British Actors Archives - Page 35 of 125

Phil Daniels

IMDB entry:

Phil Daniels was born on October 25, 1958 in London, England as Philip Daniels. He is an actor, known for Chicken Run (2000), EastEnders (1985) and Quadrophenia (1979)He sang on the original recording of British band Blur‘s single “Parklife”. He is a big fan of Chelsea Football Club from London and has performed on stage wearing his beloved Chelsea team shirt whilst singing with the British band Blur along with Damon Albarn, who is also a fan of the team.Has an uncredited role in Bugsy Malone (1976) as a waiter who spills spaghetti.Is one of 17 EastEnders (1985) actors to compete in Strictly Come Dancing (2004). The others, in chronological order, are Christopher Parker (Spencer Moon), Jill Halfpenny (Kate Mitchell), Patsy Palmer (Bianca Jackson), Louisa Lytton (Ruby Allen), Letitia Dean(Sharon Rickman), Matt Di Angelo (Deano Wicks), Gillian Taylforth (Kathy Mitchell),Jessie Wallace (Kat Moon), Zoe Lucker (Vanessa Gold), Ricky Groves (Garry Hobbs),Natalie Cassidy (Sonia Fowler), Jimi Mistry (Fred Fonesca), Scott Maslen (Jack Branning),Kara Tointon (Dawn Swann), Anita Dobson (Angie Watts) and Sid Owen (Ricky Butcher). As of 2009 he is the only 1 to have been eliminated in the first week of the contest. His daughter, Ella, was born in 1990.

Attended The Anna Scher Theatre School.

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Prunella Scales TCM Overview

Sybil Fawlty- What a woman – bossy, controlling, vulgar, irritating, dim but absolutely brilliant. Prunella Sc ales created one of televisions most memorable characters. She was born in 1932 in Surrey. She has performed extensively in theatre. She has too featured in movies such as “Hobson’s Choice” with Charles Laughton and John Mills in 1954, “Room At The Top” in 1959 and “Wolf” in 1994 when she made in the U.S. with Jack Nicholson.

TCM overview:

A gifted comedienne, Prunella Scales is perhaps best recognized as the as the bane of husband/hotel manager Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) in the British sitcom “Fawlty Towers” (BBC, 1975 and 1979). While primarily a beloved stage actress in her native Britain, she has made intermittent, and highly effective, appearances in several TV programs and films.

Born Prunella Illingworth, she adopted her mother’s maiden name as her stage name. Trained at the Bristol Old Vic School, she first appeared on stage in 1951 as the cook in “Traveller Without Luggage” at the Theatre Royale in Bristol and made her London debut in “The Impresario from Smyrna” in 1954. The following year, she made her Broadway debut playing Ermengarde, the niece of Horace Vandergelder, in Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker”. She often appeared in plays by Shakespeare in the 50s, including playing Nerissa in “The Merchant of Venice” and Jacquenetta in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”. In 1971, she toured the USA in “Trelawny of the Wells” and, overall, nary a year has gone by without Scales being on a stage somewhere. Her popularity peaked with “An Evening with Queen Victoria”, a one-woman show she has performed numerous times during the past decade.

Her work on the small screen has brought her even wider recognition. Scales made her debut in a 1952 British adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” and co-starred with Richard Briers in “The Marriage Lines” (BBC, 1960-66), a sitcom about the tribulations of a young married couple. In the 1970s, “Fawlty Towers” guaranteed her a lasting place in TV history. In the show’s twelve episodes, Scales was the no-nonsense foil for Cleese’s ill-mannered, sarcastic hotelier. A decade later, she co-starred opposite Geraldine McEwan in “Mapp and Lucia”, playing Elizabeth Mapp, the reigning “queen” of a British town suddenly thrust into competition with an upstart.

Scales engendered a bit of controversy in 1992 when she portrayed the first-ever fictionalization of the reigning monarch in John Schlesinger’s TV production “A Question of Attribution” by Alan Bennett. In 1996, she was the mother trying to deprogram her daughter (Jodhi May) from a cult in “Signs and Wonders” (PBS) and followed with two choice roles: playing the mother of Alan Turing (Derek Jacobi), the World War II computer expert who is also homosexual, in “Breaking the Code” (PBS) and the talkative Miss Bates in “Jane Austen’s ‘Emma'” (Arts & Entertainment Network).

Scales made her feature film debut in David Lean’s “Hobson’s Choice” (1954), playing Vicky Hobson, the subservient daughter of Charles Laughton. Peter Sellers couldn’t keep his eyes off her in “The Waltz of the Toreadors” (1962) but by 1978, she was relegated to maternal roles, cast as the parent of the one of the Hitler clones in “The Boys From Brazil”. Scales supported Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins in “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” (1987). She co-starred as the wife of a tyrannical amateur stage director in “A Chorus of Disapproval” (1989) while in Mike Newell’s backstage “An Awfully Big Adventure” (1995), Scales got to be the autocrat. She also appeared briefly as Aunt Juley, the surrogate parent of the Schlegel sisters (Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter), in the Merchant-Ivory “Howards End” (1992) and was the helpful social worker in “Second Best” (1994).

The times obituary in 2025.

Prunella Scales was entitled to feel miffed that her portrayal of Sybil in the television sitcom Fawlty Towers put her so firmly in the public mind as a comedy actress. Most of her career had, after all, been spent doing serious drama, from Shakespeare to Chekhov, Beckett, Pinter and Bennett.

Sybil was nonetheless a superb comic creation. A small yet domineering figure with a towering hairdo and a raucous laugh, she was the perfect foil to John Cleese’s manic, snobbish Basil, the Torquay hotelier who hated his guests. Although Sybil was intimidating, she was also flirtatious and gossipy, especially on the phone — “Oooh, I know” — and, crucially, she was socially below Basil, which was not what Cleese and Connie Booth, his co-writer, had envisaged but rather what Scales suggested.

Their on-screen chemistry was perfect, with each as long-suffering as the other. While Basil would address Sybil in a faux romantic way, calling her “my little nest of vipers”, she would say: “You never get it right, do you? You’re either crawling all over them [the guests], licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some benzedrine puff adder.” In any event, her short, sharp cry of “Basil” was all it ever took to stop him in his tracks. He was terrified of her. “I don’t feel sorry for him,” she said of her character. “I feel sorry for her, being married to a lunatic.

Scales based the character of Sybil on someone she met when she was a child — a hotelier with an ingratiating manner who spent all day painting her nails. The media were always disappointed to meet Scales in real life and see that she was nothing like Sybil, not least because she had a rather patrician way of speaking.

Fawlty Towers ran for only 12 episodes spread over four years, 1975 to 1979, but the memory of it never faded. Indeed, many years later, the British Film Institute ranked it first on a list of the 100 greatest British television programmes. While Scales accepted that the role overshadowed her acting career, she did not think this was necessarily a bad thing.

“In this business, you are lucky if you become associated with a single role because then people are curious to find out what you will do next.” That said, the main reason she went into acting was “the chance to play people more interesting than me

Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth was born in Sutton Abinger, Surrey, in 1932. Her father, John Illingworth, was a sales manager for Tootal, the cotton firm, and her mother, Catherine Scales, was a professional actress. Her unusual first name came from a play, Prunella, by Laurence Housman and Harley Granville-Barker, in which her mother had acted. Her friends called her Pru.

“I’m so grateful to my parents because they were really very hard up,” she recalled in later life. “During the war we — my brother, Timothy, and I — were evacuated to a little village in Devon and my mother kept the two of us and a friend on £8 a week. This is ‘I was born in a shoe box on the M1’ territory, but my father only ever had what he earned.”

Her parents were a bit eccentric, she reckoned, because they sold the only house they ever owned for fear it would get bombed and through friends rented a farmhouse 35 miles from Hyde Park Corner. “There was no gas, electricity or water but we had lots of books. When we went to other people’s houses, we used to enjoy the electric light.” She walked through the woods every day and caught a bus to Dorking North station to get to school at Dulwich.

Her first ambition was to be a ballet dancer but there were no ballet classes where she lived and by the age of eight she wanted to be an actress. She attended Moira House, a progressive girls’ boarding school in Eastbourne, East Sussex, where she excelled academically, getting eight As in her school certificate, and acted in many school productions

In 1949, she won a scholarship to the Old Vic drama school in London and, to start with, she struggled. She was barely 17 and unworldly, stood only 5ft 3in and sported pigtails and thick glasses. However, she battled through and on leaving joined the Bristol Old Vic as an assistant stage manager. Her first professional role was an elderly cook in Jean Anouilh’s Traveller Without Luggage.

She was soon given her first film, Laxdale Hall, playing a Scottish schoolmistress, and in 1952 she made her television debut as Lydia Bennett inPride and Prejudice. Three years later, she made her West End debut as the romantic juvenile Ermengarde in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, directed by Tyrone Guthrie.

It ran for nine months in London before transferring to the US, playing in Philadelphia, Boston, Washington and finally on Broadway. While in New York, she attended acting classes under Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio, which helped to build her confidence after her unhappy experience at the Old Vic School. Then the teachings of Stanislavsky, the inspiration for the American Method school, had meant little. Now they made sense.

After playing small parts during the 1956 Shakespeare season at Stratford-upon-Avon, she joined the Oxford Playhouse, where she blossomed under a sympathetic director, Frank Hauser, and played the pupil in the first English production of Eugène Ionesco’s The Lesson.

On television, she was a bus conductress in two episodes of Coronation Street before, in 1963, becoming a household name through the BBC comedy Marriage Lines. She and Richard Briers played newlyweds negotiating the pitfalls of early married life. She was keen to be the perfect wife, but managed to burn the dinner and resented being stuck at home while her husband joined his pals in the pub. There were frequent rows, but good nature prevailed. Towards the end of the show’s three-year run, Scales, who had married the actor Timothy West, became pregnant and her character followed suit.

Theirs was the happiest of unions, both professionally and personally, and would last for 61 years. Scales and West had two sons, Joseph, a translator and teacher, and Samuel, who became a distinguished actor and director in his own right. “My parents warned me it was a difficult profession,” Samuel West once said. “They were saying you are going to be unemployed, you are going to have to do shit work just to keep solvent, you are going to be associated with types or brands or characters that people will expect you to be — like my mother in the case of Sybil — and you will experience mild euphoria and pleasant triumphs and deep loneliness and despair.” Scales is survived by her sons and a stepdaughter, Juliet, from West’s previous marriage.

Such may have been the disadvantages of a husband and wife being in the same profession, but the marriage, Scales found, got easier with time. “When the children were young, I did have a lot of time when I was getting much less work, and I was a bit discontented. I think, to do him justice, Tim was equally worried. But, on the whole, over the years, we’ve had the same amount of work and that’s a great blessing

They had a shared hobby throughout their marriage — narrowboating. “The boys got lovely and tired opening locks and went to bed early, so in the evenings their parents could play Scrabble and chess and make love. I cook better on the boat than I do at home: there’s no telephone, no TV — it’s been the perfect resource for us.” She had always preferred being in the countryside to the town — she was the president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England from 1997 to 2002 — and canals afforded her a perfect means by which she could be close to nature.

Despite the success of Marriage Lines, Scales was little seen on television until Fawlty Towers came along almost a decade later, and in the meantime she concentrated on the stage. At the Nottingham Playhouse under Richard Eyre, she played Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew and made her bow as a director on Major Barbara. She directed many other productions, including Uncle Vanya and Alan Bennett’s Getting On, both starring her husband.

Immensely hard-working and a perfectionist, Scales always started from the character’s background, who she was and where she came from. If she got the accent and the speech pattern right, much else would fall into place. On television, in 1985 she was felicitously teamed with Geraldine McEwan as the country ladies trying to outdo each other in Mapp & Lucia, from the novels by EF Benson. Another television success was Simon Brett’s gentle comedy After Henry, which started on Radio 4 in 1985 and was taken up by ITV where it ran for four series. Scales was a widow who shared her house with her manipulative mother and precocious teenage daughter. The following year she raised eyebrows when she appeared nude in an episode of Unnatural Causes, in which she plays a wife who cooks her husband. She was, she said, pleased to receive only one letter of complaint, from a vicar in Derbyshire.

In 1988, she played the Queen in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution at the National Theatre. She worked hard on capturing the Queen’s voice, look and bearing and created an astonishingly lifelike performance well clear of caricature. She was appointed CBE in 1992. At the investiture, the Queen, remembering her portrayal at the National, said: “I suppose you think you should be doing this.”

On the other half of an Alan Bennett double bill, Scales played the actress Coral Browne in An Englishman Abroad, visiting the spy Guy Burgess in Moscow. She looked nothing like Browne but clever acting took her through

One of the roles for which she was best known was the domineering Dotty in television commercials for Tesco, with Jane Horrocks as her daughter. She used the money to subsidise her less-well-paid stage work and had no qualms: “I tell my critical socialist chums that it is my way of obliging industry to fund the arts.” She always voted Labour and was an active supporter of the party, appearing in general election broadcasts in 2005 and 2010. It was a subject upon which she was prone to get exercised. “I wish I were more effective,” she once said. “The Labour Party has lost so many elections one fears that the support of actors doesn’t help them. We get to one ward meeting in 84 and try to drive people to the polls at election time. But we’re stigmatised as the chattering classes.”

Though she claimed she was never beautiful or even pretty in her youth, Scales was blessed with a youthful appearance that lasted well into older age. This she attributed to her genes, because her mother and father had been the same. She did admit, however, that she had the bags under her eyes done in 1978, “and would do it again if it became necessary”.

In 2014, West (who died last year) announced that his wife had vascular dementia and the couple discussed coping with the disease on a Radio 4 programme with Joan Bakewell. Two years later, they appeared together in Great Canal Journeys for Channel 4. Viewers were touched by West’s attentiveness and devotion and it soon became apparent that this was about something other than a canal journey: it was a meditation on a long and successful marriage drifting to a close. “She can’t remember things very well,” West said, “but you don’t have to remember things on the canal. You can just enjoy things as they happen — so it’s perfect for her.”

Prunella Scales CBE, actress, was born on June 22, 1932. She died on October 27, 2025, aged 93

Noel Willman was born in Derry in the North of Ireland in 1918. He made “Androcles and the Lion” in Hollywood in 1953. Other movies include “The Net”, “Carve Her Name With Pride” in 1958, “Doctor Zhivago” in 1965 and “The Odessa File” with Jon Voight in 1974. He directed “A Man For All Seasons on Broadway in 1962. He died in 1988 in New York.

Article from Ulster Biography:

Noel Willman had a most distinguished career which covered every aspect of the acting profession, whether on stage, screen or television, acting, directing, or both at once.

Noel Bath Willman, son of Romain Willmann (sic; he changed the spelling of the family name when Noel was a child), a hairdresser, and Charlotte Ellis Willmann, was born in the city of Derry, studied at the London Theatre School and made his acting debut at the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1939, in Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud in what would be the last production in that theatre for fifty years. During the Second World War and after Willman was mostly active in provincial repertoire theatre, especially in Manchester, where he again appeared in Hamlet with Gielgud in 1944. In 1945-1946 he was at the Bristol Old Vic and in 1948 joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford where he took some major roles – Antonio inThe Merchant of Venice and Pandarus in The Taming of the Shrew. His Broadway debut came in December 1951 at the Plymouth Theatre in Jean Anouilh’s Legend of Lovers in a cast headed by Richard Burton (this was an English-language translation of the author’s adaptation ofEurydice, first produced in 1942).

Sir Tyrone (“Tony”) Guthrie, the renowned theatre director, encouraged Willman to try directing for the stage. In 1955, after some film work which was hard work but financially beneficial, he took an acting-directing role in All’s Well That Ends Well at the Stratford Festival. For several years he had a cross-ocean existence between London and other English venues, and Broadway, between acting and directing on stage and screen. One (or the) undoubted high point of his whole career came in 1962, when he won a Tony Award in 1962 for his direction of the original Broadway production of double-Oscar winner Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons. Bolt described how Willman was instrumental in many aspects of the play’s development, including the casting of Paul Scofield as Thomas More. The play was first performed on Broadway on 22 November 1961, at the ANTA Playhouse, and was an enormous success, enjoying a run of 620 performances. (Scofield took the same role in the 1966 film and won an Oscar.) In 1966, Willman was again nominated for an Emmy for his production of A Lion In Winter, which featured Christopher Walken, who would later become a leading Hollywood star. (A “Tony” Award is an Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre awarded annually for excellence, specifically for productions on Broadway, New York.)

His screen career began in 1952, with the role of Mr Perker in director Noel Langley’s version of The Pickwick Papers; other roles included Lord Byron in Beau Brummell, in a cast including Stewart Granger, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Ustinov and Robert Morley. Willman was often cast as cold, aggressive authoritarian figures. In Doctor Zhivago, David Lean’s epic based on Boris Pasternak’s novel, he was Razin, the icily intimidating Commissar jointly commanding a group of communist partisans during the Russian Civil War, who kidnap Omar Sharif’s eponymous doctor out of need for a medical officer, ignoring his pleas on behalf of his family. In The Odessa File, he was Beyer, a former SS officer in charge of vetting applicants to join a secret society of former SS members and who is humourless, imperious, and thorough. In Carve Her Name With Pride, he is casted simply as “Interrogator”; the person he interrogates is Violet Szabo (Virginia McKenna), the Anglo-French secret agent who has been captured while operating undercover in Nazi-occupied France. In 1976 he appeared as the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Bruno Merk, in 21 Hours at Munich, a television film dramatising (accurately enough) the hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics in 1972, when members of the Israeli Olympic squad were taken hostage by terrorists; many were killed.

Noel Willman suffered a heart attack while in a cinema in New York City. He died on the way to hospital.

Born:	4 August 1918
Died:	24 December 1988

Rosalie Crutchley seemed to specialise in playing sinister housekeepers or worried villagers in horror and period movies. She was born in 1920 in London. She made her film debut in 1947. Among her movies are “The Spanish Gardner” in 1956 and “Man of La Mancha” in 1972. Her son Jonathan Ashmore had a lead role as a child in “A Kid For Two Farthings” in 1956. Rosalie Crutchley died in 1997.

“Independent” obituary:

In her first film, Rosalie Crutchley is asked by her former boyfriend how she has been doing and replies, “Me, I’ve had one smack in the face after another.” Later she is strangled to death. The role was symptomatic of the sort of parts for which the actress became best known – dour, pessimistic, rarely smiling.

She was often cast in foreign roles (“I do not know why this should be,” she said. “Perhaps I look foreign”); her thin face, dark hair and luminously large eyes were well suited to tragedy, and she won acclaim for frequent appearances on stage in the Greek classics. Not surprisingly, she twice played the wicked Madame DeFarge in A Tale of Two Cities, but typecasting should not obscure the fact that she was a fine dramatic actress.

Her theatre work was lauded by such critics as Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson and she was consistently in demand for films, while her work on television and radio was enormously prolific. Within the profession, “Bun”, as she was affectionately known, was both respected and liked.

Born in London in 1920, she trained at the Royal Academy of Music before making her acting debut in 1938 with a non-speaking part in Saint Joan at the Liverpool Repertory Company, and the following year became a member of H.M. Tennant’s repertory company which shuttled between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray, Sonia Dresdel and Cyril Cusack were other members of the group, half the company opening simultaneously in each city then exchanging for the second week of the run. Crutchley made her first West End appearance in 1943 alongside John Gielgud in Love for Love, part of a Gielgud-Peter Brook season which also included The Circle and A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.

In 1947 she made her first film, Take My Life, the directorial debut of Ronald Neame and an effective thriller in which Crutchley had only two scenes, as a violinist and former mistress of an opera star’s husband (Hugh Williams), but made a strong impression, particularly in the murder scene where she spitefully taunts her killer.

In Prelude to Fame (1950), she movingly presented the dilemma of an Italian peasant persuaded to relinquish custody of her musical prodigy son (Jeremy Spencer), and the following year journeyed to Rome to play Acte in the lavish spectacle Quo Vadis? Other film roles included Malta Story (1953), The Spanish Gardener (1956), A Tale of Two Cities (1958), The Nun’s Story (1959) and Sons and Lovers (1960).

She made her Broadway debut in a stage version of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter in 1950, and in 1952 had one of her greatest personal triumphs in the West End production of Charles Morgan’s The River Line, playing Marie, the stoic leader of an escape movement during the Second World War. The same year she made her last stage appearance, as Kristine Lynde in A Doll’s House at the Lyric Theatre, after which she worked exclusively in films, television and radio.

Crutchley’s first television appearance was as Juliet in Michael Barry’s BBC production of Romeo and Juliet (1948), and numerous roles followed in both classic and new plays, series and serials. In 1956 she was voted Television Actress of the Year for her performance in Black Limelight. Other notable roles included Madame Danglers in The Count of Monte Cristo, Mrs Sarti in Galileo, DeFarge in the 1960 television adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, Katharine Parr in both The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1969) and Elizabeth R (1970), Clytemnestra in Electra (1974), Jocasta in an Open University production of Oedipus (1976), Simone in the television movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1981), and episodes of such series as Miss Marple, Poirot, The Prisoner and Casualty.

She provided the narration for The Troubles (1981), Thames Television’s five-part series on Northern Ireland, was an effective story-teller on the BBC-TV children’s programme Jackanory, and appeared in over 50 radio plays. Her last film role was an amusing cameo as a brusquely inquisitive guest in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

Rosalie Sylvia Crutchley, actress: born London 4 January 1920; married first Danson Cunningham (marriage dissolved), secondly Peter Ashmore (died 1997; one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved); died London 28 July 1997.

Tom Walls is best associated with the Aldwich farces on the London stage of the 1920’s. He also had considerable success as a character actor in British films of the 1930s and 1940s. He was born in Northampton in 1883. His films include “Rookery Nook”in 1930, “Johnny Frenchman” in 1944 and “Love Story” in 1945. He died in 1949.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Comedy farceur Tom Walls is indelibly associated with the popular Aldwych Theatre farces of the 1920s and 1930s. Born in 1883, this English gent was a former constable and jockey before making his stage debut in 1905. As the star and producer of a succession of witty spoofs typically denigrating society’s uppercrust, he often played the slick cad. Written expertly by Ben Travers and in tandem with fellow comic extraordinaires Ralph Lynn and Robertson Hare, the shows were chock full of sight gags, puns, double entendres and slapstick.

With Walls at the helm as director, a number of their successes were transferred to the 30s silver screen, beginning with One Embarrassing Night (1930). The madcap nonsense seemed to be just what the doctor ordered, so an assembly-line of their classic stage shows were filmed, including Plunder (1931), A Night Like This (1932), Thark (1932),Turkey Time (1933), A Cuckoo in the Nest (1933), Dirty Work (1934) (directed only), andA Cup of Kindness (1934), more or less all of them presented as photographed plays. His career waned following the decade, but he was still seen in a number of films, both comedic and touchingly dramatic, until his death in 1949.

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

IMDB entry:

Ramon Tikaram was born on May 16, 1967 in Singapore. He is an actor, known for Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), Vampire Academy (2014) and My Talks with Dean Spanley(2008). Brother of singer Tanita Tikaram. Ramon was invited by Elton John to appear in his video for the song “Something about the Way you Look Tonight’ along with fellow This Life (1996) cast members. Holds a First Class Honours degree.As a young child, he was raised in Germany, before the family relocated to England in the early 1980s.His father was an Indian-Fijian British Army officer, his mother is Malaysian. Has three children and lives in London He was educated in Britain and went on to become an actor in the U.K. He has featured in “Eastenders” and among his films are “This Life” and “Mile High”.

Vickery Turner was born in 1945 in Sunbury-on-Thames. Her breakthrough role came in the UK stage production of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” which starred Vanessa Redgrave. While filming “Crooks and Coronets” with Edith Evans, she met and married the U.S. actor Warren Oates and went to live and work in the U.S. She was also a published novelist. She died in 2007.

“The Stage” obituary:

A distinguished stage and screen actress, Vickery Turner also enjoyed a successful career as a novelist and a celebrated screenwriter.Ê She created the role of the schoolgirl Sandy in the original stage production of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Wyndham’s 1966) for which she won the London Critics’ Award and the Clarence Derwent Award. She was best known to television viewers for her role as Charlotte Bronte in Yorkshire Television’s The Brontes of Haworth. Born in London on April 3, 1945, she was educated at Selhurst School for Girls and trained for the stage at RADA. After leaving she worked briefly as a journalist on a south London newspaper After her awarding-winning performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she starred in Ken Loach’s adaptation of Nell Dunn’s gritty novel Up The Junction (1967). In 1968 she appeared opposite Edith Evans in the film comedy Prudence and the Pill. She went on to play Olivia in Twelfth Night (Royal Court) with Malcolm McDowell and played a leading role in the play Mr. Pim Passes By (Hampstead Theatre). She also appeared in many major television dramas including Dennis Potter’s award-winning Stand Up, Nigel Barton (1965), Ibsen’s Ghosts, with Tom Courtney (1968,) Hay Fever, with Ian McKellen (1968) and The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) with Brian Cox. Later, notable stage roles included appearing opposite Richard Chamberlain in Jonathan Miller’s production of Richard II at the Ahmanson Theater, Los Angeles and she played Celimene in The Misanthrope (Oxford Playhouse). She also starred in The Day After the Fair, which toured the USA.

In 1981 she starred in the Granada Television production of The Good Soldier. Turner wrote many widely acclaimed television and film scripts. Her first, Keep on Running, appeared as part of the BBC’s Thirty-Minute Theatre series. Other credits included Magnolia Summer, Kippers and Curtains and The Children’s Teeth Are Set on Edge, which dealt with drug addicts on the streets of London. She also wrote the screenplay for A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, based on the letters of Isabella Bird, an English woman who rode through the Colorado mountains in 1873. Recently she adapted her novel The Testimony of Daniel Pagels for the screen. Her other novels included Lovers of Africa, Delicate Matters and Lost Heir. She died at her home is Los Angeles on April 4, 2006. She is survived by her husband, Michael J Shannon and her daughter, Caitlin.

Patrick Newley

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

Louis Hayward

TCM Overview:

Suavely handsome, often tongue-in-cheek leading man of the 1930s and 40s who began his career with a provincial theater company in England. Hayward came to Hollywood in the mid-30s and quickly established a second-rank level of stardom which lasted until the mid-50s. He more than held his own in a wide variety of films; his light touch with cynical, witty banter suited him well in drawing room comedies and romantic dramas (“The Flame Within” 1935, “The Rage of Paris” 1938, “Dance Girl Dance” 1940), but he regularly appeared in detective films and adventures as well. Often cast as somewhat roguish playboys, Hayward played the leading role in Rene Clair’s sterling adaptation of Agatha Christie’s mystery “And Then There Were None” (1945) and was fine in dual roles James Whale’s stylish version of “The Man in the Iron Mask” (1939).

The latter film prefigured the later contours of Hayward’s film career, as his athletic, romantic dash led him to be cast in many medium-budgeted swashbucklers, four of which (including “Fortunes of Captain Blood” 1950 and “The Lady in the Iron Mask” 1952, recalling his earlier triumph) teamed him with Patricia Medina. Hayward was married for a time to Ida Lupino, with whom he co-starred in the Gothic melodrama “Ladies in Retirement” (1941).

Los Angeles Times obituary in 1985:

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Louis Hayward, whose debonair charm and athletic good looks made him one of Hollywood’s most successful swashbuckling heroes of the 1930s and ‘40s, died Thursday at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs.

He was 75 and had spent the last year of his life in a battle against cancer, which he attributed to having smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for more than half a century.

A lifelong performer (“I did a Charlie Chaplin imitation for my mother when I was 6 and never really got over it,” he told friends), Hayward scored his first major screen success with the 1939 film, “The Man in the Iron Mask,” and spent the next decade starring in such adventure films as “The Son of Monte Cristo,” “The Saint in New York,” “The Black Arrow” and “Fortunes of Captain Blood.”

“I also did rather creditable acting jobs as the rotten seed in ‘My Son, My Son,’ and the villainous charmer in ‘Ladies in Retirement,’ ” he said ruefully. “But nobody really cared. They just handed me another sword and doublet and said ‘Smile!’ ”

Born March 19, 1909, in Johannesburg, South Africa, a few weeks after his mining engineer father was killed in an accident, Hayward was taken first to England and then to France, where he attended a number of schools under his real name, Seafield Grant.

He received early training in legitimate theater, appeared for a time with a touring company playing the provinces in England and then took over a small nightclub in London.

“Which is where my career really began,” he said. “Noel Coward came in one night; I managed to talk to him for a time and wound up wriggling into a small part in a West End company doing ‘Dracula.’ ”

He followed with roles in “The Vinegar Tree,” “Another Language” and “Conversation Piece” before going to New York, where a chance acquaintance with Alfred Lunt led to a role in the Broadway play, “Point Valaine,” for which he won the 1934 New York Critics Award.

His first Hollywood efforts in “The Flame Within” and “A Feather in Her Hat” were moderately successful, moderately well-received and almost instantly forgotten.

But then came the 1936 role of Denis Moore in “Anthony Adverse,” and studio officials began talking about stardom.

The dual role of Louis XIV and Philippe in “The Man in the Iron Mask” established Hayward as a swashbuckler and was followed by major roles in “And Then There Were None,” “The Duke of West Point” and similar vehicles.

Hayward, who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen the day before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, served three years in the Marine Corps during World War II, winning the Bronze Star for filming the battle of Tarawa under fire.

Formed Own Company

Returning to films after the war, he formed his own film company and was one of the first stars to demand and get a percentage of the profits from his pictures, which included “Repeat Performance,” “The Son of Dr. Jekyll,” “Lady in the Iron Mask,” “The Saint’s Girl Friday,” “Duffy of San Quentin” and “The Lone Wolf,” which he subsequently turned into a television series, playing the starring role in 78 episodes in the 1960s.

Hayward left Hollywood in the late 1950s to appear in a British television series, “The Pursuers,” returning for television appearances in “Studio One” and “Climax” anthology shows and returning to the stage as King Arthur, opposite Kathryn Grayson, in a Los Angeles Civic Light Opera production of “Camelot” in 1963.

His first two marriages, to actress Ida Lupino and to socialite Margaret Morrow, ended in divorce.

Hayward, who had lived in Palm Springs for the last 15 years, is survived by his wife, June, and a son, Dana. At his request, a family spokesman said, no funeral was planned.

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Louis Hayward (1909–1985) was the “thinking man’s swashbuckler.” While often compared to Errol Flynn, a critical analysis of Hayward’s career reveals a much more complex, psychologically driven actor. He was the first to bring a “noir” sensibility to the adventure genre, portraying heroes who were often as haunted and cynical as they were heroic.

As a protégé of Noël Coward and the first actor to play “The Saint” on screen, Hayward carved out a legacy defined by mercurial charm and technical precision.

I. Career Overview: From the West End to the High Seas

Act 1: The Coward Protégé (1930s)

Born in Johannesburg and educated in England, Hayward was discovered by Noël Coward. He became a star of the London stage in Conversation Piece (1934) before moving to Broadway and Hollywood. His early film roles, such as in The Flame Within (1935), established him as a sophisticated, sometimes volatile romantic lead.

Act 2: The Definitive “Saint” and Swashbuckler (1938–1950)

Hayward made cinema history as the first Simon Templar in The Saint in New York (1938). He then pivoted to the genre that would define him: the historical epic. He starred in the dual role of Louis XIV and Philippe in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), which set the gold standard for “twin” performances in early cinema.

Act 3: Post-War Noir and Television (1945–1970s)

After serving as a combat photographer in the Marine Corps during WWII (earning a Bronze Star), Hayward returned to Hollywood with a darker edge. He starred in the quintessential “Ten Little Indians” adaptation And Then There Were None (1945) and transitioned into television with the series The Pursuers.

II. Critical Analysis: The Architecture of the Anti-Hero

1. The “Bipolar” Performance: The Man in the Iron Mask

Hayward’s performance in this 1939 classic is a masterclass in physical and vocal contrast.

The Technique: To play the twin brothers, Hayward didn’t rely solely on costumes. He used two distinct vocal registers and completely different sets of facial tics. He portrayed Louis XIV as a preening, effeminate sociopath and Philippe as a grounded, rugged hero.
Critical Impact: Critics often note that Hayward’s Louis XIV was ahead of its time—a “camp” villain played with deadly, serious conviction. He managed to make the audience loathe and root for the same face simultaneously.

2. The Saint: Sophistication with a Switchblade

While many actors played Simon Templar, Hayward’s interpretation in The Saint in New York is considered the most “accurate” to Leslie Charteris’s original novels.

The Dark Edge: Unlike the later, more polished versions (like Roger Moore), Hayward’s Saint was a dangerous vigilante. He brought a mercenary coldness to the character’s charm.
Analysis: Critics point out that Hayward understood the “Saint” was a criminal who happened to be on the side of the law. He played the role with a “knowing smirk” that suggested he was always five minutes away from committing a crime himself.

3. The Post-War “Haunted” Hero

Hayward’s service in the Pacific deeply affected his later work. In the 1940s and 50s, his swashbucklers (like The Fortunes of Captain Blood) felt different from the escapism of the 30s.

Cynical Vitality: There was a “tightness” in his later performances—a sense of a man who had seen real violence. This added a layer of grit and realism to the adventure genre. He was one of the few actors who could make a sword fight look like a desperate struggle for survival rather than a choreographed dance.

III. Major Credits and Comparative Roles

Work	Medium	Role	Significance
*The Saint in New York*(1938)	Film	Simon Templar	Created the blueprint for the “Gentleman Rogue” on screen.
*The Man in the Iron Mask*(1939)	Film	Louis XIV / Philippe	His most technically impressive “dual” performance.
*And Then There Were None* (1945)	Film	Philip Lombard	A study in ensemble acting and post-war cynicism.
*The Son of Monte Cristo*(1940)	Film	Edmond Dantès, Jr.	Solidified his status as Errol Flynn’s primary “thinking” rival.
*House by the River* (1950)	Film	Stephen Byrne	A rare, terrifying turn as a murderous aristocrat for director Fritz Lang.

Adam Benedick’s obituary of Alexander Knox in “The Independent” in 1995:

The air bites keenly at the top of Ibsen’s mountains. It takes stamina on each side of the footlights to make the ascent a success; the atmosphere hums with metaphysics and metaphors. We were riding high at an Edinburgh Festival with the ’69 Theatre Company which had loomed up first at Hammersmith with Brand in 1958, a rare enough piece by Ibsen to stick for generations in the memory; and now 10 years later in the Edinburgh Assembly Hall came another resurrection, Michaell Elliott’s revival of When We Dead Awaken.

t would also, like Brand, end with an avalanche. The things Ibsen expected of his players and designers! Out of the mists of all this gloomy and daring symbolism, emerged the Canadian-Scottish actor Alexander Knox, stern, intense, authoritative, chilling, and supposedly a sculptor.

He was playing with drily persuasive conviction one of Ibsen’s artists rediscovering a soulmate – a sexually insensitive egotist and idealist whose relationship with his uninspiring and disenchanted wife makes way for a reunion with a former model.

She had sat for the ageing sculptor’s masterpiece without inciting his lust. She (Wendy Hiller) could never forgive him. He, the cold, high-principled thinker, was crucially unaware of her needs.

The spectacle, with lesser players, might have been laughable, but Ibsen, given the right director, can be marvellously bracing; and Knox, the stillest and sometimes subtlest of players, had us in his palm as he moved up the menacing mountain towards the inevitable symbol of personal failure – with the bride-like Hiller at his side. It may have been her evening in its dignified evasion of absurdity, but it was Knox who commanded that peninsular stage – Tyrone Guthrie’s famous but tricky invention – to an extent which drove away all irreverent thoughts while he was on it.

He had been powerful before, in his quiet way, on London stages. In Ugo Betti’s The Burnt Flowerbed (Arts, 1955) he had played another Ibsenish character of symbolic and highly imaginative importance; and more strikingly still in Clifford Odets’s Winter Journey (St James’s) he had succeeded Michael Redgrave as the flamboyantly neurotic and drunken American actor trying to make a comeback. Even before the Second World War he was something of a name in London. At the Old Vic he had played opposite Laurence Olivier as Dr McGilp in James Bridie’s The King of Nowhere, in which he had a particular success; and he was in several of Shaw’s later plays like Geneva (1938) and, at Malvern Festival, Good King Charles’s Golden Days.

At the Old Vic he had been noted in Ralph Richardson’s Othello for a “strongly humanised” Brabantio and for Emlyn Williams’s Richard III (as Catesby) he gave “a secret, dour-lipped performance” which left at least one critic guessing. It was however as Snout in Guthrie’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Knox’s acting “leapt to life” – “mournful of face with a voice dripping melancholy, and a shy nervous habit of running his hand through his hair and down his side – the very lyricism of woe”.

When a young actor provokes that kind of notice as one of the “rude mechanicals” his future as a comedian might seen assured, but it was not to be in comedy that Knox came to matter, but rather as a serious, even sombre classical actor.

After the outbreak of war he returned to America and was snapped up by Hollywood, again with little scope for comedy but with a gift for playing characters rather older than himself, such as President Woodrow Wilson in Wilson (in a chilling pince-nez), for which he was nominated as best actor of 1945 in the Academy Awards.

He also acted on Broadway, with some distinction, as Baron Tuzenbach in The Three Sisters and in Hollywood and the European cinema gave generally admired performances as professors, psychiatrists, judges, neurotics and other figures of usually grave authority. One of his more memorable screen appearances came opposite Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Europa 51, otherwise entitled No Greater Love; but back in England in the 1950s he had shown his quality in Guthrie’s Henry VIII at the Old Vic. Guthrie had a specific if distorted notion of Wolsey which made it impossible for Knox to be true to Shakespeare, but as several critics recognised, he remained true to his own gifts of passion, bitterness, ribaldry and irony.

Adam Benedick

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

Alexander Knox, actor: born Strathroy, Ontario 16 January 1907; married Doris Nolan; died Berwick-upon-Tweed 26 April 1995.

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