William Sylvester (January 31, 1922 – January 25, 1995) was an American TV and film actor. His most famous film credit was Dr. Heywood Floyd in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968). Born in Oakland, California and married at one time to the British actress Veronica Hurst, he moved to England after the Second World War and became a staple of British B films at a time when American and Canadian actors were much in demand in order to give indigenous films some appeal in the US.
As a result, he gained top billing in one of his very first films, House of Blackmail (1953), directed by the veteran filmmaker Maurice Elvey, for whom he also made What Every Woman Wants the following year. He also starred in such minor films as The Stranger Came Home (1954, for Hammer), Dublin Nightmare (1958), Offbeat (1960), Information Received (1961), Incident at Midnight, Ring of Spies and Blind Corner (all 1963). There were also lead roles in four British horror films: Gorgo (1960), Devil Doll (1963), Devils of Darkness (1964) and The Hand of Night (1966). Among his many TV credits were a 1959 BBC version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (playing Mark Antony), The Saint, The Baron, The High Chaparral, Harry O and The Six Million Dollar Man.
His later films included You Only Live Twice (1967) and, back in the USA after his prominent role for Kubrick, Busting (1973), The Hindenburg (1975) and Heaven Can Wait (1978). He died in Sacramento, California in 1995, aged 72.
Alexander Gauge was a British actor best known for playing Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood from 1955 to 1959. Born in a Methodist Mission station in Wenzhou in China, Gauge was a well-known English character actor. Gauge attended school in California before moving to England.
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Patricia Owens (17 January 1925, Golden, British Columbia - 31 August 2000, Lancaster, California) was a Canadian-born American actress, working in Hollywood. She appeared in about 40 films and 10 TV episodes in a career lasting from 1943 to 1968.
Canadian-born actress Patricia Owens moved to England with her parents in 1933, and ten years later, at age 18, she made her motion-picture debut in Val Guest's musical comedy Miss London Ltd. The following year, she had a small role in Harold French's social satire English Without Tears. Her career continued in this manner for the next few years, Owens getting ever-larger roles in generally better movies (though not always—the same year in which she worked in the Launder-Gilliat production of The Happiest Days of Your Life, one of the funniest movies ever made in England, she also appeared in the abysmal Old Mother Riley, Headmistress).
Her career took a giant step upward when she was seen by a 20th Century Fox executive while performing in a theatrical production of Sabrina Fair and was offered a screen test. The result was a contract with the studio and a move to Hollywood. Her first American film was Island in the Sun (1957) for Fox, and then Owens was loaned out to Warner Bros. to play opposite Marlon Brando in the drama Sayonara (1957), one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the year. Owens spent the rest of 1957 working mostly on loan-out, but it was a 1958 Fox production that secured her place in motion picture history—as Helene Delambre, the wife of scientist Andre Delambre in The Fly (1958), co-starring with David Hedison and Vincent Price. Owens carried much of the film's story and drama, which were told in flashback from her character's point-of-view. The Fly was one of the most successful science fiction movies of the decade; the image of Owens unmasking her stricken husband and screaming at what she sees—and the shot of her horrified visage seen in a "fly's eye" view—became one of the defining moments in the genre.
Unfortunately for Owens, she never got another movie half as good as The Fly, from Fox or anyone else, and in 1961 was reduced to working in the threadbare, backlot POW/jungle chase drama Seven Women from Hell. Owens made occasional television appearances, on series such as Perry Mason and Burke's Law, but these were relatively infrequent. Owens also starred in one of the 17 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents directed by Hitchcock himself, "The Crystal Trench" (1959). By 1965, she was working in Black Spurs, one of producer A.C. Lyles' B-Westerns, renowned for their use of aging genre stars, and Owens retired from movies after portraying Richard Egan's love interest in the low-budget espionage thriller The Destructors (1968). Her last professional appearance was in a 1968 episode of Lassie.
She was the third wife of screenwriter and producer Sy Bartlett.
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