Elvi Hale was born in 1931 in Essex, England as Patricia Elvira Hake. She is an actress, known for True as a Turtle (1957), The Heroes of Telemark (1965) and The Navy Lark(1959).
Brittish Actors
Elvi Hale was born in 1931 in Essex, England as Patricia Elvira Hake. She is an actress, known for True as a Turtle (1957), The Heroes of Telemark (1965) and The Navy Lark(1959).
Marcus Gilbert was born in 1958 in London. he starred in “Riders” with Michael Praed and “A Ghost in Monte Carlo” in 1990.
IMDB entry:
Lulu is fondly remembered by movie buffs for her performance in “To Sir With Love” with Sidney Poitier and Suzy Kendall in 1967. She won the Eurovision for the UK in 1969. She was born in Glasgow in 1948.
IMDB entry:
Born in Glasgow in 1948. As a teenager, she toured the northern clubs with her band, “the Luvvers”. After her initial success with a cover of “Shout” reaching #7 in 1964, Lulu went on to establish herself as one of the biggest-selling British female singers of the 1960s. She made her film début in To Sir, with Love (1967), starring Sidney Poitier, and performed the title song, which went to No. 1 in the U.S., but was only released as a B-side in the UK with the A-side, “Let’s Pretend”, making #11. She was one of four joint winners of the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest with “Boom Bang-a-Bang”. In 1969, she married The Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, and moved more into family entertainment, building on the success of her self-titled BBC television show. After her divorce, she collaborated with David Bowie on the song, “The Man Who Sold the World,” which reached #3 in the UK charts, and sang the title theme to the James Bond feature The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), both in 1974.
After marriage to celebrity hairdresser John Frieda, with whom she had one son, Jordan Frieda, Lulu’s career moved more into occasional adverts and pantomimes. The 1990s saw her divorce again and, in 1993, she released the hit album, “Independence”. Along with her brother, she also penned the song, “I Don’t Wanna Fight”, which was performed by Tina Turner on the soundtrack to What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), and aged 44, she finally topped the UK charts with the British boyband, Take That, with a cover of “Relight My Fire”. She went on to contribute to the soundtrack of the Tim Rice/Elton John musical, “Aida”, in 1999, front her own short-lived prime-time UK lottery show on BBC TV, Red Alert with the National Lottery (1999), and starred in the film Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? (1999).
In 2002, she released an album of duets entitled “Together”, featuring the likes of Paul McCartney, Elton John, Cliff Richard, Sting and Ronan Keating, along with a best-selling autobiography. In 2003, she released her “Greatest Hits” album, which débuted at #35 in the UK charts.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Glc19Gareth@netscape.ne
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Jane Mallory Birkin was born on 14 December 1946, in Marylebone, London. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an English actress, best known for her work on stage. Her father, David Birkin, was a Royal Navy lieutenant-commander and World War II spy. Her brother is the screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin. She was educated at Upper Chine School, Isle of Wight.”Je t’aime” made UK chart history in that on 4 October 1969 and the following week on 11 October, the song was at two different chart positions even though it is the same song, the same artists, and the same recorded version
TCM overview:Landed several lightweight movie roles in the 1960s, when her looks seemed to symbolize the swinging spirit of the times (she played one of the nude models in Antonioni’s 1966 “Blow-Up”) and subsequently resurfaced as a respected talent in France. Birkin was the subject of a documentary by Agnes Varda, “Jane B. par Agnes V.” (1988) and gave an affecting performance opposite Dirk Bogarde in Bertrand Tavernier’s “Daddy Nostalgia” (1990). Her younger daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, by composer-director Serge Gainsbourg, is also an actress and her brother is writer-director Andrew Birkin (“Burning Secret” 1988). The ultra-expensive luxury item the Birkin bag was created by Hermès head Jean-Louis Dumas in 1984, inspired by a meeting with the actress and singer in which she complained about never finding a leather purse she really liked.
Jane Birkin died in Paris in 2023 aged 76.
Shortly after Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg had recorded the infamously erotic Je t’aime . . . moi non plus, the couple went to dinner at the Hôtel des Beaux Arts in Paris.
“There was a record player, and without saying a word, Serge put the song on,” Birkin recalled. “All of a sudden all the couples around us stopped talking, their knives and forks held in mid-air.”
As their fellow diners sat transfixed by the record’s sexually explicit lyrics interspersed with Birkin’s orgasmic gasps and moans, Gainsbourg turned to his lover. “I think we’ve got a hit record,” he said.
Birkin with Serge Gainsbourg and their daughter Charlotte in 1971
Indeed, the duo not only had a hit but a song that would become an avatar for the Swinging Sixties and its sexual permissiveness — a “symbol of freedom”, as Birkin called it.
Prudes and moral guardians everywhere were outraged. The Vatican denounced the record and the BBC banned it, as did countless other radio stations around the world.
The critic Sylvie Simmons described the song as “the musical equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared Emmanuelle movie”, and the aural sex that oozed from the grooves was too libidinous even for the traditional Gallic laissez-faire: the record was declared too risqué to be played on French radio before an 11pm watershed. In Italy the head of Gainsbourg and Birkin’s record label was jailed for offending public morality.
The bans only served to enhance the record’s success and Gainsbourg called Pope Paul VI “our greatest PR man”. Je t’aime . . . moi non plus hit No 1 in the UK charts in the autumn of 1969, the first banned record to do so. It remained in the charts for 31 weeks and was said to have contributed to a dramatic spike in the birth rate.
Birkin in Cannes in 2021 for the release of a film, Jane Par Charlotte, about her by her daughter Charlotte
A prurient media speculated that it was a genuine live sex session recorded in the boudoir rather than faked in the studio, although Gainsbourg denied it. “Thank goodness it wasn’t, otherwise I hope it would have been a long-playing record,” he said. Birkin giggled alongside him as he said it.
Birkin had arrived in Paris in 1968 as a 21-year-old aspiring actress with an androgynous figure and an innocent baby-doll look that had earned her a role in Antonioni’s “swinging London” movie Blow-Up. She also had a one-year-old daughter from a brief marriage to the film composer John Barry, who as soon as she had fallen pregnant left her for an even younger model and moved to Los Angeles.
Dulcie Gray was one of the stalwarts of British cinema in the 1940’s. She was born in Malaya in 1915. She married actor Michael Denison in 1939. She starred in such movies as “My Brother Jonathan”, “The Glass Mountain” and “Angel One Five”. She had great success on British television in the series “Howard’s Way” between 1985 and 1990. She and her husband also starred in many plays in both the West End and the provinces. She died in 2011 at the age of 96.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Veteran British actress Dulcie Gray’s career is often linked with that of her late actor/husband Michael Denison, with whom she appeared frequently on stage, TV and in films. Dulcie was born in Malaya, where her father was a lawyer and sent her to boarding school in England at quite an early age. Originally interested in dance until the lure of the theatre altered her direction, she attended the Webber Douglas Drama School where she met her future husband. Dulcie became a London stage star with dramatic roles in “The Little Foxes” as Alexandra, and “Brighton Rock.” From there she slowly moved into such popular Gainborough Studio films as Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945), A Place of One’s Own (1945) and They Were Sisters (1945), her first lead. With husband Michael, she later appeared in My Brother Jonathan (1948), The Glass Mountain (1949) and Angels One Five (1952) to generous reviews. However, like her husband, the theatre was her true calling and she would stay committed to it for most of her career, making relatively few films overall. She and Michael performed together in 26 stage productions, including “Candida” and “An Ideal Husband”. Dulcie later turned to writing, authoring 24 books, most of which are crime novels. She earned TV success back in England with Howards’ Way (1985) (in which Michael also starred) – a major hit in the late ’80s — and, following his death in 1998, she returned to the theatre playing delightful elderlies in such fare as “The Ladykillers” and “The Lady Vanishes”.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Dennis Barker’s”Guardian” obituary:
Although as an actor in films of the 1940s she was best known in ladylike and thoroughly English rose types of role, Dulcie Gray, who has died aged 95, had a background and overall career that was more cosmopolitan and interesting than that might suggest. She was in some ways the more complex half of the successful marital and professional stage and film partnership of Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray.
In The Glass Mountain (1949), in which a married composer loves an Italian girl who saved his life during the second world war, Gray, then one of the great stars of the British film industry, almost inevitably played the wronged but agonisingly understanding English wife. It was the sort of role for which she was most often chosen: the inconspicuous, quietly adoring woman able and willing to put her own emotions in the background to care for her erring man; round-faced, genteel and rather prim.
Most reference books now deride the film, but at a time when Britain was emerging from the war into a period of grey austerity, The Glass Mountain and movies like it were a popular tonic. Set in the beautiful Dolomite mountains, with graceful performers and a nostalgically slow pace, it was one of the most successful British films to that date. The part of the composer was taken by Denison, with whom Gray starred on stage and screen so many times that the Denisons became one of the “royal families” of the British entertainment scene.
Their partnership spanned the war and postwar years, and was still going strong into the 1990s with the revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, in which they both appeared, and in which they made their Broadway debut together in 1996. Gray had by then found renewed screen fame on BBC television in the cast of the glossy yachting drama Howards’ Way, in which she took the role of Kate Harvey from 1985 to 1990. She was also a playwright and prolific author of crime novels.
She was born not, as might be expected, in Cheltenham or Frinton, but in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the daughter of a lawyer, Arnold Bailey. She adopted the surname Gray from her mother, Kate. Although she often gave her year of birth as 1920, Gray much later admitted that “the fib began in the 40s when studios insisted on making you younger”. She moved to England at the age of three and went to school at Wallingford, Wokingham and Swanage, before working as a school teacher and as a journalist in Kuala Lumpur, then returning to England on a cargo boat in 1937, with only £4 and her luggage.
Living on 6d a day for food, and often going hungry, she studied at the Webber Douglas school in London, where she met Denison. In 1939, with the second world war in the offing, she married him and started with him on the same day in Aberdeen repertory – the week after their wedding. Her first appearance was as Sorel Bliss, the ingenue in Hay Fever, at His Majesty’s theatre, Aberdeen. Denison and Gray first played opposite one another as Parnell and Kitty O’Shea in the play Parnell. From Aberdeen, Gray went on to rep at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Harrogate.
During the war she was most widely known through her film and radiowork, which included 395 performances in Front Line Family – a saga of genteel folk coping against Hitler. She was an early contributor to television. But she also worked steadily on stage throughout the war. She played in Shakespeare at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre; in popular plays such as The Little Foxes (1942), Brighton Rock (1943) and Dear Ruth (1946); and also that year went on tour with Fools Rush In. When her husband returned from war service, he found that his wife was established as a film star and radio favourite.
In the years immediately following the war, she was in some of the longest-running West End productions of the light comedies that were in vogue until the arrival of the more permissive 1960s and 1970s. Then she also began to tackle more heavyweight material, such as The Cherry Orchard (1980, at Exeter), The Kingfisher (1980, at Windsor and on tour) and The Living Room (1987), and appeared in productions of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest.
All this suggested a useful if not overly magnetic stage presence, pretty rather than beautiful, reassuring rather than challenging; it was possibly true. But she was engaged in other activities that lifted her as a person above this comfortable rut. She wrote a play called Love Affair, which was performed and published in 1956. It toured successfully but was not a hit in London – it opened a month after the play that was to revolutionise London theatre, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.
It was as the author of murder novels, usually with a theatre setting, that she enhanced her middle and later years. There was a string of these books, including Murder On the Stairs (1957), Epitaph for a Dead Actor (1960), The Devil Wore Scarlet (1964), No Quarter for a Star (1964), Died in the Red (1968), Deadly Lampshade (1971), Understudy to Murder (1972), Stage Door Fright (1977) and Dark Calypso (1979). The list would have done credit to the most venerable of crime queens, rather than to a gracefully petite player of light comedy. She also wrote a factual book on butterflies – one of her interests – called Butterflies On My Mind (1978), for which she won the Times Educational Supplement’s senior information book prize.
Her work as a writer went on simultaneously with her acting. In the 1960s, she appeared in a play with her husband in every year except one; in the 1970s, she played Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in A Murder is Announced and was in Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce. She usually wrote at home before going to the theatre. At her peak, she produced a book a year.
Although they were not bestsellers in the Agatha Christie league, they gave her a steady income, a source of reassurance to any actor enduring the ups and downs of stage and film life. One of her favourite anecdotes was how she had bought some diamond jewellery in a good year and then tried to sell it back to the same shop when she had a lean year; the shop offered her a derisory sum on the grounds that the jewellery was secondhand.
Gray was awarded the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977; she and Denison were both appointed CBE in 1983. After her husband’s death in 1998, she continued to take stage and television roles, and last appeared on screen in 2000, in the BBC drama Doctors. She lived latterly in the actors’ care home Denville Hall, in west London.
• Dulcie Gray, actor and author, born 20 November 1915; died 15 November 2011
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Barry Jones was born in the Channel Islands in 1893. He had a very successful career as a character actor in such British movies as “Seven Days to Noon” in 1950 and “The Clouded Yellow” the following year. In the mid 1950’s he went to Hollywood and amde such movies there as “Brigadoon” with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, “Prince Valiant” with Robert Wagner” and “The Glass Slipper” with Leslie Caron. He returned to Europe to make “War and Peace” as Audrey Hepburn’s father. He then resumed his career in such British movies as “The 39 Steps” and “A Study in Terror” in 1965. He died in the Channel Islands in 1981 at the age of 88.
Beautiful Anna Ford was born in 1943 in Glouchestershire, the daughter of a vicar. She has been a television broadcaster since 1976.
Trevor Bannister was an English actor best known for having played the womanising junior salesman Mr. Lucas in the sitcom “Are You Being Served?“ from 1972 to 1979, and for his role as Toby Mulberry Smith in the long-running sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, from 2003 until it ended its run in 2010. He died in 2011 at the age of 76..
Anthony Hayward’s “Guardian” obituary:
The actor Trevor Bannister, who has died of a heart attack aged 76, was best known to television viewers from his role in Are You Being Served? as Mr Lucas, the menswear assistant at the Grace Brothers department store. The character was conceived by the sitcom’s creators, David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, as one of the linchpins in the ensemble cast, creating a link between the menswear and ladieswear departments through his constant chasing of the stereotypical dollybird Miss Brahms (Wendy Richard).
Bannister was also adept at portraying Mr Lucas as a rebel who frequently questioned the store’s management policies – such as requiring staff to smile more – and made fun of the pecking order, in which he stood at the bottom. He served as a mouthpiece for Lloyd, who had himself sold menswear at Simpson Piccadilly, in central London, but kept his views to himself – although Lloyd was eventually fired for selling soft drinks from a fitting room during a heatwave.
Mr Lucas began as the junior menswear member of staff when Are You Being Served? was launched as a 1972 episode in the BBC’s ComedyPlayhouse slot, before it was turned into a series the following year. In 1979, he was promoted to assistant when the camp Mr Humphries (John Inman) became senior in the department.
Bannister did not appear in the final three series, pulling out in 1980 after the BBC refused to change the programme’s recording day to allow him to continue in a long-running stage tour. He starred in the show’s 1977 film spinoff, but was not approached to reprise the role of Mr Lucas in the 1990s television sequel, Grace and Favour. By then, he had firmly put Are You Being Served? behind him, saying: “I’ve done an awful lot of things since then and I did an awful lot of things before then. That was just eight years of bits and pieces in my life. I don’t hang my hat on that.”
Bannister was born in Durrington, Wiltshire. His father was a tobacconist and newsagent. He attended the private Modern school, in Salisbury, leaving at the age of 15 to join a repertory theatre company in Folkestone. He trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and, after two years’ national service in the army, gained further repertory experience in Torquay, Bath, Bedford, Worthing, Wolverhampton, York and Birmingham.
He made his London West End debut as Arthur Crabtree in Billy Liar (Cambridge theatre, 1960) and later acted on stage in the farce Move Over Mrs Markham (Vaudeville theatre, 1969), Funny Money (Playhouse, 1995) and a revival of The Odd Couple (Theatre Royal Haymarket, 1996).
After making his film debut in Reach for the Sky (1956), Bannister’s screen appearances were almost exclusively on television. He starred as Peter Barry in the children’s sci-fi series Object Z (1965) and Object Z Returns (1966), before his breakthrough role as the titular spiv in The War of Darkie Pilbeam (1968), the popular trilogy about a 1940s black marketeer, written by the Coronation Street creator Tony Warren.
He was then cast as the refuse collector Heavy Breathing in all three series of the Granada sitcom The Dustbinmen (1969-70), written by Jack Rosenthal, whose gutter language tested the patience of the moral crusader Mary Whitehouse.
After Are You Being Served?, Bannister played the ladykiller and burglar-alarm dealer Peter Pitt, who joins a group run by Brian Wilde’s retired army major and Neighbourhood Watch founder, in the sitcom Wyatt’s Watchdogs (1988). He also took three roles in Coronation Street, appearing first as Harry Lester (1967), then as Ritchie Levitt (1972) and finally as Mike Baldwin’s solicitor (2006).
From 2001, he enjoyed making guest appearances in Last of the Summer Wine as the golfclub captain Toby, becoming a regular for the final two series (2009-10). Throughout his career, Bannister was a regular pantomime dame on stage, taking 34 roles in 35 years, and always supplying his own wigs, moulded to his head.
In 1959, Bannister married the actor Kathleen Cravos, from whom he was later divorced. He is survived by their three sons, Simon, Timothy and Jeremy, and by his second wife, Pam Carson, whom he married in 1982. Two of his sons followed him into show business: Simon as a theatre stage manager and Jeremy as a producer of commercials and pop videos.
• Trevor Gordon Bannister, actor, born 14 August 1934; died 14 April 2011
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Norman Eshley was born in 1945 in Bristol. In 1971 he starred opposite Mia Farrow in “Blind Terror”. He is best remembered for his role in the TV series “George & Mildred|”.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
