Derek Farr had a long career as a leading man in British films of the 1940’s and 50’s. He was born in 1912 in London. Among his films are “Quiet Wedding” in 1942 opposite Margaret Lockwood, “The Shop at Sly Corner” opposite his wife Muriel Pavlow and the excellent war movie “The Dam Busters”. He died in 1986.
IMDB entry:
Appeared with Welsh actor Gareth Thomas in two science fiction programs in the 1970s: Star Maidens, in which he played Professor Evans and a guest appearance in the Blake’s 7 episode “Orac” as Ensor, creator of Orac. He also provided the voice of Orac in that episode.
In 1955 he featured in the Capstan “Navy Cut” Cigarette advertisement under the slogan, “How Derek Farr Got Away from the Crowd”.
Played a group captain in The Dambusters; his younger brother, Air Vice Marshall Peter Farr OBE DFC (1917 – 2009) was a bomber pilot during WW2.
Formerly a schoolteacher before becoming a stage actor in 1937.
Paul Danquah was born in 1925. He is best remembered for his performance opposite Rita Tushingham in “A Taste of Honey” in 1961. He was a friend of the painter Francis Bacon and in the late 1990’s he discovered a case containing drawing by Bacon which are now in the Tate Gallery. His other film appearances were in small roles in “That Rivera Touch” and “Maroc 7”.
Brefni O’Rorke was born in Dublin in 1989. He featured in many British films of the 1940’s beginning with “The Ghost of St Michael’s” in 1941. Other movies include “Love On the Dole”,”The First of the Few” and “Unpublished Story”. He died in 1946.
Ann Firbank was born in 1933 in India. Her mvies include Accident” as the wife of Stanley Baker, “Anna and the King of Siam” in 1999 and “The Servant” in 1963.
Patricia Laffan was born in 1919 in London. She is best remembered for her performance as ‘Poppaea’ opposite Peter Ustinov in “Quo Vadis” in 1951 . Her other major movies include “23 Paces to Baker Street” with Van Johnson and “Devil Girl From Mars”. She died in 2014.
Patricia Laffan
Patricia Laffan
Patricia Laffan was an English stage, film, TV and radio actress, and also, after her retirement from acting, an international fashion impresario. She was five-feet-six-inches tall, with dark reddish-brown hair and green eyes.[3] She is best known for her film roles as the Empress Poppaea in Quo Vadis (1951) and the alien Nyah in Devil Girl from Mars (1954).
Patricia Laffan was the daughter of Irish-born Arthur Charles Laffan (d 1948) and London-born Elvira Alice Vitali (1896-1979). She described her father as ‘a successful rubber planter in Malaya‘. Her parents returned to the British Isles shortly before the birth of their daughter in London. On seeing the M-G-M film The Broadway Melody (1929) at the age of ten Patricia decided she wanted to act. She was educated at schools in Folkestone, Kent, and at the Institut Français in London. At the Webber-Douglas Dramatic School she studied acting. She also studied dancing at the De Vos Ballet School.
Laffan’s first film appearance was in One Good Turn (1936). She joined the Oxford Playhouse Repertory Company, and her first stage appearance was as Jenny Diver in The Beggar’s Opera (January 1937) at the Oxford Playhouse. Her first London appearance was as the Young Girl in Surprise Item (25 February 1938) at the Ambassadors Theatre. Her first credited film part may have been as a cast member in Cross Beams (1940). She toured military bases throughout England during World War II, appearing in Hay Fever and Twelfth Night. In the period 1946-1947 she appeared in six teleplays for the BBC, in which she had substantial roles and was always credited. From this point onwards her film roles were also more substantial and always credited. In 1947 she was cast with Don Stannard in the short mystery film Death in High Heels as Magda Doon, a fashion model and unintended murder victim. In 1948 she was in another short film, Who Killed Van Loon?, starring Raymond Lovell. In 1950 she appeared in the feature-length crime drama Hangman’s Wharf as Rosa Warren, a glamorous film star.
In the M-G-MTechnicolor film Quo Vadis (1951) she played Poppaea, the second wife of the Roman Emperor Nero (Peter Ustinov). The producer and director of the epic blockbuster selected her for this major role after they watched a screen-test she had made for a smaller part in the film. This was her first film in colour, and it was the biggest, longest, most expensive and most commercially successful film in which she would appear. With costumes by Herschel McCoy, hairstyles by Sydney Guilaroff, jewellery by Joseff of Hollywood, and two pet cheetahs on golden leashes she was the most fabulous-looking character on the screen. Her performance as Poppaea has drawn considerable praise over the years.
In Escape Route (1952), a crime thriller starring George Raft, she played Irma Brooks. She starred as the ruthless, PVC-clad alien Nyah in the science fiction movie Devil Girl from Mars (1954), which is now a cult classic. She had a sizeable supporting role as Miss Alice MacDonald in 20th Century Fox‘s CinemaScope mystery thriller 23 Paces to Baker Street(1956). By the 1960s she appeared mainly on radio and television, including performances in Anna Karenina, The Aspern Papers, and Rembrandt, and panel game shows such as Petticoat Line and Call My Bluff. In the late 1960s and 1970s she produced and choreographed fashion shows around the world.
The 10 July 1954 issue of Picture Show magazine featured “The Life Story of Patricia Laffan”, which included these facts:
“She lists fast cars and breeding bull terriers as her hobbies. She is quick-witted and says that had she not become an actress she would probably have been a writer. As a matter of fact, she has had a number of short stories published, and during the time she spent in Paris she wrote scripts for the Paris radio. She speaks French fluently.”[3]
Laffan had a piece printed in Winter Pie — Miscellany for Men & Women ( A Pie Pocket Special), published in October 1947. It was entitled “Penicillin and Paris” and was a breezy account of her “first weekend in Paris,” under doctor’s orders to take vitamins and a holiday. She was “wined and dined on the right bank and on the left” and broadcast (and sang Night and Day with a large band) over Radiodiffusion Francaise. There is a reference to the fact that she was appearing in the film The Rake’s Progress, then showing in Paris.
The Pittston Gazette on 20 January 1955 had an item discussing Laffan’s first visit to the United States for a combination of work and vacation. She was scouting out panel and quiz shows (she appeared in several in England) to compare notes on American methods. She noted that “The air’s so good here.” On 25 January 1956, the Daily Reporter ran an item from Louella Parsons: “Hollywood is talking about the uncanny resemblance of British actress Patricia Laffan to Gertrude Lawrence, and the interest in Patricia to play the Lawrence biography…”
Laffan was interviewed on 21 March 1998 in London by Lisa Cohen for her book All We Know (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012), an account of the lives of three women: New York intellectual Esther Murphy Strachey, writer-feminist Mercedes de Acosta, and British Vogue fashion editor Madge Garland. Laffan had a tangential connection to Garland: Garland was romantically involved with divorce lawyer Frances (Fay) Blacket Gill, one of the first women solicitors in England.[13] Laffan is referenced as Gill’s “last girlfriend,” and briefly discusses Gill and her relationship with Garland. In 2008 Laffan was interviewed by Matthew Sweet for the BBC 4 documentary Truly, Madly, Cheaply: British B Movies. She died at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London on 10 March 2014, just nine days short of her 95th birthday. The cause of death was given as multiple organ failure due to an acute kidney problem.
Terry Thomas was one of Britain’s best loved comedians who went on to have a major Hollywood career in the 1960’s. He was born in 1911 in London and after World War Two became popular on BBC Radio. Sadly his later life was marred by ill health and poverty and he died in London
TCM overview:
Gap-toothed comic player who used his expressive eyes, mobile eyebrows and Royal Guards’ mustache to create a variety of asinine British characters, usually in supporting roles, occasionally in leads. His antic personae ranged from the comically malevolent to the naive in “I’m All Right, Jack” (1959), “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963) and, perhaps his signature role, Sir Percival War-Armitage in “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” (1965
Interesting article on the beloved Terry-Thomas in the Mail On-Line, can be accessed here.
Alfred Burke was a terrific British character actor, best known for his portrayal of ‘Frank Marker’ in the UK TV series “Public Eye” which ran for ten years from 1965 until 1975. He was very effective as the trade unionist in “The Angry Silence” in 1960 and featured in ” Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”. A prolific stage actor, he acted well into his eighties. He died in 2011 at the age of 92.
Dennis Barker’s “Guardian” obituary:
For 10 years, the actor Alfred Burke, who has died aged 92, starred as the downbeat private detective Frank Marker in the popular television series Public Eye (1965-75). The character was intended as a British rival to Raymond Chandler’s American gumshoe Philip Marlowe. Tough, unattached and self-sufficient, Marker could take a beating in the service of his often wealthy clients without quitting. “Marker wasn’t exciting, he wasn’t rich,” Burke said. “He could be defined in negatives.”
An ABC TV press release introduced the character as a “thin, shabby, middle-aged man with a slightly grim sense of humour and an aura of cynical incorruptibility. His office is a dingy south London attic within sound of Clapham Junction. He can’t afford a secretary, much less an assistant, and when he needs a car, he hires a runabout from the local garage.”
Tall, sharp-featured, saturnine and with an incisive voice, Burke was perfectly cast as Marker. He thought up the character’s name himself – originally the detective was to be called Frank Marvin. In 1972 the role brought him a Bafta nomination for best actor. The following year, Marker was voted the most compulsive male character in a TV Times poll.
Burke – who was always known as Alfie – was born in Peckham, south-east London, to Irish parents. His father, William, worked in a fur warehouse. He left school in 1933 to take a job as an office boy with a firm that specialised in repairing railway wagons. Soon afterwards he became a steward in a City club for businessmen, but left after an uncharacteristic dispute with a barmaid which ended with her squirting a soda siphon in his face.
He dared not tell his parents that he was out of work, so he ran away to Brighton, returning to London to take a job in a silk warehouse in Cheapside. He began to perform with a local amateur dramatic group run by a headteacher who persuaded him to apply for a London county council scholarship to Rada. Before the principal, Sir Kenneth Barnes, and his colleagues, Burke declaimed, “Is this a dagger I see before me?”, read a Tennyson poem and played two parts from The Last of Mrs Cheyney. He took up his place at Rada in 1937.
Two years later he appeared on stage professionally for the first time, in The Universal Legacy at the Barn theatre in Shere, Surrey. The second world war then intervened. Burke registered as a conscientious objector, and was directed to work on the land. After the war, he went back to theatre work at Farnham, Surrey, where he met Barbara Bonelle, a stage manager, who became his wife.
Burke then did a series of tours with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (which became the Arts Council). The tours were aimed at bringing culture to “the people” – in his case, in the Welsh valleys and the Lake District.
In the late 1940s, he joined the Young Vic company and went on to spend time in Manchester at the Library theatre, at the Nottingham Playhouse and in London, appearing in Pablo Picasso’s play Desire Caught By the Tail at the Watergate theatre. He was at Birmingham Rep for the three parts of Henry VI, which transferred to the Old Vic in London in 1953.
By the late 1950s, Burke had established himself as a serious stage actor and a useful character actor in films including the war movies Bitter Victory (1957) and No Time to Die (1958). He played the industrial agitator Travers in The Angry Silence (1960), in which a worker (Richard Attenborough) is shunned by his colleagues for refusing to take part in a strike. In 1964 he appeared in the science-fiction movie Children of the Damned, a sequel to Village of the Damned.
On TV, he took roles in episodes of The Saint, The Avengers and Z Cars, as well as several editions of ITV’s Play of the Week. In 1964 his own script, Where Are They Now?, written under the pen name of Frank Hanna, was produced as a Play of the Week. The following year, he slid into the arms of a welcoming public as Marker. In between starring in seven series of Public Eye, he had leading roles at the Leeds Playhouse in Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV, in 1970, and in Pictures in a Bath of Acid, as the writer August Strindberg, in 1971.
Burke enhanced his TV popularity with parts including the father in The Brontës of Haworth (1973), Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1977) and Major Richter, a German commandant in occupied Guernsey, in the series Enemy at the Door (1978). He portrayed Richter as essentially decent, despite the dire obligations of war.
After a recurring role in the series Sophia and Constance (1988), based on Arnold Bennett’s novel The Old Wives’ Tale, he continued to take small TV parts throughout his 70s and 80s. He had his highest-profile role for years when he appeared – albeit briefly – as Armando Dippet, the former Hogwarts headteacher, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002).
He and Barbara had two sets of twins – Jacob and Harriet, and Kelly and Louisa – and they remained on good terms. He spent the last 25 years with Hedi Argent. They all survive him, along with 11 grandchildren.
Michael Coveney writes: As he grew older, Burke’s stage voice became even huskier and more distinctive. Along with his natural authority and imposing presence, this served him well over many seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company from the 1980s into the new century, both at Stratford-upon-Avon and in their new London home in the Barbican Centre.
As Duncan in the RSC’s Macbeth (1986) and Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1994), he summoned a powerful sense of another age and morality. He played the best ever Gonzalo in Nicholas Hytner’s The Tempest (1988); a fine Lepidus in John Caird’s Antony and Cleopatra (1992); a wonderfully frail but deserving old Adam in As You Like It, directed by David Thacker (1992); and a not-to-be-messed-with Escalus in Michael Boyd’s Romeo and Juliet (2000). In Steven Pimlott’s 2000 production of Richard II, he delivered John of Gaunt’s “sceptred isle” speech with more retrospective anger than sing-song melancholy.
Burke continued to return to the stage in the new century, appearing in his 90th year at the National theatre as the Shepherd in Frank McGuinness’s version of Oedipus.
The most interesting of his later stage performances, however, were perhaps his two roles in John Barton’ s 1994 Peer Gynt, translated by Christopher Fry. He played both Solveig’s father and the Button Moulder. Barton had unearthed a previously unperformed scene in which the stern and implacable father promised his daughter’s hand in marriage, as long as Peer atoned for all his sins. This gave Burke’s appearance in the fifth act as the Button Moulder, who comes to collect Peer’s soul, an unusual and surprising resonance.
• Alfred Burke, actor, born 28 February 1918; died 16 February 2011
Tom Burke was born in Kent in 1981. He is the son of actors Anna Calder-Marshall and David Burke. He starred in the television mini-series “State of Play” and stars in BBC’s “The Three Musketeers”.
Chris runs his own production company, and decided to leave “Lovejoy” in 1994 to concentrate on the business. This is why his acting appearances number very few.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Dave Smith <ds20@cant.ac.uk>
