SIR MICHAEL REDGRAVE and the REDGRAVE FAMILY: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (5)

 

[This is the fifth in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

It may be true that Sir Michael Redgrave never quite scaled the acting heights of the three great 20^th century theatrical knights – Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson – but there is no doubt Redgrave was an actor in the very front rank, handsome and authoritative on stage and the paterfamilias of a richly talented dynasty comprising Vanessa, Corin and Lynn with Vanessa’s Natasha and Joely ushering in the next generation.

Michael Redgrave, Matinee Idol

Michael Redgrave (1908-1985) was born in Bristol of a theatrical family; his father left his mother when Michael was 8, becoming a silent film star in Australia. His mother then married a tea-planter whom Michael intensely disliked. After school at Clifton College he went up to Magdalene, Cambridge, befriending, among others, later Soviet agent Guy Burgess. He became a schoolmaster at Cranleigh, being much involved in school theatricals, and entered the acting profession in 1934.

Tyrone Guthrie offered him a job at The Old Vic and after a busy apprenticeship he had a success as Orlando in 1936 in As You like It playing opposite and falling madly in love with Edith Evans. Yet in 1935 he had already married another talented actress Rachel Kempson – they stayed married until his death 50 years later. She had to be particularly tolerant as Michael was bi-sexual, like many of his circle, although he hid his homosexual side from his family until the 1970s, despite having an affair with Noel Coward in the 1930s and many such liaisons thereafter.

He made his film debut as an artist in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes in 1939 and The Stars Look Down, A. J. Cronin’s tale of injustice in a mining community. After 2 years in the Navy he was invalided out and returned to a variety of West End and Old Vic roles. He was often to repeat his acclaimed part as Ratikin in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.

It was in the 1940s and 1950s that he built his movie career. A ventriloquist with a sinister dummy in Dead of Night (1945) was followed by Fame is the Spur Howard Spring’s 1947 drama about a politician betraying his socialist principles. Redgrave triumphed as the schoolmaster Crocker-Harris in the 1951 film of The Browning Version from Terence Rattigan’s play and he shone too in Anthony Asquith’s The Importance of being Earnest (1952) as Jack Worthing. 

Dead of Night

As Barnes Wallis in The Dam Busters

 

He brought distinction to the role of boffin Barnes Wallis in The Dam Busters (1954) opposite Richard Todd as Guy Gibson VC and he was often in uniform – a spooked air-commodore in The Night my Number came up (1955) and a ditched airman with fellow-gay Dirk Bogarde in The Sea shall not have Them, prompting Noel Coward waspishly to quip “Oh, I don’t see why not, everyone else has!”

Michael’s defining stage role was as the eponymous Uncle Vanya in the 1962 Chichester and West End production of Chekhov’s classic directed by Laurence Olivier. Redgrave conveyed self-doubt and wistfulness to perfection. Olivier’s professional jealousy prevented their partnership being repeated.

Redgrave experienced the onset of Parkinson’s in 1971, forgetting his lines on a first night, and his last work was a narration of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner in 1975. Unable to work, he was looked after by wife and children and dictated his memoirs. Knighted in 1959, he died in 1985, much respected as the fine actor he most assuredly was.

Redgrave as Uncle Vanya

The Redgrave Family was certainly highly talented if not always well-balanced. The senior member now is Vanessa Redgrave (born 1937) who has had a most distinguished acting and movie career, progressing from a 1960s icon in Blow-up to the fey title role in Isadora, a splendid Mary Queen of Scots - she has won many honours and glowing critical eulogies for stage and film roles. 

Vanessa in Blow-up

Vanessa, CND Marcher

 

A strikingly beautiful young woman, all 5ft 11in of her, she had a turbulent marriage in the 1960s to admired director Tony Richardson, who later died of AIDS. Although father Michael was a man of the far Left, he did not parade his views. Vanessa is quite different. Espousing CND and decrying the US over historic anti-communist witch-hunts and her later policies in Vietnam, Vanessa became a shrill militant. With her brother Corin, she founded and financed the Trotskyite Workers Revolutionary Party, veterans of many a noisy demo: their party fractured into The Marxist Party and has now morphed into the wholly insignificant Peace and Progress Party. It has characteristically championed the supposed rights of Palestinians, Chechen insurgents and detainees at Guantanamo.

For me, her extreme political views are a huge turn-off and I would not wish to see her perform, however inspiring her genius.

I regret that the same would have been true of Corin Redgrave (1939-2010). He was an excellent Shakespearean actor (I recall his icy Octavian in Antony and Cleopatra) and also in the West End. But his political fanaticism clouded his reputation; after writing a candid biography of his father Michael, he died of heart problems in 2010, aged 70.

Vanessa and Corin’s sister, Lynn Redgrave (1943-2010) was more conventional. After an apprenticeship in rep, she performed both at the Old Vic and the West End. She appeared in the hit movie Tom Jones (1963) before taking the leading role in the stunningly successful Georgy Girl. A busy career in stage, screen and TV followed in Britain and the US. I remember seeing her on Broadway in 1985 in a lively Aren’t we All? With Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert – she became a US citizen. Sadly her life was cut short by breast cancer and she died in 2010.

Corin Redgrave, actor and fanatic

Lynn Redgrave as Georgy Girl

Vanessa had two daughters Natasha and Joely. Natasha Richardson (1963-2009) was pretty and intelligent, who carved out a remarkable career on the stage and on screen. She made her film debut as Patti Hearst in 1988 but her Broadway debut, which earned her critical awards, was in the revival of O’Neill’s drama Anna Christie in 1994. She also scintillated as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Marrying star Liam Neeson as her second husband in 1995, Natasha seemed destined for a career in the first rank and was seen in the popular movies The Parent Trap (1998) and Maid in Manhattan (2002). Natasha died in 2009 after a freak accident during a skiing lesson sustaining a traumatic brain injury. 

Finally Joely Richardson, born 1965, has carved out for herself a notable career particularly in film and TV drama. She has played Wallis Simpson in a saga Wallis and Edward, Queen Catherine Parr in an American series on The Tudors, and is a star in the US drama (100 episodes) Nip/Tuck about two Florida plastic surgeons. Clearly the inspired Redgrave acting gene swims powerfully in her bloodstream.

Natasha Richardson

Joely Richardson

  

SMD

28.02.14

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014

SIR JOHN GIELGUD: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (4)

[This is the fourth in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

If one had to choose who was the greatest British actor of the 20^th century, one would probably nominate Sir Laurence Olivier; but if the choice was the greatest British Shakespearean actor the palm would go to Sir John Gielgud whose lovely voice, clear diction and consummate acting technique, flowering particularly from the mid-1930s to the 1940s, astonished and delighted the fortunate critics and audiences of that time in an 75-year career.

A Young Gielgud as Hamlet

John Gielgud (1904 – 2000) was born into the theatrical Terry family dynasty on his mother’s side. Dame Ellen Terry, a hugely successful actress of Victorian and Edwardian England, was a great-aunt and his mother Kate had also been an actress before marrying City stockbroker Frank Gielgud, who in turn was descended from a distinguished Polish-Lithuanian family, a grandmother being a famous actress there.

After school at Westminster, Gielgud asked to be allowed to try the stage and was given a time limit of age 25 to succeed or else he would have to go to university. His early efforts were not glorious. Shy and spindle-shanked his drama teacher, Lady Benson, told him “You walk like a cat with rickets”. He stumbled through as an extra at the Old Vic and minor roles at the Oxford Playhouse. He spent a valuable year at RADA and in due course played Romeo, a flop. However he first found his feet as Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, thought avant garde at the time receiving warm praise from the influential critic James Agate. He understudied and in time succeeded Noel Coward in his sensational play The Vortex in 1928 and then had a long run in The Constant Nymph. He had arrived.

From then onwards, Gielgud, both as an actor and director, alternated busily between the “serious” and the “commercial” theatre. A catalogue of his many appearances would be wearisome and I will only mention highlights. He had a 311-night run in J B Priestley’s The Good Companions but at the Old Vic he made the role of Hamlet uniquely his own – he was recognised as the finest Hamlet of his generation. He also shone as John Worthing in Wilde’s great comedy The Importance of being Earnest. He played classic seasons with his rival Olivier and more with his friend Ralph Richardson at the Queen’s Theatre, demonstrating his astonishing range.

Unlike his colleagues, he was not much interested in the world of film. While they rushed off to sign remunerative Korda contracts, the stage was his main love and he did not become a film regular until the 1960s, when he had relaxed his acting style. Gielgud with his prominent beak of a nose, his sonorous voice and high forehead was an unmistakably patrician figure.

Gielgud as John Worthing

For one so word-perfect on stage, Gielgud had a peculiar talent for saying the wrong thing entirely in company – “Gielgoofs”, he called them and they much amused his profession. To give a taste of his many faux pas; 

-          Did you see that man just coming in?" he asked his companion. "He’s the biggest bore in London, second only to Edward Knoblock." At that moment he remembered that Edward Knoblock was in fact the man sitting across from him. "Not you, of course," Gielgud quickly added. "I mean the other Edward Knoblock.".

-          To Maggie Smith whom he was directing in Private Lives; "For heaven’s sake, Maggie darling, don't screw up your face like that. You look like that ghastly woman in that film. What was it . . . Travels with My Aunt?"

-          On thanking the company at the end of a run: “and may I just mention the two leading actresses (Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft) I hope I will never have the pleasure of acting with them again!”

His conversation was a rich compound of theatrical anecdote and bawdy; while performing (surely to his  shame) in the Penthouse soft porn flick Caligula (1979) he commented comically on the sight of Helen Mirren’s orifices, during one of several orgy scenes!

Gielgud was far from saintly. He was by nature entirely homosexual at a time when male homosexuality was illegal. After various liaisons (including with James Lees-Milne at Oxford), he took as his partner in 1928 John Perry, a struggling Irish writer, and they lived together until 1938 when Perry transferred his affections to the powerful head of theatrical managers H M Tennent Limited,  “Binkie” Beaumont. All three remained staunch friends. Gielgud lived with interior designer Paul Anstee for much of the 1950s and his final live-in lover was Martin Hensler, a designer of Hungarian origin, who shared his life from 1962 until Hensler’s death in 1999. Gielgud was most devoted to the theatre and he liked a quiet life without many emotional traumas.

Gielgud poses in character

Gielgud’s gay proclivities were almost his undoing. He was knighted in the Coronation Honours of 1953, but a few months later he was arrested in a police trap in a West End public lavatory for “persistently importuning for immoral purposes”. This was all part of an ugly drive by homophobic Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe and was happily the last such convulsion in England. Gielgud was convicted and fined £10 and he feared ruin; his audience was luckily more tolerant and when he first reappeared on stage he was given a standing ovation. It had been a humiliating shock and he was even more discreet thereafter, avoiding all discussion of personal matters. He finally “came out” in the twilight of his career in 1995.

In the 1940s Gielgud continued his busy round, playing Shakespeare, inevitably Hamlet (he performed this demanding role over 500 times in his career) and as Raskolnikov in a 1946 Crime and Punishment – “one of Gielgud’s finest performances” thought Agate. He had much success with Fry’s verse play The Lady’s not for Burning. The 1950s were more difficult for him as his kind of polite play was disappearing from the commercial theatre while “kitchen-sink” drama took front place. Gielgud found a vehicle for his strengths in the Shakespearean The Ages of Man which he toured round Britain and America. He had a rare foray into Hollywood in 1953 as a fine Cassius in Julius Caesar, his effortless skill demoralising his co-stars Marlon Brando and James Mason.

Gielgud found a second wind in London as the headmaster in Alan Bennett’s allegory Forty Years On (1968) or as a Hollywood character actor or in many cameo roles like the King of France in Becket (1964) but his big movie success was as the foul-mouthed butler Benson ministering to Dudley Moore’s Arthur (1970). On stage he teamed up with Ralph Richardson in David Storey’s Home, featuring two old men conversing in the garden of a mental home. A great success in London it transferred to New York prompting Clive Barnes to proclaim "The two men, bleakly examining the little nothingness of their lives, are John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson giving two of the greatest performances of two careers that have been among the glories of the English-speaking theatre.” They appeared together again in Pinter’s No Man’s Land (1975) and Gielgud was inevitably a moving Prospero. He finally retired from the stage in 1988.

Gielgud, Grand Old Man of the Theatre

Working up to his last days, Gielgud died in 2000, a venerable 96, at his beloved house South Pavilion at Wotton Underwood, which he had shared with Martin Hensler for 37 years. The house was later bought by Tony Blair. The plaudits and the honours had deservedly piled up. He was sincerely loved within his profession, a cherished personality and inspiration: he had brought incomparable distinction to the acting world.

SMD

25.02.2014

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014

ALASTAIR SIM and MAX WALL: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (3)

[This is the third in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

The two artistes I here describe have little in common professionally, but they were both highly eccentric in manner and appearance. Once seen, they were never forgotten.

Alastair Sim

Alastair Sim (1900-76) was born in Edinburgh, the fourth son of a prosperous tailor, who designed and sponsored the Earl Haig Gardens in the city and later refused a knighthood. His fellow-native of Edinburgh, Ronnie Corbett, once memorably described Sim as "a sad-faced actor, with the voice of a fastidious ghoul". Sim was educated at the prestigious Heriot’s School and studied at Edinburgh University, becoming from 1925-30 a Fulton lecturer in elocution and drama at the university. 

His own acting career started in 1930 and he made his film debut in 1935. He played a succession of bit-parts and so developed his distinctive manner that he was a regular “scene-stealer”.  His acting manner involved a mixture of eye-rollings, mutterings, giggles, deep rumblings and sudden gestures, hard to describe and much perfected to look spontaneous. He had a season at the Old Vic and began to win leading roles, including Captain Hook in several stage versions of Peter Pan.  

Odd on the stage, for sure his personal life was odder still. When he was 26 he met a 12-year old girl Naomi Plaskitt; he wooed her, apparently innocently, and when she was 18 in 1932 they married. They stayed married, producing one daughter, until he died in 1976 and lived happily together, even if for some time in a cottage outside Edinburgh with no running water. Later on this couple brought to live in their house a succession of talented young men and girls needing acting help, among them the young cockney George Cole aged 15, now a renowned actor, who stayed with them on and off for 14 years from 1940. Cole and others always spoke well of Sim’s generous kindness – but it was not surprising that his close involvement with those much younger than himself raised an eyebrow or two in middle-class 1930s and 1940s Edinburgh.

Sim’s reputation grew and his film breakthrough came in 1950 when he played a headmaster whose school was mistakenly billeted during the war on a girls’ school, headed by splendid Margaret Rutherford, in The Happiest Days of your Lives. This was soon followed by Scrooge, a version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has become a much-loved classic, Sim injecting the character with a rich compound of humour, pathos and terror leading to the miser’s heart-warming redemption. Sim’s interpretation of Scrooge has never been surpassed; he was voted Britain’s favourite film actor in 1950.

Sim as Scrooge

 

Sim as Scrooge after the original print was coloured

          

 Sim went on to take the lead in An Inspector Calls (1954) as the mysterious policeman questioning a dinner party about a young woman’s death from J B Priestley’s drama. But it was in comedy where Sim most shone as a reluctant legatee in Laughter in Paradise (1951), as the bungling assassin in The Green Man (1956) but his most popular role was as Miss Millicent Fritton in The Belles of St Trinians (1954). 

Sim, Headmistress of St Trinians

Sim played the genteel but hard-up Miss Fritton and also her gambling brother Clarence, with Joyce Grenfell an infiltrating police sergeant, George Cole the spiv Flash Harry, Irene Handl, Beryl Reid and Joan Sims add to the fun in the common-room, but most of all Miss Fritton presides over a monstrous regiment of felonious, lacrosse and hockey stick-wielding schoolgirls terrorising the populace to the despair of the ministry of education official (Richard Wattis in fine form), as first memorably illustrated by the cartoonist Ronald Searle. A good time was had by all.

Sim gradually faded from the film world – his style became unfashionable and, seldom giving interviews and never signing autographs, he only asked to be judged on his performances. He was personally rather distant, loving the theatre (he had corresponded with his friend James Bridie, the Scottish dramatist) and was not one of the “luvvie” acting crowd. He had a late triumph in 1969 in Chichester and the West End as Mr Posket in the brilliant farce, The Magistrate by Arthur Wing Pinero.

Sim emulated his father in refusing an offered knighthood dying in London in 1976 and his wife Naomi died in 1999. For all his oddity, all the evidence is that Sim was a decent and kind man. He was certainly a consummate actor and he gave great pleasure to many.

                                                ----------------------------------------------

Max Wall (1908 – 1990) was a decidedly acquired taste. He was a throwback to the halcyon days of the Music Hall and he was perhaps one of the last of the old troupers.

Max Wall contemplates

Max Wall grimaces

           

Both his mother and father played the halls round London and in the South of England. Max had his showbiz education watching from the wings. His father was, surprisingly, a Scots comedian from Forfar called “Jock” Lorimer and his mother was a singer. His mother ran off with an artiste called Wallace in 1916 whom she married when Jock died in 1920. The family moved to live in a pub in Essex. Max (born Maxwell Lorimer) abbreviated his given name and borrowed from his stepfather to become Max Wall.

He appeared in many shows and musicals in London and around during the inter-war years but his career was going nowhere. He re-emerged in 1946 and became well-known as “Professor Wallofski”, a bizarre creation famous for his funny walks with Max in a lank wig, black tights and ungainly boots. John Cleese acknowledged his debt to Max for his “funny walks”. He would also sing, tap-dance and play the piano in his multi-talented way. He was becoming well-regarded.

In Christmas 1960 Max was booked for 3 weeks as the lead comedian and Baron Hard-up in the panto Cinderella at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, then in our family’s ownership. My father, Herbert, and his 2 brothers ran the business but the eldest brother, James, who normally ran the theatre with his son Jimmy, was down with appendicitis, so father, who normally ran the main cinemas, was the senior director in charge.

Max was not well received on the first night. The audience of Aberdeen burghers and farming folk from the North East were mystified by him; they did not understand his cockney accent and the bairns were frightened by his sinister face-pulling. Fatally he sharply answered back some catcalls. When he embarked upon a comic monologue there was a slow-handclap. When Max smiled, he tended rather to leer and the indignant audience reckoned they were being laughed at by a Dirty Old Man from England. Max’s final curtain-call was equally fraught – he was greeted by a wall of noisy booing. In short he was given the bird, common enough at that famous graveyard of comedians, the Glasgow Empire, but unheard of at His Majesty’s, Aberdeen.

My father was much agitated, as a successful panto saw the business through the thin winter months. With his nephew Jimmy’s staunch support, they both saw Max at once and told him he would not do and paid him off handsomely. A “resting” Scots comic called Ally Wilson was signed up as a substitute at short notice; he performed well and the panto season was saved, to great family relief.

Max did the rounds of the radio and TV chat-shows but he was philosophic as he received their condolences. Yet the Aberdeen Disaster must have hurt his pride: he had to resort for a few years to tours of the raucous Northern working-men’s clubs as some theatrical managements no doubt looked upon him as box-office poison.

Max worked his way back, as he had real talent. He was to be seen in the serious theatre in Osborne’s The Entertainer and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and other avant-garde roles. He also appeared in cameo roles in TV shows. Latterly he gave much pleasure with his one-man show Aspects of Max Wall, a nostalgic reprise of the Music Hall world.

In 1990 he fell and hit his head dining at London’s Simpsons in the Strand. He never recovered; he was 82. He had outlived his time.

Max pondering

SMD

19.02.14

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014