British Actors Archives - Page 88 of 131

Tom Conti

Tom Conti was born in 1941 in Paisley, Scotland. He made his television debut in 1959 in “Mother of Men”. He built up an extensive televise resume before venturing into film. His television successes include “Madame Bovary” in 1975, “The Glittering Prizes” and “The Norman Conquests”. His films include “Reuben, Reuben” which he made in the U.S. and “Shirley Valentine” with Pauline Collins.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Preferring contemporary over classical theatre (with nary a Shakespeare stage credit in sight), one of West End theatre’s most enduring and popular faces of the past four decades has been that of Tom Conti. He was born Thomas Antonio Conti on November 22, 1941, in Paisley, Scotland to a pair of hairdressers (Alfonso, his Italian immigrant father, and Mary McGoldrick, his Irish-Catholic mother). A student at Hamilton Park Catholic School (for boys), he initially trained for a musical career as a classical pianist but switched gears while attending the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Conti’s acting credits began with the Citizen’s Theatre’s 1959 production of “The Roving Boy” at age 18.

Throughout the 1960s he tried to make ends meet on the Glasgow and English repertory stages but gained little momentum despite some scattered TV appearances in between. Unable to find the break to sustain himself, he considered leaving the arts at one point for a steadier career in medicine. While performing in the 1972 play “The Black and White Minstrels” at the Traverse Theatre for the Edinburgh Festival, however, he was spotted and cast in the TV series Adam Smith (1972), thus beginning a more promising streak of work. He would return to the play in 1974 at the Hampstead Theatre, where he also performed in “Other People” (also 1974) and as the title role of “Don Juan” (1976). An earlier London stage debut in 1973 with the acclaimed Christopher Hampton play “Savages” also helped move things along.

Following a number of successful Engish mini-series roles, particularly his slothful Charles Bovary in Madame Bovary (1975), Jewish novelist Adam Morris in The Glittering Prizes(1976), and ever-conquesting Norman in “The Norman Conquest” trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn, Tom reaped huge career rewards under the theatre lights starring as a paralyzed sculptor in both the London and Broadway mountings of the right-to-die play “Whose Life is it Anyway?” in 1979. Among the reaps were the Tony, Outer Critics Circle, Laurence Olivier, and Variety Club Awards; among the rewards was a 1980s film career in starring roles. Despite losing out on recreating his “Whose Life…” role on film (Richard Dreyfuss was granted that opportunity in 1981), Tom absolutely wowed American audiences with his scene-stealing work in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) andReuben, Reuben (1983). He was given the National Board of Review award for his participation in both films, and earned a “leading actor” Oscar nomination for the latter in which he played an alcoholic Scottish writer. To date, he has not received another Oscar nomination or, arguably, been handed comparative film roles since.

Continuing in American films with the lesser-received American Dreamer (1984) andSaving Grace (1986), he failed to nab what seemed quite inevitable — Hollywood screen stardom. He did, however, venture off to find other film projects to star or co-star in over the years — both here and abroad. These have included Shirley Valentine (1989) oppositePauline Collins, Someone Else’s America (1995), Out of Control (1998), Paid (2006) andBlind Revenge (2010) with Daryl Hannah.

Not one to frequent pubs himself, he nevertheless earned glowing reviews disappearing into the lives of two notorious celebrity tipplers — columnist Jeffrey Bernard in “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell” (1990, 2000, 2006) and bon vivant actor John Barrymore in “One Helluva Life” (2002) — in separate one-man stage shows. A writer as well, the versatile Conti published the thriller novel “The Doctor” in 2004. He has long been married to Scottish actress Kara Wilson (since 1967), who has appeared with him on stage (“Present Laughter” and “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers”, both of which he also directed) as well as TV and film. Daughter Nina is an actress and ventriloquist. The couple maintain residence in London.

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

Miriam Margoyles was born in 1941 in Oxford. She is a scene stealing character actress who shines in every role she plays. Her movies include “The Awakeing” with Charlton Heston in 1980, “The Apple”, “Yebtl” with Barbra Streisand and “Age of Innocence” with Daniel Day-Lewis which she filmed in the U.S.

IMDB entry:

A veteran of stage and screen, award-winning actress Miriam Margolyes has achieved success on both sides of the Atlantic. Winner of the BAFTA Best Supporting Actress award in 1993 for The Age of Innocence (1993) she also received Best Supporting Actress at the 1989 LA Critics Circle Awards for her role in Little Dorrit (1988) and a Sony Radio Award for Best Actress on “Radio” in 1993. She was the voice of Fly the dog in Babe(1995).

Major credits during her long and celebrated career include Yentl (1983), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), I Love You to Death (1990), End of Days (1999), Sunshine (1999), Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Cats & Dogs (2001), Magnolia (1999) and she was Prof. Sprout inHarry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002).

Most recently Margolyes appeared in Stephen Hopkins‘ The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004), Modigliani (2004), István Szabó‘s Being Julia (2004) and Ladies in Lavender (2004) (with Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench), which is opening at the NY Tribeca Festival on April 23rd.

Most memorable TV credits include Screen Two: Old Flames (1990), Freud (1984), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986), The Black Adder (1983), The Girls of Slender Means(1975), _Oliver Twist (1982) (TV)_, The History Man (1981), Vanity Fair (2004) , Supply & Demand (1997). She was Franny in the CBS sitcom Frannie’s Turn (1992) and starred recently in the Miss Marple episode, “Murder at the Vicarage”.

Stage credits include “The Vagina Monologues”, Sir Peter Hall‘s Los Angeles production of “Romeo & Juliet”, “She Stoops to Conquer” and “Orpheus Descending” (all for Sir Peter Hall), “The Killing of Sister George”, “The Threepenny Opera” (Tony Richardson), Michael Lindsay-Hogg‘s “The White Devil” at The Old Vic, the Bristol Old Vic production of “The Canterbury Tales” and her own award-winning, one-woman show, “Dickens’ Woman”. In the 2002 Queen’s New Years Honours List, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II awarded her the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British) Empire for her services to Drama.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Paul Coates

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Original Cinema 1-Sheet Poster – Movie Film Posters

John Bowe was born in Cheshire in 1950. He is best known for his television performances including “The Bill” and “Coronation Street”. His films include “The One and Only Phyllis Dixey”,”Stalin” and “County Kilburn”.

“Wikipedia” entry:

John Bowe (born 1 February 1950) is an actor best known for his television roles. He is married and has six children.

Bowe was born in Greasby, on the Wirral in Cheshire, England. His highest profile role was probably that of George Marlow in the first Prime Suspect serial in 1991. He also playedDuggie Ferguson in Coronation Street from 1999 to 2002, having previously appeared in another of Granada TV‘s soap operas; Families.

Other TV credits include: Warship, Secret Army, Boon, The New Statesman, Capital City, Class Act, Lovejoy, Silent Witness, Dalziel and Pascoe, Cleopatra and Einstein and Eddington, ” Tipping the Velvet” (TV mini- series, 2002), The Hour and DCI Banks. Film credits include The Living Daylights, Resurrection and Gozo.

In 2007 he played Dr Morgan in the BBC five-part series Cranford.

In April 2010 Bowe joined the cast of London’s West End production Priscilla Queen of the Desert – The Musical, playing the part of Bob. In September 2011, he appeared as Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd at Chichester, a role he continued in the West End transfer.

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

Ben Keaton was born in Dublin in 1957. He starred in “Casualty” between 1999 and 2002. He also appeared in the cult TV classic “Fr Ted”. Films include “East Is East” and “Double Time”.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Ben Keaton (born 1956, Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish actor who appeared as Jeff Brannigan in ITV soap opera Emmerdale. He appeared in BBC‘s Casualty playing the part of Spencer between 1999-2002. He also appeared in the Channel 4‘s Irish comedy Father Ted, “Think Fast, Father Ted“. He had a small part in the British film East is East as apriest.

Keaton is also a well established actor in the theatre, and has appeared at The Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in Animal Crackers, American Buffalo, Harvey, Cyrano de Bergerac,^[1] and playing the role of David Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever.^[2] Keaton also works as a comedian, and has won the Perrier Comedy Award at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival,^[3] two Manchester Evening News Best Actor Awards and a Laurence Olivier Nomination. He is a regular guest member with the Comedy Store Players,^[1] the Steve Frost Improv All Stars and Eddie Izzard, and appeared in this style of comedy at the Royal Exchange in his show “Ben & Friends” which has included Stephen Frost, Niall Ashdown,Steve Steen, Andy Smart, Brian Conley and Paul Merton.

Keaton currently lives in Lincolnshire.

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

Bobby Henrey

Bobby Henrey gave one of the best performances by a child ever on film in Carol Reed’s classic “The Fallen Idol” in 1948. He was born in France in 1939. His mother was the author Madeleine Henrey and he was cast in the film after his photograph was noticed in one of his mother’s books. He went on to make “The Wonder Kid” in 1951. He did not pursue an acting career and went to live in the U.S. where be became a chaplain.

“Guardian” article from 2001 by : Claire Armitstead

Bobby Henrey was a lonely child. French was his first language, but he spent the second world war in a flat in Piccadilly, at the heart of a blitzed city emptied of other children. His parents were writers, and the cover of one of their books featured a picture of their pretty blond son looking out of their window on the ruins of London.

It might all have ended there, had the picture not been spotted by film producer Alexander Korda, who was looking for a little Francophone boy to star in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s short story The Basement Room.

The film, retitled The Fallen Idol, was released in 1948, the first of three collaborations between Greene and director Carol Reed, and has just been restored by the British Film Institute. According to David Hare, one of the donors who helped finance the restoration, “It’s a great, overlooked masterpiece of the British cinema. The more you read about Reed, the more you realise that he is our William Wyler – the director who seems able effortlessly to go to the heart of his subject, without ever drawing attention to himself. He just knows where the story should go, and that’s the rarest gift of all in cinema.”

Reed and Korda are long dead, but gathered for the recent premiere of the new print were three people whose lives were indelibly marked by the film: Bobby, the actress Dora Bryan, and Reed’s assistant director Guy Hamilton, who was embarking on a career that would include a raft of Bond movies.

Part of Hamilton’s job was to coax a performance out of Bobby, who was more interested in watching what the electricians were up to than in playing to the camera. Bobby was not a stage school brat; he belonged to that other tradition of child actor most commonly associated with realist directors such as Bill Douglas or Ken Loach – where the film-maker’s art is to observe a child being a child.

“Bobby had the concentration of a demented flea,” says Hamilton. “Carol and I would play good cop, bad cop. I could shout at him, but Carol could never lose his temper, even though the sweat would be pouring down his face. He would film six or seven hundred feet of film just to get one line.”

Reed was also a very good observer. One day he watched Bobby playing with a piece of string, and encouraged him to do it again on film. This little, spontaneous action becomes a defining part of the character of the lonely boy.

In the Greene short story, the child is English: Philip, only son of rich absentee parents, betrays his beloved butler to the police for the murder of his shrewish wife, who goes beserk when she discovers he is having an affair. The story is narrated with the hindsight of 60 years, during which the boy has become a shrunken shadow of what he might have been had the twisted passions of the adult world not been forced on him so young.

In the film, there is no such hindsight. There is no murder either, but an accident, which the child – here the son of the French ambassador – misinterprets because he has been enlisted in adult deceptions but is too young to understand what he is being asked to cover up. In one of those alchemical transformations that marks out a great screen adaptation, it becomes a thriller of partial vision – of sight without understanding, fact without truth.

All these are embodied in the fidgety eight-year-old, who, quite literally in cinematic terms, belongs to a different world from the adults he tries to help. There is a dazzling moment when he looks through the distorting window panes of a tea shop at wasps on racks of iced cakes and pulls a face, as if he is trying to become one of them. Seconds later, he glimpses his mentor, played by Ralph Richardson, having tea with his lover in a corner and the deception begins.

For David Hare, “the scene between the lovers in the tea shop is the most painful image of repressed love in the British cinema – the way they fiddle with the cakes and stare into each other’s eyes is infinitely more moving than anything in Brief Encounter. Richardson’s desperate vulnerability and his desire not to let himself down in the child’s eyes is very profound. It’s Freud, of course – Graham Greene as lost child, lost believer, wanting to tell the truth and fearing its power.”

All this responsibility for a child actor who did not act – who was so clueless, in fact, that one weekend, in the middle of shooting a key scene, he went off for a haircut. That meant a two week delay in filming while his hair grew back, and some useful extra work for Bryan, who had been hired for a day’s work as a tart with a heart down at the local nick. The Fallen Idol was her second film – a promotion from “two giggling girls in phone box” and it gave her a show-stealing line, to the little boy clutched to her bosom: “Oh, I know your daddy.”

Bryan says she knew at the time that this wasn’t a “run-of-the-mill film”. But Reed was not so sure, Hamilton recalls: “He was very worried because he realised Bobby Henrey was the star, and if the audience didn’t warm to him, the whole thing would turn to seaweed. And Bobby was a very odd little boy, quite effeminate, French, not a little Anthony Newley.”

He invited Hamilton to watch an early cut: “I thought it was a disaster – a two hour, 25 minute pudding.” Only in the cutting room did what Hamilton describes as “this miraculous child performance” begin to emerge. Not that Henrey was aware of any of it. He went on to make one other “attrocious” film, Karl Hartl’s The Wonder Kid, before being sent off to boarding school.

His only subsequent brush with showbusiness was when, as a student at Oxford, he was invited to appear on Bryan’s This Is Your Life. He spent his career as an accountant in America, before retiring to work as a hospital chaplain in Greenwich Village. Now in his 60s, he is the same age as the older, ruefully retrospective Philip in the short story. It’s not lost on Henrey that there is a certain symmetry between Greene’s fiction and his life.

“There’s a little comment in a film book I once read describing the child as restless intelligence personified. I saw that as rather descriptive of how I am. I think the film also recognised the feelings of isolation that I had. When I went to school I was teased, of course. It continued to be quite a difficult thing to live with until quite recently. It wasn’t tragic, but it wasn’t fun.”

He didn’t know he was in at the birth of the tilting camera, and had no idea he was co-starring with one of postwar England’s most celebrated actors. Indeed, wherever possible, his scenes with Richardson were filmed with Hamilton padded up as a body double. But he does remember the cinematographer Georges Perinal, who was the Rembrandt of cinema lighting. “He used little fingers of cardboard to influence the way the light fell. They were on tripods, and I was fascinated by them. I haven’t thought about that for 50 years.”

The above “Guardian” article can also be accessed here.

Jonathan Dixon was born in Pudsey, London in 1988. He is best known for his portryal as Darryl Morton in “Coronation Street”. He has also acted in “Grange Hill” and “Casualty”.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Jonathan Dixon (born 10 August 1988 in Pudsey) is a British television actor, best known for playing playground bully Matthew “Mooey” Humphries in long-running CBBC show Grange Hill.

He appeared in Manchester-based soap opera Coronation Street as Darryl Morton. He joined the soap in March 2007.

He was a friend of Jack P. Shepherd who plays his on-screen friend David Platt before getting his role on Coronation Street.^[1] It was reported on 15 May 2009 that Dixon and co-star Wanda Opalinska would be written out of the soap and would be departing later in the year with it being said that this was due to “natural storyline progression.” ^[2] He last appeared in the episode broadcast on 16 October 2009.

In April 2011 Jonathan achieved a long held ambition of his when he went to Birmingham to film a much anticipated episode of Doctors set to be broadcast on BBC1 in July 2011.

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

Ninette de Valois was born in Blessington, Co. Wicklow in 1898. Her birth name was Edris Stannus. She established the Royal Ballet in London. She died in 2001 at the age of 102.

“Guardian” obituary:

Mary Clarke and James Monahan
The Guardian, Friday 9 March 2001 02.27 GMT

On July 13 1996, just before the Royal Ballet School’s annual matinée at Covent Garden was about to begin, applause suddenly erupted from one side of the auditorium. “It must be Madam,” said those of us who could not see her, and everyone spontaneously rose to applaud the fragile, white-haired figure who had been wheeled to her place at the side of the stalls circle.Madam it was. Dame Ninette de Valois, who has died aged 102, had made it, as she had made it almost every year, to see the student dancers who would carry forward the work she had started so many years ago – the tiny enterprise that was to grow into the whole edifice of the Royal Ballet and its school.

Earlier that year, on February 20, she had made it to Covent Garden for the 50th anniversary of the reopening of the Royal Opera House in 1946 with her company’s production of The Sleeping Beauty. And she had come on stage for a standing ovation, led by the Queen from the royal box.

She was also at Sadler’s Wells that year for the final gala there, before the demolition of the theatre where her company had started. Far from being sentimental or nostalgic, Dame Ninette, although she never ceased to recognise the vital part which that theatre, thanks to Lilian Baylis, had played in the foundation of British ballet, knew it was time for rebuilding and lent her blessing to the enterprise. She had also travelled on a special train, at the age of 92, to celebrate the relocation of the then Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet to Birmingham when it was time for that company to move on and become the Birmingham Royal Ballet of today. She took a great interest in the reopening of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in October 1998, and of the Royal Opera House in November 1999.

Characteristically, she spent her 100th birthday at White Lodge in Richmond Park, the junior school of the Royal Ballet, still mentally alert to all that was going on and applauding, as always, the young dancers of the future. For, as she once wrote, “The work has not been thought out just for the present but for those days, months and years that go to make up the future. In brief there has been planted for you a true heritage. It is your duty to protect this gift – and see that it lives and expands.” The gift, of course, was the Royal Ballet.

The Royal Ballet was Dame Ninette de Valois’s ballet, the Royal Ballet School her school. So she regarded them; and no one disagreed. Without her the 20th-century history of ballet in these islands would have been entirely different. Dame Ninette made British ballet. She had lieutenants, of course, but the generalship was hers, and she alone, in the formative years, was irreplaceable.

Latterly she could not scrutinise, all the time, the working of both London and Birmingham companies and the school; but her occasional visitations, her questions and whiplash criticism never ceased to matter greatly. She always aroused awe in those, especially the women, who worked under her. To the last it was Madam’s approval that blessed, and her disapproval that damned, a budding project.

At any time in her long career, “indomitable” was one of the right adjectives for her, especially in the last decades of her life, when she refused to give in to the arthritis and other ailments that increasingly afflicted her. She was constantly in demand and was obdurately conscientious in meeting that demand.

Hindsight may tell us now that in the 1920s Britain was, at last, due for its turn as a centre of ballet. The Diaghilev company, known in London since 1911, had made a particularly big impression here. So had Pavlova. British dancers – Sokolova, Markova, Dolin, De Valois herself – were beginning to be noticeable among Diaghilev’s exalted Russians. But this was also a time when the French title worn by Diaghilev’s organisation, Les Ballets Russes, was a pertinent reminder that these exiled Russians had made their artistic home in France, where the tradition of ballet long outdated even the Russian one.

It would have been a rare prophet who, at that time, could tell that an enduring consequence of this gorgeous Franco-Russian marriage would be the determination of a young, rather solitary Irish dancer that such delights should be made possible in Britain too.

De Valois was born Edris Stannus at Baltiboys, a country house some two miles from the village of Blessington in County Wicklow, and always insisted, like WB Yeats, with whom she worked, “I am of Ireland.” Irish she was, by birth and temperament, but it was to England – like the Polish Marie Rambert – that she gave her life. Her first dance was an authentic Irish jig, taught to her by the family cook, Kate, to perform on the stone floor of the kitchen at Baltiboys. Did that jig, which she “adored”, instil in her the passionate understanding of native dances of the British Isles that she was, much later, to introduce with such sensible determination to the curriculum of the Royal Ballet School?

By the age of 11, the family had moved to London and she learned “fancy dancing” from the fashionable Mrs Wordsworth, and then more professional exercises at the Lila Field Academy. Halfway through her 14th year she was on tour with the “Wonder Children” from that academy, had learned the Dying Swan from having seen Pavlova, and claimed to have danced it – sometimes with encore – “on the end of every pier in England”.

But she realised that more serious training in classical ballet was necessary and went to Edouard Espinosa for classes. She became principal dancer in pantomimes at the Lyceum and in opera ballets at Covent Garden; took classes alongside Diaghilev’s dancers in London with Maestro Cecchetti; and became friends with Lydia Lopokova and Léonide Massine, with whose small company, in 1921, she had her first taste of working with Russians.

Already moves were afoot to establish a British national ballet and De Valois, with her usual good sense and foresight, realised that the only way to learn how to run a ballet repertory company was to join one. She went straight for the best and joined, unconditionally as a member of the corps de ballet, Diaghilev’s company. She was there from 1923 to 1925, and returned briefly in 1926. She danced and created solo roles in ballets by Massine and Nijinska; she learned about company procedure, choreography and, from her studies with Cecchetti and Nicholas Legat, the classic, academic dance.

In 1926 she opened her own school, grandly called the Academy of Choreographic Art, and that same year had her now celebrated interview with Lilian Baylis of the Old Vic. Baylis “liked her face”, liked her long-term plans for the establishment of a school and company – and the fact that she was not asking for any money. She offered work with her actors and singers at the Vic – “£l a week, dear, for the teaching, £2 for arranging a short dance per show” – and a carrot. She was planning to rebuild the derelict Sadler’s Wells Theatre, which would offer space for an embryonic ballet company. De Valois accepted her terms and never wavered in her gratitude for the faith Baylis had in her and for the support she gave.

In the years of waiting for the reopening of Sadler’s Wells, De Valois busied herself not only with her school but in working with Yeats at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and with Terence Gray at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge. She was also creating her first choreographies, so that when the time came to close her school and move it into Sadler’s Wells she had a nucleus of small ballets on which to build. With but one or two performances a week, and very few dancers, she had little else on which to build. But she had the immense good fortune of securing, right from the start, the services of Constant Lambert as musical director and, as invaluable guests, Markova and Dolin. It was Dolin’s performance as Satan in Job and Markova’s Giselle that really launched the company.

In 1935, when Markova left, De Valois dared, very riskily as it seemed, to make a ballerina of the adolescent Margot Fonteyn. She introduced the great classics, one by one, into the repertory and, there being no more adequate choreographer immediately in sight, she set about supplementing the classics with a British repertory.

Of her own choreography she was the toughest of critics, yet she was responsible for making much of that early repertory very British in character. She drew on artists such as Blake, Hogarth and Rowlandson for inspiration and decor, and British compositions old and new, guided by Lambert, for music. Once Frederick Ashton joined her in 1935 as chief choreographer, she was content to delegate much of the choreographic task to him, and in all the postwar years made only one ballet for her company, the unmemorable Don Quixote – to the Roberto Gerhard score. Yet three of her principal prewar works have lived on: Job – made for the Camargo Society, that curtain-raiser to the Vic-Wells company – The Rake’s Progress and Checkmate. They have lived because they are well-constructed and distinctively British items in an increasingly Catholic repertory.

From 1931 until her retirement from the directorship in 1963, Madam’s biography is that of her company, although she allowed, in her enchanting autobiography Come Dance With Me (1957), “a glimpse of the private side of someone’s public life”. It seems in retrospect a story of regally calm progress, but it had its challenges and its crises. Until 1939 there was the formidable rivalry of De Basil’s and later Massine’s big touring organisations, which had inherited so much of Diaghilev’s repertory and talent and came, every summer, to the big theatres of the West End, reducing the enterprise at Sadler’s Wells to pygmy size. Yet, even before the war scattered them, these Ballet Russe companies were disintegrating. They had no homes; no Diaghilevs to bind them.

During the war the Sadler’s Wells company became homeless – and was nearly stranded in Holland by the German invasion. Temporary residence was found at the New (now Albery) Theatre; nationwide touring became necessary; the loss of male dancers to the armed forces was, somehow, surmounted. The momentous step of accepting the invitation to reopen the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, implying recognition of national status, followed in 1946. Perhaps the company was not quite ready. But largely through the new, sumptuous staging of The Sleeping Beauty (supervised by De Valois), it quickly acquired the strength to fit a bigger role. Then came the first visit to the United States in 1949; again a risk, again a triumph.

By 1956, the infant Vic-Wells Ballet had gained its Royal Charter – through a brilliantly argued submission written by De Valois – which safely united both companies and their schools under their Royal name. The Royal Ballet had become a setter of international standards, a provider of dancers, choreographers and ballet masters for all save the eastern bloc. And even in that world it proved its quality on its first visit to Moscow and Leningrad in 1961.

Meanwhile, the school had expanded into a full-time educational establishment, and when Madam retired from the company in 1963, it was to the school that she devoted her scarcely abated energy.

In addition to her work building a national ballet, Dame Ninette lived a happy parallel life as the wife of Dr AB Connell, whom she married in 1935 (he died in 1987). It was an exemplary union of volatility and calm. While Dr Connell practised at Sunningdale, she was known locally simply as “the doctor’s wife”, for she was as efficient and charming in running a household (she was an excellent cook) and in dealing with telephone messages for the doctor as she was in running her company.

She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1957 and a Companion of Honour in 1982, and was awarded the ultimate honour, the Order of Merit, in 1992, receiving in the same year the special award of the Society of West End Theatres for her lifetime’s achievement. In addition, there were innumerable honorary degrees and decorations, accepted not so much for herself as in recognition of “the company”.

Lilian Baylis was not alone in “liking her face”. When young she was very pretty and a piquant, accomplished dancer. Her eyes were large and her facial bone structure was fine; she had the sort of young good looks that age enhanced.

Her manner was unobtrusive to the point of shyness and her conversation was a voluble flurry. She had many advisers, to none of whom she seemed to listen; her views were always strong, sometimes ruthless and, from day to day, self-contradictory. She had a persuasive charm that was almost irresistible and very seldom resisted. It was totally unforced, full of fun and humour.

Her great strength lay in her integrity, her complete lack of interest in getting rich – she never did – or in acquiring glory for herself. In her final years, past achievements mattered less and less to her; she looked urgently, impatiently, to the future, concerned only with what “her” ballet was going to become. Her colleagues, her dancers – her children, as they could not help regarding themselves – loved her, especially towards the end when she needed them most. They knew that without her they, the two companies, the school, the whole of British ballet with its reputation built over half a century, would not be here.

On her 100th birthday at White Lodge she was surrounded by the children she loved, especially the small boys. It was a beautiful day and she turned to one of her former colleagues, looked up at the sky and said: “I don’t see how anything up there can be as beautiful as this.”

Ninette de Valois (Edris Stannus), ballerina, choreographer, ballet company director and teacher, born June 6 1898; died March 8 2001

The late James Monahan (the Guardian’s former ballet critic, James Kennedy) took charge of the Royal Ballet School at the end of a long career in journalism and at the BBC World Service. He died in 1985.

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

Nigel Patrick was born in 1913 in London. He made his movie debut in 1940 in “Mrs Pym of Scotland Yard”. His cinema highlights include “The Perfect Woman” in 1949 with Patricia Roc, “Encore”, “Young Wive’s Tale” with Audrey Hepburn, “The Sound Barrier” and “The Sea Shall Not Have Them”. He was married to Irish actress Beatrice Campbell. Nigel Patrick died in 1981.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

This droll, dry-witted London-born gent came from a family of actors. He made his stage debut in 1932 and established his reputation in stylish plays. He progressed to films in 1939 but his career was immediately interrupted after only one movie appearance by WWII, serving as a lieutenant colonel in the infantry. He managed to regain his footing in films during the post-war years and played a number of doubting debonairs and high ranking officials in both the lead and second lead capacity. Such films as Spring in Park Lane (1948) Trio (1950), Encore (1952), Breaking the Sound Barrier (1952), The Pickwick Papers (1952), How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957) and The League of Gentlemen (1959) solidified his cinematic status and purposefulness. In the 60s he made a strong return to the theatre serving as both actor and director and also appeared on TV in the Zero One, which was briefly syndicated in the U.S. Long married to actress Beatrice Campbell until her death in 1979, he passed away two years later of lung cancer.

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

Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters

Maxine Audley was born in 1923 in London. Her film debut was in “Anna Karenina” with Vivien Leigh and Kieron Moore in 1948. Her other films included “Our Man in Havana” in 1959, “Peeping Tom” directed by Michael Powell and “Hell Is A City” as the wife of police inspector Stanley Baker. She died in 1992.

“Independent” obituary:

A TRUE stalwart of the British theatre, Maxine Audley was the supreme professional, a strikingly elegant, dark-haired actress with superb diction and remarkable range. She was a tartly elegant Amanda in Private Lives, a pathetic Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, a commanding Tamora in Titus Andronicus, a vicious Goneril in King Lear and more recently a magnificent blowsy matron tossing off wisecracks between slugs of gin in a revival of Light Up The Sky.

Born in London in 1923, Audley was educated in Gloucester but trained for the stage at the Tamara Daykharhanova School in New York and the London Mask Theatre School. She made her theatrical debut in 1940 at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre with a non-speaking part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After the war she toured with the Old Vic in Arms and the Man and did a season at Salisbury’s Arts Theatre before her West End debut in the musical Carissima (1948). The previous year she had made her first film, Julien Duvivier’s Anna Karenina with Vivien Leigh, who became a close friend. Her work in the theatre continued to be mainly in the classics and in 1950 she joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford to appear in King Lear, Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing, also touring Germany with the company. In London she played Charmian in both Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra (1951), with the Oliviers, Emilia in Othello (1951), Lady Lurewell in The Constant Couple (1952), Sara in Tobias and the Angel (1953) and Violet in Angels in Love (1954). Leigh suggested to John Gielgud that he cast Audley as Olivia in Twelfth Night for Stratford’s 1955 season, where she also took the roles of Tamora in Andronicus and Lady Macduff in Macbeth. Kenneth Tynan praised the ‘exceptional power’ of Audley and Keith Michell as the Macduffs, but Audley found herself consoling Leigh for the same critic’s attacks on Leigh’s performances.Michael Denison was part of the same company and asked Audley to create the role of Marion opposite Keith Michell in the Birmingham premiere of Dulcie Gray’s play Love Affair.

In 1957 the controversial Peter Brook production of Titus Andronicus came to London with Audley recreating her role as Tamora. She later named this as one of her favourite roles along with Blanche and Amanda. Four years later she played Lady Macbeth for the first time with the Old Vic company and in 1965 became part of what Noel Coward called ‘an extremely talented company’ along with Nigel Patrick, Phyllis Calvert and Richard Briers in a successful revival of Present Laughter. Her enormous range was further demonstrated when in 1969 she took part in A History of the Music Hall portraying Marie Lloyd and other stars of old time variety. Later that year she had one of her greatest successes as Mrs Hasseltine in Conduct Unbecoming, a part she played for over a year.

Though she continued to play in the classics (Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals, Mrs Marwood in The Way of the World), later years saw her in more modern works – A Streetcar Named Desire, All My Sons, Butterflies are Free, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, and most recently the Drury Lane production of 42nd Street. Along with her consistent theatre work, she was featured in many television plays, hundreds of radio broadcasts and over 20 films, including Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger (1954), the 1956 version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, The Prince and the Showgirl (1957, with Olivier), Chaplin’s A King in New York (1957), and Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana (1959) and the Agony and the Ecstasy (1965).

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