British Actors Archives - Page 34 of 131

Michael Caine

TCM overview:

Prolific British film actor Michael Caine rose to fame as an icon of London’s ‘swinging ’60s,’ but four decades later, having contributed to some of cinematic history’s highest and lowest moments, he was recognized as an international film legend. Caine initially seemed an unlikely movie star, with his glasses and working class cockney accent, but with films like “The Ipcress File” (1965) and “Alfie” (1966), he came to personify the cultural upheaval of 1960s Britain, when the smashing of class barriers finally meant that regular blokes had a shot at the spotlight. With his foundation in repertory theater, Caine had already played hundreds of characters by the time he hit it big, and that background made him one of the most versatile leading actors on film. He deftly transitioned from gritty mobster (“Get Carter”), to scheming soldier (“The Man Who Would Be King”), warm-hearted doctor (“The Cider House Rules”), charming con man (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”), erudite professor (“Educating Rita”) to transvestite psychologist murderer (“Dressed to Kill”). Caine convincingly inhabited some of the best-known characters in literature and world history – not through self-analysis and method acting, but by holding up a mirror to the audience, presenting them with truths about themselves. His realistic acting style and ability to connect with an audience earned the actor a reputation for being approachable and down-to-earth, despite his ultra-luxury lifestyle and bona fide star status. For Caine, this was no act, as he had risen from the poorest of the poor with all odds seemingly stacked against him.

Michael Caine was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite Jr. in the charity wing of St. Olaves hospital in the Rotherhithe area of South London on March 14, 1933. The child of a fish market worker (with an unlucky gambling habit) and a cleaning woman, Caine was born with rickets from prenatal malnutrition and wore leg braces as a child. He was also diagnosed with blepharitis – an inflammation of the eyelids responsible for his heavy-lidded look, and a mild facial tic that was then known as St. Vitus dance. Caine’s younger brother Stanley was born two years later, and the family lived in a two-room flat with no electricity or running water. Generations of earlier Micklewhites may have been satisfied working at the fish market, but Caine – a voracious reader and avid moviegoer – knew that there was a better life out there and he was going to live it. However, there was little encouragement or opportunity for young working class toughs like Caine to explore drama. West End theaters were out of reach, drama lessons were unheard of, and the family did not have a TV, so for Caine, the movie theater became his second home. He idolized Humphrey Bogart, as much for the powerful onscreen characters he created as for the luxurious movie star lifestyle he lived, but Caine had no idea how one even began the journey from his South London flat to a Hollywood mansion. And the code of his class dictated that he was born a cockney and that was all he would ever be. But Caine’s intelligence and interest in the arts did make him different from the street gangs who did not quite accept him. He was finally given the chance to explore his interests at the age of 14, when he joined a local youth program designed to keep kids off the street. Their drama department gave Caine his first exposure to the stage, and he appeared in all their stage productions, as well as found a mentor in a film history teacher and short filmmaker who worked with the group, giving Caine an early education in filmmaking.

Caine left school at 16 and landed an entry-level production job at an industrial film company. At 18, he was called upon to do military service, and for the next two years, served overseas and even saw frontline combat in Korea. He made his glorious re-entry into civilian life working at a butter factory before landing a job as an assistant stage manager and eventually an actor at a repertory theater in West Sussex. However, a bout of post-war malaria forced him offstage for a time. After his recovery, he joined another repertory theater in the seaside town of Lowestoft. As with his earlier position, Caine barely made enough money to cover his living expenses, but the experience proved to be invaluable, with the actor often having to learn a new role every week.

While in Lowestoft, Caine met and fell in love with fellow troupe member Patricia Haines. The couple married and moved to London to try their acting luck, but Haines fared better. With his roles few and far between, Caine was forced to work as a plumber’s assistant and a baker. The financial pressure proved to be too much for the young couple, especially after the birth of their daughter, leaving both to eventually move back home with their parents and to divorce. Caine’s father died shortly thereafter and with the walls closing in on him, he escaped to Paris for a month, wandering the streets and sleeping in subway stations and brothels. He eventually dragged himself home to find a telegram from his agent, offering him a bit part in the military drama “Hell in Korea” (1956). This led to small, mostly uncredited appearances in more films and TV, alternating with civilian jobs and frequent moving from one cheap roommate situation to another. His misery had plenty of company, as he had made scores of friends who were struggling artists and actors, all hoping against hope that they would someday be household names – Harold Pinter, Terence Stamp, David Hockey, even his barber, Vidal Sassoon.

Caine, who had by now officially changed his stage name to Caine in order to appear in an actor’s equity production, carried on with play after play, eventually making it to the London’s famed West End in 1963. He understood that stage was his training ground, but Caine’s sights were still firmly set on becoming a film actor of the most glamorous sort. Not long afterwards, he went on an audition for a role as a cockney soldier in a war film, only to have the American director take one look at his lean frame and long blond locks and instead cast him in a leading role as an upper crust army officer. “Zulu” (1964) was truly Caine’s breakthrough, earning him more money than he had ever seen, as well as an offer to star in the espionage thriller “The Ipcress File” (1965) and a seven-year film contract. In “The Ipcress File,” Caine played working-class spy Harry Palmer – the antithesis of James Bond’s ridiculous glamour – who drank pints of beer rather than shaken martinis, and whose mode of transport was a public bus, not a snappy sports car. Caine gave an exceptional performance; his matter-of-fact delivery perfectly suited for the part. With his salary of 10,000 pounds a week, he moved his mother to a nicer flat, got himself a new place, and outfitted it with the best of everything.

“Ipcress” won Caine sizable fame, but “Alfie” (1966) succeeded in making the long-struggling, 33-year-old actor a household name. A swinging cockney cad with a great tailor and insatiable appetite for the ladies, Caine’s Alfie – along with the success of the Beatles – signaled a major shift in the British cultural voice away from the elite aristocracy and towards anyone who wanted to join the youth-driven party. Caine earned an Oscar-nomination for “Alfie” and made his U.S. debut later that year opposite Shirley MacLaine, who invited him to appear in the enjoyable comic caper “Gambit.” The full-time movie star reprised Harry Palmer with “Funeral in Berlin” (1966) and “Billion Dollar Brain” (1967), before churning out two American films for 20th Century Fox – “Deadfall” (1968) and “The Magus” (1968) – and starring in one of the most memorable films of his career, the action comedy classic, “The Italian Job” (1969).

Caine had established himself with wry, street smart characters who were ultimately likeable even when they were up to no good, but there was nothing he could not or would not tackle. Evolving with the climate of the times, Caine reflected the grittier, more violent atmosphere of the city streets with 1971’s landmark action film “Get Carter,” playing a hit man searching for the man who killed his own brother. In 1972, he held his own opposite acting giant Laurence Olivier in the psychological tete a tete, “Sleuth,” earning his second Best Actor Oscar nomination. In 1975, Caine was thrilled to receive an offer from director John Huston to take the leading role initially intended for his hero Humphrey Bogart in the epic adventure “The Man Who Would Be King.” He next revisited his flair for comedy in the classic Neil Simon ensemble romp “California Suite” (1978), playing a British tourist in Beverly Hills. Forever worried that his fortune might dry up and his fame disappear, Caine tried to stay as busy as possible, which explained why he finished out the decade with horrific missteps, “The Swarm” (1978) and “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure” (1979).

Caine had spent considerable time stateside during his career. With penal taxes threatening to bankrupt him, he and his second wife Shakira (also an actress and co-star of “The Man who Would Be King”) and their daughter moved to the famed Hollywood Hills, with Caine officially realizing his childhood dreams of the movie star life. He was welcomed to America with an offer from controversial director Brian DePalma to play a transvestite psychiatrist in his stylized thriller “Dressed To Kill” (1980) and one from Sidney Lumet to play opposite Christopher Reeve in the thriller “Deathtrap” (1982), which generated controversy for an onscreen kiss between the co-stars. With Caine’s next film, “Educating Rita” (1983), any recent trespasses were soon forgotten. Caine took home Golden Globe and BAFTA awards as well as another Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Dr. Frank Bryant, a college professor and failed poet whose alcoholic self-loathing turns a corner when he begins tutoring a hairdresser (Julie Walters) looking to improve her lot in life. Caine played the complexities of Bryant’s despairing soul with a stirring subtlety that reminded audiences why he had been a leading man for 20 years.

Caine finally picked up an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category for “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986). In what was arguably Woody Allen’s best ensemble piece, Caine was tenderly sympathetic as a cultured accountant who becomes lovestruck by his wife’s sister (Barbara Hershey), who is herself trapped in a suffocating relationship. Back in London, Caine gave a mesmerizing performance as a contemptible mob boss in Neil Jordan’s “Mona Lisa” (1986). Any discussion of Caine’s work during the 1980s should mention the actor’s theory that for every five films, you need one standout picture in order to survive. He knew from experience, having dodged the bullet several times. 1987’s “Jaws: The Revenge” and ’88’s “Bullseye” definitely fell into the clunker category, but Caine bounced back quickly with a Golden Globe-winning performance in the miniseries “Jack the Ripper” (CBS, 1988). Ever a delight when he returned to comedy, Caine’s sophistication paired nicely with the broad antics of Steve Martin in 1988’s classic con men comedy, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988).

By the 1990s, Michael Caine was again living in London and enjoying his status as an elder statesman of the cinema. For the first time since prior to becoming a film star, he appeared in a number of television projects, starring in 1990’s “Jekyll & Hyde” (ABC) and producing and starring in HBO’s spy drama “Blue Ice” (1993). He made a rare family film appearance as Scrooge in “A Muppet Christmas Carol”(1992), before reprising an aging Harry Palmer in Showtime’s original “Bullet to Beijing” (1995). If one mercifully overlooked the lackluster Steven Seagal vehicle “On Deadly Ground” (1994), Caine could be said to have made a most auspicious return to the big screen in his excellent but little seen performance as a ruthless safe cracker in “Blood & Wine” (1996). Instead, the film adaptation of the West End hit “Little Voice” (1998) proved to be Caine’s so-called comeback. As Ray Say, a Northern seaside town-dwelling talent scout whose London accent divulges his washed up status, the actor gave a stand-out performance in a film brimming with exceptional acting. Always keeping Ray Say’s pathetic desperation just below the surface until the end, Caine reached new heights in an already remarkable career. His show-stopping performance of “It’s Over” was nothing short of breathtaking, so it was not surprising that the legendary actor should win that year’s Golden Globe.

Caine’s big screen renaissance also included a fifth Oscar nomination and second win for Best Supporting Actor in Lasse Hallstrom’s “The Cider House Rules” (1999). Caine was back at the top of his game as a New England orphanage-running abortionist, and it was the actor’s keen subtlety that saved what might have been a treacly sentimental parable into something of moving relevance. The 66-year-old actor celebrated his latest landmark by taking a year off for the first time in his life since he began working at age 16. He wrote and released the entertaining autobiography What’s It All About? and decided to retire. For Caine, retirement meant taking small supporting roles as they interested him, but passing on leads that would take months to shoot and involve rigorous promotional tours. Still, to Caine, essentially retirement still meant appearing in two or three movies a year. He took a small role in the pointless Stallone-helmed remake of his early hit “Get Carter” (2000), and likewise paid homage to the cheeky spy dramas he helped popularize in “Austin Powers in Goldmember” (2002), playing the equally randy father of Mike Myer’s “shagadellic” secret agent.

Caine “came out of retirement” in 2002 and earned some of the best acting notices of his career for playing a British journalist covering the early days of Vietnam’s revolt against the French government in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.” He earned another Best Actor Academy Award nomination and went back to smaller roles with “Batman Begins” (2006), the stylish period thriller “The Prestige” (2006), and Alfonso Cuarón’s apocalyptic “Children of Men” (2006).

In 2007, Caine again revisited an earlier triumph with an updated version of 1972’s “Sleuth,” playing the aging writer role that had been Laurence Olivier’s and Jude Law in Caine’s original role as the young upstart vying for the writer’s wife. Despite the screenplay by Caine’s old friend Harold Pinter and direction by Kenneth Branagh, the overwrought film lacked the allure of the original. Law had previously starred in a 2004 remake of “Alfie,” but like most remakes of Caine’s prime work, it paled in comparison.

All actors had their side investments and pet projects, and for Michael Caine it was being a restaurateur. Caine, at one time, had partnerships in five restaurants, including his first venture, Langan’s Brasserie in London and the English-style grille Shepherd’s. The actor took an active role in running the businesses and could frequently be seen dining under his own awnings. He eventually sold all of his restaurant interests, but added another title to his long resume in the summer of 2007 when he released the CD Cained, a collection of chill-out tracks. Though he was admittedly far north of the electronica music’s demographic, Caine was a big fan of chill-out music and after years of making compilations for friends, he was encouraged by his friend Elton John to release his own collection of favorites.

Caine’s body of work was recognized in 1999 with an Evening Standard British Film Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. The following year, he was knighted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the UK Empire Awards. The National Board of Review honored Caine with a Career Achievement Award and the San Sebastian Film Festival recognized the actor with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. The Film Society of Lincoln Center honored Caine with a star-studded Gala Tribute in 2004. Caine accepted his honor with the expected witty charm: ”I’ve been practicing humility all day. It’s very difficult for someone who’s been an actor for 40 years.”

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1720342 Beau Brummel de CurtisBernhardt avec Stewart Granger et Elizabeth Taylor 1954; (add.info.: Beau Brummel de CurtisBernhardt avec Stewart Granger et Elizabeth Taylor 1954).

When Stewart Granger was the hottest male property around the British studios he was seldom taken seriously. He was just too good-looking, involved in too many junky films – and by his own admission – too arrogant. His relationship with the press was poor, so he was irritatingly labelled ‘glamour boy’. The name hardly stuck, but he never managed to get away from the dimpled teeth-flashing he-male roles he started with and only in glimpses has he been able to show that there is something more in him”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars- The International Years”. (1972)

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary from 1993:

James Lablache Stewart (Stewart Granger), actor: born London 6 March 1913; married 1938 Elspeth March (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1948), 1950 Jean Simmons (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1960), 1964 Viviane Lecerf (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1969); died Santa Monica, California 16 August 1993.

TALL, DARK, debonair and rakishly handsome, Stewart Granger was one of the greatest British stars of the Forties, and went on to become one of the handful to achieve true international stardom in Hollywood. He was one of that quartet of stars – along with Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Phyllis Calvert – who became associated with the enormous successes made by the Gainsborough Studios under the auspices of Maurice Ostrer, starting with The Man in Grey (1943), and including Fanny by Gaslight, Love Story, Madonna of the Seven Moons (all 1944), and Caravan (1946).

Granger’s dashing good looks, energy, humour and the arrogance that laced his romantic ardour made him the British cinema’s foremost sex symbol, with a huge teenage following, and in Hollywood he took his place among the greatest swashbucklers with at least one of his movies, Scaramouche (1952), a masterpiece comparable to the best of Errol Flynn. Though Mason was the finer actor, Granger achieved greater popularity in the Hollywood cinema, and it is ironic that Mason’s finest role there, as Norman Maine in A Star is Born (1954), went to him only after Granger turned it down. It is to be regretted that Granger’s enormous ego (to which he freely confessed) did not allow him to accept the role or the character roles later in his career that might have sustained and enhanced his reputation.

He was born James Stewart in London in 1913 and had planned to be a doctor. But he lacked the dedication (as he later admitted) to continue medical studies. A friend suggested that since he had a car and a good set of clothes he could find work as a film extra for a guinea a day. Work at the studios during 1933 – the Babe Daniels musical A Southern Mai, Allan Dwan’s I Spy, in which he acted as stand-in for Ben Lyon, and Give Her a Ring are his only known credits from this period – aroused an interest in acting and Granger won a scholarship to the Webber-Douglas School of Dramatic Art. He served a long apprenticeship in the theatre, working with the Hull and Birmingham repertory companies at the Malvern Festival (1936-37), where his performance as Magnus in The Apple Cart won the approval of its author, George Bernard Shaw, as well as that of the critics, and making his London debut at Drury Lane in 1938 in a short-lived musical version of Sanders of the River called The Sun Never Sets. He later talked warmly of these early years: ‘I learnt acting in the reps, where the audience teaches you – particularly timing.’

At Birmingham he had met the actress Elspeth March, and in 1938, while he was appearing at the Gate Theatre in Serena Blandish with Vivien Leigh, he and March were married. The same year he was given his first sizable screen role, as the romantic lead in So This Is London. His billing read Stewart Granger, the name he had taken to avoid confusion with the Hollywood actor, though throughout his life he would be known to his friends as ‘Jimmy’. In 1939 he and his wife starred in a season of plays in Aberdeen, including Hay Fever, Arms and the Man and On Approval – Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray were juveniles with the company.

After touring with the Old Vic as Dunois in St Joan, Granger was given a small role in Pen Tennyson’s admirably understated saga of the wartime navy Convoy (1940) before his acting career was interrupted by war service. He joined the Gordon Highlanders, then won a commission with the Black Watch but was invalided out with an ulcer. He resumed his career with two supporting film roles, in Secret Mission (1942) and Thursday’s Child (1943), before being asked to take over the role of Maxim DeWinter in a successful London stage production of Rebecca, and it was while appearing in this that he tested for The Man in Grey. This florid Regency melodrama was an unprecedented success, establishing a ‘house style’ that Gainsborough Pictures would market for several years to come and boosting the careers of all four stars. Granger, the least known, was an overnight sensation, causing the critic CA Lejeune to state in her review, ‘I don’t know of any British actor I would sooner sign as a prospect.’

Granger had indeed been signed to a contract. Before the release of The Man in Grey he had been assigned to The Lamp Still Burns, a restrained tribute to the nursing profession, then he was cast again with Calvert and Mason in Fanny by Gaslight, another great Gainsborough hit. Granger liked Mason, who shared his traits of independence and an outspoken disdain for the films they were making, but he envied Mason his villainous roles, maintaining they were more interesting than the heroic ones he was playing. He had particular disdain for his next two scripts.

Love Story starred Margaret Lockwood as a concert pianist with a fatal disease and Granger as the engineer she falls for – he does not know that she is dying, she does not know that he is going blind. With a background of pounding Cornish waves and a popular musical piece called ‘Cornish Rhapsody’, it was the sort of heady stuff to which audiences of the time flocked, and it was the perfect showcase for the mixture of bravado and vulnerability that was to make the best of Granger’s performances so appealing.

In Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) Granger was a Romany gypsy who wooed a tempestuous hoyden (Calvert), in reality a society matron with a split personality. It was another gigantic success and the song a dubbed Granger sang, ‘Rosanna’, became a hit. Though Granger described these films as ‘terrible’ he also conceded that ‘they provided the escapism people needed’. (Whether regarded as camp, nostalgia or just plain fun, they are still giving pleasure 50 years on.)

Granger at last played a villain in his next film, Sidney Gilliatt’s Waterloo Road (1944), as a shady black marketeer who has dodged the draft and tries to steal the lonely wife (Joy Shelton) of a serviceman (John Mills). It was a splendidly gritty slice of wartime life and climaxed with a fist-fight between the two men which was uncompromisingly realistic for its day and achieved considerable notoriety. News of Granger’s fan following had by now spread to the United States, and when his next film, Gabriel Pascal’s financially disastrous Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), opened there, one critic described him as ‘the pet of the British bobby-soxers’.

Just before the war’s end, Granger did an Ensa tour through Europe performing Gaslight with Deborah Kerr, with whom he became romantically involved. (Granger later claimed in his autobiography that Kerr had initially seduced him in a London taxi, to which the actress’s response when queried on the story was, ‘What a gallant man he is]’) He then mistakenly turned down The Wicked Lady because the part of the highwayman was too small. James Mason took the role in Gainsborough’s most successful film. Instead, Granger did a sprawling but popular melodrama, Caravan (1946) and a highly fictionalised account of the life of Paganini, The Magic Bow (1946).

The actor’s arrogance and volatile temperament had not endeared him to some of his co-stars – during the filming of The Man in Grey his colleagues wrote a joint letter to his agent insisting that his strong language be curbed – and when Calvert was cast with him for the fourth time in The Magic Bow she rang him to ask if they should do it. He replied, ‘If you’re talking about our personal feelings, no. But if you’re talking about Our Public, yes.’ Yehudi Menuhin played the violin on the soundtrack, but the script was poor. Granger’s champion Lejeune gave it a one-word review (‘Fiddlesticks’) and even the public was disappointed.

Cinema was changing in the postwar atmosphere and though more realism was injected into Granger’s next few films, they failed to match his earlier successes at the box-office; Frank Launder’s Captain Boycott (1947), based on the true story of an Irish farmers’ revolt against unprincipled landlords, Marc Allegret’s Blanche Fury (1948), a tragic tale of treachery and murder, and Basil Deardon’s Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), the story of Sophie Dorothea’s doomed romance with Konigsmark, were all too grim for popular acceptance, though the last two had beautiful colour photography and splendid performances.

Granger had during this time been falling in love with the talented and beautiful actress Jean Simmons, though he confessed to some concern about their difference in age (she was 16 years younger). In 1949 he and March were divorced, and he conceived the idea for an updating of the Daddy Longlegs story as a vehicle for himself and Simmons. The result, Adam and Evelyne (1949), was a charming and popular romantic comedy, but the couple followed this with an ill-advised stage production of Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Granger later stated that he thought they would be applauded for choosing such a challenging project rather than a safe commercial venture, but the brooding, morbid piece (Simmons played a mentally retarded peasant) was disliked by audiences and regarded by critics as another example of Granger’s arrogance and pretensions.

Long aware that international stardom could only be achieved in Hollywood, Granger was delighted when MGM offered him the lead in King Solomon’s Mines (1950). Made partially in Africa, it was a creditable version of H. Rider Haggard’s adventure classic with Granger a dashingly heroic Allan Quatermain. It got his Hollywood career off to a rousing start, but his hesitancy to sign a long-term contract with the studio lost him the lead in Quo Vadis?, and when he finally committed himself he was rewarded with an uneasily comic version of Kipling’s Soldiers Three and a mild comedy- thriller, The Light Touch.

Next, though, came what is probably Granger’s finest film, George Sidney’s Scaramouche (1952), an exquisitely fashioned adaptation of the Rafael Sabatini classic with Granger as a roistering devil-may-care playboy-poet who, setting out to avenge his friend’s death by sword, becomes a fencing champion and joins a pantomime troupe to conceal his identity. Ardently wooing the demure Janet Leigh, exchanging verbal barbs with his waspish mistress Eleanor Parker, performing slapstick with the troupe or fencing as to the manner born, Granger is superb in a swashbuckling performance to rank with the best.

Sumptuously produced and directed with visual panache, the film builds excitingly to its memorable climax, a seven-minute swordfight in a theatre taking the protagonists over the boxes, through corridors, down the immense foyer staircase and finally on to the stage where props and curtains are slashed in this great action sequence. Scaramouche was a subject dear to Granger’s heart – he had read the book as a child and seen the 1923 silent version – and another classic of the past, The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), provided him with another fine heroic role. A scene-by- scene remake of the 1937 version (the film’s director, Richard Thorpe, had a Moviola on the set running the original), it tends to be underrated due to the classic quality of the earlier version, but Granger, Deborah Kerr and James Mason are excellent substitutes for the original cast and the final sabre duel is very exciting.

Granger and Simmons were married in 1950, and she joined him later in Hollywood when her remaining contract with Rank was bought by Howard Hughes. In 1953, while Granger was making Salome with Rita Hayworth, he and Simmons sued Hughes, who was claiming that he had the actress under personal contract for seven years. Much of Hollywood was sceptical at their taking on such a Goliath, but they won and Simmons was able to star at MGM in Young Bess (1953) with Granger, Charles Laughton and Deborah Kerr supporting the radiant star. Granger would later cite this as his best Hollywood film.

The couple owned a house overlooking the San Fernando Valley and regular visitors to their Sunday brunches included Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding (who had been an extra with Granger), Richard and Sybil Burton, and Spencer Tracy, after whom they named their daughter. Granger had two children by his first marriage, Jamie and Lindsay, who lived with the couple in Hollywood for several years while growing up.

It was Tracy who suggested to the director George Cukor that Granger would be perfect as Norman Maine in A Star is Born after the first choice, Cary Grant, had turned it down. Granger auditioned with Judy Garland at Cukor’s home but the director’s insistence on advising on every vocal inflexion annoyed the actor and he walked out. He later expressed regret at turning down the role which proved the highlight of his old friend James Mason’s Hollywood career. It is highly probable that Granger would have been superb as the alcoholic former swashbuckler who sees his wife’s star rising as his fades, and it would doubtless have helped a career which was starting to fade.

Granger played the title-role in Beau Brummel (1954), which had only gorgeous decor to recommend it. The film caused a scandal in England when chosen for the Royal Film Performance since it shows the descent into madness of King George III. Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet (1955) was a disappointing smuggling adventure but Footsteps in the Fog (1955), made in England with Simmons, was an effective Victorian thriller. Granger finally worked with Cukor on Bhowani Junction (1956), an interesting attempt to film John Masters’s novel set against 1947 anti-imperialist India. Granger began a lifelong friendship with his co-star Ava Gardner, but Cukor was disparaging about him. ‘I wanted Trevor Howard; Granger was just a movie star.’

His contract coming to an end, he was given less important films by the studio, and he turned down the role of Messala in Ben Hur rather than be billed below Charlton Heston. Although 43 years old, he refused to see himself in character parts, while being disarmingly modest about his abilities: ‘I know I haven’t a nutshell of talent compared to my wife, Jean Simmons,’ he said in 1958. The couple had been very much in love, but the long separations involved in their careers eventually put a strain on the marriage and they were divorced in 1960, the year Granger made his last truly successful film as a star, Henry Hathaway’s rollicking comedy adventure North to Alaska, co-starring John Wayne.

Granger showed that he could still play a swashbuckling role with flair in Swordsman of Sienna (1961), but most of his films for the next decade were made on the Continent, including three as the German author Karl May’s western hero Old Surehand, and in the Seventies he become active in television movies. He played the villain in the 1978 adventure The Wild Geese, supporting his old friend Richard Burton, and in 1990 returned to the theatre, touring England and then making an acclaimed Broadway debut in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle with Rex Harrison and Glynis Johns

Wikipedia entry:

Jonathan Newth (born 6 March 1939 in Devon) is a British actor, best known for his performances in television.

Credits include: Emergency Ward 10, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Ace of Wands, The Troubleshooters, Z-Cars, Callan, Van der Valk, The Brothers, Softly, Softly, Poldark, Doctor Who, Notorious Woman, Secret Army (Barsacq), The Professionals, The Nightmare Man, The Day of the Triffids, Tenko (Colonel Clifford Jefferson), Triangle, Angels, Juliet Bravo, After Henry, Boon, Bugs,The Bill, Agatha Christie’s Poirot (Dumb Witness), Peak Practice, Heartbeat and The Spire (Play at Sailsbury Cathedral).

Roy Marsden

Roy MarsdenWorking full time in the theatre. Roy has chosen to devote his full attention to acting and directing on stage. His latest effort was his own production of “A Christmas Carol” that he not only directed but also played Scrooge. His days as Commander Adam Dalgliesh are surely over as the new BBC production of PD James’ latest book “Death in Holy Orders” will star Martin Shaw as Dalgliesh. [March 2003]

On his television series “Airline”: It was one of the most enjoyable programmes I ever made. Learning to fly those old DC-3s was terrific. And I enjoyed playing Ruskin enormously because he had hope. Of course, he was a pain up the tushie most of the time, but then you’d see that youthful desire to actually get out and triumph against enormous odds. I identified with that character the most.

Lee Evans was born on February 25, 1964 in Avonmouth, Bristol, England. He is an actor and writer, known for There’s Something About Mary (1998), The Fifth Element (1997) andMousehunt (1997). He has been married to Heather Nudds since September 22, 1984. They have one child.

“Guardian” obituary:

Veronica Horwell
The Guardian, Monday 17 March 2003 00.19 GMT

An interviewer from the Guardian once spent four hours recording Dame Thora Hird, who has died aged 91, stopping only because he ran out of tapes. “Listen to this,” he enthused afterwards, and turned up the sound of her singing a rude ditty about “balls” (rhymed with “orchestra stalls”) that she had written 60 years earlier. The journalist had interrogated Hollywood’s top brass across their studio desks, but they never fired him up as did this octagenarian in a wheelchair, talking about God and Morecambe Co-op.He was responding to a national institution, venerable yet rorty, both Queen Mum and a Donald McGill seaside postcard. She was 86 in the year of that interview, and had just won the second of her three Bafta awards as best television actress – this time for Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologue, Waiting For The Telegram, playing a centenarian who wept on remembering that she had not bedded her sweetheart the night before he left to die in the trenches.

Hird was not, she would sharply remind those who confused life and art, as old as the character – “It’s not actually me, love, it’s acting. That’s what I’m paid for, it’s pretending” – although she could just recall the first world war wounded convalescing in Morecambe. But then she could recall everything, even the names of her classmates at the Misses Nelson’s prep school: Vera Muff, Madge Peel, Ada Lob and Maudie Poles.

The Morecambe of Madge and Ada was home to Hird. Her dad, James Henry Hird, was manager of the Royalty theatre, and later of the entertainments on the pier, where a weekly ticket admitted holidaymakers to a pocket opera company and Madame Rosa Vere, who dived off in red tights every high tide, after which her mother passed the hat. Thora’s own mother, Mary, had carried her daughter on stage at eight weeks old; mam was acting a lass who had been done wrong by the squire’s son, and the bundled baby played the result. Theatre then was a reliable local business, like undertaking or clog repairs.

On leaving school, Hird worked for 10 years behind the Co-op cash desk, storing away the look of Mrs Edale, “who always sucked a split pea”, and Mrs Bradley, trying to feed 10 kids on nowt, and practised their mannerisms by night in the Royalty rep, while dad coached her timing and checked her inflections.

George Formby spotted her in 1939, wanted her to play his mother and sent up a casting director from Ealing Studios to peer through his monocle at her. She was too young for the role, but was put under film contract anyway -£10 a week between parts and £10 a day in work. They gave her a £5 note to cover the fare, and she arrived at the studios to the sound of the first air raid siren of the second world war.

Hird had sworn to her mam that she would, one day, wear a sequin-spangled frock, fur coat and orchids, and her mam had said she hoped it would keep fine for her; but on the wartime day when the beginnings of West End success financed a £50-fur, second-hand gown and slightly passé orchids, it poured down. She remained mindful of her dad’s exactitude about timing. The night before he died, he told her: “You’re a wonderful artist. I’ve lived to see you perform like you did tonight.”

Hird had her own family by then. In Morecambe, she had fancied James Scott, a drummer in the Winter Gardens orchestra, and they had courted decorously for four years, with him coming round to her mam’s for supper every night until they married in 1937 (the wedding photos were all teeth and arum lilies). They returned from honeymoon with 3s 8d left. He believed in her: “You will get on,” he said when they were broke, “and when you do, we’ll go round the world.” They laughed for an hour at that.

Scott put down £25 on the plot of land which eventually became their house at Prompt Corner, complete with the luxury of a built-in kitchen cabinet. He said he wished he could give Hird more on their first anniversary than a bunch of chrysanths, and she said, you can, you can give me a baby: in 1938, their daughter Janette pulled into the world, with fish servers in lieu of forceps. When Hird did get on, Scotty became her house-husband, cook and chaffeur, and manager to both Hird and Janette, who had a movie career as a child and teenage actor. Scotty served his war as a bedpan-wallah with the RAF – his wife’s description.

Through the 1950s in British cinema, Hird was one of the company of what you might call the Real National Theatre – actors always present because they represented the familiar and the true. On screen and stage, in more than 700 roles, she drew on those customers she had shelved in her memory at the Co-op. Until the 1960s, she was usually cast condescendingly – from a gawky maid named Eunice Sidebottom up to about middling dragon landlady. As she said later, she had not been at the front of the queue when the looks were given out, so she was always a character – yes, she played the nurse in Romeo And Juliet.

Yet she was John Osborne’s favourite actor – cast, at his request, in The Entertainer (1960) – both because of her ability to turn moods on a sixpence and because one of her specialities was Osborne’s pet hate, the narrow-minded mother-in-law with pretensions. Her best in that line was in John Schlesinger’s A Kind Of Loving (1962), with Alan Bates as her angry young son-in-law: Hird shoved in your face the power in that vernacular adjective “interfering”. She could do the dismissive mother of a floppy lad, too – Alan Bennett wrote her one in his television play Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1978), in which she tells him that being called Trevor is no bar to greatness; there had been a Trevor who had done well for himself in Northern Gas.

Hird was a natural for television. Long before her alliance with Bennett, there had been a clutch of amiable series: Meet The Wife; her matriarch of an undertaker’s family in In Loving Memory; The First Lady, in which her county councillor owed much to her own Auntie Nellie, who had hissed an aspirational “Yice” for “yes”, and never proffered a plate of biscuits ungraced by a doiley. What seemed eccentricity in her work was really extreme precision about the concerns of a local world. She set the tone of the women in The Last Of The Summer Wine.

Hird’s conversation shared with Bennett’s writing the exactly-placed names – a cup of Horlicks, a tumbler of dandelion and burdock – and a sense of a vast, lost innocence, of a world where knobbly knees were life’s norm. They also shared a certain humour – “Dear Thora, Just come up to change the lavatory seat, love Alan” read one of his postcards from Yorkshire – and a disdain for approximation: “That’s an ‘if’, not a ‘but’, and when you do a Bennett it is an ‘if’, not a ‘but’,” she remarked about memorising his scripts.

The first solo he created for her, A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, in the original Talking Heads series, won her first Bafta award in 1988. Her character faced a lonely death after a fall in the isolation of home. Bennett forced Hird towards her core toughness – no mawkishness permitted – as did Derec Longden in Lost For Words, his 1999 play about the last weeks of his mother’s life. “Do you want to be buried, mum, or cremated?” asks the son. “Oh, I don’t know, love,” Hird answers; then, after a pause timed to a nanosecond: “Surprise me.”

An easier side of her was visible for decades in television religious broadcasts, including her own series, Praise Be! Her chapel Christianity could come over comfy, although her relationship with “me pal oopstairs” clearly sustained her as the eventide fell. She used to say she had done a deal with him – no pain, when she was filming, in exchange for bearing whatever hurt when resting. Osteoarthritis demanded repeated hip replacements, she had a heart bypass and angina, and was immobilised after a kitchen fall too close to a Bennett script: “I was taking the little strings off the French beans, and I sat off the chair.”

After Scotty died of a stroke in 1994, Hird hired professional help, and worked on to pay their wages. There was still family, Janette and the grandchildren. It is a curious fact that her son-in-law was the singer Mel Torme (obituary, June 7 1999); she had visited the family in Beverly Hills 24 times – “It’s perfect for a holiday, but there’s no corner shop, love.”

Her autobiography, Scene And Hird, appeared in 1976. She was made an OBE in 1983, got an hon DLitt from Lancaster University in 1989, and became a dame in 1993. She met Princess Diana nine times and the Queen repeatedly, but it did not modify her memory of who she had been. “Never forget,” she told an awed reporter, “I scrubbed my mother’s steps when I was younger… Will you fetch me mink?”

· Thora Hird, actor, born May 28 1911; died March 15 2003

Johnny Briggs

Johnny Briggs was born in London on Sept 5, 1935, to Ernest and Rose Briggs, Johnny had a younger sister, Barbara, who died in 1955 at age 15. As a boy, he sang soprano in a church choir and during World War II he was evacuated to the safety of the English countryside. Back in London he won a scholarship, at age 12, to the Italia Conti Stage Academy. Among his classmates were Nanette Newman and Anthony Newley. A scattering of parts followed in movies, stage plays and TV shows. In 1953 Johnny began two years of service in Germany with the Royal Tank Regiment. He then resumed his acting career.

In 1961 he married Caroline Sinclair and they had two children, Mark and Karen, before divorcing in 1975. In 1975 Johnny married schoolteacher Christine Allsop and they’ve had four children: Jennifer, Michael, Stephanie, and Anthony. British audiences know him best as ‘Mike Baldwin’, the part he played on the Coronation Street (1960) TV series for more than 20 years beginning in 1976.

American audiences are more likely to remember him as the young sailor who was stripped to the waist and flogged in 1962’s Damn the Defiant!(1962)! Though working less frequently these days, Johnny remains an avid golfer.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: dinky-4 of Minneapolis

Johnny Briggs died in 2021.

“Guardian” obituary in 2021.

The actor Johnny Briggs, who has died aged 85, was cast as the flash cockney Mike Baldwin in Coronation Street in 1976 to boost audience figures for the northern soap opera in the south of England. He ended up staying for 30 years.

Mike arrived with experience in the rag trade, opened a factory, Baldwin’s Casuals, where he was a tough boss with no time for unions – and went to bed with Bet Lynch, the Rovers Return barmaid.

A string of lovers followed, and the biggest bombshell came when Mike had an affair with Deirdre Barlow, whose husband, Ken, became his arch-enemy. The 1982-83 love triangle was one of the serial’s most popular storylines, with unprecedented newspaper coverage debating whether Deirdre should stay with Ken. In the end, almost 20 million viewers watched the episode in which they were reconciled. Such was the massive public interest that the electronic scoreboard at Old Trafford – where Manchester United were playing against Arsenal – informed the 56,000 football fans: “Deirdre and Ken united again!”

Johnny Briggs, left, as Mike Baldwin with Roy Barraclough as Alec Gilroy and Julie Goodyear playing Bet Gilroy.Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

A sweet-talking Romeo, Mike then fathered a son with Maggie Dunlop and married four times. The first marriage, to Susan Barlow – Ken’s daughter – was guaranteed to make the drama soar. Then came Jackie Ingram, Alma Sedgewick and Linda Sykes. Alma was the love of his life and the couple were reunited when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In true soap style, Mike was eventually revealed to be the father of two more children, Adam, the son he believed did not exist because Susan had terminated the pregnancy, and Danny, born after Mike’s fling with his brother’s wife many years earlier. He made Danny a partner in Underworld, his knicker factory.

When Briggs, described by one critic as having “twinkling eyes and slightly shifty charm”, tired of the increasingly busy Coronation Street filming schedules, Mike was written out with a heart attack in 2006 – dying on the cobbles in the arms of Ken Barlow.

Briggs was born in Battersea, south-west London, the son of Ernest, a joiner and carpenter, and Rose (nee Good). He was evacuated to Surrey and Cheshire during the second world war, when Rose, worked in a munitions factory. In Cheshire, he sang solo treble in a chapel choir.

Back home in the capital after the war, he was awarded a scholarship to the Italia Conti Stage Academy aged 12. Millicent Martin, Nanette Newman and Anthony Newley were all in his year and Briggs was soon in the chorus of an Italian opera company visiting London (Cambridge theatre, 1947). Over the years, he joined the company’s annual production, performing in La Bohème, Tosca, Falstaff and Rigoletto.

William Roache, left, playing Ken Barlow takes on Johnny Briggs as Mike Baldwin in a 1986 episode of Coronation Street. Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock

Briggs also had bit parts in the films Hue and Cry (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948), before a more significant role in The Kite, one of four Somerset Maugham short stories in Quartet (1948), filmed on Wimbledon Common with George Cole. More uncredited appearances followed in other films, including the Ealing Studios comedy The Lavender Hill Mob (1951).Advertisementhttps://664bc5a338de357a5151cda9c30b099c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Briggs appeared in his first stage play, Life With Father, at Northampton repertory theatre in 1949, the year he performed alongside a young Audrey Hepburn in the chorus of the London revues Sauce Tartare and Sauce Piquante (Cambridge theatre). When his voice broke, Briggs stuck to acting and joined Dewsbury repertory company (1950).

On leaving Italia Conti, he became a stage hand and spotlight operator at the Windmill theatre, and did two years’ national service as a driving instructor and gunner in the 8th Royal Tank Regiment.

Briggs had his first credited screen role, as Skinny Johnson, one of the gang of juvenile delinquents, in the film Cosh Boy (1952), starring Joan Collins. More parts followed in Second Fiddle (1957), Sink the Bismarck! (1960), Light Up the Sky! (1960), The Bulldog Breed (1960), HMS Defiant (1962, as a young sailor stripped to the waist and flogged), Doctor in Distress (1963) and three Carry On films – as one of the kilted Third Foot and Mouth Regiment in Up the Khyber (1968), a plasterer in Behind (1975) and a major’s put-upon driver in England (1976).

Briggs acted with a rep company in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, before taking the role of Kevin in the original production of Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen (Royal Court, 1959).

By the 1960s he was getting regular television work and found fame as DS Russell (1964-66) in the later years of No Hiding Place. The 5ft 7in actor put lifts in his shoes to land the role. “Give yourself an extra inch, because you’re a bit small,” he was advised by the crime drama’s star, Raymond Francis, who played DCS Lockhart in the hugely popular series. Briggs eventually wore a specially made pair of shoes that gave him an extra three inches.

Later came the parts of Clifford Leyton (1973-75), boss of a taxi firm, in the soap opera Crossroads, and Spiggy in the sitcom Thick as Thieves (1974). His long-running Coronation Street role followed a brief appearance as a lorry driver in the serial in 1974. After leaving, Briggs had one-off roles in Agatha Christie’s Marple: Nemesis, and Holby City (both 2007), and Doctors (2009). He was the caravan park operator Fin Morgan in the short-lived teen soap Echo Beach (2008).

Off screen, Briggs enjoyed playing golf and spending time at his holiday home in Florida. His autobiography, My Life As Mike Baldwin, was published in 1998 and he was appointed MBE in 2007.

Briggs is survived by his children, Mark and Karen, from his first marriage, to Caroline Hover (they married in 1961 and divorced in 1975), and by Jennifer, Michael, Stephanie and Anthony, from his second marriage, to Christine Allsop (they married in 1977 and divorced in 2006).

• John Ernest Briggs, actor, born 5 September 1935; died 28 February 2021

Josephine Griffin. IMDB

Josephine Griffin (13 December 1928 – 15 September 2005) was a well-known English film actress who appeared in a string of British films of the 1950s, such as The Purple Plain (1954), The Man Who Never Was (1956) and The Spanish Gardener (1956). After retiring from acting, under her married name Josephine Filmer-Sankey, she wrote about the Bayeux Tapestry and edited the autobiography of Sir John Mandeville.

Josephine Griffin was born in London on 13 December 1928, the only daughter of Ronald Griffin (son of Sir Lepel Griffin, a British colonial administrator in India).

In 1951–52 she acted in Peter Ustinov‘s play The Moment of Truth at the Adelphi Theatre in London, with Eric Portman and Cyril Luckham also in the cast.

She then appeared in a number of films in the 1950s. These included: The House of the Arrow (1953), The Weak and the Wicked (1954), The Purple Plain (1954, as Gregory Peck‘s wife), The Crowded Day (1954), an episode of the television series Fabian of the Yard (1955), Room in the House (1955), The Extra Day (1956) and On Such a Night (short; 1956).

She had perhaps her best roles in two other 1956 films; as Pam in The Man Who Never Was, and as Carol Burton in The Spanish Gardener.

She married in London on 11 October 1956. She made one more film, Portrait of Alison (1958; released in the USA as Postmark for Danger), then retired from the screen.

Her husband Patrick Hugh Filmer-Sankey was a film producer. He was the grandson of Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, and Constance Cornwallis-West (Winston Churchill‘s step-aunt by marriage).

Josephine Griffin’s other connection to Winston Churchill was that he was an unseen character in The Man Who Never Was; his voice was supplied by Peter Sellers.

Under her married name Josephine Filmer-Sankey, she co-wrote The Bayeux Tapestry: The Story of the Norman Conquest, 1066, with Norman Denny (published 1966). With Denny, she also edited a new version of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1973).

She died in London on 15 September 2005, aged 76, survived by her son William and two grandchildren, Frances and Benedict.

Her name has been attached to a pearl bracelet sold commercially.

IMDB entry:

Leo Genn was the son of a successful jewelry merchant Woolfe (William) Genn and his wife Rachel Asserson. He attended the City of London School as a youth and went on to study law at Cambridge. He received his law degree as a qualified barrister (which in English law tradition is a lawyer who is a specialist in law and who appears in court as representative of a client, whereas a solicitor is also a lawyer but further defined as an attorney who deals directly with the client, writing all case-related briefs and hiring a barrister for court appearance – there is no such division in the USA). He began practice in 1928, however law was not his only interest. Acting caught his eye, and about 1930 he made the acquaintance of actor/manager Leon M. Lion, who needed an actor and a legal advisor. Genn fitted both and was hired and later that year made his stage debut. It was certainly of practical value that he continued offering legal counsel into the 1930s to augment the small income of a budding stage performer learning his craft. In 1933 he met and married Marguerite van Praag, a casting director at Ealing Studios.

His first screen role was as Shakespeare’s Shylock in the UK production Immortal Gentleman (1935). It mortised nicely between his two year (1934-36) period of Shakespearean apprenticeship as a member of the Old Vic Company where he appeared in many productions of Shakespeare. Genn had a very pleasant neutral British accent that could fit anywhere. And his voice was wonderfully smooth and yet authoritative, likened to “black velvet”, that fit like a glove to his refined manner. Douglas Fairbanks Jr.., in London for one of his many UK starring vehicles, hired Genn as a technical advisor on the law forAccused (1936) and received a bit role – not for his legal advice – but for a “splendid voice and presence”. But the legal side of his character stuck to him as he was in the process of dropping the law for acting full time. He spent 1937 playing film prosecutors and defending attorneys – not something he expected. Things picked up the next year – though still wading through some crime dramas – when he nabbed a small Indian character role inDrums (1938), the ambitious adventure yarn by producer Alexander Korda. And he was the prince dance partner to Wendy Hiller in Pygmalion (1938) – uncredited – as was a youngAnthony Quayle. Obviously, small featured extra roles allowed time for more ambitious outings. He starred in the stage hit “The Flashing Stream” also in 1938. It received the nod from Broadway, and Genn made his American debut in early 1939 in the play’s successful run in New York.

Though still tagged for law officialdom in several films, Genn moved on to more hearty supporting roles in 1940 with war looming. He joined the Royal Artillery and received a rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1943. In that year he was already wanted for film’s war effort agenda as movie narrator. In 1944 he was given leave for two flag-waver movies – the second a most unusual and significant cinematic event. For Genn, it was a small part, but it was part of a glorious celebration of England and English history during the crisis of World War II – the Henry V of Laurence Olivier. Genn was the Constable of France, and though the lines were few, Shakespeare infused them with a sardonic wink that Genn delivered perfectly in an understated style that became one of his hallmarks. This part brought him to notice as a film actor, but he did not entertain its fruits until later 1946, for with the end of the war Genn, who had been awarded the French Croix de Guerre in 1945, went back to law counseling. He volunteered his legal knowledge to the British army unit involved in the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war crimes perpetrated at the Belsen concentration camp near Luneburg, Germany. And in the subsequent tribunals, Genn served as assistant prosecutor.

He was back in film in 1946, but more so he was being courted by Broadway to return – which he did in that crowded year with one of his best stage roles in the Lillian Hellmanclassic “Another Part of the Forest”. Hollywood waited in the wings to grab him for theEugene O’Neill update Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) of the ancient Greek tragedy triangle “Orestaia”. It was not Genn’s American film debut, for he had appeared in the UK/US crime drama Girl in the News (1940) – as – what else – a prosecuting counsel – a barrister. He was competing with the American debut of Michael Redgrave in the O’Neill adaptation (3 hours, pared to about 2 hours for general release). The film was a great piece of dialog display but a disaster at the box office. But the chemistry of Genn with Rosalind Russell was such that they were marketed together again the next year in another American film, The Velvet Touch (1948), more whodunit but with snappy lines. Subsequently Genn was about equally in demand for film and stage on both sides of the Atlantic.

His film roles on into the 1950s were somewhat uneven, but Genn was always to form – the calm, understated but in control male lead or supporting character, whether war adventure or the inevitable crime drama – many a steady military officer and understanding professional – with a bit of comedy and a few shady characters thrown in.

Perhaps his best known American film role was as the sardonic Gaius Petronius Arbiter inQuo Vadis (1951). Genn’s generous part as the ancient Roman satirist was filled with double meaning quips and understated sarcasm that Genn delivered with his poker face charm and subtle sidelong glances. He is so good that the audience hangs on his next sub-level dig with anticipation that partially eclipses the first rate histrionics of Peter Ustinov as a tongue-in-cheek deranged Nero. The level of Genn’s performance was recognized with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. The next year he was more than just a straight-laced William Bradford of American colonial history fame in Plymouth Adventure (1952), a much maligned American film that was, in fact, a realistic portrayal of the trials and tribulations of the Pilgrims (they were not all religious dissenters, not the dour, black and white Puritans who were later arrivals). Having to compete with a cantankerous, perhaps too hammy Spencer Tracy as the ship’s captain, Genn’s understated intensity brings off a compassionate portrayal.

Genn helped grace some of the most ambitious films of the later 1950s and into the 1960s:Moby Dick (1956), The Longest Day (1962), and 55 Days at Peking (1963). He embraced TV playhouse, both American and British programs, and US/UK episodic series through the period, as well as more outings on Broadway. He made six appearances on the Great White Way – the last in a short run of “The Only Game in Town” in mid 1968. All along Genn’s voice had found welcoming slots in narration. Beside films, he was the voice of the royal coronation programs of 1937 and 1953. And he always kept a foot in his first love, British theater; he was a governor of London’s The Mermaid Theatre.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: William McPeak