Brittish Actors

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Kaz Garas
Kaz Garas
Kaz Garas

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
Joseph Mawle
Joseph Mawle

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
John Moulder-Brown
John Moulder-Brown

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
John McEnery
John McEnery

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
Kay Walsh
Kay Walsh

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.

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.

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.

The Allisons

The Allisons

 

The Allisons

The Allisons were a singing duo who represented the UK in the Euovision Song Contest in 1961 with their song “Are You Sure”.

“Wikipedia” entry:

The Allisons were an English pop duo consisting of:

  • Bob Day (born Bernard Colin Day; 2 February 1941 – 25 November 2013)
  • John Alford (born Brian Henry John Alford; 31 December 1939)

They were marketed as being brothers, using the surname of Allison.

The Allisons represented the United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest 1961 with the song “Are You Sure?“. They came second with 24 points. The song was released as a single on the Fontana Records label, and climbed to number 1 on the UK NMEpop chart. However, the chart compiled by The Official Charts Company shows the song spent six weeks at number 2 and a further three weeks in the top 4. ‘Are You Sure” sold over one million records, earning a gold disc.  In Germany the single reached number 11. Despite a couple of minor follow-up hits, the duo disbanded in 1963.

Alford initially tried songwriting, but he and Day teamed up for short tours to keep ‘The Allisons’ name alive. Additionally, in the 1970s and 1980s Alford was joined by other “brothers” — Mike “Allison” and Tony “Allison”. By the 1990s, Day and Alford regularly reunited to perform on the oldies circuit.

Bob Day died on 25 November 2013, aged 71, after a long illness.

The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.

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Jonathan Hyde
Jonathan Hyde
Jonathan Hyde

Jonathan Hyde was born in 1948 in Brisbane, Australia.   One of his first roles was in the TV series “The Professionals” in 1978.   His movies include “Richie Rich” and “Titanic”.   Recently he was featured in the hit British TV series “Endeavour”.

IMDB entry:

Jonathan Hyde was born on May 21, 1948 in Brisbane, Australia. He is an actor, known for Titanic (1997), Jumanji (1995) and The Mummy (1999). He is married to Isobel Buchanan. They have two children.Trade Mark (2)   Rich baritone voice   Often plays posh upper-class figures   Is a respected member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.   Graduated from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).   An Associate Member of Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).   Is a leading member of the Royal National Theatre Company.   Father of actress Georgia King.   On the opera visits during his youth: I remember seeing Joan Sutherland sing Semiramide, a wonderful production. Carmen, I remember well, and going to see Robert Speight in “A Man for All Seasons” and then these fantastic trips to Florentino’s. Any boarding school kid really learns the value of good food.

On his role in The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb (2006): And then I went to India to shoot an absolutely ghastly pile of tosh, but we were in Jaipur for seven weeks; I’d never been to India and I found it the most astonishingly beautiful, wonderful and nourishing country I’d ever been to in my life. Thank you very much: where next?
On his role as the Egyptologist in The Mummy (1999):…you end up with a bunch of people who are really fun, and find you are all in Marrakesh for a couple of weeks, then the middle of the desert for five weeks. What could be more wonderful?
 
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
 

Denholm Elliott
Denholm Elliott
Denholm Elliott

Denholm Elliott was born in Ealing, London in 1922.   His first major movie role was “The Cruel Sea” in 1953.   His other roles include “The Heart of the Matter”, “Trading Places” and “A Room With A View”.   He died in 1992.

David Shipman’s “Independent” obituary:

Denholm Mitchell Elliott, actor, born 31 May 1922, CBE 1988, married 1954 Virginia McKenna (marriage dissolved 1957), 1962 Susan Robinson (one son, one daughter), died Ibiza 6 October 1992.A FEW weeks ago, Noises Off limped in and out of some of the country’s cinemas. It had been a co-production between two companies adept at making box- office successes, Disney and Amblin, ie Steven Spielberg, but likely to strike horror into the breasts of the more sensitive of us. In fact, Noises Off was hastily replaced by a revival of Spielberg’s Hook, a film as misconceived as any ever made. On stage, Michael Frayn’s farce ran for several years, and even though he endorsed the film version in a long article in the Observer no one seemed to believe him. The few of us who did see it laughed immoderately – and one of its joys was the wonderful teamwork of a cast including Michael Caine and Carol Burnett, Christopher Reeve and Denholm Elliott. Elliott was in his element as an ageing British actor (the rest of the cast, except Caine, played Americans), prone to tipple, forget his lines and turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time. As so often with this actor he stole every scene in which he appeared.

After an unhappy childhood, he studied acting at RADA (on the advice of his psychiatrist), but he left after a year. He spent the war with the RAF, and it was his three years as a prisoner of war in Germany, playing in amateur productions, which intensified his interest in acting. He began his career in 1945 and went in to high gear when Laurence Olivier selected him to play his son in Christopher Fry’s comedy, Venus Observed, in 1950. Later that year, Elliott went to New York to play the dual role – done by Paul Scofield in London – in Fry’s adaption of Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon. Both performances won awards for Elliott, who had already made his film debut in Dear Mr Prohack in 1949, based on a novel by Arnold Bennett. Cecil Parker played the title-role and Elliott was a minor civil servant who marries his daughter, Sheila Sim.

His performance suggested a career as a character actor, as did the one he gave as Ralph Richardson’s cowardly son in The Sound Barrier (1952) but the acclaim in London and New York brought him some straight leading roles, as in The Cruel Sea (1953), as the officer married to a two-timing actress (Moira Lister). He was much better cast as the civil servant who cuckolds Trevor Howard in The Heart of the Matter (1953), but in Lease of Life (1954) and The Man Who Loved Redheads (1954) he was merely just another jeune premier. He was not movie-star material, as he proved in the lead of Pacific Destiny (1956), based on Sir Arthur Grimble’s autobiography, A Pattern of Islands. Elliott’s rather remote, semi-aristocratic style (though this he would late use to good advantage) were never likely to make him a popular stage favourite. This he realised, continuing to act on the stage, notably in TS Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk in 1953 and in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real in 1957.

The film offers became thin on the ground with the advent of Albert Finney and a sturdier kind of British hero. What changed Elliott’s career was a king-sized character role in Nothing but the Best (1964), a title which referred to what Alan Bates wanted, as he looks for his ‘room at the top’. However, this was not John Braine rehashed, but a clever social satire by Frederic Raphael, with Elliott wonderfully cast as the black sheep of an aristocratic family. Bates realises that the Elliott character can teach him much of what he needs to know in his ascent and Elliott, who has little of his past except a monthly cheque, is happy to accept. The film was directed by Clive Donner, but when he tackled something similar later, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, the result was disastrous. Elliott this time played the father of the girlfriend of the man on the make, Barry Evans, and was briefly amusing as the wine-snob given to chasing the maid. He did his first film in Hollywood, King Rat (1965), as one of the most cynical of the prisoners, but it was his role as a sleazy back-street abortionist in Alfie (1966) which really attracted national attention. He returned to Hollywood to play a self-appointed vice-finder in The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968). He had established himself in light villainy, and although too varied as an actor to be type-cast he was seldom to escape from this, but he did in Sidney Lumet’s film of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1968), in which he was the doctor.

He had a leading role in Patrick Garland’s version of A Doll’s House (1973), with Claire Bloom, as Krogstad, the conniving bank official aiming to replace Torvald (Anthony Hopkins), but was back on familiar ground with The Apprentice of Duddy Kravitz (1974), as a drunken has-been British director ‘used’ by Richard Dreyfuss in his rise to the top. He worked almost non-stop in films thereafter, in parts big and small, and the latter would include Harrison Ford’s academic superior in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the second of its sequels, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Among the larger ones was the immensely snooty but bribable butler in Trading Places (1983) and Mr Emerson in A Room wth a View (1986): perhaps because this last was an unexpectedly big success Elliott was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, but by the time the director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had finished with Forster’s novel even an actor of Elliott’s skill could not make the character anything but unfathomable.

Apart from Noises Off, perhaps his best screen work during the last decade was as an ageing but brave Fleet Street hack in Defence of the Realm (1985). Gabriel Byrne, who played the lead, observed: ‘I amended the actor’s cliche to ‘Never work with children, animals or Denholm Elliott’.’

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