix; this “disgusting, three-sided erotic hotchpotch”, as one of the “excluded” characters in the play dubs it, as restored to the repertoire as a modern classic.

His TV follow-up to The Main Chance was Wilde Alliance (1978), in which he and Julia Foster were a husband and wife team of amateur detectives, but it lasted for only one series. After playing Bluntschli in Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Oxford Playhouse in 1976, he became a stranger to the stage until the Bragg play in Chichester. And in this same year, 1992, he scored heavily, for the last time on television, as two debauched characters: a lecherous businessman, Sir Bernard Bellamy, in Fay Weldon’s Growing Rich; and as the promiscuous Welsh “media type” Alun Weaver in Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.

By the time he played Bragg’s actor-laddie, he seemed to be a caricatured, bloated version of his former self. The play, anyway, was a poor re-tread of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser (1980), in which Freddie Jones (and, on film, Albert Finney) played a version of Donald Wolfit as Lear during the blitz; Stride’s Lear in modern Manhattan, besieged by two wives, a strident television gossip journalist and a drug addict daughter, was too forced a dramatic analogy, and Stride himself seemed to have morphed into a snowy-haired, bibulous and bulging version of Bragg’s old director buddy Ken Russell. It was, nonetheless, a memorable and agreeably growling performance, and approved by the critics, who were collectively delighted to see him back in action.t

Stride was twice married, first in 1958 to his Rada contemporary Virginia Thomas (the marriage ended in divorce) and then, in 1972, to the actor April Wilding.

She died in 2003 and there are friends who say he never fully recovered from this blow. His last years were spent in a nursing home near Oxford. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage and one from his second.

• John Edward Stride, actor, born 11 July 1936; died 20 April 2018

Ben Cross was born in 1947 in London. Upon graduating from RADA, he began his career on the stage appearing in such plays as “Royal Hunt of the Sun” and “Death of a Salesman”. In 1978 he played Billy Flynn in the musical “Chicago”. He had a major success with his role as Harold Abrahams in “Chariots of Fire”. He also scored with leading roles on TV in A.J. Cronin’s “The Citadel” and “The Far Pavilions”. In 2007 he was cast in the new Star Trek film. Interview with Ben Cross in “The Jewish Chronicle” can be accessed here.
Sadly Ben Cross died aged 72 in Vienna in August 2020

“Guardian” obituary in 2020

The actor Ben Cross, who has died of cancer aged 72, took the film world by storm in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire when he played Harold Abrahams, the British Jewish athlete driven as a runner not just to win gold at the 1924 Paris Olympics, but also to battle antisemitism. A fellow British team member, the devout Scottish Protestant missionary Eric Liddell, played by Ian Charleson, is similarly seen in a quest to combat discrimination. Abrahams wins the 100 metres, while Liddell triumphs in the 400 metres.

The two stars shared one of the most memorable opening scenes in film history, among the sprinters on a training run along a Scottish beach, enhanced dramatically with moments in slow motion and Vangelis’s inspirational music.

“The water was freezing,” recalled Cross, “and we had bare feet – completely ridiculous. If you spoke to a sports trainer about running barefoot in ice-cold water, they’d ask you if you were mad. But, look, it made for a good opening sequence.”

The 1981 film, produced by David Puttnam and directed by Hugh Hudson, won four Academy awards at the following year’s Oscars ceremony. However, despite Colin Welland’s “warning” to Hollywood that “the British are coming” as he accepted his statuette for best original screenplay, the two stars never quite fulfilled the promise they had shown in such a high-profile film – even though they jointly received the Variety Club’s most promising artiste award.

While Charleson chose to spend much of his time on stage before his premature death from Aids in 1990, Cross found most of his best roles on television, which utilised his bony features and earnest, sincere air, and said he had no hunger for theatre.

“Of all the jobs I’ve been offered, television was the best quality,” he later said. “I haven’t liked most of the films I’ve been offered. Film has the greatest international audience, so you have to be very choosy about what you do.”

He had his first starring role on the small screen in The Citadel (1983), the BBC’s 10-part adaptation of AJ Cronin’s semi-autobiographical novel about a doctor who swaps his crusading job in a poor Welsh mining village of the 1920s for a wealthy existence taking care of London society before realising he has sacrificed his ideals.

Going from the parochial to the international, Cross headed the cast in The Far Pavilions (1984), a lavish mini-series set in 19th-century India during the days of the British Raj. As the dashing romantic hero Ashton Pelham-Martyn (“Ash”), he played a British officer in love with a princess and battling to understand his own identity, having been orphaned and previously believing himself to be of Indian birth. To prepare for the role, Cross went to the country four weeks before shooting began in order to absorb the atmosphere – just as he had spent three months “training like a madman” for Chariots of Fire.

“The man discovers he is English, yet his heart and emotions are very much Indian and he’s accepted in neither world,’’ reflected Cross at the time. “These misfit roles seem to seek me out. I always seem to play people not totally at home in the situation we discover them.”

Ben Cross and Amy Irving The Far Pavilions, 1984. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Born in Paddington, London, to Catherine (nee O’Donovan), a cleaner, and Harry, a doorman, Cross was brought up a Catholic and attended Bishop Thomas Grant school in Streatham, south London.

Playing the title role in a school production of Toad of Toad Hall brought him laughs – and an ambition to act that was a long time unrealised after leaving home at 15, living in a van and working as a window cleaner.

He eventually found jobs backstage, as a carpenter for the Welsh National Opera and property master at the Alexandra theatre, Birmingham. Then, during two years at Wimbledon theatre, watching a different show every week, Cross decided to get himself under the stage lights, successfully auditioned for Rada and graduated in 1972, aged 24.

Apart from a handful of TV roles over the rest of the decade, his only screen appearance was as Trooper Binns – described by Cross as a “glorified extra” – alongside an all-star cast in the 1977 war film A Bridge Too Far.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/CSav51fVlKU?wmode=opaque&feature=oembedRunning scenes from Chariots of Fire, with Vangelis’s theme music for the film

However, he began to get attention on stage. During a stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company he took the role of Kevin Cartwright in the world premiere of the Peter Nichols national service farce Privates on Parade (Aldwych theatre, 1977). His singing voice was showcased when he played Wally in the original London production of the Cy Coleman-Michael Stewart musical I Love My Wife (Prince of Wales theatre, 1977-78) and, at the time of auditioning for Chariots of Fire, he was Billy Flynn, Roxie Hart’s lawyer, in Chicago (Cambridge theatre, 1979-80), observed by the Stage as “strong and sly as the courtroom superstar”.

His other television roles included Padre Rufino, a Franciscan monk aiding Jewish wartime refugees, in The Assisi Underground (1985), the vampire Barnabas Collins in the 1991 mini-series Dark Shadows, Rudolf Hess in Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial (2006), Prince Charles in William & Kate (2011) and the ruthless Ukrainian mob boss Mr Rabbit in the first two series (2013-14) of the American drama Banshee.

Ben Cross in London in 2012. Photograph: Jon Furniss/Invision/AP

The Italian production Honey Sweet Love (1994) gave him a rare starring film role, as a British army officer falling in love in Sicily during the second world war. He was also seen on the big screen as Prince Malagant in First Knight (1995) and as Sarek, Spock’s father, in the 2009 film Star Trek.

Cross’s first two marriages, to Penelope Butler (1977-92) and Michele Moerth (1996-2005), both ended in divorce. In 2018 he married Deyana Boneva in Bulgaria, where he had been living for more than 10 years.

She survives him, along with the two children of his first marriage, Lauren and Theo.

• Ben Cross (Harry Bernard Cross), actor, born 16 December 1947; died 18 August 2020

Nyree Dawn Porter obituary in “The Guardian” in 2001.

Nyree Dawn Porter will forever be identified with her role as Irene Forsyth in the 1960’s television series “The Forsyth Saga” with Kenneth More and Eric Porter. The series was a huge success worldwide. Unfortunately it was not made in colour so it has not been reshown often in recent years. She was born in New Zealand in 1936 and came to the UK after she won a talent competition. She made some minor British films and then had a success on television playing the title character in “Madame Bovary”. A visit to Hollywood did not result in any U.S. films. In the 70’s she starred with Robert Vaughn in “The Protectors”. Nyree Dawn Porter died in 2001.

Nyree Dawn Porter, who has died aged 61, became a star when she was one of the popular television players used by the producer Donald Wilson to persuade a reluctant BBC to make The Forsyte Saga, the memorable 1967 series created from the novels of John Galsworthy attacking the dominance of property over humanity. The series won an audience of over 100m in 26 countries.Porter’s classical good looks, slightly wan and other-worldly, were ideal for the part of Irene Forsyte, wife of the cold “man of property” Soames Forsyte, played by Eric Porter (no relation). Her looks became known world wide, so that for years she received often demented fan mail from people who either thought that the cold and property-conscious Soames should have been hanged, drawn and quartered for raping his beautiful but frigid wife, or sympathised with him on the grounds that Irene was herself a cold and irritating bitch.The formidable cast with whom she had to play also included the film star Kenneth More, who was temporarily in a career limbo at the age of 50. He played Jolyon Forsyte, cousin of Soames, who in the end runs off with the Nyree Dawn Porter character.

The series, in which the character of Irene was made pivotal, nearly did not get made. Donald Wilson had been keen on Galsworthy’s novels since 1928 and had been seeking the film rights, owned by MGM, for 11 years. But Sydney Newman, head of BBC drama, was doubtful whether a “costume” piece would appeal to popular taste in the Swinging 60s. Others were equally doubtful – even if such a series were to be made – whether two people both called Porter could star in it.

In the end the actress got her big chance because of BBC politics. The 26 episodes that were broadcast in 1967, the centenary of Galsworthy’s birth, were deliberately used by the corporation to boost public interest in BBC2, which had been launched three years previously and was still not popular because the necessary re-tuning of sets was expensive. BBC2 needed a big bold project and the series which made Nyree Dawn Porter’s name was the most expensive BBC drama project to date at £250,000.

It called for the sort of professionalism which Porter could provide. She had arrived in Britain from her native New Zealand in 1960, the daughter of a master butcher in Napier, and had acquired experience in New Zealand theatre companies. Some of her scenes “with” Eric Porter had to be played in his absence, with her uttering answers to questions that had not been asked, since Eric Porter had gone down with appendicitis. The last 13 episodes were being recorded when the first were being broadcast, so there was little room for error.

Out of the 8m people who could receive BBC2, 6m watched The Forsyte Saga; the leading actors became household names; the monthly number of TV sets being readjusted to BBC2 trebled. When the series was shown the following year on BBC1, it was to an audience of 18m.

Such epoch-making success in television often has a price, and it did so in the case of Nyree Dawn Porter. Before the Saga she had not experienced difficulty in getting guest appearance parts (in such series as The Saint, The Avengers – for which she refused to wear the regulation black leathers – and Danger Man). She could also get leading roles, making her British TV debut in the Madame Bovary series in 1964 for BBC2, and then going on to play the title role in the television version of Hugh Walpole’s Judith Paris.

But, after The Forsyte Saga, she found that the BBC usually resisted her agent’s advances, calling her “our Irene”, and refusing to con template her as anything else. She returned to the theatre, often in international tours, and in 1995 was able to boast that since playing Irene she had been round the world four times.

The truth could well have been that by the 1960s her personality and style were largely out of fashion, except for “costume drama” set in quite different eras. A quiet church-going person, she maintained that “you don’t need to strip to be sexy” – a truth that was rapidly going out of circulation.

She acted for British TV in the 1980 series For Maddie With Love and in David Copperfield. But apart from fortune-telling with cards, which caused some of her friends to call her the Witch, she had fine bone structure but no flamboyant sales points in a steadily corrupting market. She also had personal tragedies: her first husband, the actor Byron O’Leary, died from an accidental overdose of sleeping tablets and whisky; she and her second husband, Robin Halstead, by whom she had her only daughter, Talya, were divorced in 1987; constant travelling was not conducive to stable relationships. Her agent said she had died suddenly, and had not been suffering from a long illness.

Although she appeared in a stage version of The Forsyte Saga as late as 1991, in which the Soames-Irene marriage was made even more the centrepiece, it was that one BBC television series in the 1960s that gives the Nyree Dawn Porter name (it means “little white flower” in Maori) a continuing resonance.

The final irony is that when she arrived in Britain from New Zealand at the very start of the 1960s, no television service existed in New Zealand and she had never seen a television set.

Nyree Dawn Porter, actress, born January 22 1940; died April 10 2001 “The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.

“All the great stars have a quality which cannot be exactly pinned down. You can say that Flora Robson has a beautiful speaking voice, but how do you define that stillness, that urgent inner momentum, the flick of humour, the smile that can light up a room – the combination of all four? Perhaps the clue to her art is in the stillness, always an indication of confidence, of an artist having mastered his art. It would have been her wish, it is known, to have been beautiful but she is much more interesting than most of her contemporaries. She has played a wider spectrum than most actresses but is in the end better in sympathetic parts. – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The Golden Years”. (1970)

Flora Robson was a magnificent character actress who made many films in Britain and in Hollywood from the 1930’s to the 1970’s. Although she played wifes and mothers, she seemed especially effective as single women e.g. her housekeeper Ellen Dean in the 1939 version of “Wuthering Heights” and Muriel Manningford in “2,000 Women”. She was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1960. Flora Robson died in 1984. Her obituary in “The New York Times” can be accessed here.

TCM Article:

In the 1930s, a British film fan magazine wrote, “Although she has a strong personality of her own, she has always kept the faculty, comparatively rare in film stars, of losing her own identity in the role she is playing. For this reason, she may never be a great star, in the ordinary sense. But her characterizations will live in your memory long after those of the more conventional type of screen star have been forgotten.” Had Flora Robson been beautiful, she would have been a major star; but while her talent made her worthy of stardom, her 5’10″stature and plain features forever relegated her to the ranks of the truly great supporting actresses. Her true vocation was the stage.

One Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;

Born Flora McKenzie Robson in South Shields, Durham, England on March 28, 1902, she was one of eight children born to a former ship’s engineer and his wife. Her talent for recitation became apparent at the age of six and after attending Palmers Green High School, her father paid for Robson to study at the famed Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she won a Bronze Medal in 1921. Following graduation, she performed in the West End, making her debut in Clemence Dane’s Will Shakespeare, but after two years of regional theater, the financial instability of acting led her to take a job as a welfare officer in a Shredded Wheat factory for several years. While there, she organized theater productions for the workers.

She returned to acting in 1929 (ironically at the start of the Great Depression) by joining the Cambridge Festival Theatre and in 1931 had secured a position at the Old Vic in London, where her career took off. Now one of England’s top stage actresses, she moved to an apartment at 19 Buckingham Street, across the hall from the great American singer/actor Paul Robeson and his wife. In January 1933, Robeson approached Robson about co-starring with him in Eugene O’Neill’s play about an interracial marriage, All God’s Chillun’. Director Andre Van Gyseghem wrote, “Robeson was Jim and the result was terrifying in its intensity. Time and time again directing Flora and Paul I had the feeling of being on the edge of a violent explosion. I had touched it off, but the resulting conflagration was breathtaking. They literally shot sparks off each other. Seldom have I seen two performers fuse so perfectly. It was so intimate and intense that I felt, at times, I should apologize for being there. Watching it was sometimes more than one could bear at such close range. Robeson’s technique was not Flora’s. She was an expert actress with tremendous emotional power. She absolutely hushed audiences as she stripped the meager soul of Ella. But her technically superb performance found a perfect foil in Robeson’s utter sincerity.” Dame Sybil Thorndike, who attended the play, later wrote “When I saw Flora, I thought to myself, here we have the making of one of England’s greatest tragic actresses. Flora was not beautiful in the conventional sense; in fact she was rather plain. But she took the role of Ella beyond racial themes and portrayed the devastating love/hate relationship between the couple to the point that it was almost too painful to watch.”

Robson’s fame as a theater actress brought her to the attention of British filmmakers. Her first film, A Gentleman of Paris (1931) did not make a big splash, nor did the other three films she made in 1932. It was in 1934, when she was a bona fide theatrical star, that Robson began her real film career by playing a queen. It would almost become typecasting for her. In The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934), she played the Russian Empress Elisabeth, which led to her being chosen to play Queen Elizabeth I in Alexander Korda’s Fire Over England (1937), co-starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Of the role Robson wrote, “Provocative, aggressive, possessive and perhaps a bit temperamental, Elizabeth was every inch a queen. She was essentially a woman of action, and that is just the kind of women I like best to portray. Whether they are characters of actual history, or folk-lore or of pure fiction, such women whose lives and work were more important than their loves aremuch more in tune with our modern ideals and tempo of life than many of the silken sirens who have figured as the heroines of sexy and sentimental film in the past.”

Hollywood came calling after Robson’s fiery portrayal of Elizabeth. Among them, Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted Robson for his Wuthering Heights (1939) once more co-starring her with Laurence Olivier. 1939 saw Robson in no less than five films, both in the United States (We Are Not Alone as Paul Muni’s wife) and England (Poison Pen). The latter was Robson’s only starring role, as the writer of poison pen letters who might be a murderer, and it was promoted with the following advertising copy, “The name of Flora Robson at the head of the cast is a sure sign that this is something very much more than a mere recital of horror and tragedy. This is one of the few opportunities the screen gives of seeing England’s finest emotional actress.”

Robson found acting for the screen to be vastly different than the stage: “The slightest touch of self-consciousness on the screen shows. I’ve learnt from bitter experience. In the theatre one feels the audience. One overacts. But the camera, like a huge eye a yard away, snaps up everything. [Famed Hollywood cameraman Hal Rosson helped me to overcome the inevitable theatrical exaggeration and to eliminate certain small mannerisms of expression which, while perfectly natural on the stage, were little short of grotesque when translated to the screen. I knew of course that the camera demanded much less emphasis of facial expression than the stage, but I had not realized that it required under-emphasis, that is, less than would be natural. Everything like this has to be entirely eliminated for the camera, and you must even speak with as little lip movement as possible.”

Although war had broken out in Europe, Robson remained in the United States, where she accepted a role on Broadway in Ladies in Retirement (1940), with rehearsals to begin after once more portraying Queen Elizabeth on the screen. This time, she was cast opposite Errol Flynn in Michael Curtiz’s The Sea Hawk (1940), beating out such competition as Gale Sondergaard, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Judith Anderson. It was to be the second of a two-picture deal with Warner Bros., but the film ran into delays and she accepted a role in the George Raft film Invisible Stripes (1939). The Sea Hawk finally went into production and despite the many stories of Flynn’s bad behavior on the sets of his films, Robson remembered him fondly. “We hit if off from the beginning. He was naughty about his homework. I told him that because he couldn’t remember his lines it would hold up the picture and I would be delayed going to New York to do a play. When I told him this, he was very kind and learned his lines to help me: the work went so fast we were finished by four in the afternoon on some days. I remember Mike Curtiz saying to him, ‘What’s the matter with you? You know all your words.'”

Robson’s lifelong preference for the stage over film work puzzled movie executives. “The people [in Hollywood] find it very difficult to understand the English actor’s off-hand attitude towards the film industry.” That attitude led her to turn down the role of Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) because she wanted to return to the stage. Once the run of Ladies was over, she returned to London in 1941 and remained there until the end of the war, doing theater. She returned to Hollywood in 1945 to play the role which gave her the only Academy Award nomination of her career, Saratoga Trunk (1945) opposite Ingrid Bergman. It was an odd role for Robson, that of a scheming mulatto slave and it required her to act in makeup that was close to blackface. Other films in the 1940s included Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), once more with Vivien Leigh and Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus (1947). However, it was her stage work that was the most important, especially her legendary performance as Lady Macbeth in 1949 and as Paulina in John Gielgud’s 1951 production of The Winter’s Tale. As a Shakespearian actress, it was said she “took Shakespeare’s utterances on her lips with a natural dignity and beauty.”

Robson’s career continued throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s with her accepting the occasional film, as in 55 Days at Peking (1963) playing the Dowager Empress Tzu-Hsi ; and Murder at the Gallop (1963), one of the very popular Miss Marple films starring Margaret Rutherford. There was also television work, both in the United States and Britain. By 1969, Robson, now in her late 60s had retired from the theater, but not before being honored with a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) from Queen Elizabeth II, which was elevated to a DBE in 1960, making her “Dame Flora Robson”. This last was in recognition of her many unpublicized charitable works. She also had the distinction of having a theater named after her: The Flora Robson Theatre in Newcastle, England. Her homes in Brighton were designated with plaques after her death as well as the doorway of the Church of St. Nicholas in Brighton, where she attended.

Flora Robson ended her career with television movies and mini-series including Gauguin the Savage and A Tale of Two Cities (both in 1980), with her last appearance as one of the Stygian Witches in Clash of the Titans(1981), also co-starring Laurence Olivier. She died in Brighton, England on July 7, 1984.

by Lorraine LoBianco

The above article can be also accessed here.

Flora Robson as Mary Tudor in Wilfred Grantham ‘s ‘Mary Tudor’ at the Playhouse Theatre, London, 1935. Cover of ‘Play Pictorial’. Flora Robson, English actress, 28 March 1902-7 July 1984. No. 405.(Photo by Bridgeman via Getty Images)

Michael Rennie’s best known role was as the visitor from space Klaatu in the science-fiction classic “The Day the Earth Stood Stlll” in 1951. Pervious to that most of his career was in British film. His most frequent co-star was Jean Simmons. During the 1950’s he was under contract with 20th Century Fox and starred in many of their epic dramas. As his film career waned he moved into acting on television. He died in 1971.

“Wikipedia” entry
Michael Rennie (25 August 1909—10 June 1971) was an English film, television and stage actor best known for his starring role as the benevolent space visitor Klaatu in the 1951 classic science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. Eric Alexander Rennie was born in Idle, a village near the West Yorkshire city of Bradford (subsequently, a Bradford suburb) and educated at The Leys School, Cambridge. During the late 1930s, Rennie served his apprenticeship as an actor, gaining experience in acting technique, while touring the provinces in British repertory. There is evidence that, at the age of 28, he was noticed by one of the British film studios, which decided to appraise his potential as a film personality by arranging a screen test. The 1937 test, which exists in the British Film Institute archives under the title “Marguerite Allan and Michael Rennie Screen Test”, did not lead to a movie career for either performer. In Secret Agent, he was primarily a stand-in for leading man Robert Young, and his own on-camera bit was so small that it cannot be discerned in the preserved final version of the film. He also played other bit parts and later, minor, unbilled roles in ten additional films produced between 1936 and 1940, the last of which, “Pimpernel” Smith, had a belated release in July 1941, while Rennie was already in uniform, serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II. Second leads and then leads in seven other British films produced between 1946 and 1949 followed, including what may be considered Michael Rennie’s only role as one of two central characters in a full-fledged love story. In the 47-minute episode, “Sanatorium”, the longest among the Somerset Maugham tales constituting the film Trio (released in London on 1 August 1950), the mature-looking, lightly-mustached, 40-year-old Rennie and twenty-years-younger Jean Simmons are patients in the title institution, which caters to victims of tuberculosis. Michael Rennie, along with Jean Simmons and The Wicked Lady leading man James Mason, was one of a number of British actors offered Hollywood contracts in 1949-50 by 20th Century Fox’s studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. The first film under his new contract was the British-filmed medieval period adventure The Black Rose, starring Tyrone Power who became one of Rennie’s closest friends. Fifth-billed after the remaining first-tier stars Orson Welles, Cecile Aubry and Jack Hawkins, Rennie was specifically cast as 13th century King Edward I of England, whose 6′ 2″ frame gave origin to his historical nickname, “Longshanks”. Rennie’s second Fox film gave him fourth billing in the top tier. The 13th Letter, directed by his future nemesis and love rival Otto Preminger. Rennie’s next film dramatically moved his billing up to first and assured him screen immortality. The Day the Earth Stood Still was the first postwar respectably-budgeted “A” science fiction film. A serious, high-minded exploration of humanity’s place in the universe and our responsibility to maintain peaceful coexistence, it has remained the gold standard for the genre of the era. A unique aspect of the film is the participation, within its fictional structure, of four top newscasters and commentators of the period—Elmer Davis, H. V. Kaltenborn, Drew Pearson and Gabriel Heatter. The story was dramatized in 1954 for Lux Radio Theatre, with Rennie and Billy Gray recreating their roles and Jean Peters speaking the dialogue of the Patricia Neal character. Seven years later, in October 1961, when The Day the Earth Stood Still had its television premiere on NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies, Michael Rennie appeared before the start of the film to give a two-minute introduction. Convinced that it had a potential leading man under contract, the studio decided to produce a version of Les Miserables as a vehicle for him. The film, released on August 14, 1952, was well-directed by All Quiet on the Western Front’s Lewis Milestone, and Rennie’s performance was respectfully, but not enthusiastically, received by the critics. Michael Rennie’s next film was the last under his five-year contract with 20th Century Fox. The Rains of Ranchipur, released on December 14, 1955. In 1959 Rennie became a familiar face on television, taking the role of Harry Lime in The Third Man, a British-American syndicated TV series very loosely based on the character created by Orson Welles. During the 1960s he continued his TV career with guest appearances on such series as Route 66 (a moving portrayal of a doomed pilot in the two-part episode, “Fly Away Home”); Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Perry Mason (one of four actors in four consecutive episodes substituting for series star Raymond Burr, who was recovering from surgery); Wagon Train, The Great Adventure; Lost in Space (another two-part episode—as an all-powerful alien, “The Keeper”, he worked one last time with his Third Man co-star Jonathan Harris); The Time Tunnel (as Captain Smith of The Titanic, in the series’ September 9, 1966 premiere episode); Batman (as the villainous Sandman in league with Julie Newmar’s Catwoman), three episodes of The Invaders (as a malign variation of the Klaatu persona), and two episodes of The F.B.I.. Both of Michael Rennie’s marriages ended in divorce. He was first married to Joan England in 1938. His second marriage was to actress Maggie McGrath. Their son David Rennie is a UK circuit judge in Lewes, Sussex. Michael Rennie was also briefly engaged to the ex-wife of the Hollywood director, Otto Preminger. It was rumoured that Preminger, who not surprisingly hated Rennie, was the prime instigator in Rennie’s fall from stardom. John Rennie, the designer and builder of the original Waterloo Bridge, is presumed to have been his great-great grandfather. His final seven feature films were lensed in Britain, Italy, Spain and, in the case of The Surabaya Conspiracy, The Philippines. Less than three years after leaving Hollywood, he journeyed to his mother’s home in Harrogate, at a time of family grief following the death of his brother. It was there that he suddenly died of an emphysema-induced heart attack, nine weeks before his 62nd birthday. Upon cremation, his ashes laid to rest in Harlow Cemetery, Harrogate.

Detailed biography on “Wikipedia” can be found here.