Characterised by Clive James as permanently baring his lower teeth, and to be fair there’s lots to have a go at Dickie...
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...
A theme of unfair stereotyping runs through this list, for which we make no apologies. We know Madeline Smith is an actress...
Ah, you can hear the lazy terminology here: ‘craggy’, ‘brooding’, etc., like the harsh, rugged landscape of his native… But sod all...
Sometimes an actor can be hamstrung by physical appearance, and the inevitable physiological shorthand that attaches itself to them via the medium...
There’s nothing wrong with an actor specialising, if he does it well. And when it came to short, Jewish cockneys with an...
Well, we could just sit here listing titles, couldn’t we? Dr Zhivago, Billy Liar, Darling, Don’t Look Now… big time roles were...
Short, middle-aged feisty eccentrics were the speciality of this Australian-born mockney lass, although she wasn’t limited to parts such as the doggedly...
Blustering, mincing, nincompooperising, looking askance down the nose (if that’s possible)… No-one said a character actor had to choose likeable parts, and...
As dullards have it, she was a child actress who ‘went rude’. That’s it, case closed, knowing harrumphs all round, retire haughtily...
Take a close look at that ’50s/’60s war film you’ve got there. Who’s that stocky bloke, standing near the back, in a...
Plain old Marjorie Robertson to the Home Office of course, but as half of the Wilcox-Neagle dream team, she dominated British cinema...
‘The British Lucille Ball!’ Nah, she was better than that. You don’t have to be Morrissey to appreciate the former Tiller Girl...
You want old-school upper crust sauce without the transatlantic taint of a Joan Collins? Fenella’s your girl! That husky voice was a...
Well, what to say? The picture used to illustrate the word ‘stalwart’ in dictionaries, if there’s any justice, and if the sorts...
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...
Grandson Paul McCartney may have insisted he was ‘very clean’, but no-one ‘did’ shabby like Wilfrid B. Drunks, minor tradesmen, tinkers in...
Now, whatever you think of the two productions involved, you have to admit – A Clockwork Orange and So Haunt Me: that’s...
Nominated by Duncan Steele as ‘the “if wet” for every UK actor of the 50’s and 60’s, deserves to be in the...
Even the staunchest class warrior must feel that the old school patrician elite can’t have been all bad if there was a...
It’s hard now to appreciate how ‘naughty’ the Gainsborough Girls were in their day. Heaving bosoms had to be snipped out for...
We’ll ignore that damn tonic water catchphrase (tempting though, isn’t it?) and celebrate the screen’s smoothest operator this side of Peter Bowles...
Not one, but two stereotypes cling to Val – as a buxom secretary being leered at by a tubby character actor in...
Vladek Sheybal may have come over here from Eastern Europe for a career of Bloc-parts, but Essex-born Francis De Wolff had the...
Walking the tightrope of self-parody for as long as we can remember (which is probably longer than he can remember), yet with...
She may have been Australian, but with an upper-class accent as affected as that tacked-on ‘e’, she personified cinematic horsey haughtiness for...
Devotees of the legitimate stage can’t picture Ms Whitelaw without an attendant pile of mud and crap covering her lower half, but...
You don’t argue with Superman’s mum of course, but if there was ever an odder CV among these nominees we’d like to...
As luck would have it, Dora’s main line of work – never knowingly overscrubbed ladies from the wrong side of the dog...
Some actors just understand the subtlety of screen acting by instinct (and we’re not talking about the Michael Caine masterclass where he...
Earmarked for on-screen military service having come to the cinema via The Army Game, the generously-chinned Liverpudlian nevertheless amassed a varied career...
Again, with your kind permission we’ll respectfully agree to knock that role on the head for our purposes and delve into the...
The lugubrious-visaged Polish émigré left Andrez Wajda and pals behind to make a fine living being sinister in British and American films....
Steve Bolsover makes a mad, passionate case case for Big Bern: ‘Yes, we know he can do the comedic stuff, but his...
Yes, you know how this one’s going to go: More than Marple! Well, more in the sense of ‘lots of other fussy...
We’re thinking of her pre-soap career here, of course. The Joan who played an assortment of cockney teenage tarts in various downmarket...
Pre-Medford, there’s a reliable seam of ‘local bobby’ roles racked up by the former Owen John, exhibiting, according to Mike Davis, ‘a...
A Burmese lad, of course, but he’s welcome in this pantheon anytime. One of those careers of two halves we’ve been hearing...
Always barking away somewhere in Pinewoodland. Son of music hall legend Nosmo King, Watson was indicted into showbiz at an early age,...
Always adding a touch of class to his two minutes or more in many a comedy, with a good part in “The...
Hard to believe she started off on celluloid as the ‘if wet’ Audrey Hepburn, after the latter’s ‘people’ baulked at the rum...
The word here, of course, is ‘formidable’. Formidable like the gangster’s moll in Margs’ first ever film role, whacking a copper with...
Proof positive that, in many a film comedy, the nominally ‘straight’ man is often to be found giving a more assured comic...
We don’t know exactly what that hyphen was all about (real name: Thomas Terry Hoar-Stevens), though the man himself joked it was...
A shoo-in on the strength of his demented mirth in Asylum alone. Throw in such other roles as his sympathetic Rev Philip...
A quick glance down the roles he played from 1936 to 1991 indicate that while never in top billing, indeed rarely in...
Recent studies have shown that the average man aged between thirty and forty spent 20{30e2395aaf6397fd02d2c79d91a1fe7cbb73158454674890018aee9c53a0cb96} of his formative years… let’s say ‘contemplating’...
The convent’s loss was the screen’s gain, as FA swapped her dreams of nunnery for a role as a pupil in Carry...
Getting a bit arty here – Jenny’s done Antonioni, Cassavettes, Pasolini, Jarman, she was in the infamous Alternative Miss World beauty-contest-cum-art-‘happening’, and...
Well, we won’t try and be clever here and claim she was actually a gifted musical comedienne or something. No, Ingrid Pitt...
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