Hattie Jacques
Hattie Jacques was an English comedy actress of stage and screen. She is best known as a regular of the Carry On films, where she played strict, no-nonsense characters, but was a prolific television and radio performer. Jacques started her career in 1944 with an appearance at the Players' Theatre in London, but came to national prominence through her appearances on three popular radio series on the BBC: with Tommy Handley on It's That Man Again. After the Second World War Jacques made her cinematic debut in Green for Danger, in which she had a brief, uncredited role. From 1958 to 1974 she appeared in 14 Carry On films, playing various roles including the formidable hospital matron. On television she had a long professional partnership with Eric Sykes, with whom she co-starred in his long-running series Sykes and Sykes and a.... The role endeared her to the public and the two became staples of British television. In private, Jacques led a turbulent life, she was married to the actor John Le Mesurier from 1949 until their divorce in 1965, a separation caused by her five-year affair with another man.
Jacques, overweight since her teenage years, suffered ill-health soon after the separation from Le Mesurier and her weight rose to nearly 20 stone. She died of a heart attack on 6 October 1980, at the age of 58, her biographer, Francis Gray, considers Jacques had a "talent for larger-than-life comedy which never lost its grip on humanity", while she could display "a broader comic mode" as a result of her "extraordinary versatility". Jacques was born Josephine Edwina Jaques on 7 February 1922 at 125 Sandgate High Street, Kent, she was the youngest child of Robin Rochester Jaques, a serviceman in the British Army and the Royal Air Force, Mary Jaques, a nurse who served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment. The Jaques family were predominantly non-theatrical, with the exception of Mary who appeared in the small role of Harry Hathaway in the Christmas pantomime Robinson Crusoe at the Palace Theatre, Cologne, in 1920. Mary enjoyed the theatre, took Jacques to live performances from an early age; the result had a "profound effect" on the young girl a love of dance.
Robin Rochester Jaques, who attained the rank of flight lieutenant with the RAF, was a keen sportsman and became a semi-professional footballer. He signed to Clapton Orient and Fulham F. C. but his career was cut short when he died in a flying accident on 8 August 1923. Upon his death, Mary and her elder brother Robin moved from Newton in Lincolnshire to London, where Jacques was sent to the Lady Margaret primary school in Chelsea. In July 1930 Jacques started her secondary schooling at the Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, attended a local dance school, the Dean Sisters Academy, where she was a principal dancer in the Academy's shows, she left Latymer in the summer of 1939 with unremarkable grades. She continued intermittently with amateur theatricals, in May 1939 appeared with the Curtain Club in Barnes in productions of Fumed Oak and Borgia. At the outbreak of the Second World War Jacques became a nurse in the VAD. After a reorganisation in the VAD, Jacques sought new work and, in the summer of 1943, she became a welder in a factory in north London, a job that lasted until the end of the year.
Around this time she became romantically involved with Major Charles Kearney. Jacques claimed that the pair had been engaged and that Kearney had been killed in action, although her biographer, Andy Merriman, discovered that Kearney had a wife and children in the United States when he had proposed to Jacques, had returned to them after the war. In 1944, after being auditioned by Leonard Sachs, Jacques made her professional theatrical debut as Josephine Jacques—adding a "c" to her birth name as she did so—at the Players' Theatre, London in a revue called Late Joys, she became a regular performer with the company, appearing in music hall revues and playing the Fairy Queen in their Victorian-style pantomimes. Her biographer, Frances Gray, described the Players' as being Jacques's drama school, as she acted, wrote lyrics and "developed the persona she was to use in pantomime for years, the large, but vulnerable fairy queen", it was while appearing in a Late Joys revue in June 1946 that she made her debut on television, when the show was broadcast on the BBC.
While appearing at the Players' in 1946 she acquired the nickname "Hattie" after performing in the minstrel show Coal Black Mammies for Dixie. A member of the backstage staff compared her "blacked up" appearance with the American actress Hattie McDaniel, known for her work in Gone with the Wind, Jacques adopted the name for the rest of her life. Jacques made her big-screen debut and uncredited, in the 1946 film Green for Danger, directed by Sidney Gilliat. In December that year, she joined the Young Vic Theatre Company and played Smeraldina in The King Stag; the play ran at the Lyric Theatre for a month before going on a five-month tour of the UK. It received favourable reviews. In March 1947 Alberto Cavalcanti's film Nicholas Nickleby was released, in which Jacques had her first credited big-screen role as Mrs Kenwick. While engaged at the Players' in June 1947, Jacques was introduced to the actor John Le Mesurier and the two began a relationship. Le Mesurier was married but estranged from his
Lynn Redgrave
Lynn Rachel Redgrave was an English and American actress. A member of the Redgrave family of actors, Lynn trained in London before making her theatrical debut in 1962. By the mid-1960s she had appeared in several films, including Tom Jones and Georgy Girl which won her a New York Film Critics Award and nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, she made her Broadway debut in 1967, performed in several stage productions in New York while making frequent returns to London's West End. She performed with her sister Vanessa in Three Sisters in London, in the title role of Baby Jane Hudson in a television production of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1991. She made a return to films in the late 1990s in films such as Shine and Gods and Monsters for which she received another Academy Award nomination. Lynn Redgrave is the only person to have been nominated for all of the'Big Four' American entertainment awards without winning any of them. Redgrave was born in London, to actors Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson.
Her sister is actress Vanessa Redgrave. She was the aunt of writer/director Carlo Gabriel Nero and of actresses Joely Richardson, Jemma Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, the sister-in-law of director Tony Richardson, actress Kika Markham and Italian actor Franco Nero, her grandfather was silent screen leading man Roy Redgrave. After training at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Redgrave made her professional debut in a 1962 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Royal Court Theatre. Following a tour of Billy Liar and repertory work in Dundee, she made her West End debut at the Haymarket, in N. C. Hunter's The Tulip Tree with John Clements, she was invited to join the National Theatre for its inaugural season at the Old Vic, working with such directors as Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Noël Coward in roles such as Rose in The Recruiting Officer, Barblin in Andorra, Jackie in Hay Fever, Kattrin in Mother Courage, Miss Prue in Love for Love, Margaret in Much Ado About Nothing which kept her busy for the next three years.
During that time she appeared in films such as Tom Jones, Girl with Green Eyes, The Deadly Affair, the title role in Georgy Girl. For the last of these roles, she gained the New York Film Critics Award, the Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination. In 1967, she made her Broadway debut in Black Comedy with Geraldine Page. London appearances included Michael Frayn's The Two of Us with Richard Briers at the Garrick, David Hare's Slag at the Royal Court, Born Yesterday, directed by Tom Stoppard at Greenwich in 1973. Redgrave returned to Broadway in My Fat Friend. There soon followed Knock Knock with Charles Durning, Mrs. Warren's Profession with Ruth Gordon, Saint Joan. In the 1985-86 season she appeared with Rex Harrison, Claudette Colbert, Jeremy Brett in Aren't We All?, with Mary Tyler Moore in A. R. Gurney's Sweet Sue. In 1983, she played Cleopatra in an American television version of Antony and Cleopatra opposite Timothy Dalton, she was in Misalliance in Chicago with Irene Worth, Twelfth Night at the American Shakespeare Festival, California Suite, The King and I, Hellzapoppin', Les Dames du Jeudi, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Cherry Orchard.
In 1988, she narrated a dramatised television documentary, Silent Mouse, which told the story of the creation of the Christmas carol Silent Night. She starred with Stewart Granger and Ricardo Montalban in a Hollywood production of Don Juan in Hell in the early winter of 1991. With her sister Vanessa as Olga, she returned to the London stage playing Masha in Three Sisters in 1991 at the Queen's Theatre and played the title role in a television production of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Again with her sister. Highlights of her early film career include The National Health, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex*, The Happy Hooker and Getting It Right. In the United States she was seen in such television series as Teachers Only, House Calls and Chicken Soup, she starred in BBC productions such as The Faint-Hearted Feminist, A Woman Alone, Death of a Son, Calling the Shots and Fighting Back. She played Broadway again in Moon Over Buffalo with co-star Robert Goulet, starred in the world premier of Tennessee Williams' The Notebook of Trigorin, based on Anton Chekhov's The Seagull.
She won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in Talking Heads. Redgrave became well-known in the United States after appearing in the television series House Calls, for which she received an Emmy nomination, she was sacked from the show after she insisted on bringing her child to rehearsals so as to continue a breastfeeding schedule. A lawsuit was dismissed a few years later. Following that, she appeared in a long-running series of television commercials for H. J. Heinz Company the manufacturer of the weight loss foods for Weight Watchers, a Heinz subsidiary, her signature line for the ads was "This Is Living, Not Dieting!". She wrote a book of her life experiences with the same title, which included a selection of Weight Watchers recipes; the autobiographical section became the basis of her one-woman play Shakespeare for My Father. In 1989, she appeared on Broadway in Love Letters with her husband John Clark, thereafter they performed the play around the country, on one occasion for the jury in the O. J. Simpson case.
In 1993, she appeared on Broad
Theatre Royal Haymarket
The Theatre Royal Haymarket is a West End theatre on Haymarket in the City of Westminster which dates back to 1720, making it the third-oldest London playhouse still in use. Samuel Foote acquired the lease in 1747, in 1766 he gained a royal patent to play legitimate drama in the summer months; the original building was a little further north in the same street. It has been at its current location since 1821, it is a Grade I listed building, with a seating capacity of 888. The freehold of the theatre is owned by the Crown Estate; the Haymarket has been the site of a significant innovation in theatre. In 1873, it was the venue for the first scheduled matinée performance, establishing a custom soon followed in theatres everywhere, its managers have included Benjamin Nottingham Webster, John Baldwin Buckstone, Squire Bancroft, Cyril Maude, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, John Sleeper Clarke, brother-in-law of John Wilkes Booth, who quit America after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Famous actors who débuted at the theatre included John Liston.
The First Haymarket Theatre or Little Theatre was built in 1720 by John Potter, carpenter, on the site of The King's Head Inn in the Haymarket and a shop in Suffolk Street kept by Isaac Bliburgh, a gunsmith, known by the sign of the Cannon and Musket. It was the third public theatre opened in the West End; the theatre cost £1000 to build, with a further £500 expended on decorations and costumes. It opened on 29 December 1720, with a French play La Fille a la Morte, ou le Badeaut de Paris performed by a company known as'The French Comedians of His Grace the Duke of Montague'. Potter's speculation was known as The New French Theatre; the theatre's first major success was a 1729 production of a play by Samuel Johnson of Cheshire, Hurlothrumbo, or The Supernatural, which ran for 30 nights – not as long as John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, but still a long run for the time. In 1730, the theatre was taken over by an English company, its name changed to the'Little Theatre in the Haymarket'. Among the actors who appeared there before 1737 when the theatre was closed under the Licensing Act 1737 were Aaron Hill, Theophilus Cibber, Henry Fielding.
In the eight to ten years before the Act was passed, the Haymarket was an alternative to John Rich's Theatre Royal, Covent Garden and the opera-dominated Drury Lane Theatre. Fielding himself was responsible for the instigation of the Act, having produced a play called The Historical Register that parodied prime minister Robert Walpole, as the caricature, Quidam. In particular, it was an alternative to the pantomime and special-effects dominated stages, it presented opposition satire. Henry Fielding staged his plays at the Haymarket, so did Henry Carey. Hurlothrumbo was just one of his plays in that series of anti-Walpolean satires, followed by Tom Thumb. Another, in 1734, was The Dragon of Wantley, with music by John Frederick Lampe; this work punctured the vacuous operatic conventions and pointed a satirical barb at Walpole and his taxation policies. The piece was a huge success, with a record-setting run of 69 performances in its first season; the work debuted at the Haymarket Theatre, where its coded attack on Walpole would have been clear, but its long run occurred after it moved to Covent Garden, which had a much greater capacity for staging.
The burlesque itself is brief on the page, as it relied extensively on absurd theatrics and other non-textual entertainments. The Musical Entertainer from 1739 contains engravings showing. Carey continued with others. Additionally, refugees from Drury Lane's and Covent Garden's internal struggles would show up at the Haymarket, thus Charlotte Charke would act there in a parody of her father, Colley Cibber, one of the owners and managers of Drury Lane; the Theatrical Licensing Act, put an end to the anti-ministry satires, it all but shut down the theatre. From 1741 to 1747, Charles Macklin, Samuel Foote, others sometimes produced plays there either by use of a temporary licence or by subterfuge; the conjuror's publicity claimed that, while on stage, he would place his body inside an empty wine bottle, in full view of the audience. When the advertised act failed to appear on stage, the audience gutted the theatre. Although the identity of the hoax's perpetrator is unknown, several authors consider John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu, to have been responsible.
In 1754, John Potter, rated for the theatre since its opening, was succeeded by John Whitehead. In 1758 Theophilus Cibber obtained from William Howard the Lord Chamberlain, a general licence under which Foote tried to establish the Haymarket as a regular theatre. With the aid of the Duke of York he procured a royal licence to exhibit plays during four months in each year from May to September during his lifetime, he bought the lease of the theatre from Potter's executors and, having added to the site by purchasing adjoining property, he enlarged and improved the building which he opened on 14 May 1767, as the Theatre Royal, the third patent theatre in London. Several successful seasons followed, with Foote producing numerous plays at the theatre, but Foote got himself into difficulties by his custom
Dudley Moore
Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE was an English actor, comedian and composer. Moore first came to prominence in the UK as one of the four writer-performers in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe from 1960, with one member of that team, Peter Cook, collaborated on the television series Not Only... But Also; the double act worked on other projects until the mid-1970s, by which time Moore had settled in Los Angeles to concentrate on his film acting. His solo career as a comedy film actor was heightened by the success of hit Hollywood films Foul Play, 10 and Arthur. For Arthur, Moore won a Golden Globe Award, he received a second Golden Globe for his performance in Maude. Moore was born at the original Charing Cross Hospital in central London, the son of Ada Francis, a secretary, John Moore, a railway electrician, his father was Scottish, from Glasgow. Moore was brought up in Essex, he was notably short at 5 ft 2 in and was born with club feet that required extensive hospital treatment and, coupled with his diminutive stature, made him the butt of jokes from other children.
His right foot responded well to corrective treatment and had straightened itself by the time he was six, but his left foot became permanently twisted and his left leg below the knee was withered. This was something of which he remained self-conscious throughout his life. Moore became a choirboy at the age of six. At age eleven he earned a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music, where he took up harpsichord, violin, musical theory and composition, he developed into a talented pianist and organist and was playing the pipe organ at local church weddings by the age of 14. He attended Dagenham County High School where he received musical tuition from a dedicated teacher, Peter Cork, who became a friend and confidant to Moore and continued to correspond with him until 1994. Moore's musical talent won him an organ scholarship to Magdalen College, where he was tutored by the composer Bernard Rose. While studying music and composition there, he performed with Alan Bennett in the Oxford Revue. During his university years, Moore had developed a love of jazz music and soon became an accomplished jazz pianist and composer.
He began working with such leading musicians as Cleo Laine. In 1960 he left Dankworth's band to work on Beyond the Fringe. John Bassett, a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford recommended Moore, his jazz bandmate and a rising cabaret talent, to producer Robert Ponsonby, putting together a comedy revue entitled Beyond the Fringe. Bassett chose Jonathan Miller. Moore recommended Alan Bennett, who in turn suggested Peter Cook. Beyond the Fringe was at the forefront of the 1960s UK satire boom, although the show's original runs in Edinburgh and the provinces in 1960 had had a lukewarm response; when the revue transferred to the Fortune Theatre in London, in a revised production by Donald Albery and William Donaldson, it became a sensation, thanks in some part to a favourable review by Kenneth Tynan. There were a number of musical items in the show, using Dudley Moore's music, most famously an arrangement of the Colonel Bogey March which resists Moore's repeated attempts to bring it to an end. In 1962 the show transferred to the John Golden Theatre with its original cast.
President John F. Kennedy attended a performance on 10 February 1963; the show continued in New York until 1964. When Moore returned to the UK he was offered his own series on the BBC, Not Only... But Also, it was commissioned as a vehicle for Moore, but when he invited Peter Cook on as a guest, their comedy partnership was so notable that it became a permanent fixture of the series. Cook and Moore are most remembered for their sketches as two working class men and Dud, in macs and cloth caps, commenting on politics and the arts, but they fashioned a series of one-off characters with Moore in the role of interviewer to one of Cook's upper class eccentrics; the pair developed an unorthodox method for scripting the material, using a tape recorder to tape an ad-libbed routine that they would have transcribed and edited. This would not leave enough time to rehearse the script, so they had a set of cue cards. Moore was famous for'corpsing' — the programmes went on live, Cook would deliberately make him laugh in order to get an bigger reaction from the studio audience.
The BBC wiped much of the series. In 1968 Cook and Moore switched to ATV for four one-hour programmes entitled Goodbye Again. On film and Cook appeared in the 1966 British comedy film The Wrong Box, before co-writing and co-starring in Bedazzled with Eleanor Bron; the film was directed by Stanley Donen. The pair closed the decade with appearances in the ensemble caper film Monte Carlo or Bust and Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, based on the play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. In 1968 and 1969 Moore embarked on two solo comedy ventures, firstly in the film 30 Is a Dangerous Age and secondly, on stage, for an Anglicised adaptation of Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam at the Globe Theatre in London's West End. In the 1970s the relationship between Moore and Cook became strained as the latter's alcoholism began affecting his work. In 1971, however and Moore took sketches from Not Only.... But Also and Goodbye Again, together with new material, to create the stage revue Behind the Fridge.
This show toured Australia in 1972
Gale Pedrick
Frank Gale Pedrick-Harvey, known professionally as Gale Pedrick, was an English author, journalist and broadcaster. Pedrick was born on 15 June 1906, in London and was educated at Sir Roger Manwood's School at Sandwich, he began work as a newspaper journalist, first for the Western Mail in Plymouth, in 1920 for the Daily Dispatch in Manchester, before moving to London to be a theatre critic and feature writer for The Star. He began broadcasting for the BBC in 1926, but during World War II served in the Devonshire Regiment and worked for the British Forces Broadcasting Service, which he was managing by 1944, from a studio in Algiers, he was mentioned in dispatches. Between 1946 and 1949 he was a script editor for the BBC, he created and produced Pick of the Week, a compilation of the week's broadcast highlights, which he selected. His works for the BBC included scripts for television, including the first 35 episodes of the UK version of This Is Your Life, radio, from which there was at least one spin-off book, the crime fiction Meet the Rev.
He wrote the novelisation tie-ins for Steptoe and Son. He co-wrote George in Civvy Street, he appeared as a "castaway" on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs on 15 February 1965. Pedrick collapsed and died at Tottenham Court Road station on 23 February 1970, aged 64. An obituary was published in The Times the next day. ——. Meet the Rev. Sampson Low. ——. Profitable scriptwriting for tv & radio. Pearson. ——. Battledress broadcasters: a history of the British Forces Broadcasting Service. British Forces Broadcasting Service. ——. Steptoe and Son. Hodder & Stoughton. ——. Steptoe and Son at the Palace. Hodder & Stoughton. Gale Pedrick on IMDb Discussion of Meet The Rev
Bob Hope
Leslie Townes Hope, known professionally as Bob Hope, was an American stand-up comedian, actor, dancer and author. With a career that spanned nearly 80 years, Hope appeared in more than 70 short and feature films, with 54 feature films with Hope as star, including a series of seven "Road" musical comedy movies with Bing Crosby as Hope's top-billed partner. In addition to hosting the Academy Awards show 19 times, more than any other host, he appeared in many stage productions and television roles, was the author of 14 books; the song "Thanks for the Memory" was his signature tune. Hope was born in the Eltham district of southeast London, UK, arrived in the United States with his family at the age of four, grew up in the Cleveland, area. After a brief career as a boxer in the late 1910s, he began his career in show business in the early 1920s as a comedian and dancer on the vaudeville circuit, before acting on Broadway. Hope began appearing on radio and in films starting in 1934, he was praised for his comedic timing, specializing in one-liners and rapid-fire delivery of jokes which were self-deprecating.
He helped establish modern American stand-up comedy. Celebrated for his long career performing in United Service Organizations shows to entertain active duty American military personnel, making 57 tours for the USO between 1941 and 1991, Hope was declared an honorary veteran of the U. S. Armed Forces in 1997 by an act of the United States Congress, he appeared in numerous specials for NBC television starting in 1950, was one of the first users of cue cards. Hope participated in the sports of golf and boxing and owned a small stake in his hometown baseball team, the Cleveland Indians. Hope retired in 1997, died at the age of 100 in 2003, at his home in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Hope, the fifth of seven sons, was born in Eltham, County of London, in a terraced house on Craigton Road in Well Hall where there is now a blue plaque in his memory, his English father, William Henry Hope, was a stonemason from Weston-super-Mare and his Welsh mother, was a light opera singer from Barry, Vale of Glamorgan, who worked as a cleaner.
William and Avis married in April 1891 and lived at 12 Greenwood Street in Barry before moving to Whitehall, to St George, Bristol. In 1908, the family emigrated to the United States, they passed through Ellis Island, New York before moving on to Cleveland, Ohio. From age 12, Hope earned pocket money by busking—public performing to solicit contributions, singing and performing comedy, he entered numerous dancing and amateur talent contests as Lester Hope, won a prize in 1915 for his impersonation of Charlie Chaplin. For a time, he attended the Boys' Industrial School in Lancaster, as an adult donated sizable sums of money to the institution. Hope had a brief career as a boxer in 1919, he had three wins and one loss, he participated in a few staged charity bouts in life. Hope worked as a lineman in his teens and early 20s, he had a brief stint at Chandler Motor Car Company. In 1921, while assisting his brother Jim in clearing trees for a power company, he was sitting atop a tree that crashed to the ground, crushing his face.
Deciding on a show business career and his girlfriend at the time signed up for dancing lessons. Encouraged after they performed in a three-day engagement at a club, Hope formed a partnership with Lloyd Durbin, a friend from the dancing school. Silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle saw them perform in 1925 and found them work with a touring troupe called Hurley's Jolly Follies. Within a year, Hope had formed an act called the Dancemedians with George Byrne and the Hilton Sisters, conjoined twins who performed a tap dancing routine in the vaudeville circuit. Hope and Byrne had an act as Siamese twins as well, danced and sang while wearing blackface until friends advised Hope he was funnier as himself. In 1929, Hope informally changed his first name to "Bob." In one version of the story, he named himself after race car driver Bob Burman. In another, he said he chose the name because he wanted a name with a "friendly'Hiya, fellas!' Sound" to it. In a 1942 legal document, his legal name is given as Lester Townes Hope.
After five years on the vaudeville circuit, Hope was "surprised and humbled" when he failed a 1930 screen test for the French film production company Pathé at Culver City, California. In the early days, Hope's career included appearances on stage in vaudeville shows and Broadway productions, he began performing on the radio in 1934 with NBC radio, switched to television when that medium became popular in the 1950s. He began doing regular TV specials in 1954, hosted the Academy Awards nineteen times from 1939 through 1977. Overlapping with this was his movie career, spanning 1934 to 1972, his USO tours, which he conducted from 1941 to 1991. Hope signed a contract with Educational Pictures of New York for six short films; the first was a comedy. He was not happy with it, told newspaper gossip columnist Walter Winchell, "When they catch Dillinger, they're going to make him sit through it twice." Although Educational Pictures dropped his contract, he soon signed with Warner Brothers, making movies during the day and performing in Broadway shows in the evenings.
Hope moved to
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