British Actors Archives - Page 45 of 131

Jane Birkin

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.

The Times obituary in 2023:

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.

Birkin at a fashion show in 2016 with her daughters Charlotte Gainsbourg, left, and Lou Doillon

Birkin arrived in Paris in 1968, aged 21

Birkin performing for television in 1991

Birkin and Gainsbourg in 1972 with Kate Barry, Birkin’s daughter from her first marriage, and their child, Charlotte

Birkin in Berwick Street market, London, in 1977

My Brother Jonathan, poster, US poster art, top from left: Michael Denison, Ronald Howard, Beatrice Campbell; bottom left: Dulcie Gray, 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

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|”.

Simon Ward is best known for his performance in the 1971 movie about Winston Churchill entitled “Young Winston”. He was born in 1941 in Kent. His other movies include “Zulu Dawn” and “The Three Musketeers”. He also starred with Martin Shaw in the popular courtroom drama series “Judge John Deed”. He died in 2012. His daughter is the actress Sophie Ward.

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

Simon Ward was a handsome actor whose patrician, public-school demeanour made him ideal casting for dashing period romances and for the screen role that brought him international prominence, that of the youthful Winston Churchill in Richard Attenborough’s Young Winston (1971). On stage, he had already received favourable notice for his role in the original production of Joe Orton’s Loot (1967), and he later starred in such films as All Creatures Great and Small (1975), as the author James Herriot) and Zulu Dawn (1979), as Lieutenant Vereker. His career stalled in 1987 when he suffered a mysterious physical attack which resulted in serious brain damage and memory loss, but he later resumed acting, with recurring roles in such television series as Judge John Deed and The Tudors, and film roles including that of Mr Linton in Wuthering Heights (1992), which starred his daughter, Sophie Ward.

The son of a car dealer, he was born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1941, and had acting ambitions from an early age. He was educated at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, where the National Youth Theatre was founded. He joined it at age of 13 and stayed for eight years. After a spell training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art he made his stage début with the Northampton Repertory Company in 1963, and in the same year he appeared on the London stage when played the title role in Hamlet in a National Youth Theatre production at the Scala Theatre, its cast including Hywel Bennett and Bill Kenwright. He then worked with repertory companies in Birmingham and Oxford.

Though he is sometimes reported to have made his film début as one of the rebellious students in Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), he is not credited on screen and his participation has never been verified. Films in which Ward certainly appeared before Young Winston include I Start Counting (1969), in which Jenny Agutter suffered the threats of a serial killer, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), one of the better Hammer horrors, in which Ward was a young doctor blackmailed into helping Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) perform his gruesome experiments, and Quest for Love (1971), an intriguing time-travel romance starring Joan Collins.

Ward had a great personal success in Young Winston, particularly in the scenes depicting his love-hate relationship with his father (Robert Shaw), who tells him, “You’re the greatest disappointment in my life’, and his mother (Anne Bancroft) a ravenously socialising American. Ward’s subsequent films included Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), in which he was a “sympathetic” Nazi, and The Four Feathers (1978). He played George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in Richard Lester’s lively The Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequel, The Four Musketeers (1974).

He and Colin Firth played idealistic pilots in the First World War adventure Aces High (1976), based on RC Sheriff’s classic play Journey’s End, and distinguished by its fine aerial sequences. He played William Trench in the 1978 version of The Four Feathers, and frequent television productions included An Inspector Calls (1982) and The Corsican Brothers (1985). In 1986 he starred as TE Lawrence in the first London revival of Terence Rattigan’s Ross, which toured the UK and played in Toronto before opening at the Old Vic in London.

In 1987 he made newspaper headlines when he was discovered unconscious with a fractured skull by a canal in Camden, London. He was unable to recall the devastating incident, for which he had brain surgery, and since there were no witnesses the police were (and remain) baffled.

Ward developed a chronic blood disorder, polycythaemia, due to the assault, but he was able to gradually resume his career on stage, screen and television, in 1995 becoming part of a controversy when at very short notice he took over Stephen Fry’s leading role in the play Cell Mates after Fry walked out and disappeared near the start of the run.

On television, Ward had notable success as Sir Monty Everard in Judge John Deed (2003-07) and Bishop Gardiner in The Tudors (2009-10). In 2010 he embarked on an arduous tour starring in Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of King George III, but last May he had to withdraw from a revival of Pygmalion, in which he was playing Alfred Doolittle, because of a virus he could not overcome.

Ward had three daughters, the eldest being Sophie Ward, who had been married to a vet for eight years when she came out as lesbian, and in 2010 she married Rena Brannon at a registry office in Stroud. Ward’s youngest daughter, Kitty, is married to the stand-up comedian, Michael McIntyre.

Ward moved to Somerset in 2010 and said, “It has taken the edge off my hunger for working because it is so beautiful here, and I love being near my children and six grandchildren.”

Simon Ward, actor: born Beckenham, Kent 16 October 1941; married (three daughters); died 20 July 2012.

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

A. E. Matthews was born in 1869. He was an English actor who played numerous character roles on the stage and in film for eight decades, and who became known for his acting longevity. Already middle-aged when silent films began production, he enjoyed increasing renown from World War II onwards as one of the British cinema’s most famous crotchety, and sometimes rascally, old men. He died in 1960.

IMDB entry:

The venerable British stage and film actor A.E. Matthews was born Alfred Edward Matthews on November 22, 1869 in Bridlington, Yorkshire, England. The actor nicknamed “Matty” established himself on the British and American stage and in British films, taking up the craft after working as a clerk in a London bookstore. He said that after he learned that the great actor Sir Henry Irving (the first thespian to be knighted) had worked at the store, and used the very same desk he did, he decided to dedicate his life to the theater.

The former bookseller started at the Princess Theatre as a “call boy,” the factotum who calls the actors to the stage. Eventually, he was given acting roles, and appeared on stage with such greats as Ellen Terry (the aunt of Sir John Gielgud and Sir Gerald du Maurier. Matty made his Broadway debut on August 8, 1910 at the Garrick Theatre, in “Love Among the Lions.” Later that year he appeared as Algernon Moncrieff in a production of Oscar Wilde‘s The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) at the Lyceum. He did not appear again on The Great White Way until 1921, when he played Jerry in the comedy Peg o’ My Heart (1922) opposite the legendary American stage actress Laurette Taylor. Later that year he played the eponymous lead in Bulldog Drummond (1929).

A.E. Matthews appeared on Broadway an additional eight times in the 1920s and appeared in seven Broadway productions in the 1930s. Of his appearance in W. Somerset Maugham‘ comedy “The Breadwinner” in 1931, “Time Magazine” credited his acting with contributing to the success of the comedy, which had problems in its third Act and was described by the “Time” reviewer as “simply a bag of parlor tricks performed by dialog.” The reviewer praised “gentle, toothy Mr. Matthews, who somehow suggests the kind old water rat in The Wind in the Willows.”

Matty’s last appearance On Broadway was in 1949, in William Douglas-Home‘s comedy “Yes, M’Lord,” with a cast that featured a young Elaine Stritch. He appeared in numerous roles on the British stage.

He made his film debut in 1916, in the silent comedy Wanted: A Widow (1916). He appeared in two more flicks in 1916, one in 1918, and two more silents in 1918 before devoting himself to stage-work. He did not make his talking picture debut until 1934, when he supported George Arliss in The Iron Duke (1934), which also featured Emlyn Williams. He made one more movie in the 1930s, the backstage drama Men Are Not Gods(1936) (1936) which featured a young Rex Harrison. His film career began in earnest in 1941, when he appeared in Anthony Asquith‘s Quiet Wedding (1941), the propaganda film This England (1941) (again with Emlyn Williams), and Leslie Howard‘s “‘Pimpernel’ Smith (1941)_. He appeared in another 41 movies from 1942 to 1960, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), _Million Pound Note, the (1956), The Ship Was Loaded (1957), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

A.E. Matthews died on July 25, 1960. He was 91 years old.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Jenny Agutter

Jenny Agutter TCM overview:

This talented, atypically beautiful teenage lead trained as a ballet dancer and made her film debut at age 12 in “East of Sudan” (1964), playing an Arab child. Jenny Agutter came to international attention, however, in Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout” (1971), as a girl lost with her brother in the Australian outback who comes to rely on an aborigine in order to survive.

She has since made a smooth transition to adult roles–although usually in supporting parts–in such diverse films as “Sweet William” (1979), “An American Werewolf in London” (1981), “Darkman” and “Child’s Play 2” (both 1990).

Agutter began her career studying ballet. After her film debut, she was in demand for teenager roles and segued to the small screen in the 1965 British serial “Alexander Graham Bell”, followed by such other series as “The Newcomers” (1968).

Although she played Pamela, the daughter of the flamboyant Gertrude Lawrence (Julie Andrews), in “Star!” (1968), the screen persona of her youth was that of a youth left to her own devices as in the TV serial “The Railway Children” (BBC, 1968), a role she reprised in a 1971 feature and, especially, “Walkabout”. She continued in this vein with an Emmy-winning turn in the TV adaptation of Paul Gallico’s “The Snow Goose” (NBC, 1971).

Within a few years, however, Agutter had outgrown that image and matured into ingenues with an edge, usually one who believes in a non-conformist young man. She played this role in the 1977 feature adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play “Equus”, for which she won a BAFTA Best Supporting Actress Award. Shifting to working for American studios, Agutter was “Amy” (1981), a woman who leaves her husband to teach the handicapped in the Disney production.

Also that year, she was the libertine who loves and believes David Naughton in “An American Werewolf in London”. Agutter shifted her career to Hollywood at the time, although feature films became sporadic; with her dark blonde hair and unconventional attractiveness, she was not a lead that reflected American tastes. By the 1990s, she was in horror films like “Child’s Play 2” (1990), providing vocals for animated films (“Freddie as F.R.O.7” 1992) and appearing in little seen efforts like 1995’s “Blue Juice”.

After winning her Emmy, Agutter played an Irish Catholic who falls for a British soldier (Anthony Andrews) in the Emmy-winning TV-movie “A War of Children” (CBS, 1972) In 1979, she portrayed Priscilla Mullins, one of the first American heroines of folklore, in “Mayflower: The Pilgrims’ Adventure” (CBS, 1979).

Agutter broke type to play an English prostitute in the 1980 NBC miniseries of the antebellum South, “Beulah Land”. Her other TV work has included Rosline in the 1984 BBC version of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost”, Nancy in a 1987 adaptation of “Silas Marner” (PBS) and a British society woman in “The Buccaneers” (PBS, 1995), based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel. More recently, she was in conflict with Jacqueline Bisset in the Showtime original “September” (1996).

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.