British Actors Archives - Page 58 of 124

Doris Lloyd

Doris Lloyd, was born in Walton Liverpool in 1896. She began her acting career on Broadway in 1925 and began making movies in 1929. She became a well known character actress. Her movies include “Tarzan, The Ape man” in 1932, “Back Street”, “The Letter”, “Shining Victory”, “Midnight Lace” and later “Rosie” and “The Sound of Music”. She died in California in 1968.

IMDB entry:

Doris Lloyd was born on July 3, 1896 in Liverpool, England as Hessy Doris Lloyd. She was an actress, known for The Sound of Music (1965), Alice in Wonderland (1951) and The Time Machine (1960). She died on May 21, 1968 in Santa Barbara, California, USA. British stage actress who came to Hollywood in 1925 and stayed playing domestic and/or dowager support roles in costumers. Was a very popular radio & television actress, appearing in over 150 movies. Versatile character actress, who first appeared on stage with the Liverpool Repertory Theatre Company in 1914. Intended to merely visit her sister in the United States, but ended up settling down in California. Her lengthy movie career began in 1925 and included countless small parts as (British) charwomen, landladies and, occasionally, society matrons. Notable as a spy in ‘Disraeli’ (1929) and Nancy Sykes in the Monogram version of ‘Oliver Twist’ (1933). On Broadway in ‘An Inspector Calls’ (1947-1948,as Sybil Birling).

Gary Oldman is one of the best actors in movies to-day. He came to fame with his brilliant performance as ‘Sid Vicious’ in “Sid & Nancy” in 1986. He has had a string of worthwhile movies, the best I think is “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”.

TCM overview:

From the start of his career, actor Gary Oldman displayed an edgy intensity that brought verve to his portrayals of ambiguous and obsessive personalities. Equally at home as either heroes or villains, Oldman gained a well-earned reputation as a brilliant chameleon who first staked his claim playing wayward Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious in “Sid and Nancy” (1986). Following acclaimed turns as playwright Joe Orton in “Prick Up Your Ears” (1987) and a slick attorney in “Criminal Law” (1989), the actor was eerily indistinguishable as Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-driven “JFK” (1991). Oldman added to his vast array of characters by playing the famous Count in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), a dreadlocked drug dealer in “True Romance” (1993), Ludwig von Beethoven in “Immortal Beloved” (1994) and a terrorist leader in “Air Force One” (1997). In the new millennium, he was conservative senator who vigorously challenged the appointment of the first woman to the vice presidency in “The Contender” (2000) and was virtually unrecognizable as the mangled Mason Verger in “Hannibal” (2001). While sometimes associated with small films, Oldman excelled in blockbusters, playing the mysterious Sirius Black in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004) and several sequels, and Lieutenant Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” (2005) and “The Dark Knight” (2008). Though virtually unrecognized by awards until 2010’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” Oldman nonetheless remained an actor held in high esteem among critics, audiences and fellow actors, thanks to scores of acclaimed roles under his belt.

The son of a welder and a housewife, Leonard Gary Oldman was born on Mar. 21, 1958 in New Cross, London, England. An academically indifferent student, Oldman dropped out of school at 16 and found a job as a store clerk. He soon discovered his métier on stage, becoming active in the Young People’s Theater in Greenwich, England. He later won a scholarship to attend the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in Kent. Graduating in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in theater arts, Oldman quickly found regular gigs on stage. Oldman’s hard work and trademark intensity made him a favorite in Glasgow in the mid 1980s, culminating in the lead role in Edward Bond’s socially-conscious drama, “The Pope’s Wedding.” A huge hit with critics, the play earned Oldman’s two of the British stage’s top honors: the Time Out’s Fringe Award for Best Newcomer of 1985-86 and the British Theatre Association’s Drama Magazine Award as Best Actor of 1985.

Segueing into television in the mid-to-late 1980s, Oldman brought some of his famous intensity to his small screen roles. An early example was evidenced in one of Oldman’s first screen performances as an explosive skinhead in director Mike Leigh’s telefilm “Meantime” (BBC, 1983). Oldman later consolidated his wild man persona with two very different, yet similarly doomed iconoclastic figures from English culture: punk rock legend Sid Vicious in the poignant and uncompromising cult classic “Sid and Nancy” (1986), and later the irreverent gay playwright Joe Orton in the finely tuned biopic “Prick up Your Ears” (1987). Though excellent in both roles, Oldman was more remembered for his turn as Vicious, portraying the heroin-addicted bassist in frighteningly accurate fashion. Meanwhile, Oldman continued his exploration of human darkness, traveling to North Carolina to play the mysterious long-lost son of Theresa Russell in Nicolas Roeg’s bizarre psychological drama “Track 29” (1987).

In the United States, Oldman displayed his remarkable talent for mimicking American accents and myriad regional dialects. The fruits of his labor resulted in Oldman giving convincing performances as a big-city attorney in “Criminal Law” (1988), a down-home Southern fried mental institution inmate in “Chattahoochee” (1990) and an Irish-American gangster in “State of Grace” (1990). But it was his dead-on impersonation of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1991) that truly cemented his status as a human chameleon; few were able to distinguish the actor’s characterization from the stock footage of the real Oswald. Based on the strength of his performance in “JFK,” director Francis Ford Coppola offered him the lead in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992). As the titular bloodsucker, Oldman proved equally compelling in various incarnations – as a wizened old man, a dapper aristocrat and a snarling monster – standing out amid the lavish makeup and visually sumptuous costumes and sets. Oldman was predictably electrifying in his next outing, playing ruthless wannabe Rastafarian pimp Drexl Spivy in the Quentin Tarantino-scripted “True Romance” (1993). Though Oldman was onscreen for only a few minutes, his dominating performance echoed throughout the rest of the movie.

Like many actors, Oldman had his share of demons to battle – in his case, alcohol. Oldman’s off-screen binges led to occasional brushes with the law, including a 1991 arrest for driving under the influence. After he completed “The Scarlet Letter” (1995), Oldman checked into rehab and underwent treatment. Once sober, he returned to Hollywood to reactivate his career and raise money for “Nil By Mouth” (1997), a dream project he wanted to write and direct. Meanwhile, Oldman was seen in varying degrees of success, making villainous turns in “The Fifth Element” (1997), “Air Force One” (1997) and “Lost in Space” (1998). Finally, he managed to raise enough money – thanks to an assist from “Fifth Element” director Luc Besson – to make “Nil By Mouth,” a blistering semi-autobiographical examination of a working-class family torn apart by alcoholism. From its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it picked up the Best Actress trophy for Kathy Burke (as the abused wife), to its 1998 theatrical release, the film earned substantial critical praise for its unflinching writing, assured direction and stunning performances.

Oldman next lent his vocal talents to the animated feature “The Quest for Camelot” (1998), then made a rare excursion into television to play Pontius Pilate in the CBS miniseries “Jesus” (1999-2000). Later in 2000, he was back on the big screen as a conservative U.S. senator attempting to block the appointment of a female colleague as the first woman vice president in “The Contender,” written and directed by Rod Lurie. The timely material – which included a sex scandal and pointed references to embattled U.S. president Bill Clinton – marked the actor’s first time as an executive producer. Rumors of a tension-filled the set were rampant prior to the film’s release and disputes between Oldman and Lurie soon became fodder for public consumption. Not one to suffer fools, Oldman expressed his unhappiness with his character’s depiction as the villain. While his arguments with Lurie and the film’s distributor DreamWorks played out in the press, “The Contender” failed to make its mark with audiences.

Oldman found himself in another situation with his prominent follow-up role as the exorbitantly wealthy, but hideously disfigured Mason Verger in “Hannibal” (2001). Some reported that the actor originally wanted screen credit. But when he was relegated to third billing, he allegedly opted to take no credit at all. Other articles claimed that he did not want to be identified for the sake of surprise, since the character required prosthetics that would render whoever played the role unrecognizable. Producer Dino De Laurentiis clearly stated at a press conference, however, that Oldman was indeed playing the role, pointing out that an actor of that stature deserved to be recognized for his contribution to the film. Although he spent much of his career playing psychotics and sadistic characters, Oldman underwent a career makeover in the mid-2000s similar to that of Sir Ian McKellen. Eschewing his more typical adult-oriented fair, Oldman began accepting a string of roles that played to younger audiences.

Among his likeable, more sympathetic characters was Sirius Black, a recurring character in the “Harry Potter” series. First introduced in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), Oldman reprised his role for its two subsequent sequels, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (2005) and “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (2007). Around the same period, Oldman delighted comic-book fan boys around the world by taking the role of Gotham City Police Lieutenant (and later Commissioner) Jim Gordon in “Batman Begins” (2005), a reboot of the lucrative Batman film franchise. Oldman later reprised the role in “The Dark Knight” (2008). He next portrayed several characters in Disney’s 3-D animated take on the Charles Dickens classic, “A Christmas Carol” (2009), lending both voice and image to Jacob Marley, former business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey), Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. Goldman also voiced General Grawl in “Planet 51” (2009), an animated spoof on alien culture and 1950s Americana.

The following year, Goldman embraced his villainous side as a post-apocalyptic powerbroker opposite Denzel Washington in “The Book of Eli” (2010) then voiced the foul peafowl Lord Shen in the hugely successful animated sequel “Kung Fu Panda 2” (2011). That same year, he played a vengeful werewolf slayer in the critically panned fantasy-thriller “Red Riding Hood” (2011) and reprised the role of Sirius Black for the final chapter of the blockbuster franchise “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2” (2011). Capping off an exceptionally busy season, Oldman admirably filled the shoes of the great Sir Alec Guinness when he took on the role of semi-retired Cold War-era spy George Smiley in the feature adaptation of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011). While Guinness’ lauded interpretation for the BBC in the late-1970s had set the bar impossibly high, Goldman’s impressive run at the character was at the center of one of the U.K.’s highest grossing films of the year. Finally, after a long and versatile career filled with great performances, Oldman nabbed his first-ever Academy Award nomination with a Best Actor nod for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

Sticking to a string of high-profile projects, Oldman returned for “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), the emotive conclusion of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and had a supporting part in John Hillcoat’s tense Prohibition-era drama “Lawless” (2012), both of which also featured fellow Brit Tom Hardy. After turning up with Marion Cotillard in a controversial religion-skewering video for David Bowie’s single “The Next Day,” Oldman went head-to-head with Harrison Ford in the poorly received corporate drama “Paranoia” (2013). Still in the midst of a hot streak, however, Oldman also filmed key roles in the sci-fi movies “RoboCop” (2014) and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2014).

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Rupert Everett came to film fame when he repeated his stage role in the film adaptation of “Another Country” in 1981. He also starred in “Dance With A Stranger” with Miranda Richardson and “My Best Freind’s Wedding” with Julia Roberts. A frequest stage performer is is currently starring on London’s West End in “The Judas Kiss” a play about Oscar Wilde.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

British-born Rupert Everett grew up in privileged circumstances but the wry, sometimes arrogant, intellectual was a rebel from the very beginning. At the age of 7 he was placed into the care of Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College where he trained classically on the piano. He was expelled from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London for clashing with his teachers and instead apprenticed himself at the avant-garde Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre in Scotland, performing in such productions as ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Heartbreak House’.

In 1984 Everett successfully filmed a lead role in Another Country (1984), which he had performed earlier on stage and shot to international attention, becoming one of England’s hottest new star. But again the wickedly sharp and suave rebel doused his own fire by clashing with the press and even with his own fans. In 1989 Everett openly declared his own homosexuality — an announcement that could have mortally wounded his film career. Instead, over time, it seems to have had the opposite effect. His career revitalized as Julia Roberts‘ gay confidante in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), and he has continued to impress notably in the classics area with Shakespeare in Love (1998) (as Christopher Marlowe), An Ideal Husband (1999) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream(1999) (as Oberon). Lately he has enhanced both films with his royal portrayals in To Kill a King (2003) and Stage Beauty (2004), and television with his effortlessly suave Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004). His predilection for smug and smarmy villains of late such as the cartoonish Dr. Claw inInspector Gadget (1999) has extended into voice animation with his “unprincely” Prince Charming character in Shrek 2 (2004).

In making his landmark decision to “come out”, Rupert becomes a living testament disproving the theory that a truly talented and successful romantic leading man cannot survive the career-killing stigma of being openly gay.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Don Henderson was born in Leytonstone in 1932. His first television credit was in a production of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” in 1968. His movies include “Brannigan” in 1975 and “Voyage of the Damned”. He died in 1997.

Anthony Hayward;s “Independent” obituary:

One of television’s most enduring detectives of the Seventies and Eighties was the eccentric George Bulman, who was first seen in the thriller series The XYY Man, before moving on to fight crime under cover in the long-running Strangers and then retiring to work as a clockmaker in Bulman, but finding that he could not entirely give up his past.

Perfectly at home as the quirky character, who enjoyed music, reading and playing with his electric trainset. Just as Inspector Morse was later to indulge a love of opera, Bulman would quote Shakespeare and other classics. It was Henderson’s portrayal of the detective that helped to raise the programme to a level above the run-of-the-mill police series. By the time he had taken Bulman into semi- retirement, Henderson made the character memorable for the plastic shopping bag that was always with him, gold-rimmed Edwardian reading glasses and a generally scruffy image.

This was, in fact, a reflection of the actor in real life, who admitted to owning just one suit and wore jeans for his second wedding, to the actress Shirley Stelfox, in 1979. This came two years after the death of Henderson’s first wife, Hilary, from a mystery lung disease. In 1980, Henderson underwent treatment for throat cancer that left him with burns that he often hid with a scarf. The cancer, which he overcame, also meant that he spoke in a whisper. Another of the unmarried Bulman’s trademarks was his pair of grey woolly gloves, worn by Henderson to cover up the wedding ring he could not remove from his finger.

The only son of a carpenter, Henderson was born in London in 1932 and brought up in Epping, Essex. Having grown up in a working-class environment, he was embarrassed by wealth in later years and said: “I could never have a chauffeur or servants because I’d be so bad at telling them what to do. I dislike giving orders. It isn’t me.”

Henderson did not become a professional actor until his thirties, after working in amateur theatre and spending almost 20 years of his working life as a dental technician in the Army, a CID officer with Essex police and a salesman. Then, he accepted a “dare” from a friend to audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, was taken on and stayed for six years, from 1966 to 1972, taking parts that included Perolles in All’s Well That Ends Well, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the title-role in Peer Gynt and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Henderson later played Floyd in Sam Shepard’s Melodrama Play in New York.

He first became known to television viewers in the BBC drama series Warship (1973-77), which followed the adventures of the frigate HMS Hero and her crew. Many television roles followed, in programmes such as Poldark, Softly Softly, Dixon of Dock Green, Ripping Yarns, Dick Turpin and The Onedin Line.

But it was the character of George Bulman that made Henderson a household name. The XYY Man (1976-77), based on a novel by Kenneth Royce, introduced Bulman as a police sergeant in the story of a cat burglar, Spider Scott (Stephen Yardley), who was recruited to work with British intelligence services. Bulman progressed to his own series, Strangers (1978-82), in the rank of detective sergeant, serving in Unit 23, a police squad working under cover in the North of England.

From 1980, Bulman and his colleagues’ unit was renamed the Inter City Squad and attempted to solve crimes nationwide. Mark McManus, who later starred as the tough Glasgow detective Taggart, was their boss, Chief Superintendent Lambie. By the end of the final, fifth series of Strangers, Bulman had been promoted to the rank of detective inspector.

Henderson revived the character in two series of Bulman (1985, 1987), who by then had retired from the force but maintained a contact in the British Secret Service. He did freelance detective work while running a small antiques shop that specialised in repairing clocks. “You were born to be a detective, not a clock mender,” he was told by his assistant, Lucy McGinty (played by Siobhan Redmond), the criminologist daughter of a former colleague.

Teaming up with the former EastEnders actor Leslie Grantham, as Frank and Danny Kane in two series of the gangland thriller The Paradise Club (1989-90), Henderson played a defrocked priest reunited with his brother after the death of their tyrannical mother. He also appeared in the 1987 children’s fantasy series Knights of God, mixing religion and the Arthurian legend, and throughout the Eighties and Nineties – despite his star status – the prolific actor was happy to continue taking character roles in dozens of television programmes, such as Jemima Shore Investigates, Annika, Dead Head, Doctor Who, Minder, Dempsey and Makepeace, Last of the Summer Wine, Moon and Son, Look At It This Way, The New Statesman, Cracker, The Detectives, Harry, Medics and Casualty.

He also joined his friend Michael Elphick to present the cookery series The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Cookery, as well as acting in television films and plays such as Mavis, Squaring the Circle, Black and Blue and Pat and Margaret.

Henderson’s film appearances included roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968, with the RSC), Callan (1974), the Oscar-winning special- effects extravaganza Star Wars (1977, as General Tagge), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), Carry On Columbus (1992), As You Like It (1992), The Trial (1993), The Wind in the Willows (1996) and Preaching to the Perverted (1997, as yet unreleased).

Donald Francis Henderson, actor, writer and producer: born London 10 November 1932; twice married (one son, one daughter, one stepdaughter); died Warwick 22 June 1997.

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

Vernon Kay was born in 1974 in Manchester. He is known for his television work on such British shows as “All Star Family Fortune”. He is married to TV presenter Tess Daly.

Stephen Haggard was a British actor and poet who was born in Guatemala in 1911. He made his stage debut in Munich in 1930. His films include “Whom the Gods Love” in 1936, “Jamaica Inn” in 1939 and “The Young Mr Pitt” in 1942. He died in 1943 in Egypt during World War Two.

Bryan Ferry is the epitome of style and cool. He was born in Tyne & Wear in the North-East of England in 1945. He was part of the great rock band ‘Roxy Music’ who came to fame in the 1970’s with such classics as “Virginia Plain” and “Do the Strand”. In the 1980’s, ‘Roxy Music’ were eve better with hits like “Avalon” and “Same Old Scene”. On film, Ferry has acted with Cillian Murphy in Neil Jordan’s “Life On Pluto”.

Chris Harvey’s 2013 article in “Telegraph”:

By what strange conjunction of planets did Bryan Ferry find himself creating music for Baz Luhrmann’s spectacular 3D film of The Great Gatsby? The boy from a mining village who grew up to become one of the 20th century’s most impossibly glamorous figures supplying a soundtrack to Fitzgerald’s study of vaulting ambition and the invented self? The gods must appreciate irony, at least, for surely Ferry is Gatsby come to life.

It happened because of the album the former Roxy Music frontman created in 2012 with the Bryan Ferry Orchestra. The Jazz Age features instrumental versions of Ferry’s songs played in the style of Twenties jazz. Luhrmann had almost finished Gatsby when he heard it and got in touch. He persuaded Ferry to add daubs of music throughout the film, including a wonderful backdated update of Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love, with Emeli Sandé, and a recasting of the mournful, bluesy Love Is the Drug that appears on The Jazz Age as a stirring up-tempo number, with Ferry’s voice floating above it like the ghost of New Orleans.

We’re sitting talking about the film the night after Ferry has seen it for the first time. I ask him if Luhrmann’s riot of colour and sound captured the jazz age as he sees it in his imagination. “I kind of see it in black and white,” he laughs. He’s not really a fan of 3D and found himself wanting the odd slower sequence or passage amid the spectacle but looks forward to watching it in 2D, with a rewind button at hand. “I’m quite slow – younger audiences absorb images much faster than somebody of my generation,” he says.

Ferry is 67. It’s more than 40 years since he was beamed down from the Planet Glam to the Top of the Pops stage to sing Virginia Plain in glittery green eyeshadow. Yet even now when he lingers on a word, his eyelids flutter downwards and hover for a few moments before he pulls them up again, just as they did in that performance in 1972. He still has great hair. He’s wearing a blue shirt, darker blue tie, and leaning back on a comfortable sofa. He talks softly, in a voice that is oddly reminiscent of the Prince of Wales. I’m so surprised by this that afterwards I scour YouTube to try to trace the slow vanishing of his Tyne and Wear accent. But no, it seems he has always talked like this. Does he identify with Gatsby?

“Yes, who wouldn’t if you came from a very poor background like mine?” he says. But, as he points out, “it was rich in many ways”. Ferry grew up in Washington, five miles from Newcastle, at the time of the slum clearances in the city. “It’s a very unsophisticated world I grew up in. I would have fancied a house like Gatsby’s,” he adds, “big parties and the sea plane. He had it made really, but the obsession will always get you in the end.”

Ah, the obsession. Fitzgerald’s hero’s rise and his downfall are intimately linked to his obsessive love for the socialite Daisy, a woman he met and fell in love with when he was a penniless soldier. Has there been a Daisy in Ferry’s own life, I wonder.

“That’s a difficult one.” He pauses. “Well, yeah, I identify with his position, yeah.” This is followed by a long silence. “I think there are always things in your life that kind of slip away. Is it fate? Is it meant to be? I guess it’s like that. It’s a good reason, really, for making the most of everything that happens to you. If things in your life do go wrong you’ve got to move on to another thing.”

There have been many women in Ferry’s life. His four children, all boys, are from his 20-year marriage to a London socialite, Lucy Helmore, which ended in the early 2000s. In 2012 he married Amanda Sheppard, a former PR who is 36 years his junior.

Has he experienced Gatsby’s obsessiveness? “Yes, I once had this song, I didn’t call it ‘Slave to Obsession’ but that was one of the key lines. It’s called No Strange Delight, it’s on a Roxy album.” The song is on Flesh and Blood, recorded in 1980, roughly two years after Ferry’s girlfriend Jerry Hall, who had appeared on the cover of the 1975 album Siren, left him for Mick Jagger. The album also includes the delicate pop classic Over You (“Where strangers look for new love, I’m so lost in love – over you.”)

Ferry has written many eloquent songs about love over the years. What has experience taught him about it? “That it’s a bit of a riddle, really. The music that I write is generally quite emotional so it lends itself well to love songs, I don’t want to be singing particularly about wind farms or the war going on here, there or anywhere.

“A lot of the tunes are quite sad as well so without knowing it I get sucked into writing yearning, more intimate songs. Some of the lyrics I’ve done I’ve been very pleased with. It’s by far the hardest part of it but the music that comes out of me tends to be quite melodic, that’s what I think I’m best at, writing melody.” He smiles. “I’m trying to avoid your question as best I can. I don’t know anything about love at all.”

Gatsby, of course, is also about class, about the collision between old money and new. With his country house in Sussex, his house in London and his ability to flit between worlds, I wonder if Ferry feels that he has escaped the boundaries of class altogether. What class does he see himself as? “I’d say classless, definitely, I like to think. The class rigidity that some people still beat themselves up with in this country seems a bit old-fashioned to me now. I do think that standards should be high. I hate dumbing down and I hate political correctness. I identify with the Cavaliers rather than the Roundheads, I always have.”

In Sussex, does he move in aristocratic circles, with “old money”? “A little bit. I’m very private. I go out to dinner most nights when I’m in London, but when I’m in the country I like to stay in. I certainly know about country living and about town living. My music is very urban, I think. It’s always been about cities, people. My mother was very urban, my dad was very rural, and so I have a foot in both camps.”

He regrets that his parents weren’t around long enough to give his own children “the odd clip round the ear”. And he wishes his boys had worked in a factory at some point. What would they have gained? “Discipline maybe. Just the grind of it and knowing every day isn’t great, you know, that you can’t have what you want all the time. Just common sense, but they’ve learnt in other ways.”

Ferry is proud of his eldest son Otis’s progress “in his hunting world” – he’s a joint master of the Shropshire Hunt. It was Otis who in 2005 burst into the House of Commons to protest at the ban on hunting and received a jail sentence. How did it feel when his son was… “Locked up?” He finishes my question. “Very, very bad indeed, yeah, but I don’t like dwelling on it.”

Ferry’s father Fred, he says, was “very quiet, smoked a pipe, courted my mother for 10 years, walked the five miles through the fields to see her and go back again because he had to be up to milk the cows. He was essentially a farm labourer, a ploughman, with the horses. He was very proud of his medals for winning all these ploughing contests. They were opposites in a way, because my mother was very tuned in to the modern world.

“My mother would do all the organising, deal with the pocket money. As long as he had money for his tobacco and his racing pigeons he was fine. So he’d give her his 15 quid and get a pound back and that would last him the week, because he never drank. He would have one drink maybe on pigeon day. It was frugal beyond belief.”

How was it even possible to dream of an existence like his? “I didn’t think I was better than anyone,” he says, “but I didn’t want to be kept down. I didn’t want to work in the mine or the local steel factory, which were the two main sources of work in the area that I lived in.”

Ferry spent his holidays working in the factory, on building sites, then a tailor’s shop. All the while he wanted to be an artist, which then “kind of veered into music”. Encouraging him along the way were his primary school teacher – “dear Miss Swaddle” – who fed his imagination in a class of 50; teachers at his grammar school after he passed the 11-plus; the uncle he talked into taking him to see concerts when he was too young to go by himself (“Chris Barber, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald – whoever passed through Newcastle I’d try to save up to see them”); and then when he went to Newcastle University to study art, there was his lecturer, the artist Richard Hamilton, who once described Ferry as “my greatest creation”.

^{Bryan Ferry with Roxy Music, circa 1972 (Rex Features)}

Ferry continued to dream of being an artist and had moved to London to work as a ceramics teacher when he put together the fledgling Roxy Music. We talk about how the internet age has sparked renewed interest in rock’s most iconic figures, and many a high-profile reunion. Does Ferry feel that route is blocked to him, because of the tensions that forced the classic Roxy line-up apart? This is an oblique approach. I want to ask him about Brian Eno, who added the synthesised sounds that took Ferry’s classic songwriting into the art-rock beyond on Roxy’s first two albums. It’s no secret that Eno left Roxy Music in the summer of 1973 because of “musical differences” with Ferry. “I don’t want to damage Roxy [by talking about it],” Eno said at the time. “I mean, I really like the other members, and I (pause) really like Bryan in a funny way.”

Ferry leans forward. I can tell I’ve touched a nerve. “What would block it?”

There’s no turning back. There remains a perception that his relationship with Brian Eno, although cordial, means that they couldn’t work together again. Does that block it?

“Well, you know, Eno played on the first two albums but we did have a few albums after that and another eight years of our career. So it’s not just him and me, there are others, and we did get together again in 2001. We hadn’t played together in 18 years and we did a reunion tour. You didn’t see that one, then?”

Now I can tell he’s cross. No, I didn’t see it. “We played all round the world, it went incredibly well but it didn’t make me really want to go and record a group album again. It’s not that odd, though. Because it doesn’t seem natural to work with the same people for the whole of your life.”

“I’ve worked with Brian in the studio a couple of times since and that was really refreshing, but I wouldn’t want to work with him for a long period of time. We get on very well when we’re alone, it’s when other people start coming in with expectations and saying, part of you is missing…”

Ferry has continued to collaborate with others, he points out, noting that Nile Rodgers, who provides the guitar on Daft Punk’s recent number-one, Get Lucky, has played on all his solo albums since 1985. Of course, Eno, too, went on to collaborate extensively, including with Ferry’s equally enduring glam-rock rival David Bowie. I wonder if Ferry has been to the Bowie show at the V&A, just a couple of miles down the road from his west London studio. “I’m aware of it. I haven’t been, have you? I ought to go before it closes, actually.”

Like Bowie, Ferry grew up to be one of the iconic figures of his generation. He became one of the stars he idolised and dreamt of being. Is he ever surprised that he became one of those people, a Marilyn Monroe? “I always tell myself that the people I did idolise were just people,” he says. “Marilyn was a goddess of the screen, yet she’s just a poor lonely girl at the end of the day, sad. Even the Sun King, Louis XIV, he was just a guy. I don’t wake up in the morning and think I’m an icon or something, that’s kind of weird. I like going to work every day and trying to achieve something.” And with that Ferry has to leave for Cannes, where he’s performing at a party for The Great Gatsby. In my imagination, he arrives by seaplane, in glorious Technicolor.

The above “Telegraph” article can also be accessed online here.

Brief Ecstasy, poster, (aka DANGEROUS SECRETS), top from left: Paul Lukas, Linden Travers; bottom: Hugh Williams, 1937. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Linden Travers was a very attractive actress in British movies of the 1930’s and 40’s. She was the older sister of actor Bill Travers. She is particularly remembered for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” in 1938 and then ten years later in “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” opposite George Raft. She died in Cornwall in 2001. She was the mother of actress Susan Travers.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Among the many questions film-goers ask themselves while watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1939), the penultimate film of the director’s British period, is what on earth the exquisite brunette Mrs Todhunter sees in the pompous and pusillanimous Mr Todhunter (portrayed by portly Cecil Parker).

So passionate and sympathetic is the lovely Linden Travers, who has died aged 88, that we can only be pleased for her when Todhunter is shot by the Nazis as he tries to make a run for it. Travers’ performance in the Hitchcock picture, the best and most famous of her films, makes one wonder why she was not, at least, the equal of Margaret Lockwood, another “wicked lady” of British cinema. Perhaps she was a victim of the timidity of the British film industry in the 1930s and 40s.

The Lady Vanishes was Travers’ 10th feature, but her own favourite was No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948), in which she played the title role, repeating her stage performance of six years earlier in London. The British film, directed by St John L Clowes, based on the James Hadley Chase shocker, was considered such strong stuff – “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen,” screamed the Monthly Film Bulletin – that it was banned in England for many years. Despite most of the British cast struggling to convince as New York gangsters using unspeakable dialogue, Travers, as the sensual kidnapped heiress who falls for her psychotic captor, emerged with some credit.

She was born Florence Lindon Travers in Durham, and showed her talents at an early age. While still a pupil at the Convent de la Sagesse, she was engaged to teach younger classmates elocution, drama, painting and sketching. Her first professional stage appearances were in repertory at the Playhouse, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in 1933.

The following year, she played the ingénue lead in Ivor Novello’s Murder In Mayfair, at the Globe in London. There, she met her future first husband, Guy Leon, whose sister was in the cast. (Their daughter, Jennifer Susan, was born in 1939.) Travers was soon alternating between stage and screen, and between femme fatale roles and light comedies.

Carol Reed cast her in small, but sexy, parts in Bank Holiday (1938) and The Stars Look Down (1939), both starring Margaret Lockwood. Then, “I seem to have jumped out of being mistresses to playing with the comics,” she recalled later. She was an effective foil to Tommy Trinder in Almost A Honeymoon (1938), was withering towards Arthur Askey in The Ghost Train (1941) and was George Formby’s inamorata in South American George (1941).

In the latter, she is a press agent who talks posh, like all Formby’s leading ladies, though she drops into Lancashire dialect once or twice, much to George’s delight.

Travers again played second fiddle to Margaret Lockwood in Jassy (1947), and was Augusta Leigh, one of the many female witnesses in The Bad Lord Byron (1949) accusing poet Dennis Price of caddishness. Her last feature was Christopher Columbus (1949), in which she is chased around the Spanish court by King Ferdinand.

After her second marriage to James Holman in 1948, and the birth of their daughter, Sally Linden, the following year, Travers limited herself to occasional television appearances, allowing her much younger brother, Bill Travers, to continue the family acting tradition. She had, however, always continued painting and, with her sisters, Alice and Pearl, opened the Travers Art Gallery in Kensington in 1969.

In 1974, after her husband died of a heart attack, Travers spent some years travelling, before settling down to paint in St Ives, in Cornwall. She also studied psychotherapy, and qualified as a hypnotist. In the 1990s, she appeared at a showing of The Lady Vanishes at the National Film Theatre, and was seen in a BBC tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, instantly recognisable as the shamefully underused star of British pictures.

She is survived by her two daughters, her brother Ken and her sister-in-law, Virginia McKenna.

· Florence Lindon ‘Linden’ Travers, actor, born May 27 1913; died October 23 2001

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

Benedict Taylor was born in 1960 in London. He is the eldest of six children. He lived in Nigeria for the first few years of his life. He made his debut in “The Turn of the Screw” on television in 1974. His movies include “The Watcher in the Woods” with Bette Davis and Carroll Baker, “Every Time We Say Goodbye” with Tom Hanks and “Monk Dawson” with John Michie.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Doris Lloyd

Gary Oldman

Rupert Everett

Don Henderson

Vernon Kay

Stephen Haggard

Bryan Ferry

Linden Travers

Benedict Taylor

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