Muriel Angelus

Muriel Angelus was born in 1909 in London of Scottish parents. Her first movie was the silent “The Ringer” in 1928. Up until 1935 she alternated between making films and appearing on the London stage. She then went to Broadway to appear in the hit show “The Boys from Syracuse” with Eddie Albert. She then went to Hollywood where she made such films as “The Light that Failed” with Ronald Colman and Ida Lupino “The Great McGinty” directed by the great Preston Sturges with Brian Donlevy. On her marriage in 1943 she retired from acting. Muriel Angelus died at the age of 95 in 2004.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

The memories are vague when it comes to recalling this London-born leading lady, but Muriel Angelus did have her moments. She managed to appear in a few classic Broadway musical shows and Hollywood films before her early retirement in the mid-1940s. Of Scottish parentage, the former Muriel Findlay developed a sweet-voiced soprano at an early age. She made her singing debut at 12, eventually changing her name and becoming a popular music hall performer. She entered films toward the end of the silent era with The Ringer (1928), the first of three movie versions of the Edgar Wallace play. Her second film Sailor Don’t Care (1928) was important only in that she met her first husband, Scots-born actor John Stuart. Her part was excised from the film. Though in her first sound picture Night Birds (1930), she got to sing a number, most of her films did not usurp her musical talents. The sweet-natured actress who played both ingenues and ‘other woman’ roles co-starred with husband Stuart in No Exit (1930), Eve’s Fall (1930) and Hindle Wakes (1931), and appeared with British star Monty Banks in some of his farcical comedies, including My Wife’s Family (1932) and So You Won’t Talk (1935). Muriel received a career lift with the glossy musical London hit “Balalaika” and a chain of events happened with its success. It led to her securing the pivotal role of Adriana in “The Boys From Syracuse” and, in turn, a contract with Paramount Pictures. Divorced from Stuart by this time, Muriel settled in Hollywood and made her best films while there. She was touching as girlfriend to blind painter Ronald Colman in The Light That Failed (1939), a second remake of the Rudyard Kipling novel, and appeared to great advantage in Preston Sturges’ classic satire The Great McGinty (1940) as _Brian Donlevy_’s secretary. After scoring another long-running Broadway hit with “Early To Bed” in 1943, Muriel met Radio City Music Hall orchestra conductor Paul Lavalle while appearing on radio in New York and married him in 1946. She retired to raise a family in New England. They had a daughter, Suzanne, who later worked for NBC. Muriel pretty much stayed out of the limelight for the remainder of her life. She died at 95 in a Virginia nursing home in 2004, some seven years after her husband’s death.

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

Guardian obituary 2004

Muriel Angelus

British actor who starred in films and stage musicals, memorably singing Falling In Love With LoveRonald BerganThu 2 Sep 2004 01.36 BST

One of Rodgers and Hart’s greatest hits, Falling In Love With Love, was first sung in the 1938 Broadway production of The Boys From Syracuse by Muriel Angelus, who has died aged 95. The New York Times critic thought her portrayal of Adriana in this musical adaptation of The Comedy Of Errors “a monument to precariously controlled wifely patience”, and that she sang “with exquisite sweetness”. Unfortunately, her sweetly exquisite soprano voice was heard too seldom in a career that began at the age of 12 and ended at 33.

Born in London of Scottish parents, the blonde Muriel Angelus Findlay began singing in music halls before entering films in 1928 in the silent The Ringer, the first of three versions of the Edgar Wallace play. A year later, she was in Germany for Maskottchen, based on an operetta by Walter Bromme, in which she played “the other woman”. If the producers had waited a few months for sound, they could have included the songs.Advertisementhttps://38e84c381af680794f0905d392a93a04.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

In her first talkie, Night Birds (1930), she got to sing a number in a West End revue, in which a detective, on the trail of her fugitive boyfriend, disguises himself as a chorus boy. More serious was Hindle Wakes (1931), the first sound version of Stanley Houghton’s 1912 play, where Angelus portrayed Beatrice Farrar, the respectable fiancee of Alan Jeffcote, a Lancashire mill-owner’s son, who refuses to go away with him for a naughty weekend. Instead, he takes a mill girl, only to return to Beatrice after the girl remembers her “place”. Jeffcote was played by the Scottish-born actor John Stuart, whom Angelus married during the shooting of the film.

They then appeared together in Let’s Love And Laugh (1931), an inconsequential comedy-drama in which she was the daughter of a publisher, and he an aspiring writer. She then embarked on several farcical comedies, some directed and starring Monty Banks (Mario Bianchi), the husband of Gracie Fields, with titles such as My Wife’s Family (1932), So You Won’t Talk (1935), and Blind Spot (1932), in which she played an amnesiac, a melodrama Angelus would have wanted to forget.

· Muriel Angelus, actor, born March 10 1909; died August 22 2004

The Way Of All Flesh, poster, l-r: Muriel Angelus, Akim Tamiroff, Gladys George on poster art, 1940. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

In 1936, she starred in the Eric Maschwitz stage musical Balalaika at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Angelus was ravishing as Lydia, a ballet dancer and singer, who falls in love in Paris with an exiled Russian prince after the Bolshevik Revolution. It was the sort of thing that went down very well in the West End in the 1930s, and it ran for over a year. It led to Angelus being offered the role of Adriana in The Boys From Syracuse, and a contract with Paramount, for whom she made four prestigious films.

The first was William Wellman’s The Light That Failed (1939), the second remake of the Rudyard Kipling novel, which tells of the desperate attempt of a painter (Ronald Colman) to finish his greatest painting – of a prostitute (Ida Lupino) – before he goes blind. In a moving scene, Angelus, as the now blind artist’s girlfriend, has to hide the fact from him that the painting has been slashed by the prostitute in a jealous rage.

Of the three last films she made, all in 1940 – Safari, a studio-bound jungle melodrama with Douglas Fairbanks Jr as “the best hunter in West Africa”; The Way Of All Flesh, in which Angelus was a thieving adventuress; and The Great McGinty – the last is by far the most memorable. In this, Preston Sturges’ first feature, about a tramp (Brian Donlevy) who becomes state governor by craft and graft, Angelus played his secretary, offering to become his public wife for the sake of the “women’s vote”. Angelus triumphs as the sole character with half a conscience in one of Hollywood’s best satires.

After another success in a Broadway musical, Early To Bed (1943-44), as the madame of a bordello in pre-war Martinique, which people, for reasons known only to the librettist, keep mistaking for a girls’ school, Angelus left show business. In 1946, long divorced from Stuart, she married Paul Lavelle, the conductor of the Radio City Music Hall orchestra.

Fifteen years later, Lavelle and Angelus recorded Tribute To Rodgers And Hammerstein, in which, naturally, she sung Falling In Love With Love. She is survived by her daughter from her second marriage.

Katie Boyle is a well known broadcaster who has acted in some British films. She was born Caterina di Francavilla in Florence, Italy in 1926. At the age of nineteen she came to Britain. She was originally a model and then then appearing in such films as “Old Mother Riley, Headmistress” in 1950. Her other movies included “The House in the Square”, “The Truth About Women” with Laurence Harvey and “Intent to Kill” with Richard Todd.

IMDB entry:

Catherine Boyle was born on May 29, 1926 in Florence, Tuscany, Italy as Caterina Irene Elena Maria Imperiali de Principi di Francavilla. She is an actress, known for The Eurovision Song Contest (1974), The Eurovision Song Contest (1968) and The Eurovision Song Contest (1963). She was previously married to Peter Saunders, Greville Pollard Bayliss and Richard Bentinck Boyle.

Ian McNeice was born in Basingtoke in 1950. He is one of Britains best and most profilic of character actors. His films include “84 Charing Crfoss Road”, “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” with Maggie Smith and “Day of the Dead”. In 1995 he went to Hollywood to make “Ace Ventura Pet Detective”. Recent films have included “Oliver Twist” and “The Black Dahlia”.

TCM Overview:

Ian McNeice was born in the town of Basingstoke (in Hamsphire, England) on October 2, 1950. He studied acting at the Taunton School in Somerset and the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Arts, followed by four years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. McNeice began appearing regularly on television in the early â¿¿80s, notably on the 1982 mini-series “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.” In ’85, he was cast in a recurring role on the series “Edge of Darkness.” In addition to his TV work, McNeice appeared in the films “84 Charing Cross Road” (’87),” “The Raggedy Rawney” (’88), “The Russia House” (’90), “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls” (’95), and “From Hell” (’01). Some of McNeiceâ¿¿s most memorable roles include the villainous Baron Vladimir Harkonnen on the mini-series “Frank Herbertâ¿¿s Dune” (’00) and “The Children of Dune” (’03), the bibulous sous-chef Gustave on the British sitcom “Chef!,” and the newsreader on the HBO mini-series “Rome.” He also took the role of Winston Churchill on an episode of the British sci-fi series “Doctor Who”; the part was something of an encore for McNeice, having previously played Churchill in an ’08 stage play.

Moira Redmond was born in 1928 in Bognor Regis in Kent. Her film debut came in 1958 with the movie “Violent Moment”. Other films include “Doctor in Love” with Michael Craig and “A Shot in the Dark” in 1964 with Peter Sellers and “Kill or Cure” with Eric Sykes. In 1975 in the very popular television series “Edward the Seventh” she played Alice Keppel. She died in 2006.

“Independent” obituary:

A versatile actress of striking auburn-haired beauty, with a honeyed voice of considerable range, Moira Redmond had a particular gift for the demands of high comedy, to which she brought an impressively stylish aplomb. Her ill-health prevented audiences from seeing her tackle some of the rewarding roles – Lady Bracknell would surely have been among them – which might have come her way later in her career.

Her interest in the theatre began as a child at school in Bognor Regis. Redmond made her professional début playing walk-on parts in Peter Brook’s revelatory production of Titus Andronicus (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1957) with Laurence Olivier; she also understudied Olivier’s then wife Vivien Leigh as the abuser Lavinia and had many an uneasy moment when the wayward star occasionally went missing on the production’s European tour before its London run (Stoll, 1957).

By way of marked contrast her next West End appearance was in Agatha Christie’s tepid Verdict (Strand, 1958) after which she played a remarkably wide variety of major roles in leading repertory theatres, including Nottingham and Leatherhead.

For the enterprising Pop Theatre led by Frank Dunlop at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival, Redmond was part of an intriguingly varied company that included Jane Asher, Jim Dalt, Laurence Harvey and Cleo Laine; she was a feisty Hermione, memorably forgiving in the statue scene, in The Winter’s Tale (later in London at the Cambridge, 1966) and equally telling as Helen in The Trojan Women.

A highlight of Redmond’s career was her Queen Victoria in Edward Bond’s Early Morning (Royal Court, 1968), in which she took every opportunity to mine the vein of black comedy in a fantasia positing a lesbian relationship between Redmond’s Queen and Marianne Faithfull’s Florence Nightingale. She appeared too in another 1960s darkly comic classic, Peter Barnes’s The Ruling Class as the venal Lady Claire Gurney (Nottingham Playhouse, 1969).

Redmond’s comedic skill shone in a rare revival of “Saki” (H.H. Munro)’s only comedy, The Watched Pot (Mermaid, 1970), as Mrs Peter Vulpy, a widow with often a predatory glint in her eye. As the sleekly upwardly mobile Grainne in a wonderful but short-lived Hugh Leonard, Dublin-set comedy The Patrick Pearse Motel, she was hilariously funny.

Her range could also extend to the tragic miner’s wife at the heart of D.H. Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (Leatherhead, 1971) and it made her a natural choice as a member of the Actors’ Company formed by, among others, Ian McKellen when she returned to comedy with a delightfully randy matron in Feydeau’s Ruling The Roost (Edinburgh, 1972) and displayed a contrasted fierce concentration in Iris Murdoch’s The Three Arrows (Arts, Cambridge, 1972).

Returning to repertory, Redmond had a splendid run of parts at the Bristol Old Vic in 1975, playing the harassed Sister McPhee in Peter Nichols’s The National Health, a glittering Ariadne Utterword in Heartbreak House (she was a superb Shavian) and, outstandingly, in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, as Muriel, frustrated dragon-wife of the play’s central erring doctor.

After a period concentrating primarily on television work Redmond returned in fine form to the theatre in Alan Ayckbourn’s production of his large-scale A Chorus of Disapproval (National Theatre, 1985) set against the background of a local operatic society’s production of The Beggar’s Opera.

Early in her career Redmond was groomed as a “starlet”, with appearances in inconsequential movies including Violent Moment (1958) and Doctor in Love (1960). She had better roles in more interesting films – a good cameo in John Huston’s flawed Freud (1962) and a juicy comedy part in A Shot in the Dark (1964) – but her late film career offered her, like most actresses of her age then, little of genuine quality.

On television it was quite another story. Redmond made countless smaller-screen appearances, guesting in virtually all the leading series of her era – The Avengers, Danger Man, No Hiding Place, Paul Temple, Sherlock Holmes, I, Claudius, Nanny and The Sweeney.

Some of the most prestigious series had impressive contributions from Redmond – Monica in the rarity of Noël Coward’s Post Mortem in “The Jazz Age” series (1968), a mischievously luscious Duchess of Cleveland in The First Churchills (1969), a notably subtle and moving portrayal of the King’s mistress Alice Keppel in Edward VII (1975), and a commanding Duchesse d’Abrantes in Prometheus: the life of Balzac (1976).

Her final significant appearance was in the supporting role of Nessy, touchingly played, in the popular television version of Catherine Cookson’s The Wingless Bird (1997).

Alan Strachan

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

Gary Waldhorn was born in 1943 in London. His films include “Zeppelin” in 1971, “Escape to Victory” in 1981 and “The Chain” in 1984. He has featured in many of the popular television dramas in Britain over the past thirty years.

Waldhorn is known for his work in West End theatre productions and for his collaborations with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1972 he toured Australia and New Zealand in Harry Miller’s production of Sleuth playing opposite Richard Todd.^[1]

Apart from appearing in every episode of The Vicar of Dibley, Waldhorn has also made many television appearances since the 1970s including Softly, Softly, The Sweeney, Space: 1999, The New Avengers, Brideshead Revisited, The Professionals, Minder, Robin of Sherwood, Rumpole of the Bailey, The Bill, Heartbeat, Gallowglass and Lovejoy. He also played Lionel Bainbridge in the first three series of Brush Strokes, and Richard Beamish in the first series of All at No 20.^[1]

Actor and playwright Hugh Williams was born in East Sussex in 1904. He was a popular actor in British films of the 1930’s. He made his debut in “Charley’s Aunt” in 1930. He made “David Copperfield” in 1935 in Hollywood where he played Steerforth. He wrote plays with his wife Margaret, one of them was “The Grass Is Greener”. He died in 1969. His son is the actor Simon Williams.

TCM OVerview:

Hugh Williams was an actor who had a successful Hollywood career. Williams began his acting career with roles in such films as “Charley’s Aunt” (1930) with Charles Ruggles, “Sorrell and Son” (1933) and “Elinor Norton” (1934). He also appeared in the drama “Outcast Lady” (1934) with Constance Bennett. He continued to work steadily in film throughout the thirties and the forties, appearing in the W C Fields historical drama “David Copperfield” (1935), the drama “Wuthering Heights” (1939) with Merle Oberon and “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing” (1942). He also appeared in “Secret Mission” (1942). In the latter part of his career, he tackled roles in “An Ideal Husband” (1947), the Michael Ripper drama “The Intruder” (1955) and the Charlton Heston action film “Khartoum” (1966). Williams more recently acted in the Richard Burton dramatic adaptation “Doctor Faustus” (1968). Williams passed away in December 1969 at the age of 65.

Filmography

Hy Hazell was born in 1919 in London. “Meet Me at Dawn” in 1947 was her first film. Her other films include “The Franchise Affair”, “The Yellow Balloon”, and “Anastasia”. She died aged 50 in 1970.

Hilary Tindall was born in 1938 in Manchester. She is best remembered as the bitchy Ann Hammond in the very popular television series “The Brothers” which ran from 1972 until 1976. She also won glowing reviews for her performance in the television series “A Kind of Loving” in 1982. She sadly died in 1992 at the age of 54.

“Independent” obituary from 1993:

Hilary Tindall, actress, born Manchester 1936, married 1963 Robin Lowe (one son, one daughter), died Selborne Hampshire 5 December 1992.

HILARY TINDALL became one of television’s most popular actresses when she played Ann Hammond in the successful television series The Brothers which ran from 1972 to 1974 (and is now being repeated on UK Gold).

When Tindall won the role of Ann Hammond she little realised that it would be a turning-point in her career. Appearing in 50 episodes, she played the part of the bored and restless wife married to one of the brothers of the family- owned road-haulage company, and captured the imagination of the viewers with her adulterous affairs.

It was a part that afforded her a full range of emotions and was to make her a star wherever the series was sold in Europe and the Far East. Her family life precluded her from undertaking the many offers of work abroad which were offered at the time.

Hilary Tindall was born in Manchester and trained at RADA. Her first appearance on the professional stage was at Richmond Theatre, and she went on to play the juvenile lead in William Douglas-Home’s controversial comedy Aunt Edwina at the Fortune Theatre. This was followed by the lead in A Trip to the Castle at the Arts Theatre in 1960, where she played opposite Terence Stamp. Television roles at that time included Dear Octopus, with Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, and The Tempest, with Michael Redgrave. Leading roles followed at the Old Vic, and she appeared in the American musical Little Mary Sunshine at the Comedy in 1962.

After her success in The Brothers, Tindall was offered a starring role in a Swedish television serial, The Ship Owner. The Brothers had been a big hit in Sweden and she became an overnight celebrity there with her new series. She returned to the stage in Britain with Parent’s Day, at the Globe, and found herself in great demand, starring in several national tours of plays including Verdict, The Gentle Hook, My Cousin Rachel, The Owl and The Pussy Cat and Getting Married.

Tindall returned to musicals and starred in A Little Night Music and Company, at Colchester, and South Pacific, at the Connaught. More television followed including: Tales of the Unexpected, A Kind of Loving, The Max Headroom Show and, her last appearance, an episode of Maigret. Her last stage appearances were Dangerous Obsession (1988), at the Fortune, The Heiress (1989), at Chichester, and How The Other Half Loves (1990), at Leatherhead.

Hilary Tindall was married to Robin Lowe, the literary agent, and had two children, Kate and Julian. She was a delightful actress whose vivacity and charm endeared her to everybody she worked for.

Lionel Blair was born in 1931 in Montreal. His family came to England where he was an infant. His films include “The World of Suzy Wong” in 1960 with William Holden and Nancy Kwan. His sister was the actress Joyce Blair.

“Guardian” interview in 2013:

I was born in 1932 and we grew up in Stamford Hill, north London. When the war began we were evacuated to Oxford – just me and my sister and my mother – while my dad stayed in London working. I remember playing in the garden with my younger sister, Joyce, and we saw a German plane crash. My father said, “If that can happen there, what’s the point of being in the country away from each other?” So we came home to Stamford Hill.

My father’s parents were Russian and he was the archetypal north London barber – “Something for the weekend, sir?” and all that. From an early age Joyce and I were taken to the pictures, – it was always Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Shirley Temple. We used to go home and try to copy them. That’s how we learned to tap dance.

We were Jewish but not orthodox. During the war, Dad brought bacon home and we’ve eaten it ever since. I think that was frowned upon by certain people in the community when they got a sniff of our bacon sandwich. But every Friday we had chicken and my mother would light candles.

My father died when I was 13. He had a hernia and thought he’d cured it but he hadn’t and it became strangulated and he had a duodenal ulcer as well. He went into an operating theatre and came out dead. It was a huge shock for the whole family. It changed everything. It was the first time I’d ever thought, I’m never going to see him again. It was so awful and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a loss like it.

After Dad died, I had to grow up artificially fast. We had no money so I had to work. I’d started work as a boy actor and my dad had been thrilled about that, but I became too old for little boy parts and too young for grown-up parts. I could dance so I got into musicals and started performing with Joyce. But just as we were becoming well known on television, my mother died and so we were orphans. Then Joyce met her first husband, Eddie, so I was on my own.

I will have been married to Susan for 46 years in March. The secret of a successful marriage is memories. You must have memories together. That’s why my dad insisted that we went everywhere together, so we could talk about things. I’m so lucky to have a wife who is a nest builder. Her nest is the most important thing in the world to her.

When my first son was born I was driving home and I suddenly said to Susan, “We’ve got another life in our family,” and it was just wonderful. My children are 43, 40 and 30 and the youngest is still at home. We’ve got three grandchildren too and it’s heaven. I love them to distraction.

My children didn’t like seeing me on the telly. When they first started going to school – a state school – having a famous father was not the best thing in the world. They were teased because I was a dancer and my persona didn’t help. Then we sent them to Italia Conti [Academy of Theatre Arts], which was a different sort of thing altogether and there were kids there who were almost jealous because they had a famous father. We’ve got a very, very normal family, and for me everything comes back to family. If they’re sad, I’m sad. I want them to be happy all the time.

• Lionel Blair performs a one-man show at London’s Hippodrome Casino on 23 March, hippodromecasino.com. Box office: 020-7769 8866

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

The times obituary in 2021.

After a long day’s filming Lionel Blair was enjoying a drink in the bar on Blackpool pier when word came that a desperate man was threatening to commit suicide by jumping into the sea. It sounded like a stunt for The End Of The Pier Show, which Blair had just finished filming with the comedian Alan Carr. Yet the incident was all too real and by the time the celebrities arrived at the scene, the poor chap was hanging by his fingertips and seconds away from plunging to his death. We got his hand and said, ‘Come on, you don’t want to die. You can’t do that. Listen to us’,” Blair recalled. “He said, ‘No I want to go’. So I grabbed one arm and Alan got the other and we hauled him up.

Blair was approaching 80 at the time but it was a rare heart-in-mouth moment of danger in a showbiz career that was noted for its middle-of-the-road safeness rather than its challenging edginess.

With his big, bouffant hair, gleaming teeth and perma-tan, Blair was as cheesy as they came but his relentless energy sustained him over seven decades, beginning with his first youthful performances singing and dancing to keep up the spirits of those taking shelter from German bombs during the Blitz

An old-school family entertainer, Blair sang a bit, danced a lot and acted on stage and screen. He hosted TV game shows and talent contests and appeared in countless pantos. Eventually he became famous simply for being Lionel Blair, making it difficult to recall for what it was exactly that we were meant to remember him. His name even managed to enter the language as cockney rhyming slang for flares.

He began in the age of variety but slotted seamlessly into the 21st-century world of reality TV, known to younger generations for wearing a PVC suit and being handcuffed to the Made In Chelsea star Ollie Locke as a Celebrity Big Brother contestant in 2014.

Blair was 85 at the time and Locke was six decades his junior but he matched the younger man for x-rated language, revealing a rather different side to his character when he went off-script. “Everyone was so shocked, but it was brilliant. I’m sick of being that nice Lionel Blair,” he said.

An ability not to take himself too seriously was one of his endearing traits. Seven years earlier he had appeared in Extras, a TV sitcom written by Ricky Gervais, playing himself as a has-been entertainer struggling to save his career by appearing on Celebrity Big Brother.

His theatrical campness and general flamboyance led many to surmise incorrectly that he was gay. He once appeared on The Kenny Everett Television Show chained up half-naked in a dungeon, being whipped by the show’s host and apparently enjoying every second of it.

It led to him becoming the subject of a running gag on the BBC radio spoof panel game I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue in which the show’s chairman Humphrey Lyttelton delivered outrageously smutty double entendres about Blair’s alleged gayness. At first he took it in good humour but he eventually snapped.

“If it was just me that had to deal with it I wouldn’t care. But it’s my family it upsets,” he complained. “You should always speak good of the dead. He’s dead. Good,” he remarked after Lyttelton died. To what extent he was joking was unclear but the comment only encouraged Lyttelton’s successor, Jack Dee, to continue the relentless ribbing. That the gay jibes had got to him was evident during a charity cricket match organised by Michael Parkinson when he punched a spectator who called him a “fairy”. He laid claim in his younger years to what he called “an active bachelor life”, squiring numerous models and actresses, including Joan Collins. He even said that he had caught the eye of Errol Flynn’s wife while at a party at Ernest Hemingway’s house in Spain. A hard act to follow, presumably. A fling with a dancer, meanwhile, resulted in a son being born in 1957, after the relationship had ended. He declined to see either. “I behaved like an absolute bastard,” he recalled. “I was too busy, too cruel.

He was in his 40th year when he eventually married Susan, a model who was dating his best friend and whom he met at a dinner party. They married six weeks later and their union endured for more than half a century, despite a tabloid exposé in which he admitted a series of one-night stands. “I’m not a flirt, but I’m always friendly. It’s very lonely on tour,” he explained. A lachrymose man, mention of his wife and family often brought tears to his eyes.

He is survived by their three children, Daniel, Lucy and Matt. Family holidays were taken in Marbella, where he bought a second home, but the sniggering rumours about their father led to the children being bullied at school. He then enrolled them at the Italia Conti stage school and all three went on to become actors.

He was born Henry Lionel Ogus in Montreal, Canada, to Russian immigrants in 1928, although for most of his career he claimed to have been born in 1931. His father, Myer Ogus, was a barber and his mother, Della (née Greenbaum), a housewife. When he was two the family moved to London, where his younger sister, the actress Joyce Blair, was born. The antisemitism of the time generated by Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts led his father to change the family name.

Growing up in Stamford Hill, he was taught to observe the Sabbath without following the full orthodoxy: bacon sandwiches were a childhood favourite.

When war broke out, he was evacuated to Oxford with his mother and sister but when they watched a German plane crash from the garden of their new home, his father concluded that they might as well return to London. His biggest treats as a child were visits to the art deco Regent cinema in Stamford Hill, where he and his sister watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films. “We used to go home and try to copy them. That’s how we learnt to tap dance,” he recalled. During air raids they took shelter in Manor House Tube station, where Lionel and Joyce sang and danced for those camped out on the platforms until the all-clear was sounded.

When he was 13, his father died during what should have been a routine operation for an ulcer. Forced to become the family breadwinner, he left school and took to the boards. As his voice had not broken, he began with girlish parts.

Later he toured with the Savoy Players, did summer seasons as a double act with Joyce and danced in West End musicals.

Forming his own dance troupe, he became a regular on 1950s television variety shows, just as the medium was establishing itself as a fixture in British homes. What he regarded as the defining moment of his career came when he appeared as a double act with Sammy Davis Jr at the 1961 Royal Variety Performance. Their turn started with a sketch in which a snooty Savile Row shop assistant (Blair) offered a brash American customer (Davis) instruction in how to carry himself like a English gentleman. By the end it had become an exhilaratingly thrilling tap-dance routine with Blair matching the lightning-footed Davis step for wonderful step.

They became firm friends and Davis gave him a silver dollar inscribed: “To Lionel Blair. Because I dig you.” He carried it in his wallet for the rest of his life. Decades later Blair was still using the black and white archive footage of their performance to introduce his one-man show.

Davis was also called in to service as a family counsellor. After an acrimonious argument with her brother, Joyce had emigrated to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, claiming that she wanted to “escape being Lionel Blair’s sister”. They had not spoken for a dozen years but when both visited Davis, who was dying of cancer, he persuaded them to be reconciled.

Film work included an appearance in the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, during which he had a memorable night out in a casino with Brian Epstein, who won £89,000. Blair enjoyed a gamble but was not in Epstein’s league as a high-roller. When he lost £300 at the tables one night he decided it was a mug’s game and gave it up for good.

Always careful with his money, he had instant recall of how much he had been paid for every show he did. The 1980s, when he was appearing frequently on the TV game shows Give Us a Clue and Name That Tune, was a particularly bounteous time. “I was recording four shows a day and getting four salaries, which worked out very nicely,” he noted. Surprisingly, he found pantomime was almost as lucrative. The popular view may be that panto is for B-list celebrities, but Blair reported that he could earn £100,000 for a six-week run. “Why do you think the stars do pantomime?” he said. “Buttons, Dick Whittington, Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk. Aladdin . . . I did them all.”

It was the proceeds of a panto season that persuaded him to buy a Rolls- Royce, although characteristically it was a secondhand model for which he paid £12,000, and he soon sold it when he discovered that “one little thing goes wrong and it costs you a fortune.

He was also paid handsomely for a series of lager adverts in which he delivered the less than immortal line, “A pint of Harp,please chief”, although he claimed he had never been drunk in his life. “The drug thing I stayed well away from too and that saved me a lot of money,” he said. Despite prostate cancer he was still working when he turned 90. Looking back he admitted that there were times when he wished the world had taken him more seriously. After all, he pointed out, he had performed in Shakespeare, Stoppard and Ayckbourn. Yet ultimately he was content to have been an old-fashioned song-and-dance man. “Everybody said: ‘Give us a twirl, Lionel’,” he recalled. “That’s what they wanted, so that’s what they got.”

Lionel Blair, actor, dancer, choreographer and television presenter, was born on December 12, 1928. He died on November 4, 2021, aged 92.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Muriel Angelus

Guardian obituary 2004

Muriel Angelus

Katie Boyle

Ian McNeice

Moira Redmond

Gary Waldhorn

Hugh Williams

Filmography

Hy Hazell

Hilary Tindall

Lionel Blair

The times obituary in 2021.

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