British Actors Archives - Page 7 of 136

Peter Barkworth

Wendy Trewin’s “Guardian” obituary from 2003:

The actor and director, Peter Barkworth who has died aged 77 claimed to have felt “the sheer sensual pleasure of acting” when he first appeared on a stage. He was five years old, in the Wolf Cubs and appearing as Simple Simon in a church hall in Margate.

What followed was a notable stage career but he became known to a wider public on television. His presence was established by his role as Kenneth Bligh in the boardroom drama The Power Game (1965) and confirmed in Brian Clark’s Telford’s Change (1979) opposite Hannah Gordon. In that 10-part series, he played a high-flying banker who opts for the quiet life in Dover.

In the intervening years his small screen roles had taken in such productions as Dr Who, The Avengers (from 1961 to 1969), Paul Temple (1971) and Colditz (1972). At the the Haymarket – his favourite theatre – in 1972 he had his first stage leading part in London as Edward VIII in Royce Ryton’s abdication drama, Crown Matrimonial – at a rare emotional moment speaks to his mother of his love for Wallis Simpson with complete naturalness. He repeated the role on TV two years later.

In 1977 Peter was cast as a British academic adrift in Stalinist Czechoslovakia in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul Repeated earlier this month on BBC4, the play won Peter the Royal Television Society and Bafta’s best actor awards. Later TV included the part of Stanley Baldwin in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981) and the kidnap serial The Price (1985) with Harriet Walter, written by Peter Ransley.

His film work began in 1959 with A Touch of Larceny. It took in No Love for Johnnie (1963), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Patton (1970) and concluded with Stephen Fry’s Wilde (1997).

Peter was born in Margate, and when his father – who worked in the motor trade – was promoted to a sales managership in Manchester the family moved to Bramhall, Cheshire. Peter was educated at Stockport school and as an 11-year-old in 1940 began taking part in concerts for the war effort – and enjoying the applause. Good at work, hopeless at games, after he played the role of Macbeth the producer rewarded the cast with a trip to see John Gielgud’s Hamlet at the Opera House, Manchester. Peter was duly impressed.

While still at school he appeared with the Frank H Fortescue weekly repertory company at the Hippodrome, Stockport in For What We Are in 1942, and had some parts with the BBC drama repertory company which was based in Manchester during the war. His headmaster wanted Peter to go to university but, having played Hamlet at school, Peter applied for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and gained the Michelhill scholarship – but this only covered his Rada tuition fees. His father, earning £8 a week, gave up tobacco and alcohol and provided him with £2.15s (£2.75). a week.

His Rada contemporaries from 1946 to 1948 included John Neville, Barbara Jefford, and Robert Shaw – with whom he shared a flat for some months. Having been awarded the judges’ special medal at Rada’s public show, in 1948 he was offered a part in The Guinea Pig with the Arthur Brough Players at the Folkestone repertory company. His first taste of television was that year too, live at Alexandra Palace in a tiny part. He enjoyed it chiefly because he could speak in a whisper.

National Service proved better than he had feared, especially after he had been commissioned, but he was glad to return to weekly rep in Folkestone and the Brough Players. But when he moved to fortnightly rep in Sheffield Brough, furiously accused him of disloyalty, and vowed he would never have him back at Folkestone.

Peter did not need to make the return. He appeared at the Q theatre in Palmers Green in London, and, in Sheffield was given some good parts in a company that included his Rada contemporary Peter Sallis. Peter also wrote the songs and incidental music for the Christmas play.

Spotted by HM Tennent’s scout, and given a contract, Peter’s first London appearance was in Dodie Smith’s adaptation of Henry James’s Letter from Paris in 1952 at the Aldwych which was roundly booed and came off after three weeks. His next part, Gerald Arbuthnot in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance (1954) gave him another kind of shock. There were rows in the company, the lead, Clive Brook quarrelled explosively and Peter was so depressed that he was on the brink of giving up the stage. Athene Seyler persuaded him to carry on.

He found more backstage trouble with Christopher Fry’s The Dark is Light Enough (1955) directed by Peter Brook. Barkworth played Stefan, the young son of the Countess (Edith Evans). Arguments continued during rehearsals and on the long tour which made Barkworth consider seriously giving up once more; however, the atmosphere improved and he enjoyed the rest of the seven months’ run.

“Of all the jobs I have ever had, teaching at Rada is the one I should least like to have missed, ‘ Peter wrote in First Houses (1983) and from the mid-1950s into the early 1960s he taught acting technique. His pupils included Anthomny Hopkins, Simon Ward and Diana Rigg while Richard Wilson found that Peter was the first Rada teacher to give him real confidence. Peter had attended Fabia Drake’s classes as a student and had learnt, he said, more from her than from any other teacher.

Back on stage his roles included that of Captain Christopher Mortlock in Noel Coward’s South Sea Bubble (1956) with Vivien Leigh, and, from September 1957 Bernard Taggart-Stuart in Lesley Storm’s Roar Like a Dove. One of his favourite parts, he got more laughs than anyone else in the cast for his horrified reactions, as a town dweller, to country life. He enjoyed it so much he remained in the play for its entire three year run at the Phoenix.

At the Haymarket he was the cynical Sir Benjamin Backbite in Gielgud’s production of The School for Scandal (1962) which went to New York in 1963. It was his first appearance there.

His other stage work included The Chinese Prime Minister (1965), while at the Globe in 1976 in Michael Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years he was one of the former undergraduates who returned to their Oxford college for a reunion with their old flame (Penelope Keith). He wrote an erudite script for his one man Siegfried Sassoon (1987) which he gave at the Hampstead theatre, in the West End and on tour.

Peter conscientiously researched the technicalities of his performances; once when about to play a clergyman he consulted his local vicar. He wrote an erudite script for his one man Siegfried Sassoon which he gave at the Hampstead Theatre, in the West End and on tour.

Peter’s other books included About Acting (1980), More About Acting (1944) The Complete About Acting (1991) and For All Occasions (1997). In November 1999 a new theatre in Stockport opened, named after him.

One of his hobbies was gardening; he received an award for his small garden at Hampstead where he lived for 40 years.

· Peter Wynn Barkworth, actor and director, born January 14, 1929; died October 21 2006

Rambunctious British leading man (contrary to popular belief, he was of Scottish ancestry, not Irish) and later character actor primarily in American films, Victor McLaglen was a vital presence in a number of great motion pictures, especially those of director John Ford. McLaglen (pronounced Muh-clog-len, not Mack-loff-len) was the son of the Right Reverend Andrew McLaglen, a Protestant clergyman who was at one time Bishop of Claremont in South Africa. The young McLaglen, eldest of eight brothers, attempted to serve in the Boer War by joining the Life Guards, though his father secured his release. The adventuresome young man traveled to Canada where he did farm labor and then directed his pugnacious nature into professional prizefighting. He toured in circuses, vaudeville shows, and Wild West shows, often as a fighter challenging all comers. His tours took him to the US, Australia (where he joined in the gold rush) and South Africa. In 1909 he was the first fighter to box newly-crowned heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, whom he fought in a six-round exhibition match in Vancouver (as an exhibition fight, it had no decision). When the First World War broke out, McLaglen joined the Irish Fusiliers and soldiered in the Middle East, eventually serving as Provost Marshal (head of Military Police) for the city of Baghdad. After the war he attempted to resume a boxing career, but was given a substantial acting role in The Call of the Road (1920) and was well received. He became a popular leading man in British silent films, and within a few years was offered the lead in an American film, The Beloved Brute (1924). He quickly became a most popular star of dramas as well as action films, playing tough or suave with equal ease. With the coming of sound, his ability to be persuasively debonair diminished by reason of his native speech patterns, but his popularity increased, particularly when cast by Ford as the tragic Gypo Nolan in The Informer (1935), for which McLaglen won the Best Actor Oscar. He continued to play heroes, villains and simple-minded thugs into the 1940s, when Ford gave his career a new impetus with a number of lovably roguish Irish parts in such films as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Quiet Man (1952). The latter film won McLaglen another Oscar nomination, the first time a Best Actor winner had been nominated subsequently in the Supporting category. McLaglen formed a semi-militaristic riding and polo club, the Light Horse Brigade, and a similarly arrayed precision motorcycle team, the Victor McLaglen Motorcycle Corps, both of which led to apparently erroneous conclusions that he had fascist sympathies and was forming his own private army. The facts prove otherwise, and despite rumors to the contrary, McLaglen did not espouse the far right-wing sentiments often attributed to him. He continued to act in films into his 70s and died, from heart failure, not long after appearing in a film directed by his son, Andrew V. McLaglen.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>

Irish actor Rory Keenan has worked extensively in theatre and film. He performed leading roles on the London stage, he has also appeared in TV and film projects such as Peaky Blinders, War & Peace, Birdsong, The Guard, and soon Versailles. Rory resides in London, England where he continues to work regularly in theatre.

Bo Svenson. Wikipedia.

Svenson (born 13 February 1941) is a Swedish-American actor, known for his roles in American genre films of the 1970s and 1980s. He is a naturalized United States citizen.

Svenson was born in Sweden, to Lola Iris Viola, a big band leader, actress, and singer, and Birger Ragnar Svenson, a personal driver, athlete, and bodyguard for the King of Sweden. He emigrated to the United States and then, when he was 17, joined the United States Marine Corps, serving until his honorable discharge six years later. His first state of residence in the United States was Georgia, where he became familiar with the rural Southern accent he later employed in some of his roles.

He also holds a fourth degree (Yondan) black belt in judo. He earned his first degree (Shodan) belt at Kodokan in Japan, the home dojo of Judo, while stationed in Japan in 1961 as a Marine. He was the 1961 Far East Judo Champion in the Heavyweight Division.

In the late 1960s, Svenson had a recurring role in the hit TV series Here Come the Brides as Lumberjack Olaf “Big Swede” Gustavsen. In the mid-1970s, he took over the role of lawman Buford Pusser from Joe Don Baker in both sequels to the hit 1973 film Walking Tall, after Pusser himself, who had originally agreed to take over the role, died in an automobile crash. He reprised the role again for the short-lived 1981 television series of the same name.

One of his most famous roles in films was as murder-witness-turned-vigilante Michael McBain in the 1976 cult classic Breaking Point. He played the Soviet agent Ivan in the Magnum, P.I. episode “Did You See the Sunrise?” (1982) and many years later had a cameo as an American colonel in Inglourious Basterds, as a tribute to his role in The Inglorious Bastards; he is the only actor to appear in both films.

Janine Duvitski

Janine Duvitski was born on28 June 1952)^[1] is an English actress, known for her roles as Jane Edwards in Waiting for God, Pippa Trench in One Foot in the Grave and Jacqueline Stewart in Benidorm. Duvitski first came to national attention in the play Abigail’s Party, written and directed in 1977 by Mike Leigh.

Duvitski was born in Lancaster, Lancashire. Her father was Polish. She trained at the East 15 Acting School in London. She has four children, Jack, Albert, Ruby, and Edith Bentall, with her actor husband Paul Bentall. Her youngest daughter Edith is the lead singer of the band FOURS.

Duvitski’s principal television credits include the series Waiting for God (1990–1994), One Foot in the Grave (1990–2000), and Benidorm (2007–2018). In the BBC‘s Vanity Fair she played Mrs Crawley. She has also appeared on Lily Savage’s Blankety Blank.

She has also appeared in the one-off production of Blue Remembered Hills by Dennis Potter, as well as in episodes of Foyle’s War (“Fifty Ships”), Brush Strokes, Cowboys, Citizen Smith, Minder, Midsomer Murders (1998), My Family, Man About the House, The Georgian House, The New Statesman, The Black Stuff by Alan Bleasdale, The Knowledge, Z-Cars, The Worst Week of My Life, Little Dorrit, Still Open All Hours and, in 2013, as Emily Scuttlebutt in the CBeebies show Old Jack’s Boat.

In 2015 Duvitski starred in the BBC sitcom Boy Meets Girl. In 2017 she appeared as Mrs Leydon, the Chapel assistant, in BBC’s mockumentary Hospital People.

Duvitski had a small role opposite Laurence Olivier and Donald Pleasence in Dracula (1979), and appeared in the 1980 rock music film Breaking Glass. She also appeared in Michael Crichton’s The First Great Train Robbery (1979), The Madness of King George (1994), About a Boy (2002), The New World (2005) and Angel (2007).

Duvitski first came to national attention in Abigail’s Party, written and directed in 1977 by Mike Leigh. The play opened in April 1977 at the Hampstead Theatre, returning after its initial run in the summer of 1977, with a total of 104 performances. A suburban comedy of manners, the play is a satire on the aspirations and tastes of the new middle class that had emerged in Britain in the 1970s. In November 1977 an abridged version of the play, lasting 104 minutes, was recorded as a BBC Play for Today. Duvitski plays Angela, a nurse, wife of Tony Cooper, appearing meek and somewhat childlike, unintelligent and tactless. She comes into her own only when host Laurence Moss suffers his fatal heart attack at the climax of the play.

Her theatre career has also included productions at UK’s National Theatre, Young Vic and Royal Shakespeare Company.

In 2007 she appeared on stage in the revival of English National Opera‘s On the Town. The production, which also included veteran British comic actress June Whitfield, saw Duvitski give a “touching comic account of Lucy Schmeeler, Hildy’s homely roommate”.

Duvitski played the Vegetable Fairy in the 2017 Sunderland Empire Theatre pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk.

Eric Shorter’s obituary on Bryan Pringle from 2002 in “The Guardian”:

Bryan Pringle, who has died aged 67, was a first-rate character actor who excelled at underdogs. He brought to a wide range of nonentities, both on stage and screen, a warm humanity.

Perhaps best known in Jack Rosenthal’s 1969 television series The Dustbinmen or, on stage, playing Pinter or Beckett, few actors had a likelier physique when it came to looking the part: lugubrious, with a long face, bulbous nose, heavy jowls and bags under both sad eyes. If not visibly under someone’s thumb, Pringle seemed born to represent thoughtful inadequacy.

It was as Stanley in Pinter’s 1964 revival of The Birthday Party that he first caught critical attention, as a seedy, one-time entertainer who had turned his back on the world to eke out a wretched existence in a seaside boarding house, where he fell victim to menacing visitors

Years later, he recalled: “Harold was, by then, a big name. It wasn’t simply a question of struggling to find the meaning. He wouldn’t have told us what it was about, anyway. We took it at face value. He just told us to be truthful and the text would play itself. And of course he was right.”

Within a few weeks of that opening, Beckett’s Endgame joined the Royal Shakespeare Company repertoire – and, as Nagg, Pringle’s performance was likened to “a dead man speaking”.

It would be five years before he caught the nation’s imagination in The Dustbinmen, as the leader of a gang of refuse collectors – based, it was claimed, on daily Lancashire life – for once getting their own back on society. Wherever they went, Pringle’s disorderly cohorts spread dismay – and garbage. To Rosenthal’s popular sit-com, he brought one of his most grittily realistic and raucously observed characters of low life, and Dustbinmen went straight to the top of the ratings.

Although theatre critics would sometimes wish bigger roles upon him, as say, Uncle Mad in Keith Waterhouse’s fragment of autobiography in a 1970s series, Childhood, Pringle’s art flourished in fragments.

At Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, for instance, he headed Henry Livings’s Big Soft Nellie (1961), as a mildly demented mother’s boy mocked by workmates; and 30 years later, in Twelfth Night, his Malvolio was arresting. “Large and magnificently pompous, he has an ugly, austere face which labours like a mountain to give birth to a hideous chasm of a smile,” wrote one critic. In a national tour of My Fair Lady, Pringle’s “anarchic, gravel-voiced” Doolittle glumly lit up the stage.

Pringle was born at Glascote, Staffordshire, the son of a clergyman. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before joining the Old Vic, under Michael Benthall, in the mid-1950s. In minimal parts, he shared the stage with Richard Burton, John Neville and Paul Rogers.

But it was in rep at the Nottingham Playhouse that Pringle got his first break. In Willis Hall’s first stage play, The Long And The Short And The Tall, he was the only member of the original cast to be kept for the 1959 London opening, under Lindsay Anderson’s direction. As Private Smith, on patrol in the Malayan jungle of 1942, he was an older married man comforting a frightened youngster. After another minor West End role, as a seaman called China in Beverly Cross’s One More River, Pringle joined Littlewood’s 1960 production of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be.

What people will remember best, however, is his string of television cameos, and the reliably comic gloom of that deadpan gaze. Apart from Dustbinmen, other television appearances included the pat- ernal police-sergeant in The Growing Pains Of Pc Penrose (otherwise known as Rosie); the local publican and patronising youth-club manager in A Prince Among Men, who held that big heads never shrank; and the ruminative Mr Bebbington, and his slobbering bulldog, in Once Upon A Time. He was also Sgt Match in Joe Orton’s What The Butler Saw; Grimsdale in All Creatures Great And Small; Ben Baker in Rumpole; and the pathologist in Prime Suspect.

All the while, Pringle continued adding to his theatrical credits, last year as an aged, discontented and ultimately assassinated parent in Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. Among his film credits were The Remains Of The Day, The Boy Friend and Lawrence Of Arabia.

He is survived by his wife, actor Anne Jameson, a son and a daughter.

· Bryan Pringle, actor, born January 19 1935; died May 15 2002

The following apology was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and Clarifications column, Friday May 24 2002

Contrary to what we said in this obituary, Bryan Pringle’s wife Anne Jameson did not survive him, but died in 1999. Apologies.

Victor McLaglan

Sharon Horgan

Glynn-Carney studied at Canon Slade School in Bolton, and went on to study Musical Theatre in Pendleton College of Performing Arts.^[3]He then attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he studied acting. While studying, he participated in professional stage adaptations of Peter Pan and Macbeth.^[4]

His first experience on television was in 2013 when he had a role in two episodes of Casualty. He secured a lead role in the BBC military drama The Last Post, launched as part of the new season Autumn 2017 content on BBC1. He plays Lance Corporal Tony Armstrong.

From April 2017, Glynn-Carney starred as Shane Corcoran in the Jez Butterworth play The Ferryman which opened at the Royal Court Theatre.^[5] He later transferred with the production to the west end at the Gielgud Theatre, leaving the production in October 2017. Glynn-Carney won the Emerging Talent Award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for his performance.^[6]

Glynn-Carney’s first film is war drama Dunkirk, which was directed by Christopher Nolan and released in July 2017. He plays Peter, the son of the captain of a civil boat that sailed to rescue British soldiers from the surrounded city Dunkirk.