British Actors Archives - Page 43 of 136

Bob Hoskins

“He’s a character man. Nature made him thus. When you see a photograph you can (if you know him) hear his loud north London voice, not a pretty thing. But he does not always use his voice in that way: he can change, as varied an actors as films have ever seen. His work has a quality of rawness, of hurt, of awareness that suddenly this – fame, success – will disappear. Working-class actors like Hoskins seldom get to the top branches of show business. They may, in the clarified terms of British cinema, be clowns or comics but never a leading man. Michael Caine is another exception, and in his case a look of surprise permeated his early performances. Hoskins is a more rounded performer, if usually cast in strong roles. In the U.S. he has been compared to Edward G. Robinson and George C. Scott: comparisons in Britain would be James Mason or Oliver Reed, both of whose careers were very different.” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The Independent Years”. (1991).

Bob Hoskins was born in Bury St Edmonds, West Suffolk in 1942. A popular character actor, he became a star in 1980 with his performance as the East End gangster in “The Long Good Friday”. His other movie credits include “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, “Neverland” and “Mona Lisa”. He announced his retirement from acting in 2012. He died in 2014.

Ryan Gibney’s “Guardian” obituary:

Plenty of better-looking performers than Bob Hoskins, who has died aged 71 of pneumonia, have found themselves consigned to a life of bit parts. Short, bullet-headed, lacking any noticeable neck, but with a mutable face that could switch from snarling to sparkling in the time it took him to drop an aitch, Hoskins was far from conventional leading-man material. In his moments of on-screen rage, he resembled a pink grenade. But he was defined from the outset by a mix of the tough and the tender that served him well throughout his career.

As the beleaguered, optimistic sheet-music salesman in the BBC series Pennies from Heaven (1978), written by Dennis Potter, he was sweetly galumphing and sincere. Playing an ambitious East End gangster in The Long Good Friday (1980), he added an intimidating quality to the vulnerability already established. Hoskins could be poodle or pitbull; as a reluctant driver for a prostitute in Mona Lisa (1986) and a patiently calculating murderer in Felicia’s Journey (1999), he was a cross-breed of the two. No other actor has a more legitimate claim on the title of the British Cagney.

When international success came in the mid-1980s, Hoskins made not the least modification to his persona or perspective, maintaining the down-to-earth view: “Actors are just entertainers, even the serious ones. That’s all an actor is. He’s like a serious Bruce Forsyth.”

Born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and raised in north London, he was the only child of Robert, a bookkeeper, and Elsie, a teacher and school cook. Bob left school at the age of 15 and took various jobs – bouncer, porter, window cleaner, fire-eater – after dropping out of an accountancy course. Accompanying a friend to an audition at the Unity theatre, London, in 1968, Hoskins landed a part. He acted in television and theatre in the early 1970s; Pennies from Heaven, filmed shortly after the acrimonious collapse of his marriage to Jane Livesey, secured his reputation and showed him to be an actor as deft as he was vanity-free (he likened himself in that musical drama to a “little hippopotamus”).

In The Long Good Friday, he showed the charismatic swagger necessary to fill a cinema screen, though it was the picture’s final shot – a protracted close-up of Hoskins’s defiant face – that sticks most indelibly in the memory. In 1981, he played Iago opposite Anthony Hopkins in Jonathan Miller’s BBC adaptation of Othello and also met Linda Banwell. The following year she became his second wife, and the person he would credit with helping him survive periods of depression. He wrote a play, The Bystander, inspired by the nervous breakdown he suffered after his first marriage ended.

For more than a decade, he did little television; there were only a handful of exceptions, including some ubiquitous television commercials for British Telecom in which he delivered the catchphrase “It’s good to talk”. He concentrated predominantly on his film career. Highlights included his playful odd-couple double act with Fred Gwynne in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984), and his portrayal of a down-at-heel businessman wooing an alcoholic piano teacher (Maggie Smith) in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987). He was amusing in a cameo as a heating engineer in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and as a coarse screenwriter in the comedy Sweet Liberty (1986), one of four films he made with his friend Michael Caine.

oskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/REX

Hoskins’s pivotal roles in that period could not have been more different. Playing the belligerent but kind-hearted ex-con in Mona Lisa, Neil Jordan’s London film noir, won him many awards (including a Golden Globe and the best actor prize at Cannes), as well as his only Oscar nomination. A year later, he took on his greatest technical challenge in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Robert Zemeckis’s fusion of live action and animation, in which Hoskins was one of the film’s few flesh-and-blood participants.

In the wake of the film’s success, he worked widely in Hollywood: with Denzel Washington in the comic thriller Heart Condition, and Cher in Mermaids (both 1990) and playing Smee (a role he reprised on TV in the 2011 Neverland) in Spielberg’s Hook (1991). The chief catalyst of his disillusionment with Hollywood was his work on the disastrous 1993 videogame spin-off Super Mario Bros. His parts in US films were intermittent thereafter, and included playing J Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995). “You don’t go to Hollywood for art,” he said in 1999, “and once you’ve got your fame and fortune – especially the fortune in the bank – you can do what you want to do. It’s basically fuck-you money.”

Hoskins directed two undistinguished features – a fable, The Raggedy Rawney (1988), and the family film Rainbow (1995) – but claimed: “I just got fandangled into it.” If it is true that, in common with Caine, he made too many films purely for the money, it is also the case that he never lost touch entirely with his own talents. Although he dredged up his brutal side on occasion, such as in the action thriller Unleashed (2005), tenderness predominated in later years. He played a wistful boxing coach in Shane Meadows’s Twenty Four Seven (1997), and appeared alongside his Long Good Friday co-star, Helen Mirren, in the bittersweet 2001 film of Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders, about a group of friends scattering the ashes of their dead chum (played by Caine).

He co-starred with Judi Dench in Stephen Frears’s Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and played a loner coming late to love in Sparkle (2007), as well as a sympathetic union rep standing up for Ford’s female employees in Made in Dagenham (2010).

In 2012, at 69, he announced his retirement after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His last screen role came as one of the seven dwarves in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), in which his face was superimposed on another actor’s body. But he was characteristically subtle as a publican standing up to thugs in Jimmy McGovern’s BBC series The Street (2009), for which he won an International Emmy award.

Hoskins is survived by Linda; their children, Rosa and Jack; and Alex and Sarah, the children of his first marriage.

• Robert William Hoskins, actor, born 26 October 1942; died 29 April 2014

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

Constance Cummings was an American actress whose fame stems from her career in Britain. She was born in 1910 in Seattle, Washington State in the U.S. She went to Hollywood in 1931 and made twenty films there until 1934. That year she moved to the U.K. after her marriage to the British playwright Benn Levy. Among her film credits are “Blythe Spirit” in 1945, “The Battle of the Sexes” in 1959 and “In the Cool of the Day” in 1963. She had an extensive stage career in the West End. She died in 2005 at the age of 95.

Eric Shorter’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

Constance Cummings, who has died aged 95, was a Broadway chorus girl who met the English playwright Benn Wolfe Levy in Hollywood before the second world war and became one of the most accomplished film and stage actors on either side of the Atlantic.

Whether in tragedy, farce, comedy or melodrama, Cummings, the daughter of a Seattle lawyer and a concert soprano, seldom failed to surprise. From being what a London critic, in 1934, called “a film star who can act”, she learned, under her husband’s direction, how to play (as James Agate put it) “anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter”. It was in one of Levy’s plays, Young Madame Conti (1936), that Agate decided she “immediately takes rank, even on the strength of one performance, as an contestably fine emotional actress”. In Goodbe Mr Chips, he thought her “the most beautiful thing of the evening”, reminding him “of the fragrance and pathos, sensitiveness and radiance of the great actresses of our youth”.

How did this upstart American blonde with the peaches-and-cream complexion, beautifully waved hair and feminine curves become an actor of such exceptional power? It is true that her finest achievements – The Shrike, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Wings – were all American plays, and that many of her West End successes were in her husband’s plays, or in plays he directed.

All the same, here was a talent, best known on the screen, which turned to the theatre with sustained success and in the highest reaches of that art. Not everything she did bowled everyone over, while her looks did sometimes get in the way. As Robert Donat’s Juliet (1939), for example, with the Old Vic company in wartime exile at Buxton and at Streatham Hill, she admitted: “I didn’t know how to read the verses. That was a sloppy thing. I should have had more sense.”

In the West End, however, it was the sparkling personality, wit and virtually invisible technique that made her art so attractive, especially in her husband’s sophisticated pieces – such as Clutterbuck (1946), Return to Tyassi (1950), The Rape of the Belt (1957) and Public and Confidential (1966), in which her line in mordant comedy as an MP’s secretary-mistress was needle-sharp.

But the depths of her emotional potential, tantalisingly glimpsed as the anxious wife of Michael Redgrave’s alcoholic actor in Clifford Odets’s Winter Journey (1952), remained veiled until Joseph Kramm’s The Shrike. Here, opposite Sam Wanamaker, Cummings disclosed an arresting side to her talent – “a spiked knuckle duster in a velvet glove,” as Kenneth Hurren put it.

Meanwhile, at the Oxford Playhouse Frank Hauser could offer a taste of the true classics in Lysistrata (1957), in which she proved alluringly militant. In 1962, she played a double bill of Sartre’s Huis Clos and Max Beerbohm’s A Social Success, followed by Aldous Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess.

The Huxley play (which promptly moved into the West End) was right up her street: an adorable, ravishing, witty and self-possessed hostess. On the other hand, Sartre’s ugly lesbian, Inez, was not. At first, Cummings was “horrified”. Until, that was, rehearsals, when she began to enjoy it. “I found little seeds of her dreadfulness in myself, things I could build on. It was a marvellous liberation. I’d never opened myself before and taken such a plunge.”

Most playgoers had to wait, though, for her Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1964) to realise this branch of the talent. It cannot have been easy to follow Uta Hagen’s famous ferocity, but I shall never forget it because I never supposed it possible. What Cummings did amid all the sound and fury was to hint at an element of feminine refinement.

Here, then, was a neo-tragedienne. But as Gertrude to Nicol Williamson’s controversial Hamlet (1969), her art did not thrive, nor did it in 1971 when she joined Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre in Coriolanus, playing Volumnia to Anthony Hopkins in the title role.

The same year yielded Cummings’ finest hour, as Mary Tyrone, frail matriarch to an Irish-American family ruled by Laurence Olivier’s actor-father in Michael Blakemore’s revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night. Here Cummings found an authority, pathos and emotional integrity which had the house holding its breath before and after her every entrance. The transformation from a gentle maternal presence to fully-fledged morphine addict was a triumph of artistic delicacy.

There were no comparable triumphs to come, though her Madame Ranevsky, to Michael Hordern’s Gaev in a revival at the National of The Cherry Orchard (1973) was well received, and as a mentally ill woman trying to recover from a stroke in Arthur Kopit’s Wings, at the Cottesloe in 1978, she was judged superb, though some thought the tug at the emotions too obvious. The performance won a Tony award on Broadway.

If, by chance, there was nothing doing in London, Cummings would go to the regions, where most of the best acting parts were usually to be found – in Tennessee Williams (The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More) at Glasgow, Bernard Shaw (Mrs Warren’s Profession) at Bristol, Edward Albee (All Over) at Brighton, Somerset Maugham (The Circle) at Guildford or Friedrich Durrenmatt (The Visit) at Coventry. Her last West End performance was in Uncle Vanya in 1999.

Her husband, whom she married in 1933, died in 1973. After his death, she kept up their 600-acre dairy farm in the village of Cote, Oxfordshire. Levy had been a Labour MP in the postwar Atlee government, and Cummings supported causes such as Amnesty and Liberty, and did much work for the Actors’ Charitable Trust. She received in 1974 the CBE.

She is survived by her children Jonathan and Jemina.

Ronald Bergan writes: In 1930, the 20-year-old Cummings was brought to Hollywood by Sam Goldwyn to co-star with Ronald Colman in The Devil to Pay, but was replaced at the last minute by 17-year-old Loretta Young. However, her disappointment was allayed when Columbia Pictures snapped her up, gave her a contract and cast her as prison warden Walter Huston’s naive daughter in Howard Hawks’s The Criminal Code the following year.

Columbia was so impressed by this debut that they starred Cummings in 10 films in two years, even though most were modest productions. The exception was Frank Capra’s New Deal fantasy, American Madness (1932), in which, with much charm and passion, she played a bank employee supporting her boss’s determination to lend money on the collateral of his clients’ good characters.

After leaving Columbia, Cummings went freelance, enabling her to appear in one of her most delightful films, the Harold Lloyd comedy, Movie Crazy (1932). In Night after Night (also 1932), as a classy lady with whom George Raft is in love, she managed to shine even after the entry of Mae West, in her screen debut. Her final Hollywood film before leaving for England was the comedy-whodunit Remember Last Night? (1935), with Robert Young.

In England, Americans Robert Montgomery and Cummings were unaccountably cast in Busman’s Honeymoon (1940), as Lord Peter Wimsey and his mystery writer wife, Harriet Vane. She did get to play a brave American ally in The Foreman Went to France (1942), and was convincing as the upper middle-class wife of Rex Harrison in David Lean’s Blithe Spirit (1945). The problem was that Cummings was far more attractive than Kay Hammond in the role of Harrison’s first wife.

Among Cummings’s few films in the 1950s was The Intimate Stranger (1956), directed by blacklisted Joseph Losey (under the pseudonym Joseph Walton). In it, she played a film star causing problems for director Richard Basehart. Her last really good film role was in Charles Crichton’s The Battle of the Sexes (1959), as Mrs Barrow, the American efficiency expert sent to modernise an Edinburgh textile firm. Seeing his way of life threatened, the mild accountant (Peter Sellers) tries to murder her. Cummings was so unsympathetic that audiences willed him on. Unfortunately, the cinema’s loss was theatre’s gain, and she was seen only rarely in films after that.

· Constance Cummings Levy, actor, born May 15 1910; died November 23 2005

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

Rupert Friend. TCM Overview.

Rupert Friend was born in 1981 in Oxfordshire. He made his film debut with Joan Plowright in “Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont” in 2005. Other movies include “Pride and Prejudice”, “The Moon and the Stars” and “5 Days of War”.

TCM Overview:

Armed with an ability to play both the refined gentlemen and the uncultured street thug with equal believability, British actor Rupert Friend quickly built up an impressive résumé within a few short years. Following his small, but memorable feature film debut opposite a debauched Johnny Depp in the historical drama “The Libertine” (2004), the actor attracted more attention with a supporting turn in a well-received adaptation of “Pride & Prejudice” (2005). The dashing young performer also caught the eye of the film’s leading lady, Keira Knightley, who Friend would date for the next five years. As an actor, he took risks with often unconventional roles in such projects as the heartbreaking Holocaust drama “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” (2008) and the sexually-charged, tragic love story “Cheri” (2009), opposite Michelle Pfeiffer. A starring turn as a man who overcomes childhood horrors and a life of crime to become a successful author in the British biopic “The Kid” (2010) preceded his breakout role on American television as CIA analyst Peter Quinn on the acclaimed action-drama “Homeland” (Showtime, 2011- ), alongside series star Claire Danes. From the beginning of his diverse career, Friend consistently demonstrated a willingness to take on challenging roles – a work ethic that soon delivered critical and popular success for the promising young actor.

Rupert Friend was born on Oct. 1, 1981 in Oxfordshire, England and was raised in Stonesfield, Oxfordshire. His father was a business owner and his mother worked for an organization which specialized in immigration, asylum, and human rights. Friend attended The Marlborough School in Woodstock, as well as the Cherwell School and d’Overbroeck’s College in Oxford. Although he grew up in a house without a VCR, the acting bug bit him when he first saw “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989) at a local theater. Soon determined to develop his acting skills, he enrolled at the prestigious Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, a university whose other famous alumni included Hugh Bonneville, Matthew Goode, Julian Fellowes and Minnie Driver.

Friend’s professional acting career took off quickly when he landed a supporting role in the film “The Libertine” (2004) opposite Johnny Depp and John Malkovich. In the movie, he played Billy Downs, the handsome lover of John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester (Depp). Friend’s performance in the historical drama did not go unrecognized; in 2005, he garnered a Most Promising Newcomer nomination at the British Independent Film Awards and a Best International Newcomer nomination at the Ischia Global Film Festival in 2006. Friend followed up with a minor role in first-time director Joe Wright’s youthful adaptation of Jane Austin’s beloved 19th-century tale of life, love and gentrified marriage, “Pride & Prejudice” (2005). Though the film performed well at box offices internationally and garnered a quartet of Oscar nominations, the more lasting windfall for the actor would be the budding romance between Friend and star Keira Knightley that blossomed on set. The relationship with the high-wattage actress would put Friend on the front pages of U.K. tabloids for the majority of the couple’s five-year-relationship.

With his first starring role, Friend earned high praise for his performance opposite Dame Joan Plowright in the heartwarming drama “Mrs. Palfrey at The Claremont” (2005), which found a young writer and an elderly woman striking up an unexpected, but mutually beneficial relationship, despite their vast age difference. Possessing the self-assuredness of a far more seasoned performer, the young actor was quickly gaining a reputation as one to watch. In increasingly high demand, Friend appeared in slew of films soon after, among them the period romantic drama “The Moon and the Stars” (2007), the urban action-drama “Outlaw” (2007) and the Roman Empire adventure tale “The Last Legion” (2007), the latter of which paired Friend with such acting luminaries as Colin Firth and Sir Ben Kingsley. In a risky move so early in his career, Friend accepted a supporting role as a vicious SS officer in an adaptation of John Boyne’s controversial Holocaust novel “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” (2008). In the film – which followed the unexpected friendship between the young son (Asa Butterfield) of an concentration camp commandant (David Thewlis) and a Jewish boy (Jack Scanlon) imprisoned at the death camp – Friend delivered a fearlessly despicable performance as the preening young Lt. Kotler.

For his first stateside production, Friend worked alongside rapidly rising talent Jessica Chastain in the indie coming-of-age drama “Jolene” (2008). Back in more familiar territory, he portrayed Prince Albert, the man who would court and marry the heir to the British Crown (Emily Blunt) in the lavish historical drama “The Young Victoria” (2009). That same year, Friend earned high marks for his starring turn in director Stephen Frear’s sensuous dramedy “Cheri” (2009). Cast as a spoiled young man whose lengthy May-December romance with an aging courtesan (Michelle Pfeiffer) both liberates and destroys him, Friend once again showed impressive acting ability alongside a far more experienced screen veteran. Knightley joined her talented boyfriend on screen once again for a small appearance in “The Continuing and Lamentable Saga of the Suicide Brothers” (2009), a short fantasy film written by Friend and Tom Mison, a chum from his days at Webber Douglas. Unfortunately, the collaboration would mark one of the final mutual appearances for the couple, either on or off-screen, after which Friend and Knightley called it quits the following year, citing the pressure of constant media attention as a primary cause.

Down but not out, Friend threw himself into his work for his next role, the title character of the gritty biographical drama “The Kid” (2010). For his role as British author Kevin Lewis, Friend trained vigorously with professional boxers to convincingly play the young man who escaped a violent, abusive childhood in South London to make a better life for himself and his family. That same year, he also starred in the romantic drama “Lullaby for Pi” (2010) as a washed up jazz singer who develops a strange relationship with a mysterious female artist (Clemence Poesy) who has locked herself up in his hotel bathroom. Also in 2010, Friend made his stage debut as Mitchell in the U.K. premiere of “The Little Dog Laughed,” playing a closeted Hollywood actor whose devious agent arranges a “beard” marriage in an effort to save his client’s burgeoning career.

Returning to screens, Friend next starred as a war journalist attempting to bring the horrors of the 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict to the attention of an apathetic world public in director Renny Harlin’s overlooked action-drama “5 Days of War” (2011). He took on a much smaller role in “Renee” (2012), a biopic chronicling a young girl’s (Kat Dennings) struggle with addiction and self-abuse on the road to recovery and, eventually, serving as the inspiration for a charitable organization. It was, however, on American cable television that Friend made his greatest inroads with U.S. audiences that same year. Beginning with the hit show’s second season, the British actor ditched his accent and joined the cast of the anti-terrorism thriller “Homeland” (Showtime, 2011- ) as a young CIA analyst thrust into the middle of an ongoing illicit investigation into the activities of a decorated war hero (Damian Lewis) suspected by a troubled agency operative (Claire Danes) of being a sleeper terrorist. Friend’s witty and cocky portrayal of Peter Quinn earned him high marks alongside his Emmy-winning co-stars and quickly established him as a fan-favorite on the popular new series.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

To view “Interview” Magazine article on Rupert Friend, please click here.

IMDB entry:

Adam Godley is a film, television and theatre actor. He is a Tony Award nominee and has been nominated three times for the Olivier Award. He began his acting career at the age of 9, in a BBC radio production of Hemingway’s My Old Man. His first stage role came at age 11, as Prince Giovanni in The White Devil at The Old Vic. His childhood career also included work at London’s National Theatre, in Lillian Helman’s Watch on the Rhine, and Close of Play, directed by Harold Pinter.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: JANTEE MHORR

Per Wikipedia:

Adam Godley began his acting career at the age of 9, in a BBC radio production of Hemingway’s My Old Man. His first stage role came at age 11, as Prince Giovanni in The White Devil at the Old Vic Theatre. His childhood career also included work at the National Theatre, in Lillian Helman’s Watch on the Rhine, and Close of Play, directed by Harold Pinter.

Joan Plowright was born in Brigg, Lincolnshire on October 28, 1929, she received her training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and made her professional stage debut at Croydon in 1948. Her Londondebut came in 1954, and two years later, she joined George Devine‘s English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, which would change her life just as the drama at the Royal Court revolutionized the English theater.

The Royal Court’s 1956 production of John Osborne‘s _Look Back In Anger’ was a watershed in English theatrical history, ushering in the ‘Angry Young Man” era in British cultural life. In 1957, Plowright first co-starred with her future husband Olivier in the Royal Court’s production of Osborne’s The Entertainer (1960) when she took over the role of Archie Rice’s daughter Jean Rice when the play transferred to a commercial venue in the West End. She recreated the role in Tony Richardson‘s 1960 film of the play.

To escape the notoriety from Olivier’s divorce from Vivien Leigh, Plowright and Olivier went to New York, where they appeared on Broadway, he inBecket (1964) and she in A Taste of Honey (1961). For her performance as Josephine, which Rita Tushingham played in the movie version, she won a 1961 Tony Award as Best Actress in a Play. (She had first appeared on Broadway in a twin bill of Eugène Ionesco‘s “The Chairs” and “The Lesson” in January 1958, a month before she appeared with Olivier in “The Entertainer”.) When his divorce from Leigh came through, they were married in March 1961 in New York with Richard Burton as Larry’s best man.

From 1963 onward, she was a member of the National Theatre, which was headed by Olivier. Plowright created a distinguished stage career and was acclaimed when she began appearing more frequently in movies and television starting in the the 1980s. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the female equivalent of a knighthood, in the 2004 Queen’s New Year Honours.

Plowright divorced her first husband, the actor Roger Gage, to marry Olivier in 1961 and they had three children, Richard Kerr Olivier, Tamsin Olivierand Julie Kate Olivier.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

The times obituary in 2024.

From the time she married Sir Laurence Olivier in 1961 Joan Plowright became, in effect, two people. She was Lady Olivier, wife of the most formidable actor of his time and inevitably in his shadow, but also a promising young actress determined to pursue a career in her own right. “I had my own style and my own individuality. I was swept off my feet emotionally by him: there was no need to be swept off theatrically,” she said. Once asked what it was like to “live with a legend”, she replied deftly: “No one is a legend in their own home. He lives like any member of the human race.”

Her record on stage put her alongside such near-contemporaries as Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. First making her mark in the new British drama of the Fifties, she went on to embrace the classical repertoire with particular success in Chekhov, her favourite playwright, and Bernard Shaw.Her gift for comedy enhanced much of her work and she enjoyed long West End runs in the plays of the Italian writer Eduardo De Filippo. Apart from an effective Portia opposite Olivier’s Shylock she did comparatively little Shakespeare, never attempting the tragic heights of Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra.

The marriage was a success, despite unhelpful omens. Olivier was 22 years her senior, with two failed marriages behind him. To Plowright’s mother, who was against the match, he was little more than a philanderer. Soon after marrying Plowright, seemingly true to form, he embarked on an on-off affair with the even younger Sarah Miles.

Yet his union with “Joanie”, as he called her, was based on deep and genuine love, produced three children and endured until his death in 1989, aged 82. “My relationship with her brought a new kind of headiness in its rapture,” he said. For Plowright, however, the marriage was never easy. “I loved him so much I would have died for him, but there were times when I didn’t know how to live with him,” she reflected in one interview in 2001. Nevertheless, she insisted their commitment to each other was total.

When Olivier became director of the National Theatre and took her with him as a leading player, she was aware that her position in the company could be seen as favouritism. She wanted to break free and do other work; Olivier, however, would not let her go. When she asked for leave of absence to do a play in the West End, he not only opposed it but threatened to resign from the National if she went ahead. Some years later, he even more vehemently opposed her return to the National in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, through a solicitor’s letter, threatened divorce, only to deny all knowledge and offer Plowright a remorseful apology.

By this time Olivier’s recurrent illnesses, including cancer and pneumonia, which had twice brought him near to death, meant that he could no longer take on the amount of work he had been used to. He found it hard to accept that Plowright was the one working and, as she put it, “earning a necessary addition to our income”.

Joan Ann Plowright was born in Brigg, Lincolnshire, in 1929, the second of three children. Her father, William, was the editor of a local newspaper, the Scunthorpe and Frodingham Gazette, but the greater influence was her mother Daisy (née Burton), an aspiring ballerina and keen amateur actress and singer, who produced plays for the local youth club and painted scenery in the garden. Attached to their home was a wooden playhouse built by her father, which was named “Bohemia” and became the centre of family life. Friends gathered there and the children performed concerts and plays. “My mother had a reputation for being an outstanding local actress and she channelled her enthusiasm back to us,” Plowright said. In 2018 she appeared in the playful documentary Nothing Like a Dame with her fellow thespian dames Smith, Dench and Eileen Atkins. In it, Plowright recalled her mother’s words when she told her she was going into acting: “You’re no oil painting, but you’ve got the spark and thank God you have my legs and not your father’s.

While at Scunthorpe Grammar School she played Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal and won a trophy at a local drama festival. “I had a nagging inner compulsion to do well. I wasn’t always near the top although I might have seemed a model schoolgirl; inside I felt out of place. Above all else, I envied my brother [David] his carefree, buoyant attitude — even in failure.” She and David were “tremendous show-offs”, she recalled. “On Saturday nights, when there was a local dance, we would perform some flashy routine together.” David became a director of Granada Television, while their older brother Bob went on to be an organist and taught at Trinity College of Music.

After studying at the Rudolf von Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester, Plowright successfully auditioned for the Old Vic Theatre School in London where she was taught by George Devine, Glen Byam Shaw and Michel Saint-Denis. Devine said she did by instinct what others had to learn. At this time she saw Olivier as Hamlet in the cinema and wrote to her mother that it was “pure, unadulterated ham”.

While her future husband would later declare that “her very name was enough to make me think thoughts of love”, her first acting agent was unconvinced by it. “He thought Joan Plowright sounded like a trade. Like ploughs and agriculture,” she recalled. “He suggested something like Desiree Day. I said there was no way I could live up to that. I didn’t change my name — I changed my agent.

From drama school she went into rep at the Bristol Old Vic and made her London debut in The Duenna, a musical version of Sheridan’s play by Julian Slade. A year later, in 1955, she played Pip, the mad cabin boy, in Orson Welles’s London production of Moby Dick. She was in a Peter Ustinov play at Nottingham when Devine invited her to join his English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Although the company’s aim was to feature work by new writers, and it was put on the map by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Plowright got her first leading role as Margery Pinchwife in Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife. Olivier saw her on stage for the first time and was, as he later wrote, “entranced

In 1957 Olivier, in a bold attempt to embrace the new drama, joined the Court to play the fading music-hall comedian Archie Rice in Osborne’s The Entertainer. When the production moved to the West End Plowright took over the part of Archie’s daughter. Off stage, a relationship soon blossomed, though Plowright was initially wary of committing herself to a man with a reputation for flirting with young actresses. But her heart was “touched by the bleakness in his face when he wasn’t acting or flirting”, she wrote years later.

There were several complications: Plowright had been married since 1953 to a fellow actor, Roger Gage, and Olivier was still married to Vivien Leigh, whose increasingly erratic behaviour, the result of manic depression, was making a break inevitable, though Leigh would not agree to a divorce.

In 1958 Plowright made her New York debut in a double bill by the absurdist writer Eugène Ionesco, playing a 90-year-old in The Chairs and a 17-year-old pupil in The Lesson. She later joined Olivier in the Broadway production of The Entertainer. Back at the Royal Court she repeated the Ionesco plays and starred in Shaw’s Major Barbara. The play that established her, though, was Arnold Wesker’s Roots, in which she created the role of Beatie Bryant, the Norfolk farm girl whose ideas are transformed by a visit to the metropolis. The production opened at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry and transferred to the Royal Court in June 1959. After watching her performance, the critic WA Darlington called her “one of the most accomplished, quite the most interesting and easily the most versatile of our young leading actresses”.

In 1960, while she was appearing with Olivier in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court, Leigh made a statement to the press in New York that Olivier had asked for a divorce in order to marry Plowright. It was the first time the affair had been made public. Fearing the publicity, Plowright left the play and went into hiding for a time, before resurfacing later in the year in New York in another career-defining role, as Jo in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. It won her a Tony award..

Olivier had followed her to New York to play in Anouilh’s Becket and in March 1961, both having secured divorces, they were married in Wilton, Connecticut, in a short and low-key ceremony. Both were anxious not to be recognised, though the registrar perhaps went a little too far.

“Name?” she asked.
“Laurence Olivier.”
“Profession?”
“Actor.”
“Are you?” the registrar said. “How very nice.”.

The couple’s son, Richard, was born later that year: he became a theatre director and writer. They went on to have two daughters, Tamsin and Julie Kate, who both became actresses and keen yoga teachers, giving lessons to their mother and her actress friends. Plowright took two years off from acting after the birth of each child but always found herself pining for the stage. It was a “compulsive obsession”, she said, because acting for her was “as necessary as breathing”.

For many years the family home was a 15th-century malt house near Brighton with a swimming pool, tennis court and cook, where Plowright enjoyed gardening, painting and playing the piano. She and Olivier kept a home in London for entertaining, but wanted to be based outside the city “to have a separate life”. She said: “It was very important to me, and to Larry, that the children should have a childhood that wasn’t simply as an accessory to our lives.” They were sent to board at Bedales and, after revealing their embarrassment at being picked up from school in their father’s Bentley, he swapped the car. “Larry bought a London taxi to pick them up in, a purple one.”

During 1962 Olivier became artistic director of the new Chichester Festival Theatre, in effect (though this was not the original intention) a dry run for the National Theatre, which was launched at the Old Vic in October 1963. The National’s first season included two Chichester transfers, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with Plowright as Sonya, and Shaw’s Saint Joan, in which she made a resilient heroine.

She went on to succeed Maggie Smith as Hilde Wangel in Ibsen’s The Master Builder. Other roles for the National included a touching Masha in Olivier’s production of The Three Sisters and an intelligent Portia to Olivier’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, directed by Jonathan Miller. Her husband took on the part only after Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield declined but it was one of the most successful Olivier-Plowright partnerships.

In 1972 she finally managed to break free of the National and returned to Chichester, where she was a gentle, sympathetic Jennifer in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma and a mischievous Kate in The Taming of the Shrew opposite Anthony Hopkins. The next year at Greenwich Theatre she played Rebecca in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, a study in emotional crescendo with a bitter climax.

As the National passed, in 1973, into Peter Hall’s hands, she gave a fine performance in De Filippo’s Neapolitan comedy Saturday, Sunday, Monday — as Rosa, a house-proud Italian signora, busy with a stew in which the onions were detectable from the stalls. A sell-out success which transferred to the West End, it was the first of several fruitful, if often difficult, collaborations between Plowright and the volatile director Franco Zeffirelli.

Mature women were her meat now. In 1975, with Helen Mirren and others, she formed the Lyric Theatre company under the direction of Lindsay Anderson. She gave a sympathetic Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, then a richly comic performance as a middle-aged woman who belatedly discovers sex in The Bed Before Yesterday by the veteran farceur Ben Travers. Another award came in 1978, from the Society of West End Theatre, for an exquisitely funny performance in De Filippo’s Filumena Marturano, as a retired prostitute with three adult sons and a husband not certainly the father of any of them. Again directed by Zeffirelli, it ran for two years at the Lyric but a New York production, directed by Olivier, lasted only six weeks.

To her collection of fine Shaw performances she added Mrs Warren in Mrs Warren’s Profession at the National, her characteristic humour lurking below the surface. In 1986 she played the housekeeper to Glenda Jackson’s widow in Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba.

The year after Olivier’s death in 1989 she felt an urge to get back to work — “Larry wouldn’t want me to be a widow sitting around in weeds and weeping” — and played Mrs Conway in JB Priestley’s Time and the Conways at the Old Vic. Her fondness for Priestley dated back to her childhood, when she would listen to his popular wartime Postscripts on the wireless. The Old Vic production was a family affair: her daughters were both in the cast and the director was her son, Richard.

Afterwards she did little on stage until 2003 when she teamed up with Zeffirelli again in the West End on Pirandello’s typically teasing Absolutely! (Perhaps). It was a production of style rather than substance but Plowright won praise for her haunting performance as the old woman who may or may not be insane.

Apart from film versions of her stage work, such as The Entertainer and The Three Sisters, she largely ignored the cinema until the late 1970s when she played the mother of the troubled boy in Equus, with Richard Burton. He arrived on the first day of rehearsals wearing a mink-lined raincoat, polished shoes and an entourage to clear the way. “We were in sneakers and jeans,” she recalled. “Richard came that way because it was expected of him on every other film.” She was in Peter Greenaway’s enigmatic Drowning by Numbers, went to Hollywood for the black comedy I Love You to Death and was one of four Englishwomen on holiday in Italy in the 1920s in Enchanted April (1991). Dismissed as handsome to look at but dramatically slight when it was shown on the BBC, it became a surprise success in the United States and won Plowright a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.

Later films were mainly forgettable until she returned to Italy for Tea with Mussolini (1999), directed by Zeffirelli and based on his boyhood in Florence in the 1930s when he was looked after by English expats.

Television was the least important of her outlets but she acted with Olivier in James Bridie’s Daphne Laureola and in a revival of Saturday, Sunday, Mondayduring a season of plays in the 1970s presented by Olivier under the auspices of her TV executive brother, David. She was Meg in Pinter’s The Birthday Party, played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest and won a second Golden Globe for a biopic of Stalin. In the late 1990s she starred as the Italian mother of Nathan Lane’s failed opera singer in Encore! Encore!, an American comedy from the makers of Cheers and Frasier.
Plowright was appointed CBE in 1970 and DBE in 2004 and had a theatre named after her in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, near her birthplace. Her memoir, And That’s Not All, was published in 2001.

After Olivier’s death she and her children gathered every Christmas at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, where his ashes are interred, to sing carols, light candles and tell stories about his life.
Cynics had predicted their marriage would never last, but death alone had parted them. Reflecting on the lead role he had played in her life, she said: “Just being Larry’s Joan would not have been enough. We didn’t meet on those terms. We met on stage as artists and we fell in love.

Anna Lee was born in Kent in 1913. She began her career in 1930’s British movies such as “King Solamon’s Mines” with Paul Robson in 1937 and “Non-Stop New York”. In the late 1930’s she and her husband the film director Robert Stevenson went to Hollywood and she made many movies with John Ford, including “How Green Was My Valley” in 1941, “Ford Apache” in 1948, “The Horse Soldiers” in 1959 and 2Seven Women” in 1965. Her other movies include “Bedlam”, “The Ghost and Mrs Muir”, “The Sound of Music” and “Our Man Flint”. She starred in the long running TV soap “General Hospital” from 1978 until 2004. She died at the age of 91 in 2004.

Richard Chatten’s obituary on Anna Lee in “The Independent”:

Spirited, extremely pretty and a natural blonde, but far too refined and school-marmish for standard Hollywood stardom (the playwright Bertolt Brecht, with characteristic gallantry, dismissed her as “a smooth, characterless doll”), it would be rash to make any great claims on Anna Lee’s behalf as an actress, but it was always a pleasure to see her and she could be very effective when well cast.

Ads by Googleth (Anna Lee), actress: born Ightham, Kent 2 January 1913; MBE 1982; married 1936 Robert Stevenson (died 1986; one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1945 George Stafford (two sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1970 Robert Nathan (died 1985); died Los Angeles 14 May 2004.

In Hollywood (after inventing an Irish grandfather to win his approval) she became one of the few female members of fellow Catholic John Ford’s regular repertory company of actors, appearing in eight of his films between How Green Was My Valley (1941) and7 Women (1966). The parts that he gave her seldom amounted to very much, however, and it perversely fell to two of Hollywood’s most macho, off-beat talents to provide her with two of her best middle-aged roles.

In Sam Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959), she played Mac, the drunken, cigar-smoking Bohemian artist and earth-mother to the heroine (in whom her interest may be more than purely maternal), and in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), she was the breezy neighbour of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, who by her example allayed fears that women of her age inevitably disintegrated into Gorgons like those living next door. After shooting their first scene together, Davis barked, “It’s good to be working with a pro.”

Born Joan Boniface Winnifrith in Ightham, Kent, in 1913, daughter of the village rector, and god-daughter of Sybil Thorndike, her stage name was a composite of Anna Karenina and Robert E. Lee. She made her début on the London stage in 1932 and, a few minor film appearances later, was promoted to Jack Hulbert’s leading lady – an intrepid young aviatrix – in The Camels are Coming (1934).

Her vigorous, try-anything personality also saw service as assistant to mad scientist Boris Karloff in The Man Who Changed His Mind(1936), Allan Quartermain’s daughter in King Solomon’s Mines(1937) and a human cannonball in Young Man’s Fancy (1939), during the filming of which she was actually shot out of the cannon.

All three were directed by her then-husband Robert Stevenson, who directed most of her films at this time, and whom she accompanied to Hollywood in 1939. She was also the second lead, Jessie Matthews’ platinum blonde rival, in First a Girl (1935), a part, alas, that was to prove more characteristic of what was to come her way after transferring to Tinseltown, although she started at the top, co- starring opposite Ronald Colman in My Life With Caroline (1941).

It was a dreary film, however, and after a few undistinguished female leads in quality productions like Commandos Strike at Dawn(1942) and Hangmen Also Die (1943), she was rapidly relegated to supporting roles in “A” features such as Flesh and Fantasy (1943),Summer Storm (1944), The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) and Fort Apache (1948), and leads in “B”s. Ironically, it was one of the latter that gave her her best part (and, after How Green Was My Valley, her own personal favourite) – that of Nell Rowen in Val Lewton’sBedlam (1946), a frivolous young actress whose wilfulness provokes her sugar daddy into having her placed in the care of a leering asylum director played by Boris Karloff.

She returned briefly to the stage in 1950 in a summer stock tour ofMiranda and began increasingly to appear on television, including a three-year stint during the early Fifties as a panellist on It’s News to Me.

At this point, however, her career was abruptly interrupted by the Hollywood blacklist. Although in her own words a “Winston Churchill Conservative”, who saw nothing wrong with the blacklisting of actual Communists, she was confused with another actress and her name appeared in the notorious anti-Communist newsletter Red Channels. She was unable to get acting work for several years and was forced to make her living writing TV scripts under an assumed name.

In 1956 she finally wrote in desperation to Ford, who immediately got on the phone to Washington and cleared the situation up. “If it hadn’t been for Ford, I probably wouldn’t have been working now,” she told the film historian Joseph McBride in 1987, but even so, she still had to add a rider to every contract she subsequently signed declaring that she was not now, and had never been, a Communist.

It was Ford who made her rehabitilition complete by giving Lee her first film role since 1952, as Mrs Jack Hawkins in Gideon’s Day(1958, her only post-war British film), and later film roles included a stagecoach passenger held up by Lee Marvin in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Balance (1962) and a nun with a twinkle in her eye inThe Sound of Music (1965).

Her last substantial film role was in In Like Flint (1967) in which, to quote Variety‘s reviewer, “Anna Lee, ever a charming and gracious screen personality, is part of a triumvirate bent on seizing world power.” (The trouser suit she wore throughout the film concealed the fact that she was black and blue from head to foot and had a broken wrist and 13 stitches in her thigh from a car accident four days before shooting had started).

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties she regularly featured, still as pretty as ever, in the soap opera General Hospital, only retiring from the show last year. A year after she had joined in 1978, taking the part of Lila Quatermaine, she was paralysed from the waist downwards in a car accident, and acted the role in a wheelchair.

She had a narrow escape just before Christmas 1994 when she was hauled to safety as her cottage off Sunset Strip caved in behind her during a fire which also destroyed most of her memorabilia and the only draft of her autobiography.

Richard Chatten

The “Independent” obituary can also be accessed on-line here.

Leonard Whiting.

Leonard Whiting is best known for his performance as ‘Romeo’ in Franco Zefferelli’s 1968 film “Romeo and Juliet” opposite Olivia Hussey. He also starred opposite Jean Simmons in “Say Hello to Yesterday” in 1971. He was born in London in 1950.

IMDB entry:

Leonard Whiting was born and raised in North London, in the Woodgreen-Hampstead area. He is the only son of Arthur Leonard Whiting, who managed a store where exhibition materials were made, and of Peggy Joyce O’Sullivan, who worked in a telephone instrument factory. There are two younger sisters, Linda and Anne.

Whiting attended school at St. Richard of Chichester in Camden. An average scholar, he was graduated just a week or two before beginning work on Romeo and Juliet (1968). An agent who happened to be at a recording studio when Whiting, then 12, was making a record with a pop group, was responsible for the boys’ professional start.

After hearing him sing, the agent suggested he try out for Lionel Bart‘s “Oliver!” which constantly needed replacements for its child performers. Whiting played the Artful Dodger in the long-running London musical for 18 months, and for 13 months appeared in the National Theatre production of Congreve’s “Love for love”, which toured Moscow and Berlin.

Director ‘Zeffirelli’ described his discovery, made from 300 youngsters auditioned during more than three months: “He has a magnificent face, gentle melancholy, sweet, the kind of idealistic young man Romeo ought to be.”

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Humberto Barrer

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Freda Jackson was a British character actress who specialised in playing nasty, spiteful types. She was born in Nottingham in 1907. Among her film credits are the ‘bogus nun’ in “The Lady Vanishes” with Margaret Lockwood in 1939 directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She went on feature in “A Canterbury Tale” in 1944, “The Good Die Young”, “Bhowanai Junction” as Ava Gardner’s mother, “The Brides of Dracula” and “Tom Jones” in 1963. She died in 1990 in Northampton.

IMDB entry:

Freda Jackson was born in Nottingham, England in 1908, the daughter of a railway porter. After studying at High Pavement School and the University College there, she became a schoolteacher but gave up her career to study acting at the Royal College of Art, in London. Her first professional stage appearance was in Northampton, England in 1934, before moving on to London’s West End in 1936. In 1938 she joined the prestigious Old Vic company, touring with them in Europe and Egypt. She played Shakespeare at Stratford on Avon in 1940, but it was in 1945 that she gained fame in ‘No Room at the Inn’ in London. Following this success she went on to play many starring roles. In total Freda Jackson appeared in some sixty two major stage roles in England and overseas.

At the same time she appeared in twenty six films, including Sir Laurence Olivier’s ‘Henry V’, David Lean’s version of Dicken’s ‘Great Expectations’, Tony Richardson’s ‘Tom Jones’, and the Hammer Horror classic ‘Brides of Dracula’. Not content with this she also appeared in several classic British television shows, including Maigret, Adam Adamant Lives, and Blake’s 7, together with a number of more serious dramas.

Freda Jackson, who was married to the painter Henry Bird ARCA, died in 1990.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: David Litchfield davidlitchfield@hotmail.com

Norah Gorsen was Bill Traver’s leading lady in “Geordie” in 1955. She was born in Poole, Dorset in 1933. Her only other film seems to be “Personal Affair” with Gene Tierney and Glynis Johns. She featured on television until 1969. She was married at one time to actor Ronald Lewis.

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The times obituary in 2024.

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Leonard Whiting.

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