The well-born Felixstovian had the makings of a highly-respected, if rather boringly respectable, film career: bit part in Singin’ in the Rain, early breaks opposite Rat Pack members, the odd role in a Hollywood Biblical epic. But a small role in upscale meteor sci-fi Riders to the Stars pointed the way to B-movie immortality. Sure enough, after a ’50s spent largely in Italian productions, she struck paydirt as the wife of Paul Massie’s titular ‘ooh, very tart!’ exclaimer in The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, copping off with suave Christopher Lee when it starts going Hyde-shaped. Cuckolding air stewardess Pamela Tiffin in airline froth Come Fly With Me. Acting the Netto Bond girl opposite Tom Adams in Where the Bullets Fly. And, of course, the Amazonian title role in Zeta One. Ah, we got through this billing without mentioning Triangle.
FINEST HOUR: Mucking in for the war effort alongside Laurence Harvey and Sid James in limpet mine thriller The Silent Enemy.
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Recent studies have shown that the average man aged between thirty and forty spent 20% of his formative years… let’s say ‘contemplating’ the career of Jenny Agutter. And with four touchstone yoof films under her belt – The Railway Children, Logan’s Run, Walkabout and An American Werewolf in London, natch – it’s easy to see why she’s placed in the personal top tens of a whole generation. Add in a slew of more obscure treats like Equus, The Survivor, I Start Counting and that weird dramatisation of some John Betjeman poems (she was miss Joan Hunter Dunn, of course) and you couldn’t ask for a richer canon. 
Sometimes an actor can be hamstrung by physical appearance, and the inevitable physiological shorthand that attaches itself to them via the medium of the lazy critic. Hence, ‘jut-jawed’ and ‘heavy-browed’ dogged Harry Andrews for most of his career, despite being a thesp of towering abilities. So, while the bulk of his mighty repertoire tended towards the hard – Ice Cold in Alex, 633, Squadron, Play Dirty – he also majored in brooding period roles – The Agony and the Ecstasy, Barabbas – and could revel in uncharacteristic shtick like the closet-camp Ed in Entertaining Mr Sloane. 
‘The British Lucille Ball!’ Nah, she was better than that. You don’t have to be Morrissey to appreciate the former Tiller Girl and stand-up stooge’s masterly way with an oddball part. You name a sixties comedy of any merit, there she is – the folksy mum of Hayley Mills in The Family Way, a nutty tenant at David Hemmings’ dad’s guest house in Brighton-based rock ‘n’ roller Be My Guest and, of course, paired up with Marianne Stone as two eccentric lesbians in vampire oddity Devils of Darkness. Angers slotted in a blooming stage career as well, although she was, rather winningly, no fan of Shakespeare. ‘By the time you’ve started from the top of a line and got to the bottom of the page, you’ve forgotten what the gag was’.
The convent’s loss was the screen’s gain, as FA swapped her dreams of nunnery for a role as a pupil in Carry On Teacher alongside Richard O’Sullivan and Carol White. She’s been handmaiden to liz Taylor’s Cleopatra, crossed swords with margaret Rutherford in Murder Most Foul, swung along with Kalus Kinski, Carol Cleveland and, indeed, Brian Cant in The Pleasure Girls, donned some not-as-embarrassing-as-they-could-have-been costumes in Dune, and, last and least, was taken in by Prince Rodgers ‘along the road came bloody Lenny Henry’ Nelson in vanity project Under the Cherry Moon. 
The ex-French Resistance fighter was only in films for the money, he reckoned, but if that’s the case he picked his cash cows better than most ‘serious’ film actors in quality terms. Starting as he meant to go on with his unforgettable role as an eccentric, childlike arrival in Windsor with a sinister motive in The Stranger Left No Card, Badel always seemed to command the screen at one inscrutable remove from the rest of the cast, and two from the audience. Hence his rugby team owner in This Sporting Life, his villainous oil magnate in Arabesque, his corrupt South American president in The Adventurers. A man for all jobs, except perhaps babysitting.
Some actors just understand the subtlety of screen acting by instinct (and we’re not talking about the Michael Caine masterclass where he orders scrambled eggs with just his eyebrows). There was always something going on behind the Barkworth brow, and this skill was instrumental in his biggest achievement: making the petit-bourgeois businessman, in his suit and tie, into a fully-rounded, nay sympathetic figure. He happily accepted it was the lot of the character actor to put in tne times the work of the leading man for a hundredth of the recognition, and quietly got on with the job of being a pretty damn perfect actor.
There’s nothing wrong with an actor specialising, if he does it well. And when it came to short, Jewish cockneys with an air of dodginess about them, Alfie Bass was the specialist’s specialist. Shorty, Basher, Dicey Perkins… Alfie’s career built film by film into a rogue’s gallery of cons exhibiting various degrees of lovability and competence. He also had a sideline in looking on in slack-jawed bewilderment at the antics of Roger Moore in Moonraker. 
Oh, great. This billing will be like summarising Proust, won’t it? Er… dancing sideways on with Anthony Quinn… not being Jesus in a barn despite what Hayley Mills reckons… getting June Ritchie up the duff… sending secret notes to Julie Christie at the turn of the century… teaching books he hasn’t read to Patti Love… freaking John Hurt out with his deadly aboriginal mouth noises… and, of course, that marvellous scene by the fire. 
Reliable, lantern-jawed, mop-haired tradesman/yokel, facially halfway between Lance Percival and Vernon Kay, familiar to sitcom fans, and hence also sitcom film fans (The Up Pompeii! films, That’s Your Funeral). Also in boat-missing spy spoof The London Connection, hamming it up a treat as brusque maths teacher Mr Turkentine in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and of course, in Krull as Ergo the Magnificent (‘Short in stature, tall in power, narrow of purpose and wide of vision!’)
A shoo-in on the strength of his demented mirth in Asylum alone. Throw in such other roles as his sympathetic Rev Philip Moss in Sky West And Crooked, the austere Prison Governor in Porridge, and his charming Ernest Thesiger homage as Theo von Hartmann in The House That Dripped Blood, and his case looks all the stronger.
A trained mime, yet! Now, why didn’t we see any of that on screen? What we did get, however, was a veritable pot pourri. From early not-quite-theres fighting sillicon gone mad with Vincent Price in The Aries Computer and copping off with chicken-drummers-era Brando in The Nightcomers, through ill-advised career-haunting Italian sauce Blue Movie Blackmail (alongside Patricia Hayes as Mamma the Turk!) and into a rich seam of horror, including Schizo, And Now the Screaming Starts and, er, Inseminoid. 
The standard breakdown goes with Honor: pre- and post-telly film roles. Before getting it together with the bowler hat, she notched up a fine and sultry roster of parts, from the less-than-promising horse-related death of Fame is the Spur through smuggling comedy Green grow the Rushes, Titanic tragedy A Night to Remember and underrated crime thriller Serena among many others. After taking those judo lessons she was, of course, *that* punningly-named Bond girl, and straddled every genre from Gatling gun westerns like Something Big to Brit horror such as decidedly nutty babysitter basher Fright. 
Stuffy old film lore has her pudding-proving moment down as her depressed ballerina to C Chaplin’s down and out comic in Limelight, but we know the real test came the following year, when she was one of the magnificent seven who descended on an unsuspecting French capital in Innocents in Paris, and held her own with the veteran likes of Alistair Sim, Jimmy Edwards and Margaret Rutherford. From then on, it’s motorway all the way: Look back in Anger, The Buccaneer, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Charly, The Illustrated Man… you get the picture. The presence of the odd misfire, such as her alky nympho in ludicrous Kinsey Report ‘dramatisation’ The Chapman Report, merely add to the overall impression of a first rate job of screen work. 
Actor or novelist? Dandy or raconteur? The British Rock Hudson or John Sessions in a Panama hat? The public may never have figured it out, but they nevertheless forgave him for shooting Jack Warner in The Blue Lamp (not his debut, though – that was, winningly, in Formby racehorse comedy Come On George!) Three periods to the acting career: early wholesome fare as the ‘idol of the Odeons’ (the Doctor films of course) followed by an either brave or ill-advised dalliance with *that* taboo (Victim, and to a lesser extent those leather trews in The Singer Not the Song), leading to our favorite era, a ‘what the hell’ period of anything-goes casting (Modesty Blaise, Accident, Our Mother’s House, The Mind Benders). 
Grandson Paul McCartney may have insisted he was ‘very clean’, but no-one ‘did’ shabby like Wilfrid B. Drunks, minor tradesmen, tinkers in several films before and after Steptoe, and shifty, unwelcome dads and grandads in general were the stomping ground of an actor who only started to come to filmic notoriety in his late ’40s, although by then casting directors were already adding a good couple of decades to that innings. A dirty old man, then. But what a dirty old man! 
Steve Bolsover makes a mad, passionate case case for Big Bern: ‘Yes, we know he can do the comedic stuff, but his turns in Krull and Hawk The Slayer prove just what a damn fine actor he was. He introduced a catchphrase to the general public, ‘I only arsked’, like you didn’t know, he released a few singles and he was quite tall as well, so a few claims to fame there. His turn as Gort in Hawk The Slayer is by my reckoning his finest hour.’ We’re not going to argue with any of that.
She may have been Australian, but with an upper-class accent as affected as that tacked-on ‘e’, she personified cinematic horsey haughtiness for two generations. Witness the high-living old pal of Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame, the bathtub-bound wife of Donald Pleasence’s Dr Crippen, or a superbly unfazed Alice Hargreaves in that two-misses-to-a-hit Dennis Potter film, or even her heavenly duet with Wilfred Hyde-White in Xanadu. A class act. 
As luck would have it, Dora’s main line of work – never knowingly overscrubbed ladies from the wrong side of the dog track – developed in British film as she did, as early caricature cockney concubines in The Fallen Idol and The Blue Lamp gave way to A Taste of Honey. In between was her, ahem, ‘favour acquiring’ headmistress in The Great St Trinians Train Robbery, and the irritant sidekick to Glynis Johns’s mermaid in Mad About Men. And hers was the hotel featured in Carry On Girls, to boot!
Proof positive that, in many a film comedy, the nominally ‘straight’ man is often to be found giving a more assured comic performance than the clown. Consider his Citizen Bidet in Carry On… Don’t Lose Your Head! While Williams flares and drawls and gasps as his superior, Butterworth fawns, nods in eager agreement, immediately looks puzzled as to what he’s agreeing to, dismisses the worry from his mind and nods again, opens his mouth as if to respond, looks surprised when no words emerge from his mouth, looks down at the floor for a bit, then decides the best course of action is to stick to what you know best, and starts nodding eagerly again. All in the space of a single Kenneth Williams sentence. Now that’s attention to detail. 
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