Elke Sommer, born Elke von Schletz, is a German actress, entertainer and artist, who has starred in many Hollywood films. She was spotted by film director Vittorio De Sica while on holiday in Italy, and began appearing in films there in 1958. Also that year, she changed her surname from Schletz to Sommer, which was easier to pronounce for a non-German audience. She quickly became a noted sex symbol and moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s. She also became one of the most popular pin-up girls of the time, and posed for several pictorials in Playboy magazine, including the September 1964 and December 1967 issues. Sommer became one of the top film actresses of the 1960s. She made just shy of 100 film and television appearances between 1959 and 2005, including A Shot in the Dark with Peter Sellers, The Art of Love with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar with Stephen Boyd, Boy Did I Get a Wrong Number! with Bob Hope, the Bulldog Drummond extravaganza Deadlier Than the Male, The Wrecking Crew with Dean Martin, and The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz. In 1964, she won a Golden Globe award as Most Promising Newcomer Actress for The Prize, a film in which she co-starred with Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson.
A frequent guest on television, Sommer sang and participated in comedy sketches on episodes of The Dean Martin Show and on Bob Hope specials, made 10 appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and was a panelist on the Hollywood Squares game show many times between 1973 and 1980, when Peter Marshall was its "Square-Master", or host. Sommer's films during the 1970s included the thriller Zeppelin, in which she co-starred with Michael York, and a remake of Agatha Christie's frequently filmed murder mystery Ten Little Indians. In 1972, she starred in two Italian horror films directed by Mario Bava: Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil. The latter was subsequently re-edited (with 1975 footage inserted) to make a different film called House of Exorcism. Sommer went back to Italy to act in additional scenes for Lisa and the Devil, which its producer inserted into the film to convert it to House of Exorcism, against the wishes of the director.
In 1975, Peter Rogers cast her in the British comedy Carry On Behind as the Russian Professor Vrooshka.[2] She became the Carry On films' joint highest-paid performer, at £30,000; this was an honor that she shared with Phil Silvers (who starred in Follow That Camel).
Most of her movie work during the decade came in European films. After the 1979 comedy The Prisoner of Zenda, which reunited her with Sellers, the actress did virtually no more acting in Hollywood films, concentrating more on her artwork. She provided the voice for Yzma in the German release of The Emperor's New Groove.
Sommer also performed as a singer, recording and releasing several albums.
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Denholm Mitchell Elliott, CBE (31 May 1922 – 6 October 1992) was an English actor of stage and screen, with over 120 major film and TV credits. In the nineteen eighties, he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in three consecutive years
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Judith Amanda "Judy" Geeson (born 10 September 1948) is an English film, stage, and television actress. Her first major film appearance was as wayward teenager Pamela Dare in To Sir, with Love in 1967 alongside Sidney Poitier and popular singer Lulu. In the same year, she appeared in Berserk!. She became well-known as a result of a regular role in the BBC early-evening soap opera, The Newcomers. She also had a major role in the popular 1970s costume drama Poldark as Caroline Penvenen Enys.
Her other notable films include Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), Prudence and the Pill, 10 Rillington Place, Doomwatch and Brannigan. In the TV series Danger UXB, she played the female lead, Susan Mount, opposite Anthony Andrews and had the lead role of Fulvia in Sci-Fi series Star Maidens.
In 1984, Geeson left London for Los Angeles where she decided to stay. Among other roles she appeared regularly on hit US sitcom Mad About You as the neighbour from Hell, Maggie Conway. She also had a recurring role as Sandrine on Star Trek Voyager episodes "Twisted" and "The Cloud".
Having always had an interest in antiques, for ten years she ran her own antique store, Blanche & Co, on West 3rd Street in Beverly Hills, in addition accepting occasional acting roles. The store closed in December, 2009.
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Harry H. Corbett OBE (28 February 1925 – 21 March 1982) was an English actor.
Corbett was best known for his starring role in the popular and long-running BBC Television sitcom Steptoe and Son in the 1960s and 70s. Early in his career he was dubbed "the English Marlon Brando" by some sections of the British press.
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Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993) was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and performances in horror films. His career spanned other genres, including film noir, drama, mystery, thriller, and comedy. He appeared on stage, television, radio, and in over one hundred films. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for motion pictures, and one for television.
Price was an art collector and consultant, with a degree in art history. He lectured and wrote books on the subject. He was the founder of the Vincent Price Art Museum in California. He was also a noted gourmet cook.
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Julie Ege was a Norwegian actress and model, who appeared in many British films of the 1960s and 1970s. She was best known for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, and Not Now Darling.
John Barry Humphries, AO, CBE (17 February 1934 - 22 April 2023) was an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor, perhaps best known for his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife and "gigastar", and Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the Court of St. James's.
He was a film producer and script writer, a star of London's West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer and an accomplished landscape painter. For his delivery of dadaist and absurdist humour to millions, biographer Anne Pender described Humphries in 2010 as not only the most significant theatrical figure of our time … [but] the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin. Humphries' characters, especially Dame Edna Everage, have brought him international renown, and he had appeared in numerous films, stage productions and television shows. Originally conceived as a dowdy Moonee Ponds housewife who caricatured Australian suburban complacency and insularity, Edna had evolved over four decades to become a satire of stardom, the gaudily dressed, acid-tongued, egomaniacal, internationally feted Housewife Gigastar, Dame Edna Everage. Humphries' other major satirical character creation was the archetypal Australian bloke Barry McKenzie, who originated as the hero of a comic strip about Australians in London (with drawings by Nicholas Garland) which was first published in Private Eye magazine.
The stories about "Bazza" (Humphries' nickname, as well as an Australian term of endearment for the name Barry) gave wide circulation to Australian slang, particularly jokes about drinking and its consequences (much of which was invented by Humphries), and the character went on to feature in two Australian films, in which he was portrayed by Barry Crocker. Humphries' other satirical characters include the "priapic and inebriated cultural attaché" Sir Les Patterson, who has "continued to bring worldwide discredit upon Australian arts and culture, while contributing as much to the Australian vernacular as he has borrowed from it", gentle, grandfatherly "returned gentleman" Sandy Stone, iconoclastic 1960s underground film-maker Martin Agrippa, Paddington socialist academic Neil Singleton, sleazy trade union official Lance Boyle, high-pressure art salesman Morrie O'Connor and failed tycoon Owen Steele.
Humphries died following complications from hip surgery at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney on 22 April 2023.
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James Booth (born David Geeves; 19 December 1927 - 11 August 2005) was an English film, stage and television actor and screenwriter. Though handsome enough to play leading roles, and versatile enough to play a wide variety of character parts, Booth naturally projected a shifty, wolfish, or unpredictable quality that led inevitably to villainous roles and comedy, usually with a cockney flavour. He is probably best known for his role as Vic Fielding in the British soap opera Coronation Street.
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Anthony Andrews made his West End theater debut at the Apollo Theatre as one of twenty young schoolboys in Alan Bennett's "Forty Years On" with John Gielgud. He began his career at the Chichester Festival Theatre in the UK. His theater credits include spells with the New Shakespeare Company - "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The Royal National Theatre production of Stephen Poliakoff's "Coming in to Land" with Maggie Smith, directed by Peter Hall, the much-acclaimed Greenwich Theatre production of Robin Chapman's "One of Us" and, as "Pastor Manders", in Robin Phillips's highly acclaimed production of Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts" at the Comedy Theatre in London, produced by Bill Kenwright.
Anthony's first television appearance was in The Wednesday Play: A Beast with Two Backs (1968) by Dennis Potter, which was part of The Wednesday Play (1964) series. His first leading role in a series was as the title character in the BBC's The Fortunes of Nigel (1974) by Sir Walter Scott. Subsequently, he distinguished himself in various television classics playing "Mercutio" in Romeo & Juliet (1978) and starred in three different plays in the "Play of the Month" (1976) series, including playing "Charles Harcourt" in "London Assurance". He also starred in Danger UXB (1979), in which he played bomb disposal hero "Brian Ash".
Most famously, he received worldwide recognition for his portrayal of the doomed "Sebastian Flyte" in Brideshead Revisited (1981) for which he won a BAFTA in the UK, the Golden Globe award in the USA and an Emmy nomination for Best Actor.
Anthony's since gone on to star in Jewels (1992), for which he received another Golden Globe nomination.
Most recently, Anthony has received tremendous acclaim for his outstanding portrayal of "Count Fosco" in "The Woman In White" at the Palace Theatre in London's West End.
As a producer, he co-produced Lost in Siberia
(1991), which translates as "Lost in Siberia", filmed entirely in Russia, which received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film and Haunted (1995), produced by his own production company, Double 'A' Films.
Alan Lake (24 November 1940 – 10 October 1984) was an English actor, best known as the third husband of Diana Dors. Born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire on 24 November 1940 of Gypsy descent, Lake studied at RADA and started work in 1964. In July 1970 Lake was involved in a pub brawl for which he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison later that year (his friend, the musician Leapy Lee, was sentenced to three years for stabbing the pub's relief manager), although he was released after serving a year. Often appeared with his wife Dors until her untimely death. Depressed and grieving for her, Lake committed suicide in 1984.
George Coulouris was a British stage, film and television actor. George Alexander Coulouris was an English film and stage actor. He was perhaps best known for his collaborations with Orson Welles, most notably Citizen Kane.
Penny Irving (born 1955 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England) is a former actress and Sun newspaper Page 3 model. She is remembered for her roles in the 1970s sitcom Are You Being Served? (which she starred in as Miss Bakewell between 1976 and 1979) and in the movie adaptation of The Likely Lads (playing the role of Sandy). Penny also starred in the cult director Pete Walker's 1974 film House of Whipcord, and would later appear in his 1978 film The Comeback.
Born in Mullagh, County Cavan, Ireland, Thomas Patrick 'T. P.' McKenna was a distinguished character actor of film and TV and a prolific stage actor. He made his stage debut in "Summer and Smoke" by Tennessee Williams at the Pike Theatre in Dublin in 1954 and his film debut in the 1960 film The Night Fighters. Film credits included Straw Dogs, Ulysses, Perfect Friday, Villain, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Red Scorpion and Valmont, whilst his TV credits included Bleak House, Inspector Morse, Doctor Who, Casualty, Ballykissangel and Lovejoy.
Alan Tilvern (5 November 1918 – 17 December 2003) was a British film and television actor with a tough-guy image. He is possibly best known for his role as R.K. Maroon in the film Who framed Roger Rabbit. He was born in Whitechapel, in the East End of London, to Jewish Lithuanian parents, who changed their name from Tilovitch. After leaving school he became a barrow boy in Brick Lane. In the Second World War he served in the Army but was invalided out in 1945
The accomplished character actress Marianne Stone had the distinction of being the most prolific actress in the UK, appearing in over 200 films, an achievement that earned her a place in the latest Guinness Book of World Records as "the actress with the most screen credits". She has also been hailed in the book English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema for her contribution to the horror movies that flourished in the Sixties, but most of her screen roles were as working-class characters. In two of her earliest films she was respectively a shop assistant in When the Bough Breaks (1947), and a sluggish waitress in Brighton Rock (1947).