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1-7 of 7
- Director
- Writer
- Actor
British writer/director Donald Cammell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1934, came from a wealthy shipbuilding family. He began his career as a painter, and by the mid-1960s was celebrated among the "Swinging London" crowd. He made his foray into the film industry when he wrote the script for The Touchables (1968), a painfully pretentious--and, seen today, very dated--tale of a rock singer kidnapped by four beautiful female fans. He followed that up with Duffy (1968), about an aging hippie who helps two brothers rob their rich father. His directorial debut came with Performance (1970), about a London gangster who hides out in the house of a strange rock star. The now cult-classic film starred Mick Jagger in one of his earliest dramatic performances. Cammell's Demon Seed (1977) was intended to be a comedy, but the studio for some reason decided to turn it into a bizarre sci-fi thriller, which didn't really satisfy anyone, Cammell least of all.
He didn't make a film for ten years after "Demon Seed", when he directed the atmospheric White of the Eye (1987), about a serial killer. His final film as director, Wild Side (1995), was a thriller that was extensively re-edited by the producers. Cammell was so incensed with the result that he had his name taken off the credits, and it was credited to the non-existent "Frank Brauner".
In April 1996 a despondent Cammell committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.- In the heyday of plays on the wireless, Preston Lockwood's tones were inimitable. Today they would be labelled fruity, but to the playgoer brought up in the dark days of the Second World War by the BBC Repertory Company, Lockwood's voice was a comforting presence. At once confiding and authoritative, warm and reverberative, it took the listener, so to speak, by the lapel and led him wherever the dramatist's imagination chanced to rove. Friendly or menacing, thoughtful or whimsical, it was above all what we used to call "received" English. That is to say, we listeners took it for granted.
It was how all Lockwood's generation of actors, famous or obscure, Cockney-born or Lancashire-bred, spoke. They all (or nearly all) aspired to sound - well, like Preston Lockwood. But in films, television or the theatre? They were another world; and the only one of them to win Lockwood's constant respect was the repertory theatre.
The son of a London Transport driving instructor, Preston Lockwood grew up between the wars when every town or city suburb had two or three theatres - one to receive tours of shows on their way to or from London, one a weekly rep and the third, a variety hall. So there was plenty of work for an aspiring performer. In those days weekly rep was a better training ground than anything available now, and Lockwood treasured it, learning one play in the morning, rehearsing another in the afternoon and performing a third at night.
Were productions a trifle "rough"? They made an actor ready, at any rate. They were exciting days. So was acting for the wireless then.
Before everything was pre-recorded, plays went out "live". Just as actors today will reminisce about the tension of playing in television in the post-war era when every mistake was obvious because there was no recording, Lockwood used to look back with affection to his years with the BBC Repertory Company when everything had to be right first time or somehow covered up.
He would vividly recall the days of Saturday Night Theatre when the cast fled to the basement of Broadcasting House during a Nazi air-raid on London and had to gather round a microphone to continue their performance. Where today's technician governs what is now known as the "input" of the various voices in a broadcast drama, the players then had to judge for themselves as a team.
It was the teamwork of such broadcasts and of weekly rep which Lockwood loved and missed in later years when everything seemed to him to be taken so much more seriously than in his youth. Yet he never gave up. In his late sixties he would still act in those remaining out-of-London reps at, say, Amersham or Maidenhead or Henley. And the plays? Well, East Lynne was among the melodramas.
Like the rest of his breed, Lockwood was ready to tour; and had a minor success for example as the elderly Geoffrey in a national tour of Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, the play about the last days of an old touring Shakespearean.
Lockwood's only recorded Shakespearean performance happened to be his first appearance (as Reginald Lockwood) on the West End stage. He played Margarelon in Michael MacOwan's modern- dress revival of Troilus and Cressida (Westminster Theatre) in 1938.
He had three lines. Encountering the curious and forthright Thersites (Stephen Murray) on the battlefield, Margarelon yells, "Turn, slave, and fight." Thersites: "What art thou?" He answers: "A bastard son of Priam's." When Thersites argues that one bastard should not fight with another, and promptly disappears, Margarelon mutters: "The devil take thee, coward!"
Whether Lockwood spoke his three lines well or ill goes unrecorded but he was soon drawn to the wireless, ever his favourite medium after the repertory theatres.
Apart from his years in broadcast drama, his performance as Dennis the Dachshund in Toytown made him particular popular with young listeners to Children's Hour in the 1950s; and he would pop up now and then on television as, say, a doctor in the Tenko series, the Lord Chancellor in Rumpole, the vicar before Dawn French appeared in The Vicar of Dibley (1994), a butler in a chocolate advertisement or a ghost clutching his severed head in order to "puff" cheap cigars. In his eighties another kind of fame came Lockwood's way, in a Cutting Edge programme as an old golfer at Northwood, Middlesex, describing his attitude to the game, his club and the rights of women players.
He was also seen by the sharp-eyed viewer in Miss Marple, The Power Game, Doctor Who, Keeping Up Appearances (1990) and Inspector Morse. Among his film credits were Julius Caesar, Time Bandits, Great Expectations, The Pirates of Penzance, Dangerous Love, and Lady Caroline Lamb, in which he played a publisher.
Is it perhaps a fact that actors who spend most of their early years before a microphone look a bit resourceless on the stage, because they are not used to acting, so to speak, full-length? Or was the tall, handsome and physically impressive Lockwood simply one of those solid workaday players who loved the work wherever it led him? At all events, he was seldom out of it. - Famed nightclub owner Herman Hover dropped out of Columbia Law School in the 1930s to manage a speakeasy. He then got into "show business" as a publicity agent for Broadway producer Earl Carroll (he took credit for coming up with the motto for Carroll's Broadway and Hollywood theaters, "Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world").
In 1942 he bought Ciro's, a nightclub on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip that was on its last legs. He turned it into a success by shrewdly hiring the top stars in Hollywood--and paying top dollar for them--to perform at his club, such as Frank Sinatra, Nat 'King' Cole and Édith Piaf, among many others (he once hired famous stripper Lili St. Cyr, whose show was so "hot" it was shut down by the authorities for "lewdness").
By the mid-'50s, however, with competition from Las Vegas, Ciro's fell on hard times (a slew of lawsuits and tax problems didn't help matters, either) and resulted in Hover closing the club and declaring bankruptcy in 1959. In 1976 the building was bought and turned into The Comedy Store, which itself has passed into Hollywood lore. - Director
- Actor
- Writer
Palmer Rockey was born on 17 November 1921 in Seattle, Washington, USA. He was a director and actor, known for It Happened One Weekend (1974). He was married to Mary Ann Carson. He died on 24 April 1996 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.- Torquato Secci was born on 26 July 1917 in Terni, Umbria, Italy. He died on 24 April 1996 in Terni, Umbria, Italy.
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Writer
- Director
Solveig Ersgaard was born on 29 November 1915. She was an assistant director and writer, known for Reptilicus (1961), Enlige mødre (1954) and Pigen og pressefotografen (1963). She died on 24 April 1996.- Frank Riley was born on 8 June 1915 in Hibbing, Minnesota, USA. Frank was a writer, known for This Is the Life (1952), A Letter to Nancy (1965) and Mr. Winkle Returns (1954). Frank was married to Elfriede Stobbe. Frank died on 24 April 1996 in Manhattan Beach, California, USA.