The celebrated wine bibber and talky-singer is now inextricably linked, thanks to wet bank holidays innumerable, with his gruff attempts at carrying a tune in My Fair lady and Dr Dolittle. But there’s an acre more. The only decent thing in Cleopatra. The only sane thing in Blithe Spirit. The Ghost, of Mrs Muir fame! Getting Charlton Heston in to do his ceiling in the Agony and the Ecstasy. The presenter of Rex Harrison Presents Stories of Love (no, us neither). And, of course, Saladin! Er, you get the point.
FINEST HOUR: If you want complexity, how about his role as a cod-Nazi undercover Brit rescuing Margaret Lockwood by pretending to get her to join the Nazi party while Charters and Caldicott size up a copy of Mein Kampf in Night Train to Munich?
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We know what you’re thinking, so let’s get it out of the way – yes, Billy H will forever be associated by the majority with his early role as a man who devours an ‘unstable chemical compound’ in Harry Cohen comedy short I Am An Explosive. In fact, short comedies like this, Swinging the Lead and Say It With Music were Billy’s inroad into cinema from his stage background as a respected farceur. (We’re not being tediously faux-chummy here – he was, for most of this period, billed as Billy Hartnell.) The war, inevitably, brought more serious, indeed military, parts, and the freshly-Williamised William found himself taking the rank of Sergeant as often as not, in particular moulding an unpromising battalion (including John Laurie and Stanley Holloway) into army shape in the Way Ahead. And of course he would do it all again for laughs 14 years later in Carry On Sergeant. Oh, and he was in some children’s programme with Peter Butterworth and all.
From pantomime elf to captain of the Compass Rose, Jack Hawkins was one of those actors who looked to the stage first, and affected a benign bemusement at his own celluloid popularity. But a star he was, though a multifarious one, swapping from police superintendents to Egyption Pharaohs at the drop of a helmet. A stoic among stoics, his breakthrough picture The Cruel Sea came despite debilitating seasickness. Cancer robbed him of his voice at the end, so what later performances there were had to be dubbed by Charles Gray (‘Willard White speakin’!')
A genius. No, really. And we don’t even feel the need to preface that with the mealy-mouthed ‘of course, the word “genius” is bandied about all too often these days…’ rejoinder. Just look at it this way. Music hall sketch: dopey teacher, interfering schoolboys who, it quickly transpires, know more about the subject being taught than he does, capers galore, thwarted dignity, twenty minutes, wind it up, on with the performing seals. It was Hay’s job to take that sturdy enough but unpromising scenario, and take it, and by extension the art of the music-hall sketch, away from its gag-’n'-catchphrase bottom end and into the high realms of character-driven high dudgeon. When he got onto film ’twas even better. And when the mortar board came off, well, things fairly flew. His acting skills, flanked by Moore Marriott and Graham Moffat, shone like no other comedian-turned-actor. While others were putting the comedy clocks back with their banjoleles and cockney asides, Will was bravely putting them forward. Even if it did mean he nearly got run over by a train. 
If your childhood was anything like ours, a) you’re in serious trouble, and b) you’ll have first noticed La Hayden in Shillingbury Tales, The Right Kind of ITV Ruralist Whimsy. Then later on you’ll have noticed her giving Anthony Ainley an eyeful in Blood on Satan’s Claw, stoving in Geoffrey Keen’s head with a spade in Taste the Blood of Dracula, and doing a tad more than typing for Udo Kier in Expose. Oh, and bending over a snooker table for Robin Askwith in Confessions from a Holiday Camp and beating Airplane! to do the first Airport singing nun parody in Queen Kong, but you can’t have everything. 
Long before he donned an ill-fitting rug and stepped gamely into the tape-measure-wielding breach when Mr Grainger no longer found himself free, James Hayter took his blustering, mumbling gentlemen’s club demeanour and spread it liberally over as fine a cross-section of pre-Woodfall British filmdom as you could expect to dig up in the BFI’s bins. Here you’ll find a brace of military types going red(der) in the face in such films as Radar invention romp School for Secrets, top antiquarian comic folderol in the Ustinov-directed Vice Versa, and a strong suit in Dickensian jollies from Nicholas Nickleby through Oliver! to The Pickwick Papers. Pass the port. 
We’ve neither the time nor the sufficient number of decimal places to calculate exactly how many ‘Faces of the Sxties’, male and female, there actually were in total, but surely The Hem gets into the top ten of that overcrowded field. He started off opposite Billy Bunter of course, but we gloss over that to his early roles, where he always seemed to be forming a pop band (Some People, Live It Up!, Be My Guest etc.) Then came Blow Up, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Barbarella, and a much mocked star (we’re thinking of Monty Python’s ‘piece of wood’ jibe in particular) was born. And directing episodes of Airwolf and all! Plus! We’ve never heard his album, David Hemmings Happens, but how can it be anything less than great?
Much more than a smart way to shut up bores who demand a list of famous Belgians, Aud quickly moved up the pecking order from trilling ‘fancy a ciggie?’ in Laughter in Paradise to being adored by the whole of Rome (and a pratfalling Eddie Albert) in two short years. The gamine-for-a-laugh waif did the ‘iconic’ bit with the fag holder and the guitar strumming in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and not really singing in My Fair Lady, of course. That money’s safe. But those who don’t pause to consider the caper-chase double whammy of Charade and the gloriously oddball How to Steal a Million are missing the whole picture as they peruse their coffee table books full of elbow-length gloves and tiaras. 
Always adding a touch of class to his two minutes or more in many a comedy, with a good part in “The Wild Geese” to round off his career. A protégé of Dame Sybil Thorndike no less, the big-hootered man specialised in soldiering via Kwai et al., but also branched out into thugs, cowboys and medieval barons. A dotage appearing in reliable children’s fare like The Tomorrow People, One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing and Look and Read’s Fair Ground! assured ready recognition for the next generation too.
Yes, you know how this one’s going to go: More than Marple! Well, more in the sense of ‘lots of other fussy old suburban dears’ admittedly, but a body of work’s a body of work, and if the body in the library takes the lion’s share of the public’s attention, that’s a crime most foul. So let’s hear it for her getting het up about knickers in Carry On Girls, looking repulsed in Doctor in Love, and fussing and fretting all the way through The Card. The Consummate British Housewife. We salute you, Mrs H! 
A man who always seems to be clad in either a toga or a long coat (or, at the end of The Wildcats of St Trinians, just his pants, but we’ll gloss over that one). A man so somehow comforting in an Old Boys Club sort of way (cf Richard Vernon) even when he plays seedy characters like his cameo as a disgraced bomb expert reduced to operating the scoreboard at a dog track, there’s still a tangible inner core of respectable resilience… somewhere. Always amusing, never Ludicrus (except in Up Pompeii! of course).
David Cronenberg wishes he had anything as scary as Renee Houston in his films. Music hall comedy act (no easy job for a woman, but the audience probably dared not heckle) Renee started in pictures early clocking on for the first time in 1927. By the time she hit Lady Godiva Rides Again and The Belles of St Trinians in the 50s, she was cooking with gas. The Horse’s Mouth and Twice Round the Daffodils neatly segued into toppermost Carry On Cabby and Spying mean it’s a mystery why she’s not better remembered. 
‘I’ve been number two in films for donkey’s years,’ quoth the stalwart support actor’s stalwart support actor, and he was right. Not that, whatever Trev himself may have thought of this state of affairs, there’s anything wrong with that. Of course the knee-jerk thought is of the war, with taut squadron leaders and clandestine platform trysts with Celia Johnson. But then you’ve got his top turn in The Third Man, which for our money is as good as anything in the picture, although of course he didn’t get to say ‘cuckoo’ in a funny way with his eyebrows raised, so it went largely unheralded. You’ve got him ruthlessly epitomising the hypocritically morally outraged gentry in The Missionary. You’ve got him leading The Cockleshell Heroes, for God’s sake! And who else on the big screen would command the authority to keel-haul Marlon Brando? 
A man for all seasons, but preferably with grumpiness involved. Gord’s memory lives on via the Upstairs, Downstairs/Professionals telly double, for sure, but there’s far more going on than mere tough talk if you delve a little deeper. Would you believe, presenting Children’s Hour? And possibly uniquely among the actors listed here, there was no jobbing bit-partery for the nascent Jackson. No, it was straight into the co-lead, with Tommy Trinder as half of a duo of AWOL squaddies in the excellent The Foreman Went to France. After tha,t he packed in drawing up Rolls-Royce blueprints and the rest is film history. Whisky Galore!, Quatermass, Hell Drivers, The Great Escape… not a bad haul, all told.
Once, twice, thrice, four times a Matron of course, but to write off La Jacques as a comically predatory medical chubbster is to miss a whole lot of good stuff outside the realm of the over-starched tabard. The glamorous Hat was in evidence in The Pickwick Papers. The down-at-heel Hat is evinced as Dolly the fortune teller in Hancock’s The Punch and Judy Man. The Latin Hat gesticulates wildly at Peter Butterworth throughout Carry on Abroad. And best of all, there’s the sweetly innocent Hat Eric Sykes would take as his sister on telly, trotted out in the cinema a few times too. A Hat for every occasion, in fact. 
Two separate careers, or two ends of the same cackling candle? There’s the filthy Johannesburger’s comedy cockney sark, from Hancock through to the Carry Ons, it goes without saying, but the serious and semi-serious pre-’60s dues-paying years gave Sid a more gritty, shifty persona, as henchmen (The Lavender Hill Mob) barmen (The Small Back Room) barrow boys (The Yellow Balloon) and even dance instructors (We Joined the Navy). Who’s cackling now? 
As nominated by Mike Davis: ‘So good as the forerunner of Mr Mackay from Porridge as “CPO Crouty” in the Peter Sellers comedy “Two Way Stretch” . Hard as nails to the prisoners and then cow towing to the Guvnor. Also of course a point or two for his POSH performance in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang “. On the other side of the camera we come to “The Railway Children” …enough said!’ 
All-singing, all-dancing, all-piano-playing – ‘the complete actress’ as The Stage would have it. Glynis has certainly had a full career, lasting pretty much six decades, from donning a big vulcanised rubber tail in original mermaid-com Miranda, through settling New Zealand with Jack Hawkins and Kenneth Williams in The Seekers, to deing driven to vinegar-assisted distraction by anal husband Terry-Thomas in Vault of Horror. In all eventualities, class was exhibited in no small spoonfuls. Right up to the end, and even appearing in utter, utter shite like non-rom non-com While You Were Sleeping, she still charmed as a daffily carefree gran. 
A late arrival to the actors’ ball, Freddie Jones got stuck into cinema with enviable gusto. It’s more likely the prevalence of the genre at the time that led him to do mostly horror rather than any thespian limitations he may have had, but the likes of Frankenstein must be Destroyed and the Satanic Rites of Dracula suited his baroque style down to the ground. Oh, and we can hardly ignore his cantankerous, silver band-loving Mr Rockbottom in Never Too Young To Rock, can we? 
Mike Davis again steps up to the lectern: ‘The original and the best, who could probably out shout Brian Blessed at ten paces. Of course Sir Lancelot Spratt, but I remember a few other moments from deep in B/w Sunday afternoon telly. The teaming with Stanley Baxter and Leslie Phillips in a trio (I think ) of “rib ticklers”… “Very Important Person” being a favourite which has also has a great turn from Eric Sykes as “the sports officer”.’ 
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