Desmond Tester was born in 1919 and was an English film and television actor, host and executive. He was born in London, England, and started his career as child actor, among his most notable roles, was that of the ill-fated boy Stevie in the Alfred Hitchcock film Sabotage (1936).
After the Second World War, he moved to Australia and embarked in careers in radio, theatre, and television. As television broadcasting began in Australia, Tester soon found work with Channel Nine‘s What’s My Line? and in a variety of children’s programmes including Cabbage Quiz and Kaper Kops with Reg Gorman and Rod Hull. He spent fifteen years at Channel Nine, taking charge of children’s programming, and became more involved behind the scenes in production and publicity. He later moved to Reg Grundy Productions, eventually leaving the industry entirely due to a dislike of the overall management culture.
In 1974 he revived his stage acting career on the advice of Hayes Gordon and appeared in numerous productions including productions by playwrights Arthur Miller and John Ewing. He also had occasional minor roles in various films, such as Barry McKenzie Holds His Own(1974) and The Wild Duck (1983).
Tester was married to Evelyn Stuart and had five children – Jolyon (deceased), Dermot, Giles, Toby and Simon and five grandchildren – Sally, Daisy, Sam, Georgia, and the talented Max. The last 29 years of his life was spent in leafy Lindfield on Sydney’s North Shore with his partner Valerie Jones. Desmond Tester, died on 31 December 2002, in Sydney, New South Wales at the age of 83.
It wasn’t until 1974 that Vitali met Stanley Kubrick, with whom he would go on to have a professional relationship for the rest of Kubrick’s career. Vitali answered a casting call for Barry Lyndon and got the part of Lord Bullingdon, the title character’s stepson. Kubrick and Vitali bonded during the shoot. As filming concluded, Vitali asked Kubrick if he could stay on, without pay, to observe the editing process, to which Kubrick agreed[3]. Five years later, Kubrick sent Vitali a copy of Stephen King‘s The Shining and asked him to join the production of Kubrick’s next film, to which Vitali eagerly agreed. He is credited in The Shining (1980) as “personal assistant to director”.
In 1977 he portrayed Victor Frankenstein in Terror of Frankenstein, Calvin Floyd’s adaptation of Mary Shelley‘s classic Frankenstein, where he met his future wife Kersti Vitali, who worked as costume designer in the shoot. The Vitalis then worked as costume designers in Birgitta Svensson‘s Mackan, after which Leon played a bit part in Svensson’s next film, Inter Rail (1981). Leon and Kersti would divorce later on. Swedish actress Vera Vitali is their daughter. Masha Vitali is a second daughter. Max Vitali is their son.
Vitali teamed with Kubrick again for Full Metal Jacket (1987), where he served both as casting director and assistant to the director. Twelve years later, Vitali was credited with the same titles in working with Kubrick in what would be the director’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), in which Vitali also played the Red Cloak. The words “fashion designer Leon Vitali” also appear in the third column of the newspaper article that Tom Cruise’s character reads to learn about a former beauty queen’s hotel drugs overdose.
Since Kubrick’s death Vitali has overseen the restoration of both picture and sound elements for most of Kubrick’s films. In 2004, Vitali was honored with the Cinema Audio Society‘s President’s Award for this work.
In 2017, Vitali was the subject of a documentary, Filmworker, directed by Tony Zierra and screened at the London Film Festival in October 2017, in which he is interviewed at length about his work with Kubrick.[4] The film was broadcast by Film4 in the UK on 7 March 2019, followed by a showing of Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).
In 1999, Vitali and filmmaker Todd Field, with whom he appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, began discussing the possibility of making films together. Vitali is credited as “technical consultant” on Field’s In the Bedroom (2001), and as “associate producer” on Field’s Little Children (2006), where he also made a cameo appearance as “The Oddly Familiar Man”.
It was in the era of 1970s glam rock that Alvin Stardust, who has died aged 72, became a household name. Thanks to a dramatic appearance on Top of the Pops in 1973, his debut single My Coo Ca Choo climbed to No 2 in the British charts and blossomed into an international hit. The follow-up, Jealous Mind, went to No 1. During the 80s, Stardust’s allure proved durable enough to take him back into the Top 10 with Pretend (1981), I Feel Like Buddy Holly (1984) and I Won’t Run Away (1984).
Yet before he adopted the chartbusting persona of Alvin Stardust, who resembled a glittery 70s version of the 50s rocker Gene Vincent, he had already had a trial run at pop stardom as Shane Fenton, lead singer with Shane Fenton and the Fentones. The group scored a handful of minor hits at the start of the 60s, beginning with 1961’s I’m a Moody Guy. In 1962, they managed to crack the Top 20 with Cindy’s Birthday, and that year Fenton appeared in the Michael Winner-directed movie Play It Cool alongside Billy Fury and Helen Shapiro. However, the Fentones split up after a subsequent string of flops.
He was born Bernard Jewry in east London, to Bill, a salesman, and his wife, Margaret, but the family soon moved to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. His father got a sales job that came with a large three-storey house, and Margaret started providing lodgings for performers from the local Palace Theatre. Doubtless it was here that the young Bernard acquired an early taste for the showbusiness life.
Sent to Southwell Minster Collegiate grammar school as a boarder, he had his enthusiasm for blues, jazz and rock’n’roll fired by listening to the American Forces Network and Radio Luxembourg. He became close friends with a local band, Johnny Theakstone and the Tremeloes, and would help carry their equipment. However, their lead singer Theakstone died suddenly, the result of a childhood illness that had weakened his heart
The Tremeloes split up, but were subsequently contacted by the BBC’s Saturday Club show. They had received an audition tape sent in by Theakstone, under the pseudonym Shane Fenton, and were now inviting the band to perform on the show. Jewry was asked if he would impersonate the fictional Fenton, and he was happy to oblige. The group went down well enough to be invited back for numerous BBC broadcasts, which led to them signing a contract with Parlophone in 1961.
His transformation into Alvin Stardust came about through another bizarre identity-switch. The songwriter and producer Peter Shelley, co-founder of Magnet Records with Michael Levy (now Lord Levy, the former chief fundraiser for the Labour party), had written and recorded My Coo Ca Choo under the invented name Alvin Stardust. Shelley then had to pretend to be Stardust when Magnet’s PR department landed the fictional performer a promotional slot on TV. When the song charted, Shelley realised they would need a permanent Alvin Stardust to do the job properly, and Hal Carter, agent for Shane Fenton, suggested his client.
After his early huge chart success, Stardust’s career seemed to be fading when punk rock came along, but he proved remarkably resilient. Pete Waterman supplied him with a song, Pretend, but several labels turned him down for sounding “too seventies”. Dave Robinson, boss of the wilful Stiff Records, stepped in and signed Stardust. Pretend became one of his biggest hits, and they followed up with Wonderful Time Up There (1981), I Want You Back in My Life Again (1982) and Walk Away Renee (1983). Stardust then left the by-now-ailing Stiff for Chrysalis, where he scored in 1984 with Mike Batt’s song I Feel Like Buddy Holly and I Won’t Run Away.
In the 90s, he set out to pursue his long-cherished ambition to act. He appeared on radio, fronted his own Sunday morning children’s show for ITV, It’s Stardust, and was seen on TV in Hollyoaks, Doctors and The Grimleys. He racked up a list of theatre appearances in productions including Uriah Heep in David Copperfield – The Musical, The Phantom Of The Opera and Side By Side By Sondheim. He played the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the lead in The Billy Butlin Story at the London Palladium. Having previously been married to the actor Liza Goddard – their relationship foundered after Stardust’s sudden conversion to Christianity, apparently following his meeting with some American Baptist missionaries on a train to Waterloo – Stardust married the actor and and choreographer Julie Paton, whom he met during rehearsals for Godspell.
In 2010, Universal released Stardust’s album I Love Rock’n’Roll, comprising new recordings of his old hits alongside some new songs. He had recently been working on a new album, Alvin, for release this autumn, his first new studio collection since 1984.
He is survived by Julie and their daughter Millie; a daughter, Sophie, and stepson, Thom, from his marriage to Goddard; and two sons, Shaun and Adam, from his first marriage, to Iris Caldwell.
• Alvin Stardust (Bernard William Jewry), singer and actor, born 27 September 1942; died 23 October 2014
Sir Ian Holm is one of the world’s greatest actors, a Laurence Olivier Award-winning, Tony Award-winning, BAFTA-winning and Academy Award-nominated British star of films and the stage. He was a member of the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company and has played more than 100 roles in films and ontelevision.
He was born Ian Holm Cuthbert on September 12, 1931, in Goodmayes, Essex, UK, to Scottish parents who worked at the Essex mental asylum. His mother, Jean Wilson (Holm), was as a nurse, and his father, Doctor James Harvey Cuthbert, was a psychiatrist. Young Holm was brought up in London. At the age of seven he was inspired by the seeing ‘Les Miserables’ and became fond of acting. Holm studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, graduating in 1950 to the Royal Shakespeare Company. There he emerged as an actor whose range and effortless style allowed him to play almost entire Shakespeare’s repertoire. In 1959 his stage partner Laurence Olivier scored a hit on Ian Holm in a sword fight in a production of ‘Coriolanus’. Holm still has a scar on his finger.
In 1965 Holm made his debut on television as Richard III on the BBC’s The Wars of the Roses (1965), which was a filmed theatrical production of four of Shakespeare’s plays condensed down into a trilogy. In 1969 Holm won his first BAFTA Film Award Best Supporting Actor for The Bofors Gun (1968), then followed a flow of awards and nominations for his numerous works in film and on television. In 1981 Holm shot to fame with one of his best known roles, as Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire (1981), for which he was nominated for Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He is best known for his big action film roles, such as Father Vito Cornelius in The Fifth Element (1997), as Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and as Professor Fitz in The Aviator(2004).
Ian Holm has five children, three daughters and two sons from the first three of his five wives. In 1989 Holm was created a Commander of the British Empire (CBE), and in 1998 he was knighted for his services to drama.
Ian Holm obituary in “The Guardian” in June in 2020.
Ian Holm, who has died aged 88, was a brilliant actor in all media whose career fell into distinct phases. On stage, he enjoyed a dazzling early period and triumphant later years, most especially in Shakespeare and Pinter; but, if there was a prolonged period when Holm was absent from the theatre, it was because he suffered a temporarily paralysing form of stage fright. The theatre’s loss, however, was the cinema’s gain. He transferred the vocal precision, technical skill and impish mischief he had displayed on stage to the screen, enjoying a new, late-flowering career in scores of movies including, most notably, the Lord of the Rings cycle.
Though he had begun to make his mark at the Shakespeare Memorial theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in the 1950s, he came into his own when Peter Hall took over in 1960 and transformed a summer festival into the Royal Shakespeare Company. Holm instantly became a contract artist and graduated from spry character actor to leading man.
His long grounding in Shakespeare, his iron technique and his total mastery of verse bore rich fruit in the 1964 season, when Hall presented a complete Shakespeare history cycle. In the course of a single week it was possible to see Holm growing from a beady, watchful Prince Hal to a working-warrior Henry V who joined his men in pushing a wagon off-stage as they sang a post-Agincourt Te Deum. As if that were not enough, he then turned into a wickedly malevolent Duke of Gloucester and snickering, snarling Richard III in the concluding Wars of the Roses trilogy, which was filmed for BBC television.
Holm’s full versatility revealed itself when in 1965 he played Lenny in the premiere production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at the Aldwych: what Holm gave us, unforgettably, was a savage peacock in Pinter’s glittering north London human zoo, but one rendered impotent by Vivien Merchant’s sexually charged Ruth. After repeating the role in New York in 1967 – where he won a Tony award as best supporting actor – Holm returned to Stratford to play a fiery, intemperate Romeo in Karolos Koun’s highly physicalised Romeo and Juliet. By now, however, Holm was ready for a break from the RSC, and there followed a series of roles in new plays, including Manfred in Wesker’s The Friends at the Roundhouse and Nelson in Rattigan’s A Bequest to the Nation at the Haymarket (both 1970).
Holm’s career prospered, but it was in 1976, when he was scheduled to play Hickey in an RSC revival of The Iceman Cometh at the Aldwych, that he was struck by a paralysing terror: in the course of the final previews he was found curled in a foetal ball in his dressing-room, unable to go on stage. The source of his fear was never fully explained, but it meant that over the next two decades he turned increasingly to film and television, although there was a striking return to the stage in 1979 in Uncle Vanya at Hampstead.
Nonetheless, Holm was soon in constant demand for the screen. His memorable TV appearances included a whimsically capricious JM Barrie in The Lost Boys (1978) and his film work ranged from Alien (1979), in which he was a decapitated android spewing out yellow gunge, to Chariots of Fire(1981), where he was a straw-boatered sports trainer with a faint resemblance to Max Beerbohm. Notable work followed in the comedies Big Night (1996), A Life Less Ordinary (1997) and Beautiful Joe (2000), but it is probably his Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings that will be his ultimate passport to screen fame.
The stage, however, was Holm’s natural stamping ground and when he did eventually return, it was in triumph. In 1993 he played Andy, the dying, foul-mouthed, irascible ex-civil-servant, in Pinter’s Moonlight at the Almeida theatre: he invested the role with a scorching fury born out of a sense that, in a world without reason or religion, life is as meaningless as death. He returned to Pinter in 1994 in a production of Landscape first seen at the Gate, Dublin, and then at the National Theatre and on television. Playing opposite his then wife, Penelope Wilton, Holm turned the bluff Duff into a hauntingly tragic figure craving absolution and forgiveness from his walled-off spouse, Beth.Advertisement
After this performance it seemed only natural he should play King Lear, which he memorably did in Richard Eyre’s 1997 Cottesloe production. Stocky, grizzled and bullet-headed, he captured both Lear’s patriarchal ferocity and descent into helpless suffering.
And when in 2001 he came to play Max in the Dublin Gate theatre’s revival of Pinter’s The Homecoming, also seen in London, there were unmistakable echoes of Lear: under all the bullying bluster there was a terrifying sense of desolation as, at the end, he blundered towards his daughter-in-law emitting a great animal wail. For some of us this was every bit as moving as his Lear.
Born in Goodmayes, Ilford, in what is now the London borough of Redbridge, Ian was the son of Scottish parents, Jean (nee Holm), a nurse, and James Cuthbert, a psychiatrist. James was superintendent of the local mental hospital, where his wife also worked.
From Chigwell grammar school, Holm studied for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (1950-53), with a year’s interruption for national service. Mostly forgoing the grind of weekly rep – apart from a brief stint in Worthing in 1956 – he made his debut in 1954 at Stratford. He was small of stature, but there was a vocal incisiveness and inner mischief about him that made him a natural comedian, and led to his being cast as Puck in Hall’s celebrated Midsummer Night’s Dream and as the Fool to Charles Laughton’s underpowered Lear (both 1959).
Inevitably, one speculates about the roles Holm might have played but never did: Iago, Macbeth, Peer Gynt. But, although his theatrical career was fractured by stage fright, he was a tremendous actor who combined a laser-like vocal precision with a capacity both for baffled rage and spiritual desolation. What is gratifying is that, in his later years, Holm ascended into true greatness and claimed his rightful throne. Made CBE in 1989, he was knighted in 1998.
In 1955 he married Lynn Shaw, and they had two daughters, Jessica and Sarah-Jane. They divorced in 1965, and with the photographer Bee Gilbert, his partner until 1976, he had a son, Barnaby, and a daughter, Lissy. In 1982 he married Sophie Baker, with whom he had a son, Harry. They divorced in 1986, and in 1991 Wilton became his third wife, the marriage ending in divorce in 2002. The following year he married Sophie de Stempel. She and his children, and eight grandchildren, Talulah, Poppy, Tierney, Archie, Karris, Ellie, Edie and Teddy, survive him. Michael Billington
Ryan Gilbey writes: Versatile screen performances in commercial hits made Ian Holm popular with audiences who had never seen him set foot on stage. In four of the six parts of Peter Jackson’s 18-hour film cycle based on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Holm was a mischievous Bilbo Baggins, the homely hobbit whose obsession with a magic ring sets the entire adventure in motion. After The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003) came the prequels An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Battle of the Five Armies (2014). By this point, for his final film credits, Holm was playing Old Bilbo to Martin Freeman as his younger self.
On television, he provided teatime entertainment for a generation as Pod, the father in a family of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards, in the BBC’s charming adaptation of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1992), and its sequel, The Return of the Borrowers (1993), with Pod’s wife played by Wilton.
Early bit-parts in television and films were confined mostly to period pieces, including Franco Zeffirelli’s TV version of Jesus of Nazareth (1977). His cinema breakthrough came in Alien (1979), in which he was chilling as an android who goes to extreme lengths to protect a bloodthirsty organism. Even decapitation did little to quell Holm’s wry menace.
That film’s success coincided with his retreat from theatre and heralded a run of detailed performances. He was Oscar-nominated for Chariots of Fireand made a highly amusing Napoleon in Terry Gilliam’s fantasy Time Bandits (both 1981). (He played the military leader again, as well as his double, in the 2001 comedy The Emperor’s New Clothes.) He was touching as Desmond Cussen, besotted with Ruth Ellis (Miranda Richardson) – later the last woman to be hanged in Britain – in Dance With a Stranger, and as Lewis Carroll in Dreamchild (both 1985).
He was part of the ensemble cast of Woody Allen’s drama Another Woman (1988) and acted for Kenneth Branagh in Henry V (1989) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), though he was not in Branagh’s Hamlet, having already played Polonius in Zeffirelli’s 1990 version starring Mel Gibson as the Prince. He appeared in David Cronenberg’s daring film of Naked Lunch (1991) and played the radical Dr Willis in The Madness of King George (1994) as well as a crass restaurateur in the culinary comedy Big Night (1996).
Holm got his first film lead, and gave arguably his greatest screen performance, in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997), in which he played a troubled lawyer who tries to persuade bereaved families to sue following a fatal crash involving a school bus.
The director, Atom Egoyan, expressed surprise at being the first film-maker to have given Holm a lead role because, he said, “he is often the most memorable thing about the movies he’s been in”.
The actor reflected in 2002 on what Branagh had once written about him: “[He said] that I was of the ‘anything you can do I can do less of’ school of acting, and I guess I took that as a great compliment. I believe in working from the script. I don’t believe in doing much research, partly out of laziness. I’m a lazy person. I suppose I just assume everything will be all right on opening night.” And, with the exception of The Iceman Cometh, it was.
• Ian Holm (Ian Holm Cuthbert), actor, born 12 September 1931; died 19 June 2020
The British character actor Bernard Miles was born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, England, in 1907; his father was a farm laborer and his mother was a cook. After graduation from Pembroke College, Oxford, he was a teacher for a while and then joined the New Theatre in London. In 1937, he worked in Herbert Farjeon‘s revue company and established his theatrical career. He made appearances in relatively few films, serving as director, producer, and screenwriter, as well as actor, on a number of them. In 1959, Miles opened the Mermaid Theatre in London; his contributions to the London stage won him a knighthood in 1969 and a life peerage ten years later.
Jonathon Morris was born on July 20, 1960 in Urmston, Manchester, England. He is an actor, known for The Fantasticks (1995), Beau Geste (1982) and Vampire Journals (1997).
