Georgie Famw was born in Lancashire in 1943. He had three monster hist in the UK, “Yeh, Yeh” in 1965, “Getaway” in 1966 and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967.
Interview in “The Independent”:
Georgie Fame, 64, had his first No 1 hit in 1968 with ‘The Ballad Of Bonnie And Clyde’. Since then, the British R&B veteran has made yearly visits to Ronnie Scott’s club in London. He starts a six-night residency there on Monday
A phrase I use too often…
Nothing really. I don’t swear.
I wish people would take more notice of…
What man has done to the environment. It’s like a runaway train and I shudder to think what it will be like for my grandchildren. My generation had the best years. We missed the Second World War and caught the outburst of rock ‘n’ roll.
The most surprising thing that happened to me…
I went to Heathrow and it took 30 minutes to travel eight kilometres. Even though I allowed twice the usual time to get there, I still missed my plane.
A common misperception of me is…
Some people think I’m a rock ‘n’ roll musician and some think I’m a jazz musician but, for me, there is no difference.
I am not a politician but…
If I was I would commit suicide. There’s nothing politicians can do, only make platitudes.
I’m good at…
I learnt to fly aeroplanes about eight years ago. I’ve a few hours on my log-book and I can fly alone safely. I can cook well too.
I’m very bad at…
Being surrounded by people. I’m not good at being in a crowd anymore.
The ideal night out is…
I would take my girlfriend to Pizza On The Park in London and listen to Mose Allison. He has had a profound influence on my career. He is 80 years old and he’s still performing. It inspires me.
In weak moments I…
Stay up too long talking with old friends.
You know me as a musician but in truer life I’d be a…
Pilot or a naval aviator. In my youth I thought I was going to be a professional rugby player.
The best age to be is…
In my teens I thought it was the best, then in my twenties I thought that was it. When you get to 50 you think you’re old, but then you realise it’s cool.
In a nutshell, my philosophy is…
Be cool and try to do the best you can.
Claire Daly
The above “Independent” interview can also be accessed online here.
Malcolm Roberts was a very popular British singer who was born in Manchester in 1944. He had a huge hit with the song “Love Is All” in 1969. Sadly he died of a heart attack at the age of 58 in 2003.
Alan Clayson’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
In 1968 Malcolm Roberts, who has died of a heart attack aged 58, reached eight in the British charts with the singalong May I Have The Next Dream With You. His next single, Love Is All, did nearly as well, and he even found himself ranked just below John Lennon in the New Musical Express’s 1969 male vocalist popularity poll.
May I Have The Next Dream With You’s success was part of a late 1960s schmaltz boom. There was Engelbert Humperdinck’s Release Me and The Last Waltz, the work of artists such as Vince Hill, Petula Clark and Harry Secombe, and even the briefly resurgent “Cavalier of Song” from the 1940s, Donald Peers.
This counter revolution of “decent” music may have been tacitly applauded by the cautious programmers of the BBC’s then new Radio 1 and Radio 2, with their largely middle-of-the-road playlists. Roberts debuted on a November 1968 Top Of The Pops top-heavy with the likes of Humperdinck, Des O’Connor and Barry Ryan.
Roberts was born and raised in Manchester. After art college, he enrolled at the city’s School of Music and Drama. Following graduation he played trumpet in the National Youth Orchestra, and made headway as an actor, including a Coronation Street bit-part. By the mid-1960s, he had landed leading roles in the West End musical Maggie May and a touring production of West Side Story.
Focusing on singing, he gained an RCA recording contract in 1966, and penetrated the top 50 in 1967 with Time Alone Will Tell (the Italian ballad, Non Pensare A Me). Projected as an English answer to Las Vegas’s Jack Jones, Roberts released an album, and then transferred to the independent label, Major-Minor (then a rarity). May I Have The Next Dream With You followed.
Love Is All, by Les Reed and Barry Mason – Humperdinck’s main songwriting team – was a winner for Roberts at a 1969 Rio de Janeiro song festival. It lingered in the Brazilian charts for more than six months. Attendance of tens of thousands at Roberts’s Rio shows were not unusual.
But the days of Roberts’s hits in Britain were over. In the ensuing decade the “all-round entertainer” emerged. Record releases became adjuncts to variety earnings – although Amanee (1972) sold well in Spain and South America, and a cover of Charles Aznavour’s She was a turntable hit in Germany. He also formed songwriting partnerships with Sammy Cahn, Les Reed and Lynsey de Paul, coming up with Contact (1979) recorded by soul shouter Edwin Starr, incidental music for ITV’s dramatisation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and One Love, a contender for Britain’s Eurovision Song Contest entry in 1992.
Recently he had taken more parts in West End shows, done some artist management and successfully played the 1960s nostalgia circuit. He seemed delighted that he was so warmly remembered at Brighton’s Summer 60s 2000 extravaganza – where The Essential Malcolm Roberts CD did brisk business. He is survived by his son from his former marriage, and his partner Susie.
· Malcolm Roberts, singer and songwriter, born March 31 1944; died February 8 2003
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Peter Duncan made his TV debut in an episode of “Doomwatch” in 1971. His movies include “Stardust” and “The Old Curiosity Shop” in 1975.
IMDB entry:
Peter Duncan was born on May 3, 1954 in London, England. He is an actor and director, known for Flash Gordon (1980), Demolition Dad (2006) and The Lifetaker (1975). He has been married to Ann since 1980. They have four children. Attempted to cross the Irish Sea in a modified Volkswagen Beetle, but had to be rescued by the British Coastguard after it started sinking. In July 2004 he was appointed Britain’s Chief Scout. Has four children, Lucy (b. 1985), Katie (b. 1987), Georgia (b. 1989) and Aurthur (b. 1991) Has become the United Kingdom’s Chief Scout – the ninth since the tradition began following in the footsteps of the Scout’s founder Lord Baden-Powell. [July 2004] On election to the position of the UK’s Chief Scout: “Scouting is alive and well in 21-century Britain. I can think of no better organisation to provide a creative and challenging framework for the positive development of young men and women. Getting involved in scouting as an adult is about having fun and adventure mixed in with a real sense of purpose. Being a leader gives people the chance to contribute to the positive development of tomorrow’s adults.”
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Alan Rothwell was born in Oldham, Lancashire. He played in “Coronation Street” as ‘David Barlow’ from 1960 until 1968. Other roles include ‘Nicholas Black’ in “Brookside”.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Alan Rothwell (born 9 February 1937) is an English actor and television presenter. He was born in Oldham, Lancashire. He first came to fame in 1960, playing the character David Barlow in the then new ITVsoap operaCoronation Street. He remained in this role in 1968, and the character was killed off two years later. He also featured as a regular character in all 26 episodes of the 1961-1962 British spy series Top Secret in the role of “Mike”.Rothwell then became known as a presenter to a generation of children, appearing on the children’s television programmes Picture Box from 1969 to 1990 and Hickory House from 1973 to 1978. He returned to soap operas in 1985, this time as the heroin addict Nicholas Black in Brookside.
Beautiful Morag Hood was born in Glasgow in 1942. She began her career as a TV presenter and was one of the first people to interview for TV, the Beatles in 1963. She had a celebrated stage career including a breathtaking ‘Stella’ in “A Streetcar Named Desire” in London in 1974 with Claire Bloom and Martin Shaw. Two years earlier she played ‘Natasha’ in the television adaptation of “War and Peace” with Anthony Hopkins as ‘Pierre’. She died in London in 2002.
Her obituary from “The Scotsman”:
TWO months ago, Morag Hood was visited in the London hospice where she spent her final months by her close friend, the actor Sian Phillips. Morag was not expected to live for many more days. Indeed, the medical team caring for her was convinced she was drifting into a coma. Suddenly, Phillips reported, Morag opened her eyes and said softly: “I think that was the dress rehearsal.”
It was a remark that was typical of Morag Hood, who was a remarkable actress but an even more remarkable woman. She had beaten cancer once – more than a decade ago – and when it cruelly returned she faced it with grace and immense courage, surrounded by loving family and an army of friends from film, theatre, television and rock music – Sting and his wife, Trudi Styler, were devoted to her.
A generation of men grew up besotted with the blonde actress with doll-like proportions and porcelain skin. Her luminous performance in the Seventies TV version of War and Peace had a hypnotic effect on half the male population. She had won the part of Natasha after more than 1,000 hopefuls were auditioned for it and she turned in a wonderful interpretation, although she had no formal acting training.
Morag’s father was master of works for the company that owned most of Glasgow’s cinemas and theatres, so she was enchanted by the world of make-believe from an early age. In her teens, she also hosted, with Paul Young, a weekly current affairs programme, Roundup, on STV
The youthful Anthony Hopkins was her leading man in the Tolstoy, although over the years she acted with everyone from John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to Hollywood’s Robert Duvall. She also worked extensively at the National Theatre and was a favourite with directors such as Peter Hall, Bill Bryden and Michael Bogdanov.
Her diminutive stature and exquisite bone structure were deceiving. For she was a powerful actor with enormous presence, both on stage and screen, a sort of steel magnolia. In the Nineties, for instance, she gave a brittle-as-glass performance as the menopausal wife of a serial philanderer (Trevor Eve) in Andrea Newman’s gripping TV serial, A Sense of Guilt. And, despite the fact that the symptoms of her final illness had already begun to manifest themselves, one of her finest stage performances was in Torben Betts’s dark drama, A Listening Heaven, at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre in 2001. It won her a nomination in last year’s prestigious Barclays Theatre Awards for Best Actress.
She had last been seen at the Royal Lyceum in the world premiere of Stewart Conn’s Clay Bull in 1998, but returned from her north London home the following year to play Robert Duvall’s wife in the film A Shot For Glory. It was a thrill to play opposite a big movie star, she said, but she felt doubly blessed because her character was so well written.
A graduate of Glasgow University, where she read English, French and Economics, Morag loved words and was a champion of new writing. She premiered three plays by the Young Turk of Scottish theatre, David Greig. She was in The Architect and the original production of The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Soviet Union. In 2000, she played in his trilogy, Victoria, at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Barbican Theatre.
Acting was her passion, but she was also a dedicated gardener, creating new gardens for friends such as the actors Leslie Phillips and his wife, Angela Scoular, when “resting”.
She approached a part in a TV soap with as much energy and commitment as she did a classic play. The last time I interviewed her, she had just filmed an episode of the TV series Heartbeat, in which she ended up murdered on page 36 of the script. “She was a very interesting woman, so I was sorry she had to come to a sticky end,” she said.
I first interviewed her when she was playing Brian Cox’s wife in The Master Builder in the acclaimed 1993 Edinburgh Royal Lyceum production. She told me then that she was revelling in her middle years. Unlike many actors who bemoan the dearth of roles for women of a certain age, Morag believed she only began to flourish as a performer when she chalked up her half century. As a talented writer, she felt theatre, film and especially television, should reflect older women’s lives.
To this end, in recent years she was juggling at least four projects. She was working on a film script based on the family story of her actor friend Jane Gurnett and a major documentary with Elaine C Smith. The author of several well-received documentaries, including one on forgotten women artists such as the Glasgow Girls, Morag lectured about the life of Charlotte Bront, another of her TV “subjects”.
The role of Scottish women like Dr Elsie Inglis at the Front during the First World War had fascinated her since she played a nurse in Bill Bryden’s epic, The Big Picnic, in Glasgow, and she researched the period in depth for a proposed docu-drama. Everything she wrote was about hidden lives, she once remarked. “It’s stuff that has been neglected in the past that I like pulling into the present.”
Although she never married or had children, Morag had three long love affairs. “They were true marriages,” she said. She also found her own spiritual path and often spent time on an ashram in India.
I was privileged to count Morag Hood as my friend and my abiding memory of her will be of lots of giggles and of juddering around the Edinburgh Fringe together in her battered Fiat Panda, which we always managed to find again. No mean feat, because she famously once parked one of her crumbling cars somewhere, but could never ever remember where she had left it.
The “Scotsman” obituary can be accessed online here.
Tall, laconic Chips Rafferty was the first male Australian actor to break through on an international level. He was born in Broken Hill, New South Wales in 1909. He made his film debut in 1938 in “Ants in his Pants”. He is particularly associated with the movies “The Overlanders” and “Eureka Stockade”. He died suddenly in 1971 at the age of 62.
IMDB entry:
Years before Jack Thompson arrived on the scene, Chips Rafferty was regarded by many as the personification of the stereotypically rugged, straightforward and laconic Aussie male. Tall and thin, though not particularly striking in appearance, Rafferty was a tailor-made star for the austere, modestly-budgeted dramas made ‘down under’ in the 1940’s and 50’s. His most individual aspect was in not being remotely reminiscent of any other leading contemporary British or American actor. In his youth, Chips had learned boxing and the art of horsemanship. He also displayed an affinity for painting watercolours. By the time, he entered the film industry as an extra with Cinesound Studios in 1939, John William Pilbean Goffage (nicknamed ‘Chips’ since schooldays) had already seen a great deal of life as a sheep-shearer, drover, roo hunter, gold prospector and cellarman in a wine bar. One of his more exotic activities also included that of a ‘false teeth packer’. On the side, he wrote poems and short stories, which he sold to several Sydney publications. His first stint on the stage was as assistant and comic foil to a magician.
After his inauspicious screen debut in 1939, Chips came to the attention of film makerCharles Chauvel, who assigned him a rather more roguish-sounding surname, and proceeded to cast him as a heroic ‘digger’ in his patriotic wartime drama 40,000 Horsemen (1941). The resulting box-office success, both at home and abroad, led Chauvel to repeat the exercise with The Fighting Rats of Tobruk (1944). After wartime duties with the RAAF, Chips managed to persuade British director Harry Watt to star him in the pivotal role of tough cattle drover Dan McAlpine in The Overlanders (1946). This defined the Rafferty screen personae to such an extent, that he continued to play variations on the theme pretty much throughout the remainder of his career.
Under contract to Ealing, Chips had a brief sojourn in England opposite Googie Withers inThe Loves of Joanna Godden (1947), followed by an integral part in Massacre Hill (1949) . In the early 50’s, he co-founded – and invested much of his own money in – a short-lived production company, Southern International (in conjunction with the director Lee Robinson). They turned out a few unambitious adventure films, like Return of the Plainsman (1953) and King of the Coral Sea (1953), with Chips as the nominal star. For the most part, lucrative film work was to be found only in Hollywood: in feature films, like Kangaroo (1952), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and The Sundowners (1960); or as guest star in television episodes, ranging from Gunsmoke (1955) to Tarzan (1966). He remained for many years, Australia’s most popular actor, an archetypal anti-establishmentarian, irreverent in humour, honest and uncomplicated. His penultimate performance as an outback cop in Wake in Fright (1971) is often cited as one of his best.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Great article on Chips Rafferty in the Australian Screen website, can be accessed here.
Christopher Quinten is perhaps best known for his role as’Brian Tilsey’ in “Coronation Street”. In the U.S. he has featured in the movie “RoboCop 2”. Back in the U.K. he has featured in the series “Doctors”.
Christopher Fulford seems to have been featured in every major British television drama series over the past 25 years. Among his appearances are “A Touch of Frost”, “Inspector Morse”, “Judge John Deed”, “Waking the Dead”, “The Brief” and “Whitechapel”. He made his film debut in “The Ploughman’s Lunch” in 1983. His other movies include “Wetherby” and “A Prayer For the Dying”. He was born in London in 1955.
IMDB entry:
Fair haired British character actor Christopher Fulford has been a recognizable face on British TV and film for over 20 years in a variety of roles. Most recently he’s appeared in the BBC series Servants (2003) as the master butler and in Courtroom drama The Brief(2004). He’s appeared in many character driven roles on TV, usually in crime dramas such as A Touch of Frost (1992), Inspector Morse (1987), Silent Witness (1996), and Wire in the Blood (2002). Memorably he appeared as a suspected child murderer in Cracker(1993), a film which had a brilliant twist in the finale. He’s also appeared in many films, such as Jack the Ripper (1988), Resurrected (1989), Hotel (2001) and Eye See You(2002).
Alison Leggatt was born in 1904 in Kensington, London. Her first major film role was in David Lean’s “This Happy Breed” as ‘Aunt Sylvia’ in 1944. Other roles include “Waterloo Road”, “The Card” and “Far From the Madding Crowd” in 1967. She died in 1990.
IMDB entry:
Alison Leggatt was born on February 7, 1904 in Kensington, London, England as Alison Joy Leggatt. She was an actress, known for Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), This Happy Breed (1944) and The Day of the Triffids (1963). She died on July 15, 1990 in London.e and screen character actress who made her reputation in plays by John Osborne and Harold Pinter. Born into a wealthy family, she started acting against the wishes of her parents. In films, she was often cast as upper-crust ladies, kindly wives, disapproving mothers-in-law, landladies or housekeepers.
