British Actors Archives - Page 31 of 136

Mervyn Johns

Mervyn Johns was born in Pembroke, Wales in 1899. His film debut was in “Lady in Danger” in 1944. He was a busy character actor in British films including “Convoy”, “Pink String and Ceiling Wax”, “A Christmas Carol” and “The Sundowners”. He died in 1992. His daughter is the actress Glynis Johns.

Adam Benedick’s “Independent” obituary:

Mervyn David Johns, actor, born Pembroke 18 February 1899, married Alice Steel-Payne (died 1970), 1976 Diana Churchill, died Northwood Middlesex 6 September 1992

Mervyn Johns was one of the soundest and most sincere of character actors. His gallery of mostly mild-mannered, lugubrious, amusing, sometimes moving ‘little men’ stretched back through scores of films and plays and television series – victims usually, quiet always, and never less than authentic: petty crooks, modest bank clerks, henpecked husbands, diffident clerics – almost all Welsh and as obliging and as true as can be.

This was Johns’s great and sometimes touching quality. He seemed never to be acting. He was himself short of build, but the secret of his acting was not so much a matter of height as of depth – of being able to get under the skin of a character. He could also muster, when required, an other-worldly air of almost celestial feyness, or dreamy intuition. But his acting did not always fall into such gentle categories.

Half a century ago it was quite different. If few remember him in 1936 at The Embassy, Swiss Cottage (now the Central School), as Sir John Brute in the Restoration comedy The Provok’d Wife, he provoked the best judge of acting of the day – James Agate – to hail him as ‘blazingly good’. Trying not to declare that this new young actor whom the critic was seeing for the first time was another David Garrick, Agate had nothing but superlatives – ‘a magnificent performance which would have warmed the heart’s cockles of the old playgoers . . . In this actor’s hands, Sir John is a brute indeed, not a pewling mooncalf, but a roaring bull. Mr Johns lets us see the pleasure he is taking in the fellow’s brutish gusto. There are actors who could make the man as unbearable to an audience as he was to his own circle. Mr Johns, by lifting a corner of the brute’s mind to show us his own, is right with Garrick.’

Johns had been on the stage for 13 years before that production, soundly trained for eight of them in rep at Bristol after an eventful youth, first as a medical student, then with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War (‘I don’t think there was a single second when I was not scared to death’) and finally RADA, where he gained a gold medal.

He had a natural gift for playing frightened men, but before typecasting overtook him – so that it became hard to imagine what Agate meant with that comparison with Garrick, especially the talk about gusto – Johns not only showed a relish for Restoration comedy, but was also rated a ‘quintessential’ Priestley and Shavian actor in such shows as Time and the Conways (1937), The Doctor’s Dilemma (1939), Heartbreak House (1943), in which he replaced Robert Donat as Captain Shotover, and as Dolittle in Pygmalion (1947); though even before the Second World War he provoked another critic to dub his performance a masterpiece as a ‘brave little miner, irascible but warm’ in Jack Jones’s violent and very Welsh play Rhondda Roundabout.

And indeed Johns brought a masterly touch to scores of other roles, especially, for example, his architect whose dreaded dreams came true in Dead of Night (1945), opposite Michael Redgrave, whom he had followed in that strange play, The Duke of Darkness, a few years earlier; or as Lester in the melodrama Tobacco Road (1949), or the infinitely pious parent in Gwyn Thomas’s fountain of Welshness The Keep (Royal Court, 1961). He was unforgettable as a slow-dying sailor in the film San Demetrio, London.

But what if the Second World War had not turned the London theatre topsy-turvy? Might we not have seen more of the roaring bull and the brutish gusto? Might he have escaped typecasting?

His daughter Glynis Johns was already a star when his own stardom – if one dares to call it that for an actor who played so many supporting roles in the last half of his career – was on the wane; but he rarely gave a bad performance, however bad his material, which is more than can be said of many stars.

His Friar Laurence, for example, in Renato Castellani’s supposedly all-star Anglo-Italian Romeo and Juliet (1954) was just about the best thing in it; and television viewers will always be grateful for his work in Kilvert’s Diary and The New Avengers.

Nor should one forget that amid the modesty of his demeanour and reticence of temperament, his talent for looking so eloquently and so silently into outer space. This gaze was singularly penetrative, eerie and sometimes haunting; it needed no script, and could both chill and cheer. It was one of the most cheering aspects of his later life that in 1976, while in retirement at Denville Hall, at Northwood, in Middlesex, he married the widowed actress Diana Churchill, also in retirement.

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

Stanley Holloway had a very long career both as a music hall entertainer and then a popular character in British films of the 1940’s. In 1956 he had a major success on Broadway as ‘Alfred Doolittle” in “My Fair Lady” and repeated his rle in the 1964 film.. His last movie was “Journey Into Fear” in 1976. He died in 1982 at the age of 92.

“New York Times” obituary:

Stanley Holloway, the actor who gained wide recognition for his portrayal of Eliza Doolittle’s father in the original Broadway and London productions of ”My Fair Lady,” died today in the Nightingale nursing home in Littlehampton, Sussex. He was 91 years old.

Mr. Holloway, who established himself early as a song-and-dance man, comedian and actor, was once asked to look back over his life from his first job as an office boy in Billingsgate Market, where he learned the Cockney that served him well in ”My Fair Lady,” and choose a turning point.

”That must have been 1954,” he said, ”when absolutely out of the blue I was asked by the Royal Shakespeare Company to tour America with them, playing Bottom in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ From that American tour came the part of Alfred Doolittle in ‘My Fair Lady’ and from then on, well, just let’s say I was able to pick and choose my parts and that was very pleasant at my age.”

Mr. Holloway shared the stage in both the original Broadway and London productions with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. He also appeared in the film version. In Vaudeville in Teens

Born on Oct. 1, 1890, in London, the son of a law clerk, he had a typically strict Victorian education and was delighted when his school shut down when he was 12 and he was able to go to work in the fish market.

By 14 he was soloist in a choir and, still in his teens, in vaudeville entertainments at seaside resorts. His ambition then was to sing in opera, and he saved all the money he could to that end. By 1913 he had enough in the bank to take lessons in Milan, Italy, but after a few months the outbreak of World War I sent him back to Britain, where he enlisted as a private in the infantry. At the end of the war, he was a lieutenant. f In 1920, Mr. Holloway and nine other young performers wrote and played in a revue, ”The Co-Optimists.” It ran for six years. Mr. Holloway began in films in 1921 and was a featured player in the British comedies ”The Lavender Hill Mob,” ”Passport to Pimlico” and ”The Titfield Thunderbolt.”

But after World War II, he was also offered more serious roles, such as first gravedigger in ”Hamlet” – a role he repeated in the 1948 film with Laurence Olivier. Played Bottom at the Met

His appearance as Bottom at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1954 was his New York debut. His next appearance on the New York stage, at the Mark Hellinger Theater on March 15, 1956, came as Alfred Doolittle. a role for which he won critical acclaim.

He left the American production the following year to open with the other principals in the London production at the Drury Lane Theater April 30, 1958.

Mr. Holloway was involved in all aspects of his craft. He first performed on television in the 1930’s when it was still experimental, and in 1960, he played Poo-Bah in ”The Miikado” for NBC-TV, a program in which Groucho Marx also starred.

His own ABC-TV series, ”Our Man Higgins,” in which he played an English butler, had its premiere in October 1962 to good reviews for the star and criticism for the scripts.

In recent years he made guest appearances only, although he appeared in a television film, ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in 1973 and contended he was always ready for work.

One of his last assignments on a stage was at the Royal Command Performance of 1980 in which as the oldest member of the company – he had celebrated his 90th birthday a few weeks earlier -he introduced the youngest, a ventriloquist. He was still in good health for his years then.

The above “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Irene Worth was a higly respected stage actress who did star in a few films. She was born in 1916 in the U.S. She began her acting career on Broadway and then in 1944 moved to London. Her career was concentrated on the stage in the UK. Her few movies include “The Scapegoat” with Alec Guinness and Bette Davis in 1959, “Nicholas and Alexandra” in 1971 and “Lost In Yonkers” in 1993. She died in 2002.

Eric Shorter’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

Irene Worth, who has died aged 85, was an actor of a quality that no self-respecting playgoer would voluntarily miss, in anything. Original and intelligent, she played havoc with an old critical rule that to think too hard is to be lost.

Her Goneril, to Paul Scofield’s King Lear, in the 1962 Peter Brook production at the Aldwych theatre, London, established her importance once and for all. She somehow turned her every move and murmur into an erotic signal, even towards the servants. At the same time, she tilted the tragedy’s sympathy away from the tetchy old monarch – because her Goneril became the daughter who had once loved him.

Worth was happiest in the avant-garde, or at a run-through in a gloomy rehearsal hall – “Why should we suddenly have to be perfect on the first night?” She relished improvisation, and preferred the experimental. There had been, in 1953, Tyrone Guthrie’s All’s Well That Ends Well and Richard III in a tent at Stratford, Ontario, where “the rain poured down, and there were no critics, and the people came, and it was all very basic – but they loved it”.

Anything unexpected or unpredictable attracted Worth more than the West End’s “horrendous banality”. But although she flourished in French farce and Italian tragedy, Shakespearean comedy or American sex drama, she could also do so in Coward and Shaw, in whose Heartbreak House she gave a definitive performance as Hesione Hushabye, at Chichester in 1967.

A year earlier, with Lilli Palmer and Noel Coward in Coward’s Suite In Three Keys, Worth won an Evening Standard award – as if to prove herself in drawing rooms – but she was glad to get back to Brook’s bleak version of Seneca’s Oedipus, at the Old Vic in 1968. Worth was Jocasta and John Gielgud Oedipus. In Iran in 1972, again with Brook, she played in Ted Hughes’ Orghast, which tried out nothing less than a new language.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Worth took an education degree at the University of California, and spent five years teaching before deciding to act professionally. She made her first appearance in 1942, in Escape Me Never, touring with Elizabeth Bergner, learning to hold the stage – so Bergner said – by listening to the other actors and playing to them, instead of to the audience. Having debuted on Broadway the following year, in The Two Mrs Carrolls, she studied at Elsie Fogerty’s famous Central school in London for six months in 1944-45.

No stint in repertory followed. Worth found regular work at outlying London theatres and was critically acclaimed for her incisive style, emotional force and sharply comic – and powerfully tragic – sense.

During the next half century, she played mainly in London, but sometimes on Broadway or at the Canadian Stratford, rarely drawing a discouraging notice. It was as the doomed “other woman” Celia Coplestone, to Alec Guinness’s psychiatrist in TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, that she returned to New York in 1950. A year later, in Othello at the Old Vic, she was perhaps the most heart-rending Desdemona of her generation.

After an orthodox West End run in NC Hunter’s A Day By The Sea (1953), she joined the Midland Theatre Company in Coventry for Ugo Betti’s The Queen And The Rebels. Her transformation from “a rejected slut cowering at her lover’s feet into a redemption of regal poise” ensured a transfer to London, where Kenneth Tynan wrote of her technique: “It is grandiose, heartfelt, marvellously controlled, clear as crystal and totally unmoving.” But the audience exploded with cheers.

As if to demonstrate her range, Worth then joined Alec Guinness in Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso (1956), jamming a top hat over her chin as an adulterous Parisian wife. As Schiller’s Mary Stuart (1958), her deep, rich, plummy voice reflected that unhappy woman’s pride, sensuality – and joie de vivre.

A host of other performances stick in the mind: the giggly Portia, in The Merchant Of Venice (1953); the enigmatic seductress in the title role of Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice (New York 1964, London 1970). Her Princess Kosmonopolis, in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird Of Youth (1975), gained a Tony award, and on Broadway she also played Winnie, in Beckett’s Happy Days (1979).

Worth loved sharing the spoken word with an audience “before television gobbles it up”, yet she did award-winning work on TV in Britain, the US and Canada, and on film from the early 1950s into the 1990s. The latter ranged from Orders To Kill (1957) to A Piece Of Cake (1997).

She was revered. At the National in her 70s, when she felt dissatisfied with her delivery, she stopped, apologised, and said she would start again. Her stage authority permitted it. She went on acting into her 80s with that authority and intellectual assurance that had climaxed as Volumnia, to Ian McKellen’s Coriolanus (National, 1984), and as Hedda Gabler, at Stratford, Ontario (1970).

London saw her as an old pupil of Matisse, in David Hare’s The Bay at Nice (National, 1987) and in Chère Maître (Almeida, 1996), compiled by Peter Eyre from the letters of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert.

She rated herself “very much the homemaker”, but marriage and children were out of the question. “It would have been impossible to have been a good actress, a good mother and a good wife.”

She was made an honorary CBE in 1975.

· Peter Eyre writes: When Irene Worth walked into my dressing room at the Mermaid theatre in 1967, after a performance of Robert Lowell’s Benito Cereno, in which I played the title role, she looked at me, wagged her finger almost in admonishment, and said, “Difficult part. Good performance.”

How could I know then that my working life as an actor would be so tied up with her? Not long after that, I played her son in The Seagull, at Chichester, where I learnt that she was a unique actor of her generation in her ability to recreate her performance every night, as if for the first time.

One day before a performance, she said to me, “Do you like improvising? Let’s improvise,” – and that night, in the scene where Konstantin and Madam Arkadina berate each other, Irene covered the stage with a range of new movements and readings of the text, as if possessed. It was thrilling.

Acting with Irene was like jamming with a great jazz musician. She knew the tune and the rhythm, but one never knew what was going to happen. It was as if, when she performed, she was a deep sea diver, diving into the subtext and inner life of a piece. On the nights it worked, it was difficult for me to say my lines. I wanted to stand and shout, “Bravo. You’re a genius!”

She was a great artist, and an extraordinarily warm and humorous personality. In Melbourne, in the middle of rehearsal, she suddenly said, “Have you ever seen a kangaroo? I saw one yesterday. He was eating a piece of cake, and playing with himself at the same time.” Irene, aged 80, leapt and hopped across the room. She was the kangaroo; she was improvising.

· Irene Worth, actor, born June 23 1916; died March 10 2002

Her Guardian obituary can be accessed here.

5167940 Derek Farr with his wife actress Muriel Pavlow, 28th September 1959 (b/w photo); (add.info.: Derek Farr with his wife actress Muriel Pavlow ©Mirrorpix); © Mirrorpix.

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.

Son of Gerald and Vera Eileen (Miers) Farr.

Acted in both The Avengers and The New Avengers.

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 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-M Technicolor 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.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Mervyn Johns

Stanley Holloway

Irene Worth

Derek Farr

Paul Danquah

Brefni O’Rorke

Ann Firbank

Patricia Laffan

Terry Thomas

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