British Actors Archives - Page 47 of 136

Corin Redgrave

Corin Redgrave was born in 1939 in London. He was the son of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson and brother to Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave. He has given some terrific performances on film including “A Man For All Seasons” in 1966 and “In The Name of the Father” with Daniel Day-Lewis. He also had a prolific career on the stage and on television. He died in 2010 just a few weeks prior to his sister Lynn.

Michael Billington’s “Guardian” obituary:

Corin Redgrave, who has died aged 70, was both a formidable actor and a strenuous political activist. But, while it is fashionably easy to suggest that his career was blighted by his political activities, I suspect his talent was intimately related to his radical political convictions. And, if he enjoyed a golden theatrical rebirth from the late 1980s onwards, it may have had less to do with politics than with his determination to inherit the mantle of his revered father. Before he suffered a severe heart attack in 2005, Redgrave’s later years yielded some of his finest work.

Redgrave was born, in London, into the theatrical purple. His father, Sir Michael, was both a great classical actor and a popular film star; his mother, Rachel Kempson, was also a distinguished actor. Educated at Westminster school, Redgrave won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he got a first in English. He was part of a glorious era in Cambridge undergraduate theatre, where his contemporaries included Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Trevor Nunn. Having shone as both actor and director, he had a seemingly assured pathway into the theatre and, shortly after leaving Cambridge, was playing Lysander in Tony Richardson’s 1962 Royal Court production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For a few years his acting career progressed steadily alongside his growing political commitment. He played the Pilot Officer in Arnold Wesker’s Chips With Everything in London in 1962 – and in New York the following year – and appeared in a number of West End shows, including Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1966 and Abelard and Heloise in 1971, before moving to Stratford in 1972, where he was memorably matched with John Wood as the twin Antipholi in The Comedy of Errors.

His elder sister, Vanessa, had stimulated his interest in politics in the early 1960s when she encouraged him to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1971 he joined the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). Vanessa has recorded how, in 1973, he gave her a pamphlet, A Marxist Analysis of the Crisis, which related the economic troubles of the time to the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement and which hugely influenced her thinking: the pupil had become the master.

Redgrave’s preoccupation with politics led to the break-up of his first marriage (dissolved in 1975), to the former model, Deirdre Hamilton-Hill. It also took primacy over his acting career as he increasingly devoted himself to organisational activities with the WRP. From 1974 to 1989, his stage, film and TV appearances became ever rarer. He took time off from the WRP only to help his father write his autobiography, In My Mind’s Eye (1983), in which Michael’s tortured bisexuality was cryptically acknowledged.

When Corin re-emerged into the limelight in the late 1980s, playing Coriolanus at the Young Vic in a David Thacker production, it was as a stronger, better actor. It may have been because he felt he was no longer competing with his father. It may have been because he had, by then, made a blissfully happy second marriage, to the actor Kika Markham; they wed in 1985. Or it may have been because he had found a way of channelling his radical politics into his work. Whatever the explanation, he enjoyed a sensational late flowering as an actor in his 50s and 60s.

Redgrave had a particular gift for playing establishment figures tortured by doubt and fear: something he had witnessed first-hand in his own father. He played Sir Hugo Latymer in Sheridan Morley’s King’s Head and West End revival of Noël Coward’s A Song at Twilight (1999): a remarkable portrayal of a repressed, buttoned-up homosexual. What added to the extraordinariness of the occasion was that Coward had been one of his father’s lovers; the sense of a family affair was heightened by the presence of Markham as Sir Hugo’s long-suffering wife and of Vanessa Redgrave as a former lover. A few years earlier, the three had also collaborated, founding the Moving Theatre Company.

At the National Theatre, he followed a fine performance as an authoritarian prison governor in Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales (1998) with a deeply moving one as Hirst in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land (2001). Redgrave’s Hirst, a literary dinosaur immured in a world of fastidious elegance, eclipsed memories of Ralph Richardson as he gazed in sadness at the faces of his dead contemporaries in aged photo albums.

In 2004 he enjoyed a rich season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Through a mixture of natural intelligence and careful husbanding of his resources, he reached the summit as King Lear on the same stage where his father had played the role more than 50 years previously. “I was 13,” he remembered in an article for the Guardian in 2005. “My father was leading the Memorial Theatre Company, playing Shylock, Antony and Lear. My mother, also in the company, always a little in my father’s shadow, played Octavia and Regan. I learned to love the sound of Shakespeare from my father. Like John Gielgud, he had an effortless command of the rhythms, cadences and stresses of blank verse. But it was my mother who taught me to love Shakespeare’s stories.”

Relying on his political instincts, Redgrave presented us with a Lear who learned too late that power was no protection against mortal suffering: especially moving was the reunion with Cordelia, where he was reduced to crawling, childlike, on all fours.

Redgrave followed Lear with a solo show, Tynan, in which he conveyed – at Stratford and at London’s Arts Theatre – the famous critic’s political, aesthetic and sexual radicalism without ever stooping to impersonation. Redgrave’s ability to command a stage was also proved in Blunt Speaking, which he both wrote and performed for Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in 2002. Not the least remarkable aspect of this portrait of the Marxist aesthete Sir Anthony Blunt was his ability to persuade a Chichester audience to join him in a chorus of the Internationale.

At Shakespeare’s Globe in 2005, he also showed he could become a selfless member of an ensemble, playing the elder Pericles in Kathryn Hunter’s highly physical revival of Shakespeare’s late romance. It was during the run of that production that he suffered a severe heart attack. But he heroically resumed work, appearing as the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, at the Jermyn Street Theatre in 2009: his fortitude was all the more remarkable in that the opening coincided with the death of his niece, Natasha Richardson.

Redgrave claimed for many years that he had been dropped by the BBC because of his radical politics. For all that, he made memorable TV appearances in Persuasion (1995) and The Forsyte Saga (2002) and also wrote the BBC radio plays Roy and Daisy (1998) and Fool for the Rest of his Life (2000). With director Roger Michell, he made a deeply moving Omnibus film based on his 1995 autobiographical book, Michael Redgrave: My Father.

He had appeared occasionally in films since the 1960s, with early credits such as A Man for All Seasons, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Oh! What a Lovely War, and later films including In the Name of the Father, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Enigma and Enduring Love.

Politics obviously had a huge influence on Redgrave’s life and career. But, if that suggests he was a flaming firebrand, I can only say that he was, in my personal contacts with him, an extraordinarily modest and courteous man.

Deirdre Hamilton-Hill died in 1997. Redgrave is survived by their son Luke and daughter Jemma; by Kika and their two sons, Harvey and Arden; and by his sisters Vanessa and Lynn.

• Corin William Redgrave, actor and political activist, born 16 July 1939; died 6 April 2010

• This article was amended on 8 April 2010. The original said Redgrave got a first in classics at Cambridge. This has been corrected.

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

Elizabeth Dermot Walsh was born in 1974 in London. She is the daughter of the late Irish actor Dermot Walsh. She starred in the TV mini-series “Falling For A Dancer” opposite Liam Cunningham and Colin Farrell in 1998. She is currently starring the popular TV series “Doctors”.

IMDB entry:

Daughter of actor Dermot Walsh and actress Elisabeth Annear.Younger half-sister of Sally Walsh. Has an older brother, David Charles Walsh (b. 1969), and a younger sister, Olivia Claudia Walsh (b. 1977). Announced that she is 8 months pregnant with her first child (24 April 2012). Gave birth to her son Bertie in a London hospital (23 May 2012).

Was 9 months pregnant with her son Bertie when she took maternity leave from filmingDoctors (2000). Returned to work 4 months after giving birth to her son Bertie in order to resume filmingDoctors (2000).

Shakin’ Stevens (born Michael Barratt, 4 March 1948 in Cardiff, Wales) is a platinum-selling Welsh rock and roll singer and songwriter who holds the distinction of being the UK’s biggest-selling singles artist of the 1980s.^[1] His recording and performing career began in the late 1960s, although it was not until 1980 that he saw commercial success in England. In the UK alone, Stevens has charted 33 Top 40 hit singles.

Peter Hinwood was born in the UK in 1946. He is best known for his role in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” as the Creation in 1975. This role has made him a cult favourite among movie buffs. His other film role of note was in “Sebastian” in 1976.

IMDB entry:

Peter Hinwood was born on May 17, 1946 in England. He is an actor, known for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), The Devil’s Widow (1970) and Sebastiane (1976).

He had little or no acting experience and does not even sing his own songs in the film. After The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), he shied away from any publicity on the film and has since retired from show business.He went on to work for many years as a successful antique dealer. In the late 1990s or early 2000s, a two-page article on his gallery appeared in the American ‘House & Garden’ magazine, illustrated with a number of Islamic artworks, as well as a very large stucco or plasterwork figured relief from Elizabethan England. Rocky Horror’s singing voice was dubbed in post-production by Australian singer Trevor White.

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Kaz Garas was born in Lithuania in 1940. He came to the U.S. when he was nine years of age. He made his debut in the TV series “Seaway” in 1966. He came to the U.K. to make the popular series “Strange Report” in 1969. His films include “The Last Safari” with Stewart Granger in 1967. Fropm the 1970’s onwards most of his work has been on American television.

Joseph Mawle was born in 1974. He comes from a farming family near Oxford. He is best known for his role as ‘Benjen Stark’ in “Game of Thrones”. His movies include “Clapham Junction” and “Dive”.

Interview in “The Idol” here.

John Moulder-Brown was born in 1953 in London. He stated his career as a child actor in “A Cry From the Streets” with Barbara Murray in 1958. He is best known for his performance in “Deep End” opposite Jane Asher and Diana Dors in 1970.

John McEnery obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019

John McEnery, who has died aged 75, was an intuitive actor in the abrasive style of Nicol Williamson, whom, in some respects, he resembled: tall and rangy, with a thatch of blond hair, a default setting of sardonic indifference, piercing blue eyes, and a voice that could rasp like sandpaper and dissolve in mildly suppressed emotion.

Also, like Williamson, McEnery was a dedicated hellraiser, a free spirit who, said his former wife, the actor Stephanie Beacham, woke up each morning and invented how to live. Despite this innate unpredictability, his talent blazed when he played Mercutio in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet, a performance that won him a Bafta nomination and, briefly, a European and Hollywood reputation.

His elder brother, the actor Peter McEnery, a smoother sort of jeune premier, had made a film with Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda, La Curée (The Game Is Over), in 1966; John followed suit, co-starring with Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claude Jade in Gérard Brach’s Le Bateau sur l’Herbe (The Boat on the Grass) five years later. But, beyond a striking appearance as Kerensky in Franklin Schaffner’s sumptuous Nicholas and Alexandra (also 1971), he was unconcerned about structuring a career.

This did not deter him from accumulating some impressive spells with both Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre in the late 1960s and Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-70s, culminating in a splendid double of the spendthrift Mantalini and theatrical all-rounder Snevellicci in the celebrated Nicholas Nickleby in 1980.

He found a third “home” at Shakespeare’s Globe under Mark Rylance, where he played a caustic Fool to Julian Glover’s Lear in 2001, another great double as John of Gaunt and the senior gardener (“Go, bound thou up yon dangling apricocks”) in Mark Rylance’s all-male Richard II in 2003, and as an original, persuasive Shylock in 2007.

His offstage life became increasingly rackety. Latterly, he combined living in a hostel near St Leonard’s, in Shoreditch, east London, (where his hero, Shakespeare’s leading man, Richard Burbage, is buried) with playing large roles for the small-scale Malachite theatre in the church.

In 2015, he played a moving but unsentimental King Lear which transferred for a short season to the exposed remains of the Rose, Bankside’s first playhouse in 1587, just 50 yards from the new Globe.

Having then moved into a basement flat on the Isle of Sheppey, he was arraigned in 2017 for having brandished a water pistol in a pub in Faversham, but was cleared of all charges of intent to cause fear and violence one year later when he and a friend were dismissed by the court in Maidstone, where he appeared in shorts and sandals, as “two old fools having a laugh”. Here indeed was Lear on the blasted heath.

Born in Walsall, near Birmingham, John was the third son of Charles McEnery, who owned and managed a pickle factory, Mack’s Pickles, and his wife Mary (nee Brinson). Charles sold the factory and moved with the family to Brighton, East Sussex, mainly to benefit the health of the eldest boy, David, who had rheumatic fever.

There, and in Hove, he opened four stationery shops. John attended the Dorothy Stringer secondary modern school (now Dorothy Stringer high school, a comprehensive) and worked in a department store before taking the plunge into theatre.

He trained at the Bristol Old Vic in 1962, just as Peter established himself as a shooting star at the new RSC under Peter Hall. His first job, in 1964, was in the newly founded Everyman theatre in Hope Street, Liverpool. McEnery stayed for three years, in a company that included Terry Hands, Susan Fleetwood, Terence Taplin and Beacham.

He then joined the National Theatre at the Old Vic, appearing in the premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) as Hamlet, upstaged by his own courtiers. Other notable new NT plays included Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Charles Wood’s H, and he was a very funny Costard in Olivier’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. After Romeo and Juliet, his film career imploded save for the title role in Anthony Friedman’s Bartleby (1970) opposite Paul Scofield, as Captain van Schoenvorts in the dinosaur adventure The Land That Time Forgot (1974) and as an amiable second in Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977).

At the Nottingham Playhouse in the 70s, he returned to Stoppard’s quizzical play, taking the title role opposite brother Peter as Guildenstern and renewed his relationship with Beacham when they appeared together in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming; they married in 1973 and had two daughters, but divorced five years later. Beacham remained in touch at the end of his life.

At the RSC from 1975, McEnery played a string of important roles – Private Meek in Shaw’s Too True To Be Good, Antonio in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, Roderigo in Donald Sinden’s Othello, with Bob Peck as Iago, and Pistol in a 1979 Merry Wives directed by Nunn and John Caird in a company – Timothy Spall, David Threlfall, Ben Kingsley – that prefigured the Nickleby experience.

His best television appearances included John Harmon, opposite Jane Seymour’s Bella Wilfer, in a BBC Our Mutual Friend (1976), the Rev Francis Davey, again with Seymour, in Jamaica Inn (1983) and Uncle Ted in Hanif Kureishi’s autobiographical The Buddha of Suburbia (1993). Later films included Peter Medak’s The Krays (1990), Mr York in Caroline Thompson’s Black Beauty (1994) and the apothecary in Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003).

He was the kind of actor you could not see without thinking how good he was, still and dangerous, ticking like a time bomb, but his reputation with the public was unfocused. He was terrific again at the RSC in Sam Shepard’s dysfunctional family drama Curse of the Starving Class in 1991, and, 10 years later, as a bogus Quaker ancestor in Nick Stafford’s Luminosity.

His last mainstream stage performance came at the Young Vic in 2012, when he played an old gardener, who seduces a starving girl, in a revival of Edward Bond’s Bingo with Patrick Stewart as Shakespeare and Richard McCabe as Ben Jonson.

McEnery is survived by his daughters, Phoebe, who played Regan to his King Lear, and Chloe, and by Peter. His eldest brother, David, a photographer, predeceased him.

• John Murray McEnery, actor, born 1 November 1943; died 12 April 2019

Kay Walsh was born in 1911 in Chelsea, London. She made her film debut in 1934 in “How’s Chances”.She was at one time married to the famed director David Lean and was featured in his films – “In Which We Serve”, “This Happy Breed” and “Oliver Twist” as ‘Nancy’. She also appeared opposite Alec Guinness in “The Horse’s Mouth” and “Tunes of Glory”in 1958 and 1960. She died at the age of 93 in 2004.

Tm Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

A former chorus girl who became a popular screen player in the Thirties, Kay Walsh was leading lady to George Formby in two of the singer/comedian’s hit films. She found most recognition, though, when she had roles in two of the biggest successes of the Forties, In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed.

Kathleen Walsh (Kay Walsh), actress: born London 27 August 1911; married 1940 David Lean (marriage dissolved 1949), second Dr Elliott Jaques (died 2003; one adopted daughter; marriage dissolved); died London 16 April 2005.

The second of David Lean’s six wives, she encouraged him to become a director, and played Nancy in his version of Oliver Twist. Also a skilled writer, she is credited with devising two of the best-remembered scenes in Lean’s work – the climax of Great Expectations (often cited as better than that conceived by Dickens) and the wordless opening sequence of Oliver Twist. Later she became one of Britain’s finest character actresses, giving outstanding performances in such films as Last Holiday, Encore and Cast a Dark Shadow.

Of Irish stock, she was born in London in 1911 and raised in Pimlico by her grandmother. Although her family was not theatrical, she told the historian Brian McFarlane,

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t dance. My first memory of a public performance was darting into Church Street, Chelsea, and dancing to a barrel organ, aged three.

She was a chorus dancer in revue before making her screen début with a small part in the musical How’s Chances? (1934), then played a leading role in the minor comedy Get Your Man (1934), the first of several “B” movies that displayed her fresh blonde beauty and spirited playing. She remembered these early films with mixed emotions –

Affection because of such warm-hearted old pros as Sandy Powell, Will Fyffe and Ernie Lotinga. Fear, because of having broken out of the chorus at a time of appalling unemployment and presenting myself as an actress. I had had no training and dreaded being rumbled.

In 1936, while filming The Secret of Stamboul, she met Lean, then a fledgling editor who was cutting the Elisabeth Bergner vehicle Dreaming Lips (1937). The pair were soon in love, and Walsh broke off her engagement to Pownell Pellew, later ninth Viscount Exmouth, and began living with Lean. In December 1936, she was appearing in the play The Melody That Got Lost at the Embassy Theatre when she was seen by the Ealing producer Basil Dean, whose wife Victoria Hopper was in the show.

Dean gave her a year’s contract and cast her in her two movies with Formby, Keep Fit (1937) and I See Ice (1938). Walsh described the films as “high-flying compared to the ‘fit-up’ quickies I had been doing”, but she was unhappy at Ealing. She told Lean’s biographer Kevin Brownlow,

I never suffered so much in my life as I did at that studio. They were absolute monsters, and everyone assumed I was Basil Dean’s girlfriend. They were all freemasons and they would never give David a job because he had the wrong handshake.

Although her relationship with Lean, whom she married in 1940, was constantly subject to his infidelities, Walsh recalled their early days fondly:

We worked all day and danced all night and slept through the weekend, waking late on Sunday to make love, to read the Sunday papers and to breakfast on eggs and bacon. And, of course, we went out to a film. We were asked everywhere – we were an attractive couple, we enjoyed life enormously.

When Lean edited Anthony Asquith’s screen version of Pygmalion (1939), Walsh wrote additional dialogue for the film with such skill that, allegedly, Shaw himself never noticed.

Her film roles continued to be in lesser “quota quickies” until she was cast in Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942). She had tested, unsuccessfully, for a role in Leslie Howard’s The First of the Few, but Coward saw the test and thought she had “a nice, mousy quality” perfect for the role of the wife of an Able Seaman (John Mills). Particularly moving was the scene in which she receives a telegram informing her that her husband is one of the survivors of a sunken destroyer. After joyfully shouting the news to her mother, she dissolves into tears. “Kay’s great strength is her reality,” Mills said. “You can hardly believe she is acting; when the camera turned over she just did it.” It was Walsh who persuaded Lean, who was editing the film, to ask for co-director credit with Coward, who eventually agreed. Walsh and Coward got along well, though privately he derided her strong left-wing views, calling her “Red Emma”.

Walsh had an even better role in Lean’s first film as solo director, This Happy Breed (1944), based on Coward’s play. She played Queenie, the erring daughter dissatisfied with working-class life, who leaves home during the night to be with a married man. The scene in which, years later, she returns home, was exquisitely underplayed by Walsh and Celia Johnson, as her mother. “The only difference between Queenie and me was that I would never have given in, never have gone back home.”

She was given a writing credit on Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), her major contribution being the dénouement, completely different from that of Dickens. Estella’s transformation into a second Miss Havisham, and Pip’s throwing open the doors and curtains to let in the light, is generally considered superior to the original ending.

Walsh’s next film as an actress was the comedy-fantasy Vice Versa (1947), Anthony Newley’s first feature film:

I went to the first day rushes, then telephoned David at Pinewood, where he was doing dreadful things in the make-up room to Alfie Bass’s face (to test him for the Artful Dodger). I said, “I’ve got your Dodger.”

Walsh played Nancy in Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948), a performance she herself disliked – she wanted to look dirtier and “more damaged” than Lean would allow her.

She was much prouder of having conceived the film’s haunting opening sequence. Dickens’s novel starts with a matter-of-fact statement of Oliver’s birth, and the film-makers were so desperate to find an effective way of beginning the film that there had even been a competition held at Pinewood:

Finally, I said to David, “Look, I’ve got a couple of pages here I’ve written in an exercise book. Have a look at it.”

She had scribbled a detailed description of a storm, a girl in labour painfully climbing a hill to reach a source of light, and pulling on a bell as she sinks down and the camera goes up to a sign saying, “Workhouse”. A baby’s cry is heard and Oliver Twist is born. Although the film initially received mixed reviews, all agreed that the opening sequence, filmed as Walsh had described, was masterly.

Lean and Walsh were divorced in 1949, Walsh citing his adultery with the actress Ann Todd, who became Lean’s next muse. Later Walsh married Dr Elliott Jaques, a leading psychologist who coined the phrase “mid-life crisis”, and in 1956 they adopted a baby daughter, Gemma.

Walsh spent the next decades as a respected character actress, creating a gallery of memorable portraits. She had a good role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950), which she remembered primarily for “watching Marlene Dietrich tuck into a steak-and-kidney pudding in the canteen”. She was a sympathetic housekeeper in Last Holiday (1950) with Alec Guinness, and in another Coward adaptation, Meet Me Tonight (1951), portrayed part of a music-hall act in the “Red Peppers” sequence. Her partner was Ted Ray, “the most lovable actor I ever worked with”.

She was the frustrated wife of a vicar in Lease of Life (1954), and in The Horse’s Mouth (1956), again with Alec Guinness, she had her favourite role, as the barmaid. She enjoyed cooking for Guinness, his family, and other friends, and she was also an enthusiastic gardener and renovator of old properties.

Her last film was Night Crossing (1992), based on the true story of a family who escaped from East to West Berlin by hot-air balloon.

Tom Vallance

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

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Corin Redgrave

Elizabeth Dermot Walsh

Shakin Stevens

Peter Hinwood

Kaz Garas

Joseph Mawle

John Moulder-Brown

John McEnery

John McEnery obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019

Kay Walsh

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