Brittish Actors
Hazel O’Connor was born in 1955 in Coventry. Her father came from Galway. She was a major force in British music in the late 70’s and into the 1980’s. Her films include “Girls Come First” in 1975 and “Breaking Glass”. Her website can be accessed here.
Derek Thompson was born in Belfast in 1948. As a teenage he formed a singing duo with his twin sister. In 1977 he gave a brilliant performance as Harry Moon in the iconic series “Rock Follies”. In 1980 he was in the excellent “The Long Good Friday” and two years later had one of the leading roles in TV’s “Harry’s Game”. In 1986 he was one of the lead actors in “Casualty” and is still in the series to-day. He is an integral part of the show but sometimes one wishes that he diversified into other roles.
IMDB entry:
Derek Thompson was born on April 4, 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is an actor, known for Casualty (1986), The Long Good Friday (1980) and The Gentle Touch (1980). He is married to Dee Sadler. They have one child.
Peter Martyn was born in 1925 in London. His films include “Appointment with Venus” with David Niven and Glynis Johns in 1951, “Lady Godiva Rides Again” and “Orders are Orders”. He died in 1955 at the age of 30.
Bryan Forbes was born in 1926 in West Ham, London. After military service from 1945 until 1948 he began a career as a supporting actor in British films including 1955’s “The Colditz Story”. His other films as an actor include “The League of Gemtlemen” with Jack Hawkins and Kieron Moore and “Sea Devils” with Rock Hudson, Maxwell Reed and Yvonne de Carlo. He made his directorial debut in 1961 with “Whitsle Down the Wind” with Alan Bates and Hayley Mills. His other films as a director ing Rat”, “The Stepford Wives” and “The Slipper and the Rose”. He was married for a time to the Irish actress Constance Smith and then married to Nanette Newman. He died in May, 2013.
Dennis Barker’s “Guardian” obituary:
The director, actor and writer Bryan Forbes, who has died aged 86, was one of the most creative forces in the British film industry of the 1960s, and the Hollywood films he directed included the original version of The Stepford Wives (1974). In later life he turned to the writing of books, both fiction and memoirs.
The turning point for him in cinema was the formation of the independent company Beaver Films with his friend Richard Attenborough in 1958. For the screenplay of their first production, The Angry Silence (1960), Forbes received an Oscar nomination and a Bafta award. Attenborough played a factory worker shunned and persecuted for not joining a strike. His colleagues are shown as being manipulated by skulking professional agitators and to some it seemed more like a political statement than a human story about the crushing of an individual.
Forbes then wrote and/or directed a string of notable British productions. He both wrote and took the part of one of the disaffected officers turning to crime in The League of Gentlemen (1960), and directed Whistle Down the Wind (1961), about children who mistake a convict on the run for Jesus. He took a novel by Lynne Reid Banks as the basis for The L-Shaped Room, which he also directed, and one by Kingsley Amis for Only Two Can Play (both 1962). He provided the screenplay for and directed Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), concerning the sinister abduction of a child, and The Whisperers (1967), in which Edith Evans was outstanding as a lonely old woman.
For Hollywood, Forbes scripted and directed King Rat (1965), a thoughtful study of British and American soldiers in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. It was a critical success and did well commercially – except in America.
Other Hollywood work arrived, but in 1969 Forbes accepted the offer of the impresario Bernard Delfont, then with EMI, to run Elstree Film Studios, which the company had taken over. This amounted virtually to an attempt to revive the ailing British film industry by instituting a traditional studio system with a whole slate of films in play, one of which happened to be from my political novel Candidate of Promise. However, some EMI executives raised difficulties over Forbes both heading the studio and directing his own film, The Raging Moon (1971), starring his wife Nanette Newman as a woman paralysed from the waist down who finds love.
One success of the venture was the production of The Railway Children (1970), but most of the announced films – including Candidate of Promise – were never made. Forbes, who had a three-year contract, left after two years, complaining privately that for the first time in his life he had made powerful enemies. Delfont’s explanation to me was that Forbes lacked business and organisational skills: “My mistake was not to see that he was creative, but only creative.”
For The Stepford Wives, William Goldman provided a screenplay from the surreal novel by Ira Levin, with Newman as the figure who became the computerised fantasy of boorish men in a small American town. The final Hollywood film that Forbes directed was The Naked Face (1984), with Roger Moore as a psychiatrist who gets caught up with the Chicago mafia. His last screenwriting credit came with Attenborough’s Chaplin (1992).
Forbes was born John Clarke into a working-class home in West Ham, east London. His cultural horizons were extended when he was evacuated during the second world war to Cornwall and stayed in Porthleven with the Rev Canon Gotto, a cultivated cleric with an enormous library. Forbes said that Gotto and his wife “gave me a grounding I wouldn’t have had otherwise”.
Another mentor was the BBC radio producer Lionel Gamlin, who made him question master of the Junior Brains Trust, and advised adopting his stage name of Bryan Forbes. (The actor John Clark, who portrayed Just William on radio for the BBC, had already registered his name with Equity.) Though he got to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at 17, Forbes thought he was seen as too short and too “working-class” to play juvenile leads. He worked in repertory theatre, and had just taken over a part in Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path when he was called up for second world war service, first in the Intelligence Corps and then the Combined Services Entertainment Unit.
A published collection of short stories, Truth Lies Sleeping (1951), pointed to his promise as a writer, but his initial course was to continue acting. Presciently, he wrote to a friend while at a repertory company: “One day I shall direct a film – preferably a film of one of my own scripts.” He also took supporting film roles when possible. His first film appearances had included Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Small Back Room, and the comedy Dear Mr Prohack (both 1949), the latter adapted from an Arnold Bennett novel.
In the early 1950s, he went to Hollywood with the actor who was briefly his first wife, Constance Smith. But it was not long before he returned to Britain and undertook the rewriting of scripts as well as acting. In 1954 he had a part in Guy Hamilton’s film of JB Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls and the following year he starred in the same director’s classic war film The Colditz Story, whose cast included John Mills and Lionel Jeffries. He met his second wife, Newman, while playing a man being run over by a train. They got married in 1955.
When he returned to writing books, it was with wry fiction about the tribulations suffered by the creative spirit in showbiz, The Distant Laughter (1972) and The Rewrite Man (1983). Ned’s Girl (1977) was a biography of Evans, and That Despicable Race (1980) concerned actors as a breed. Later novels were mostly about spies, though sometimes embraced comedy, as with Partly Cloudy (1995), about domestic disasters brought about by the clash of the generations during one traumatic weekend.
Forbes was a founder of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain; with Attenborough he helped form Capital Radio, the London station launched in 1973; and he served as president of the National Youth Theatre. He wrote with incomparable irony about the bizarre workings of the film industry in his two volumes of autobiography, Notes for a Life (1974) and A Divided Life (1992). In 2004 he was appointed CBE.
He is survived by Newman and their daughters, Emma and Sarah.
• Bryan Forbes (John Theobald Clarke), actor, director and writer, born 22 July 1926; died 8 May 2013
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Nigel Terry was born in 1945 in Bristol. He is probably best known for his major role as King Arthur in John Boorman’s “Excalibur” in 1981 Other films include “The Lion in Winter” with Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn in 1969 and the title role in Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio” in 1986. Sadly he died in his homeplace of Cornwall in Aprl 2015.
His “Guardian” obituary:
Every now and then, a strange and mystical being wanders through the British theatre, and Nigel Terry, who has died of emphysema aged 69, was a prime example. Terry was admired by all who worked with him and revered by his contemporaries, fully deserving that over-used description “an actor’s actor”.
He made a sensational film debut in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968) as a drooling young Prince John, no way fazed by playing scenes with Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. But unlike his fellow debutants on this film – Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton – he became a hermit to Hollywood until he burst forth again as a rueful, melancholic King Arthur in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), playing opposite Helen Mirren as Morgana and Nicol Williamson as Merlin.
O’Toole and Williamson took a shine to Terry and they became his idols, as much for their independence and bolshiness as for their talent. Naturally taciturn and suspicious, Terry was an ideal actor – along with Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean – for the independent, idiosyncratic film-maker Derek Jarman, notably playing the title role in Caravaggio (1986) as a bisexual voluptuary with a stylish goatee and a gleaming eye; he was good at being lustful, sweaty, intense.
Otherwise, he worked mostly in theatre, but not exclusively with any one company or director. He was prominent on the fringe of both the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, often working with fellow mavericks such as the director Max Stafford-Clark and the playwright Howard Barker. He played Byron in the first revival in 1988 of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry, at the Royal Court; he was, said a fellow cast member, Sian Thomas, “beautiful, turbulent, wild
The wildness came from a deep, still centre. Off stage, in the pub, I remember him rolling his own cigarettes, very slowly, while staring into a pint. As a student, he drove a flatmate crazy with his protracted silences at the breakfast table. “I can’t stand your fucking moods!” the flatmate exclaimed one morning. Another silence of 10 minutes. “Moods?” Terry muttered, darkly.
He was always going to be an artist, preferably a painter, from a young age. His ancestry was English, Irish and Huguenot. He was the first baby born in Bristol after the end of the second world war, the only child of Frank Terry, an RAF pilot, and his wife, Doreen (nee Such). The family moved to Truro, in Cornwall, where his father was a senior probation officer.
Terry developed his passion for acting, and painting, while at Truro school, joined the National Youth Theatre in his holidays, and worked briefly in forestry and as a petrol pump attendant before training at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in 1963. He made a stage debut with Dolphin Theatre at the Shaw Theatre in north London, playing Evans in Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet.
After seasons in rep at the Oxford Playhouse and the Bristol Old Vic and The Lion in Winter, he appeared in controversial new plays at the Royal Court, including the premieres of Edward Bond’s The Fool (1975) and Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976). At the RSC in the late 1970s he was Soranzo in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Casca in Julius Caesar.
He featured in a notable season at the National in 1981, playing the lead in Molière’s Don Juan as a brazen but unflustered Spanish nobleman, as if, said the Guardian critic Michael Billington, David Niven were playing Tamburlaine. He also played a laconic Rakitin in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, opposite a refulgent Francesca Annis. Both shows were directed by Peter Gill, and I’ll never forget Terry’s bitter declaration in the latter, almost a credo, that all love was a catastrophe.
In Barker’s Victory (1983), he was Charles II, and in his The Bite of the Night (1988), directed by Danny Boyle, he was “the last classics teacher at a defunct university” who goes in search of Homer, Eros and Helen of Troy. Also in the 80s he led a brilliant production of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed directed by Yuri Lyubimov at the Almeida and, for the RSC, played a sinister Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, with Harriet Walter in the title role, and a great double of Shylock and Benedick, opposite Fiona Shaw, on a small-scale tour of The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing.
In his last major film, Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), an epic starring Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, Terry had the joy of playing a Trojan high priest and adviser to O’Toole’s King Priam. But you get the measure of the man, and his mystery, in the Jarman movies, not only Caravaggio, but also War Requiem (1989), an experimental docudrama using Benjamin Britten’s momentous music and featuring Laurence Olivier in his last ever appearance on stage or screen.
In Jarman’s Edward II (1991), an outrageous version of Marlowe’s play, Terry played Mortimer, and the king’s army were a bunch of gay rights marchers, while in the extraordinary Blue (1993), shot entirely in a shimmering shade of aquamarine, Terry, Swinton, John Quentin and Jarman himself, on the brink of death from Aids, read from the director’s diaries and other writings.
Terry moved from London back to Cornwall in 1993 and spent the rest of his days there, partly to be near his parents in their last years but also to enjoy the beauty of the cliffs and sea.
Deeply attractive and private to the last, he lived alone in a cottage near St Ives.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
• Peter Nigel Terry, actor, born 15 August 1945; died 30 April 2015
Helen Worth is best known as Gail Platt in the long running “Coronation Street” which she has played since 1974. She was born in 1951 in Wakefield. Her first television appearance was in an episode of “Z Cars”.
Linda Hayden was born in 1953 in Stanmore, Middlesex. She made her film debut in 1969 in “Baby Love” with Diana Dors. Her Hammer Horror films are “Taste the Blood of Dracula” in 1970 and “The Blood on Satan’s Claw”.
IMDB entry:
Gorgeous and voluptuous blonde actress Linda Hayden made a strong and lasting impression with her steamy portrayals of lusty nymphets and tempting seductresses in a handful of pictures made in the 60s and 70s. Linda was born on January 19, 1953 in Stanmore, Middlesex, England. She studied her craft at the esteemed Aida Foster Stage School, where she took drama, dancing and singing classes. Hayden made a bold film debut as brassy 15-year-old teenage tart Luci Thompson in the racy melodrama Baby Love (1968).
Linda achieved her greatest enduring cult cinema popularity with her appearances in several horror features; she was excellent as virginal innocent Alice Hargood in the typically fine Hammer outing Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and gave an outstanding performance as alluring devil cult leader Angel Blake in the chilling The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971).
Hayden was likewise memorable as libidinous sexpot secretary Linda Hindstatt in the sleazy thriller Trauma (1976) and had a brief cameo inThe Boys from Brazil (1978). She acted in four amusingly lowbrow comedies with her onetime boyfriend Robin Askwith: Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974), Queen Kong(1976), Let’s Get Laid (1978) and Confessions of a Summer Camp Councillor (1977).
Linda has made guest appearances in such TV shows as Now Look Here (1971), Marked Personal (1973), Crown Court: Traffic Warden’s Daughter: Part 1, My Brother’s Keeper: Pig in the Middle (1975), Robin’s Nest (1977), Mackenzie: Sole Agent (1980), The Professionals: Black Out (1980), Shillingbury Tales (1980), Cuffy (1983), Hart to Hart: Passing Chance (1983), Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense: Black Carrion (1984) and The Bill: Performance Anxiety (1997).
In addition to her movie and television credits, Hayden has also acted on stage: she co-starred with Askwith in the bawdy farce “Who Goes Bare” and has performed extensively in productions for the Theatre of Comedy Company.
Linda Hayden is married to theatre producer Paul Elliott and is the mother of two children.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: woodyanders
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Helen Shapiro was born in Bethnal Green, London in 1946. She had a string of British Top Ten hts in the early 1960’s when she was a teenager. Her first recording was “Please Don’t Treat Me Like A Child” in 1961. She went on to record “You Don’t Know” and “Walking Back to Happiness”. She was featured in the 1962 film “It’s Trad, Dad”.
Kathy Kirby was born in Ilford, Essex in 1936. She was a very popular British singer in the early 1960’s and still has a cult following to-day. She appeared in 1964 in the television drama “Ninty Years On”. She died in 2011.
Her “Guardian” obituary by David Laing:
During the mid-1960s, the singer Kathy Kirby, who has died aged 72 after a short illness, was almost ever-present on television variety shows. Her powerful vocal style was heard on the million-selling hits Dance On and Secret Love, and her blonde hair and hourglass figure drew comparisons to Marilyn Monroe.
She was born Kathleen O’Rourke in Ilford, Essex, the eldest of three children of Irish parents. Her mother, Eileen, brought up the family alone after their father left home when the children were very young. Kirby showed a taste for show business from an early age, winning a toddlers’ talent contest at three years old. After leaving a local convent school with three O-levels, and dyeing her natural red hair blonde, she regularly attended the Ilford Palais de Danse. There, dressed in a tight black dress and black evening gloves, she saw Bert Ambrose and his Orchestra and persuaded the veteran bandleader to allow her to sing.
Ambrose was so impressed with the teenager’s performance that he signed Kirby to a management contract and found her work with his own and other bands. He secured for her a recording deal with Pye Records and, despite the 40-year age gap, the couple became lovers. (Ambrose’s estranged wife was living in America at the time.)
Her first records were unexceptional but in 1962, she switched to Decca Records and the following year made her first hit single, Dance On, which reached No 11. Kirby’s next hit was a stunning recording of Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster’s well-known standard Secret Love, which had memorably been sung by Doris Day in the 1950s. Kirby’s recording reached No 4 in 1963. Two more Top 20 hits – Let Me Go Lover and You’re the One – followed in quick succession. She was voted top British female singer of 1963 by readers of the New Musical Express.
Alongside another new ballad singer, Vince Hill, Kirby became a featured performer on Stars and Garters, a TV variety series set in a studio designer’s idea of a typical working-class pub. Her album of songs from the show was a No 11 hit in 1964. She appeared on the pop shows Thank Your Lucky Stars and Ready, Steady, Go! and was eventually given her own Saturday evening primetime programme on BBC television. The Kathy Kirby Show drew audiences of more than 20 million. She appeared at the Royal Variety Performance in 1964 and, the following year, represented the UK at the Eurovision song contest. Singing I Belong, she was the runner-up to France Gall, the Luxembourg representative.
On the stage, Kirby was in demand for tours with such artists as Cliff Richard, Arthur Askey and Tom Jones and she starred in seaside summer shows at Blackpool and Brighton. She also toured Australia and South Africa, and achieved the ultimate light entertainment accolade by appearing at the top of the bill at the London Palladium.
While she was regularly claimed to be the highest-paid female singer in Britain, behind the scenes things were beginning to fall apart. Her alleged affair with Bruce Forsyth caused Ambrose to break out into fits of jealousy. Kirby also realised that Ambrose, a compulsive gambler, had lost almost all her money. He died in 1971.
Although there was a steady stream of singles and some television cameos on such programmes as The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, Kirby’s popularity waned in the late 1970s. Her live shows were infrequent and came to an end in 1983 with a cabaret appearance in Blackpool.
Kirby was later married for several years to Fred Pye, a writer and former policeman. After the marriage ended, she became almost a recluse in her west London apartment.
A biography of Kirby, entitled Secrets, Loves and Lip Gloss, written by the actor James Harman, was published in 2005. Harman became Kirby’s manager, setting up a website and successfully encouraging record companies to reissue some of her 1960s singles and albums. The subsequent revival of interest reinforced Kirby’s reputation as something of a gay icon. Various attempts have been made to stage musicals based on her life. The career of the main character in the musical Come Dancing, written by Ray Davies, has some similarities to Kirby’s.
Kirby is survived by her sister Pat, her brother, Douglas, and several nephews and nieces.
• Kathy Kirby (Kathleen O’Rourke), singer, born 20 October 1938; died 19 May 2011
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.