Dandy Nichols was an English actress best known for her role as Else Garnett, the long-suffering wife of the character Alf Garnett who was a parody of a working class Tory, in the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part.
Anthony Asquith was an English film director. He collaborated successfully with playwright Terence Rattigan on The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951), among other adaptations. His other notable films include Pygmalion (1938), French Without Tears (1940), The Way to the Stars (1945) and a 1952 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.
Violette Muriel Box, Baroness Gardiner, was an English screenwriter and director, Britain's most prolific female director, having directed 12 feature films and one featurette. Her screenplay for The Seventh Veil won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Captain Boycott is a 1947 British historical drama film directed by Frank Launder and starring Stewart Granger, Kathleen Ryan, Mervyn Johns, Alastair Sim and Cecil Parker. Robert Donat makes a cameo appearance as the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The film explains how the word boycott appeared in the English language. Ironically, the titular character plays a secondary role in the film, as an anti-hero, and the hero of the film is Hugh Davin.
The Spy in Black is a 1939 British film, and the first collaboration between the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. They were brought together by Alexander Korda to make the World War I spy thriller novel of the same title by Joseph Storer Clouston into a film. Powell and Pressburger eventually made over 20 films during the course of their partnership.
Contraband is a 1940 wartime spy film by the British director-writer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which reunited stars Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson after their earlier appearance in The Spy in Black the previous year. On this occasion, Veidt plays a hero, something he did not do very often, and there is also an early (uncredited) performance by Leo Genn.
Cecil Parker was an English actor with a distinctively husky voice, who usually played supporting roles, often characters with a supercilious demeanour, in his 91 films made between 1928 and 1969.
Phyllis Hannah Murray-Hill, known professionally as Phyllis Calvert, was an English film, stage and television actress. She was one of the leading stars of the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s such as The Man in Grey (1943) and was one of the most popular movie stars in Britain in the 1940s. She continued her acting career for another 50 years.
Private's Progress is a 1956 British comedy film directed by John Boulting and starring Ian Carmichael, Peter Jones, William Hartnell and Terry-Thomas. The script was by John Boulting and Frank Harvey based on the novel of the same name by Alan Hackney.
The Happiest Days of Your Life is a 1950 British comedy film directed by Frank Launder, based on the 1947 play of the same name by John Dighton. The two men also wrote the screenplay. It is one of a stable of classic British film comedies produced by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat for British Lion Film Corporation. The film was made on location in Liss and at Riverside Studios, London. In several respects, including some common casting, it was a precursor of the St. Trinian's films of the 1950s and 1960s.
Richard Marner was a Russian-British actor. He was best known for his role as Colonel Erik von Strohm in the British sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!.
The Next of Kin, also known as Next of Kin, is a 1942 Second World War propaganda film produced by Ealing Studios. The film was originally commissioned by the British War Office as a training film to promote the government message that "Careless talk costs lives". After being taken on by Ealing Studios, the project was expanded and given a successful commercial release. After the war and up until at least the mid 1960s, services in British Commonwealth countries continued to use The Next of Kin as part of security training. The film's title is derived from the phrase "the next of kin have been informed" as used by radio announcers when reporting on the loss of personnel in action.
Let George Do It! is a 1940 British black-and-white comedy musical war film directed by Marcel Varnel and starring George Formby. It was produced by Michael Balcon for Associated Talking Pictures and its successor, Ealing Studios, and distributed in the UK by ABFD. This was the first comedy from this studio to deal directly with the Second World War.
Bill Dean was a British actor who was born in Everton, Liverpool, Lancashire. He took his stage name in honour of Everton football legend William 'Dixie' Dean.
Love on the Dole is a 1941 British drama film starring Deborah Kerr and Clifford Evans. It was adapted from the novel of the same name by Walter Greenwood. It was the first English-made feature film to show English police wielding batons against a crowd.
David Hay Petrie was a Scottish actor noted for playing eccentric characters, among them Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (1934), the McLaggen in The Ghost Goes West (1935) and Uncle Pumblechook in Great Expectations (1946).
Fanny by Gaslight is a 1944 British drama film, directed by Anthony Asquith and produced by Gainsborough Pictures, set in the 1870s and adapted from a 1940 novel by Michael Sadleir.
Muriel George was an English singer and film actress. She appeared in 55 films between 1932 and 1955. She also appeared on the variety stage and sang on radio with her second husband Ernest Butcher for thirty years. Her hobbies were gardening and antiques. By her first marriage, to Robert Davenport, an author and lyricist, she had a son, the critic John Davenport.
Nora Gordon was a British film and television actress. She was married to Leonard Sharp. Her daughter was the actress Dorothy Gordon. She also appeared in a number of British Ministry of Information films, notably during World War II.
The Great Impersonation is a 1942 American thriller film directed by John Rawlins and starring Ralph Bellamy, Evelyn Ankers and Aubrey Mather. It is an adaptation of the 1920 novel The Great Impersonation by Edward Phillips Oppenheim with the setting moved from the early 1910s of the novel to the Second World War. It was made by Universal Pictures and was a remake of their 1935 film of the same name.
