Glenda Jackson, the two-time Best Actress Oscar winner and former British politician, has died. She was 87. Her passing was confirmed by her agent, Lionel Larner, who said in a statement, “Glenda Jackson, two-time Academy Award-winning actress and politician, died peacefully at her home in Blackheath, London this morning after a brief illness with her family at her side.” The statement continued, “She recently completed filming The Great Escaper in which she co-starred with Michael Caine.” Born on May 9, 1936, in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, Jackson made her professional stage debut in Ted Willis’s Doctor in the House. She would go on to appear in various stage productions before making her film debut in a bit part in This Sporting Life (1963). Jackson’s on-screen roles continued from there, with her starring role in Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969) leading to her first Academy Award for Best Actress. Her second Academy Award...
- 6/15/2023
- TV Insider
Actor who starred in films of the 1950s and 60s including Ice Cold in Alex and went on to a long career in supporting roles
Although Sylvia Syms, who has died aged 89, emerged as an actor during the decade from 1956 to 1966 that saw British cinema changing radically, she seemed to belong to an earlier stiff-upper-lip tradition of British films rather than “kitchen sink” drama. Nevertheless, the ethereal Syms starred in a wide variety of films during that period before she developed in later years into a fine supporting actor.
She was nominated for a Bafta for her performance in J Lee Thompson’s Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), which had Syms playing the “other woman” for whom Anthony Quayle wants to leave his wife (Yvonne Mitchell). Based on a play by Ted Willis, this candid social drama heralded a new dawn in gritty British film-making. However, the same director-writer team...
Although Sylvia Syms, who has died aged 89, emerged as an actor during the decade from 1956 to 1966 that saw British cinema changing radically, she seemed to belong to an earlier stiff-upper-lip tradition of British films rather than “kitchen sink” drama. Nevertheless, the ethereal Syms starred in a wide variety of films during that period before she developed in later years into a fine supporting actor.
She was nominated for a Bafta for her performance in J Lee Thompson’s Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), which had Syms playing the “other woman” for whom Anthony Quayle wants to leave his wife (Yvonne Mitchell). Based on a play by Ted Willis, this candid social drama heralded a new dawn in gritty British film-making. However, the same director-writer team...
- 1/27/2023
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
It’s the granddaddy of British cop dramas of the modern era. The most popular English picture of 1950 introduced PC George Dixon, a warm-hearted constable who would become a staple on BBC TV for 21 years. T.E.B. Clarke’s screenplay of a murder manhunt is stocked with actors American fans know well — Dirk Bogarde, Bernard Lee — and some we should know better — Jack Warner, Robert Flemyng, Dora Bryan. The show was made by the top craftsmen of Ealing Studios, and its fast pace and Brit sensibility will definitely impress. And remember — the Bobbies on the beat don’t even carry guns.
The Blue Lamp
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1950 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 85 min. / Street Date June 1, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Jack Warner, Jimmy Hanley, Dirk Bogarde, Robert Flemyng, Bernard Lee, Peggy Evans, Patric Doonan, Bruce Seton, Meredith Edwards, Dora Bryan, Gladys Henson, Tessie O’Shea, Betty Ann Davies, Jennifer Jayne, Sam Kydd,...
The Blue Lamp
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1950 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 85 min. / Street Date June 1, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Jack Warner, Jimmy Hanley, Dirk Bogarde, Robert Flemyng, Bernard Lee, Peggy Evans, Patric Doonan, Bruce Seton, Meredith Edwards, Dora Bryan, Gladys Henson, Tessie O’Shea, Betty Ann Davies, Jennifer Jayne, Sam Kydd,...
- 5/11/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
I saw this movie for the first and only time crossing the Atlantic in 1957, on the Mauritania, on the way to the States. My fellow English Speaking Union scholars and I, still in the grip of Look Back in Anger and seething from the moral and political debacle of Suez, regarded it with mirthful contempt. It was the kind of stilted, patronising British movie about working-class and lower-middle-class life we were in flight from after we'd just embraced Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, The Catered Affair and The Bachelor Party, and been thrilled by Ealing's Alexander Mackendrick making his American debut with Sweet Smell of Success. It's now being revived, or disinterred, as a major harbinger of British kitchen-sink realism, a term coined in the mid-1950s by my future mentor David Sylvester.
The movie turns upon a lower-middle-class clerk (stiff-upper-lip specialist Anthony Quayle) preparing to leave his loving, depressed, slatternly...
The movie turns upon a lower-middle-class clerk (stiff-upper-lip specialist Anthony Quayle) preparing to leave his loving, depressed, slatternly...
- 7/28/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
J Lee Thompson's unmissable proto-kitchen-sink drama goes all the way where Brief Encounter loitered hesitantly
Terence Davies's recent film The Deep Blue Sea returned audiences to Britain's lost postwar world of dingy flats, unhappy marriages and sing-songs in smoky pubs where adulterous couples are to be seen hunched in corners staring silently into their drinks. The rerelease of this brilliant proto-realist kitchen-sink drama from 1957, written by Ted Willis and directed by J Lee Thompson, is from just this world. Anthony Quayle and Yvonne Mitchell are Jim and Amy, a married couple: they are middle-aged, though modern audiences might find their mannerisms much older. The stars were respectively 44 and 42 years old. Amy is a superficially cheerful chatterbox, and Jim seems tolerant of her scatterbrained inability to keep the flat tidy, her habit of leaving things burning on the stove and often never getting out of her dressing-gown all day. Amy...
Terence Davies's recent film The Deep Blue Sea returned audiences to Britain's lost postwar world of dingy flats, unhappy marriages and sing-songs in smoky pubs where adulterous couples are to be seen hunched in corners staring silently into their drinks. The rerelease of this brilliant proto-realist kitchen-sink drama from 1957, written by Ted Willis and directed by J Lee Thompson, is from just this world. Anthony Quayle and Yvonne Mitchell are Jim and Amy, a married couple: they are middle-aged, though modern audiences might find their mannerisms much older. The stars were respectively 44 and 42 years old. Amy is a superficially cheerful chatterbox, and Jim seems tolerant of her scatterbrained inability to keep the flat tidy, her habit of leaving things burning on the stove and often never getting out of her dressing-gown all day. Amy...
- 7/27/2012
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
The 78-year-old Britsh actor, whose 1957 film Woman in a Dressing Gown is being re-released, talks about her rebellious past, why she's not dame material – and what she'd love to do next
Sylvia Syms sits in her lovely flat in west London explaining how she avoided being treated as a piece of meat in the 1950s. There was an "assumption that because you were blond and an actress, you were available," she says. Determined not to be "pretty, available and treated like shit", she took inspiration from Dame Sybil Thorndike.
"I thought, that's what I want," says Syms, who seems to have worked with every British screen legend – from Dirk Bogarde to Michael Caine – during her seven decades in film, TV and theatre. "I want to go on working when I'm an old lady and have that kind of jolliness and respect, which she had. She was just incredible."
Syms turns on me like a hawk.
Sylvia Syms sits in her lovely flat in west London explaining how she avoided being treated as a piece of meat in the 1950s. There was an "assumption that because you were blond and an actress, you were available," she says. Determined not to be "pretty, available and treated like shit", she took inspiration from Dame Sybil Thorndike.
"I thought, that's what I want," says Syms, who seems to have worked with every British screen legend – from Dirk Bogarde to Michael Caine – during her seven decades in film, TV and theatre. "I want to go on working when I'm an old lady and have that kind of jolliness and respect, which she had. She was just incredible."
Syms turns on me like a hawk.
- 7/20/2012
- by Patrick Barkham
- The Guardian - Film News
Film director whose quirky career covered sci-fi, westerns, drama and Hammer horror
Roy Ward Baker, who has died aged 93, progressed from teaboy to director of sturdy British dramas to weird Hammer horrors, via Hollywood. It was a rather quirky career for a very straightforward man. Baker – who directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock and made the camp Mexican western The Singer Not the Song, the lesbian The Vampire Lovers and the transsexual Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde – insisted on calling himself "a simple-minded English lad". Perhaps the film closest to his personality was A Night to Remember (1958), which many would argue is the best of the cinematic versions of the story of the sinking of the Titanic.
Roy Horace Baker (he frequently replaced his middle name with Ward, his mother's maiden name) was born in London into a middle-class family. As a boy, he was sent to study...
Roy Ward Baker, who has died aged 93, progressed from teaboy to director of sturdy British dramas to weird Hammer horrors, via Hollywood. It was a rather quirky career for a very straightforward man. Baker – who directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock and made the camp Mexican western The Singer Not the Song, the lesbian The Vampire Lovers and the transsexual Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde – insisted on calling himself "a simple-minded English lad". Perhaps the film closest to his personality was A Night to Remember (1958), which many would argue is the best of the cinematic versions of the story of the sinking of the Titanic.
Roy Horace Baker (he frequently replaced his middle name with Ward, his mother's maiden name) was born in London into a middle-class family. As a boy, he was sent to study...
- 10/8/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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