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1-19 of 19
- Actress
- Writer
- Composer
From the mid-1980s right up until her premature death in April 2016, Victoria Wood's appearances on stage and television were always eagerly anticipated, whether it was laugh-a-minute stand-up, a beautifully judged dramatic performance in the TV film Housewife, 49 (2005) or the canteen sitcom dinnerladies (1998). The incredible care and craft she lavished on each look and line of dialogue was as meticulous as it was matchless.
A shy, isolated child, Victoria Wood was born in Prestwich, Lancashire, in May 1953, the youngest of four siblings. Her insurance salesman father Stanley Wood was a frustrated writer who made up songs for his office parties and eventually went on to write scripts for Coronation Street (1960). Largely ignored by her parents ("Our house looked like an explosion in an Oxfam shop"), Wood stayed in her bedroom and sought attention as a performer, joining a youth theatre group in Rochdale and teaching herself to play the piano. She also learnt to play the trumpet.
Having been considered exceptionally bright at her primary school, Wood lost her way at Bury Grammar School, intimidated by the competition and envious of the more outgoing girls who appeared to be "having a wonderful time".
While studying drama at Birmingham University she auditioned for the ITV talent show New Faces (1973), performing a song about a woman contemplating marriage to a man who washes his Cortina more than his neck. Though eliminated in the second round, she was talent-spotted by poet Roger McGough for a revue he took up to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1976.
Her first big break was the TV show That's Life! (1986), writing and performing satirical songs loosely inspired by topical events. Her lifelong friendship and collaboration with Julie Walters began in the 1970s when they both appeared in a revue, 'In at the Death', at London's tiny Bush Theatre, for which Wood wrote a sketch. Its success led to the commissioning of Talent, Wood's first full-length play, by the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield. Talent was later filmed by Granada TV, starring Julie Walters as a disillusioned talent-show contestant. The stage version won her the Evening Standard's most promising new playwright award.
Granada commissioned two more plays from Wood, and urged her to write a sketch show for herself and Julie Walters, which became Wood and Walters (1981) and also featured Roger Brierley with who she would go on to work with again in her later productions in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the mid-1980s she was poached by the BBC for her own series, Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985), for which she assembled her own mini-repertory company consisting of Julie Walters, Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston. It was for this show that she also launched the much-loved Acorn Antiques, a low-budget TV soap of such ineptitude it made Crossroads (1986) look slick.
The spoof was held in such affection that Wood, along with the original cast, was able to sell out the Theatre Royal Haymarket 20 years later with Acorn Antiques: The Musical (2006), for which she wrote the score. Despite generally favourable reviews and Olivier nominations for best new musical, best actress in a musical, Julie Walters and best performance in a supporting role in a musical Celia Imrie, Wood later claimed that the show was a bad idea because she felt it had undermined her credibility as a playwright. Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985) ran for two series and also featured Patricia Routledge, Sue Wallace, Deborah Grant, Peter Lorenzelli, Jim Broadbent, Peter Martin, Jim Broadbent and Susie Blake.
Victoria Wood and Julie Walters worked together again with Celia Imrie, Anne Reid, Susie Blake and Lill Roughley in 1989 in a series of six playlets for the series named simply Victoria Wood (1989) which included an appearance from Joan Sims as well as appearances from Jim Broadbent, Peter Martin, Patricia Hodge, Philip Lowrie, William Osborne and Maureen Lipman.
Then again on television in 1992, Victoria Wood's All Day Breakfast (1992) starred Celia Imrie, Julie Walters, Susie Blake, Anne Reid and also featured Duncan Preston, William Osborne and Philip Lowrie.
And yet again in 1994 in Wood's TV film Pat and Margaret (1994) which also starred Julie Walters, Duncan Preston, Anne Reid, Deborah Grant, Peter Lorenzelli, Sue Wallace, Roger Brierley, Philip Lowrie and Angela Curran as well as a special appearance from Dame Thora Hird, about the strained reunion of two estranged sisters, one the star of an American TV soap, the other a waitress in a motorway service station in northern England. Wood cast herself as the dowdy Margaret, while acknowledging in an interview that she probably had more in common with Pat, a woman "so determined to get on there's no room for anything else".
While developing as a dramatist, she continued to do stand-up, nailing the hypocrisies and absurdities of everyday life with stinging wit and whiplash delivery. Her targets were often "people who think a lot of themselves" in whatever field of endeavour. With her cropped hair and androgynous dress sense, Wood cleverly bypassed any gender preference - an unthreatening, even comforting stage presence to the majority.
Fellow comedian Simon Fanshawe wrote of her: "The point about Wood is that she makes you feel comfortable and then slips spiky material in under your guard."
The commentator Judith Woods wrote in 2007: "Quite simply, Victoria Wood is a performer for grown-ups. She has an everywoman appeal to female viewers, but none of the stridency that traditionally puts off male audiences. She isn't preoccupied with pastiche and celebrity. Real life is her forte, in all its peculiarities."
An assiduous student of vintage comedy, Wood was keenly aware of her predecessors, both male and female. She saw what she did in a historical context, citing the likes of Vesta Victoria, Gracie Fields, Max Miller, Hetty King and Ken Dodd, the greats of music hall and variety, as her inspiration.
She had no interest in reflecting the often racist, sexist stand-up style of the 1980s. Her more enlightened and sophisticated take on the changes taking place in society prevailed while the unreconstructed male chauvinists withered on the vine. In a Guardian interview in 1984, she said: "I just assume that everyone believes the sexes are equal. When I go out there and make them laugh, I'm saying, 'This is my personality, I hope you like it.'"
In 1998 came the sitcom dinnerladies (1998), again collaborating with 'Anne Reid', Duncan Preston and Celia Imrie with Julie Walters also making appearances, with Angela Curran, Graham Seed, Thora Hird (then aged 87 and in a wheelchair), Richenda Carey, Lill Roughley, Andrew Livingston (2 uncredited appearances in the first series), Dora Bryan, Henry Kelly, Peter Martin, Peter Lorenzelli, Sue Wallace, Kay Adshead and Bernard Wrigley (all of whom she had worked with previously) all making appearances in one or more episodes. The series also featured three actresses who appeared in every single episode, namely Thelma Barlow, Shobna Gulati and essentially launching the career of the actress Maxine Peake. Other regular cast members would also go on to star in Coronation Street (1960) such as Sue Cleaver and Andrew Dunn. The award-winning sitcom ran for two series and consisted of a total of sixteen episodes including Christmas and millennium specials.
December 2000 saw the Christmas sketch show special Victoria Wood: With All the Trimmings (2000), featuring her regular troupe of actors including Celia Imrie, Julie Walters and Anne Reid, with further appearances from Richenda Carey, Maxine Peake and Shobna Gulati as well as a string of special guest stars such as Angela Rippon, Bob Monkhouse and Roger Moore.
Such a prodigious talent always comes at a cost, and for Wood it was her 20-year marriage to the magician Geoffrey Durham, with whom she had two children. After the breakdown of their marriage in 2002, divorcing in 2003, she withdrew from the limelight for a couple of years and went into therapy, saying it was too painful to appear in public while her private life was in turmoil.
She continued nevertheless to produce one-off specials including Victoria Wood's Sketch Show Story (2002) and Victoria Wood's Big Fat Documentary (2004). During this period Wood tended to move away from comedy to focus on drama,notably in her award-winning 2006 TV film Housewife, 49 (2005), an adaptation of the real-life wartime diaries of a Lancashire woman, Nella Last, whose life is unexpectedly turned around by the knock-on effects of war. Her beautifully judged script - and performance in the lead - deservedly won her a best actress BAFTA, as well as a best single drama award. On this occasion Wood chose to mainly work with a different set of actors and actresses including for example Stephanie Cole, Sylvestra Le Touzel and Wendy Nottingham, though Sue Wallace with whom she had worked with on at least three separate occasions previously also featured.
In 2007 Wood appeared in a three-part BBC travel documentary Victoria's Empire (2007), in which she travelled around the world in search of the history, cultural impact and customs the British Empire placed on the parts of the world it ruled. She departed Victoria Station, London, for Calcutta, Hong Kong and Borneo in the first programme. In programme two she visited Ghana, Jamaica and Newfoundland and in the final programme, New Zealand, Australia and Zambia, finishing at the Victoria Falls.
On Boxing Day 2007 she appeared as "Nana" in the Granada dramatisation of Noel Streatfeild's novel Ballet Shoes (2007).
2009 saw Wood reunite with Julie Walters to produce a Christmas special for the BBC Mid Life Christmas (2009). She again selected actors and actresses with who she had already worked with to fill complementary roles, on this occasion working with Sylvestra Le Touzel, Wendy Nottingham, Jason Watkins, Lorraine Ashbourne and Marcia Warren, who had all featured in Housewife, 49 (2005) a few years previous.
On New Year's Day 2011 Wood appeared in a BBC drama Eric & Ernie (2011) as Eric Morecambe's mother, Sadie Bartholomew.
In 2011, Wood's last major stage work, 'That Day We Sang', again based on a true story, garnered rave reviews at the Manchester International Festival, and was revived three years later at the Royal Exchange. The Stage called it "an entirely original and authentically British musical that's the best of its kind about childhood aspiration since Billy Elliot". Lyn Gardner, writing in The Guardian, said: "Music runs through the show like an unstoppable river of emotion, and Wood's script is both tart as a plum, and unashamedly sentimental."
On 23 December 2012 BBC One screened Loving Miss Hatto (2012), a drama written by Wood about the life of concert pianist Joyce Hatto, the centre of a scandal over the authenticity of her recordings and her role in the hoax.
On 26 December 2014, a television adaptation of That Day We Sang (2014), starring Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton, was shown on BBC TV.
In early 2015, Wood took part in a celebrity version of The Great Comic Relief Bake Off (2013) and was crowned Star Baker in her episode.
She co-starred with Timothy Spall in Sky television's three-part television adaptation of Fungus the Bogeyman (2015), which was first broadcast over three days in December 2015, The miniseries was filmed in the summer of 2015. This was to be her last acting project and her final role and she was notably absent from the screening of the series in late autumn that year.
Sadly in fact in the autumn of 2015 Wood fell ill with terminal cancer and withdrew from public life entirely, she was later hospitalized but she was subsequently released to be allowed to die at home with her two children at her bedside.
Victoria Wood died on 20 April 2016 at her home in Highgate, North London.
She had been appointed OBE in 1997 and had subsequently advanced to CBE in 2008.
The writer and critic Clive James said Wood "changed the field for women and indeed for everybody, because very few of the men were trying hard enough as writers before she came on the scene and showed them what penetrating social humour should actually sound like."
She was survived by her daughter Grace Durham who is an accomplished concert singer and recitalist and her son Henry Durham.- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Nova Pilbeam was a famous child actress on stage and screen in the UK. Her biggest successes were her two movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and this film. She married director Pen Tennyson in 1939, but unfortunately she was widowed less than two years later when he died in WWII. She retired from movies in 1951.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Sean Hughes was born on 10 November 1965 in London, England, UK. He was an actor and writer, known for The Last Detective (2003), Sean's Show (1992) and The Commitments (1991). He died on 16 October 2017 in Highgate, London, England, UK.- Constance Wake was born in 1928 in Horsham, West Sussex, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Behind the Headlines (1956), Suspense (1962) and Studio 4 (1962). She was married to Warren Mitchell. She died on 17 September 2017 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- John Cadell was born on 13 December 1915 in Marylebone, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for The Thracian Horses (1946) and Possession (1947). He was married to Gillian Howell. He died on 24 December 1989 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Helena Stevens was born on 18 October 1921 in Racine, Wisconsin, USA. She was an actress, known for Highlander (1986), The Lords of Discipline (1983) and Inspector Morse (1987). She died on 16 January 2009 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Ian Wallace was an affectionately regarded example of a rare, versatile breed. An opera bass-baritone of distinction, he also helped popularise the Michael Flanders and Donald Swann revue number The Hippopotamus Song - "mud, mud, glorious mud" - and was a star of the BBC Radio 4 quiz show My Music. Wallace was as at home in pantomime as he was at Glyndebourne, while his London stage work included co-starring with Robert Morley in the musical Fanny at Drury Lane in 1956.
Rotund and good-natured, Wallace had a unique talent as a raconteur. He had an unerring eye for human weakness and absurdity, but was himself so unmalicious that he was able to tell stories that made even the "victims" laugh. One of his favourite anecdotes concerned the occasion when he felt faint on stage in opera and grabbed the soprano in front of him for support. Afterwards she thanked him for supporting her when she felt faint. Just as Wallace seldom spoke ill of anyone, few spoke ill of him. As Jeanette Chalmers, his agent of many years, put it, he succeeded not only because he had talent but because he was very good with people - "he was very untheatrical ... and very straightforward".
He was, however, capable of straight talking. When in the 1980s the BBC accountants prescribed the abolition of some of the BBC orchestras as part of a cost-cutting exercise, Wallace was one of the performers who took the risk of publicly opposing wholesale cuts, while other BBC stars found it politic to keep their mouths shut.
From the first, Wallace had an affinity with the lighter and funnier side of life, though he did suffer early setbacks despite coming from a privileged background. Born in London, he was the son of Sir John Wallace, Liberal MP for Dumfermline between the two world wars, who wanted his son to become a barrister. For this ambition, the portents were not good. Ian and his mother Mary were fascinated by the stage. The boy made his first stage appearance at the age of five in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, playing Bottom the weaver. During the performance he was beset by fits of coughing and only afterwards was it realised that he had been suffering from whooping cough.
Though his father did not encourage his acting ambitions, he regarded them with tolerance. Ian was taken to variety performances at the London Coliseum, and saw the Houston Sisters, Layton and Johnstone and the clown Grock.
After Charterhouse school, in Godalming, Surrey, he read law at Cambridge, a course which his father thought would set him up as a barrister and, ultimately, a politician. After making more of an impact in amateur dramatics than in the law faculty, he emerged with a good third-class degree when - as he told it - his tutor was unable to get him a bad second.
The career dilemma was postponed by the war, in which he joined the Royal Artillery but was invalided out after a motorcycle accident. He returned to military service after he recovered, but as a lieutenant was invalided out again in 1944 with tuberculosis of the spine after spending a long time in a military hospital, where he entertained fellow patients with his own show, High Temperature, despite being in a plaster cast. "I've been here about 16 months and I got bored, so I asked if I could do this show. We're having a wonderful time," he told journalists who turned up at Horton emergency hospital in Epsom, Surrey.
In the dismal two years he spent virtually on his back, his thoughts turned more and more to the theatre. He first appeared on the professional stage at the Little Park Theatre in Glasgow, playing the nobleman in Ashley Duke's The Man With a Load of Mischief. He made a guinea (£1.05p) a week. One of the critics compared him with the distinguished actor Charles Laughton, and not only because he weighed 16 stone at the time. He never received any kind of formal instruction in acting.
After a play at the Citizens Theatre and some drama and school broadcasts for the BBC, he made his London stage debut in 1945 at Sadler's Wells in James Bridie's play The Forrigan Reel. It was produced by the actor Alastair Sim. Shortly afterwards, Wallace appeared in a singing role in The Glass Slipper at the St James's Theatre. He began to feel that his future might lie in doing character parts in musicals, regarding his voice as not good enough for opera.
His friends disagreed and persuaded him to audition, with the result that he got the part of Schaunard in La Bohème for the New London Opera Company. Princess Elizabeth was in the royal box on the opening night in 1946. Wallace worked for the group for two years. The musical director was Alberto Erede, and the singers were half British and half Italian.
From there he went, in 1948, to Glyndebourne, the opera house near Lewes, in East Sussex, appearing in comic roles as principal buffo at the Edinburgh Festival and broadcasting many of the productions for the BBC: his association with the company lasted till 1961. He also appeared in revue, sang under Sir Malcolm Sargent in The Mikado and Iolanthe, and performed the comic songs of Flanders and Swann. In 1953 he was in the Royal Command Variety Show at the London Palladium as well as singing in opera in major houses in Europe and beyond, and, in 1962, his stage "after-dinner entertainment" 4 to the Bar - arranged with a cast of four after he had modestly declined to bear the responsibility of a one-man show - was well received. It lampooned the then "hot" Irish playwright Brendan Behan by showing him singing about "Mountains of corn/Sweeping down to the sea". Wallace later relented and devised a one-man show, An Evening With Ian Wallace.
My Music (1967-94) always ended with singing from Wallace and John Amis, accompanied by Steve Race, who devised the questions put to them and the comedy writers Denis Norden and Frank Muir. It was just one of the programmes on radio and television that made Wallace a popular figure without his ever losing authority as an opera singer. In the late 1960s he appeared regularly with Scottish Opera in roles such as Leporello in Mozart's Don Giovanni and Pistola in Verdi's Falstaff, and 1987 saw him both as a classical singer for Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, and as the college Praelector in the Cambridge spoof Porterhouse Blue on Channel 4.
Wallace had a handsome home in Highgate, north London, and a Norfolk cottage which was useful to a man who liked sailing, golf, photography and walking. In 1983 he was appointed OBE, and in 1991 made honorary doctor of music by St Andrews University.
In 1948 he married Patricia Black, from Fife in Scotland, and they had two children, Rosemary and John.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Born the youngest of ten children of John Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (always called "Col") was bullied so viciously by his elder brother that he ran away from home at the age of seven. Though he was discovered and returned the next morning, the memory of that night would provide fodder for his later poetry. After his father's death, Col was sent to live with his hard-drinking Uncle John Bowden, who would often take his ten-year-old nephew with him to the taverns.
After the deaths of two of his siblings in the early 1790s, Col wrote "Monody," and in trying to conquer both his melancholy and an illness, he became addicted to laudanum opium. After unsuccessful attempts to handle both college and mounting debts, Col ran away and joined the army in 1793. As he was entirely unsuited to military service, his brother managed to arrange his discharge by reason of insanity and Col returned to college, where he became good friends with a political radical named Robert Southey. Col met and married Robert Southey's sister-in-law, Sara Fricker, and tried to be a respectable family man. Depressed by the death of his infant son and persistent illness, Col moved to Malta, where he spied for the British Crown. He separated from his wife, became estranged from his children, and despite numerous tries, was unable to break his opium habit. Samuel Taylor Coleridge died 25th of July, 1834.- Helen Misener was born on 25 April 1907 in Willesden, London, England, UK. She was an actress, known for A Night to Remember (1958), BBC Sunday-Night Theatre (1950) and The Shop at Sly Corner (1948). She died on 31 July 1960 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Douglas Jefferies was born on 21 April 1884 in Islington, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for The Cardinal (1936), While the Sun Shines (1947) and BBC Sunday-Night Theatre (1950). He was married to Nora Kathleen Wallis. He died on 27 December 1959 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Douglas Gamley was born on 24 September 1924 in Melbourne, Australia. He was a composer, known for Tron (1982), The Little Prince (1974) and Night After Night After Night (1969). He died on 5 February 1998 in Highgate, London, UK.- Silas K. Hocking was born on 24 March 1850 in Brannel, Cornwall, England, UK. Silas K. was a writer, known for Her Benny (1920), Dick's Fairy (1921) and The Shadow Between (1920). Silas K. died on 15 September 1935 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Simon Kester was born on 30 May 1924 in Bethnal Green, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for The Verdict Is Yours (1958), Alice Through the Looking Box (1960) and What's It all About? (1960). He died on 22 November 2019 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Charles Childerstone was born on 3 July 1872 in Enfield, Middlesex, England, UK. He was an actor, known for The Thirteenth Candle (1933), Perfect Understanding (1933) and The Cry for Justice (1919). He died on 29 May 1947 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Jill Nyasa was born on 1 July 1903 in Malawi. She was an actress, known for Murder in the Cathedral (1951), ITV Play of the Week (1955) and Noah (1946). She died on 13 December 1964 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Eva Dare was born in 1870 in Woolwich, London, England, UK. She was an actress, known for The Girl Who Took the Wrong Turning (1915). She was married to Walter Melville. She died on 15 October 1931 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Francis Watson was born on 7 August 1907 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, UK. He was married to Claire Bale. He died on 30 October 1988 in Highgate, Camden, London, England, UK.
- Lynne Ashcroft was born on 15 February 1944 in Marylebone, London, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Sergeant Cork (1963), Armchair Theatre (1956) and Public Eye (1965). She died on 28 March 1967 in Highgate, London, England, UK.
- Allan Bourne was born on 10 June 1907 in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, UK. He was an actor, known for The Pilgrim's Progress (1939), Magyar Melody (1939) and Lady Audley's Secret (1949). He was married to Stella Gibbons. He died on 22 July 1959 in Highgate, London, England, UK.