The Ladykillers is a 1955 British black comedy crime film directed by Alexander Mackendrick for Ealing Studios. It stars Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers, Danny Green, Jack Warner, and Katie Johnson as the old lady, Mrs. Wilberforce.
Elizabeth MacKintosh, known by the pen name Josephine Tey, was a Scottish author. Her novel The Daughter of Time, a detective work investigating the death of the Princes in the Tower, was chosen by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time. Her first play Richard of Bordeaux, written under another pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, starred John Gielgud in its successful West End run.
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, was an English actor and theatre director whose career spanned eight decades. With Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, he was one of the trinity of actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. A member of the Terry family theatrical dynasty, he gained his first paid acting work as a junior member of his cousin Phyllis Neilson-Terry's company in 1922. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), he worked in repertory theatre and in the West End before establishing himself at the Old Vic as an exponent of Shakespeare in 1929–31.
John Dickson Carr was an American author of detective stories, who also published using the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn.
Albert Eric Maschwitz OBE, sometimes credited as Holt Marvell, was an English entertainer, writer, editor, broadcaster and broadcasting executive.
Broadcasting House is the headquarters of the BBC, in Portland Place and Langham Place, London. The first radio broadcast from the building was made on 15 March 1932, and the building was officially opened two months later, on 15 May. The main building is in Art Deco style, with a facing of Portland stone over a steel frame. It is a Grade II* listed building and includes the BBC Radio Theatre, where music and speech programmes are recorded in front of a studio audience.
Val Henry Gielgud CBE was an English actor, writer, director and broadcaster. He was a pioneer of radio drama for the BBC, and also directed the first ever drama to be produced in the newer medium of television.
John Edward Hawkins, CBE was an English actor who worked on stage and in film from the 1930s until the 1970s. One of the most popular British film stars of the 1950s, he was known for his portrayal of military men.
Shoestring is a British detective fiction drama series, set in an unnamed city in the West of England and filmed in Bristol, featuring the down-at-heel private detective Eddie Shoestring, who presents his own show on Radio West, a local radio station. Broadcast on BBC1, the programme lasted for two series, between 30 September 1979 and 21 December 1980, featuring a total of 21 episodes. After the second series was broadcast Eve decided not to return to the role, as he "wanted to diversify into theatre roles". Subsequently, the production team began taking popular elements of the series and revising them for a new series, Bergerac, set in Jersey and first shown in 1981. BBC Books published two novels written by Paul Ableman, Shoestring (1979) and Shoestring's Finest Hour (1980).
Alan Wheatley was an English actor. He was a well known stage actor in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, appeared in forty films between 1931 and 1965 and was a frequent broadcaster on radio from the 1930s to the 1990s, and on television from 1938 to 1964. His most prominent television role was the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene as Robin Hood; Wheatley played the sheriff in 54 episodes between 1955 and 1959. Earlier, he had played Sherlock Holmes in the first television series featuring the great detective.
Rope, retitled Rope's End for its American release, is a 1929 English play by Patrick Hamilton. It was said to be inspired by the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.
Emery Bonett was the pen name of Felicity Winifred Carter, an English writer and playwright. Her books were made into films. She wrote several mystery, suspense and detective novels in collaboration with her husband, John Bonett, published during the 1940s-60s.
Ian Hunter was a Cape Colony-born British actor of stage, film and television.
The Alphabet Murders is a 1965 British detective film directed by Frank Tashlin and starring Tony Randall, Anita Ekberg and Robert Morley. It is based on the 1936 novel The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie.
Claude Austin Trevor Schilsky was an Irish actor who had a long career in film and television.
Reginald Denham was an English writer, theatre and film director, actor and film producer.
Lancelot De Giberne Sieveking DFC was an English writer and pioneer BBC radio and television producer. He was married three times, and was father to archaeologist Gale Sieveking (1925–2007) and Fortean-writer Paul Sieveking (1949–).
Arthur Hambling was a British actor, on stage from 1912, and best known for appearances in the films Henry V (1944) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). In 1939 he appeared in the West End in N.C. Hunter's comedy Grouse in June.
Fortune Is a Woman is a 1957 black and white British-American film noir crime film directed by Sidney Gilliat and starring Jack Hawkins and Arlene Dahl. The screenplay was by Gilliat and Frank Launder, from an adaptation by Val Valentine of the 1952 novel Fortune is a Woman by Winston Graham. Its plot concerns an attempted insurance fraud that goes badly wrong.
Frederick Walter James Peisley was a British stage, film and television actor and theatre director whose career spanned five decades. He is known for The Secret of the Loch (1934), Gentlemen's Agreement (1935) and Murder at the Cabaret (1936). His later career was mostly in television.
