Sir Thomas Daniel Courtenay is an English actor who came to prominence in the early 1960s with a succession of films, including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Billy Liar (1963), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Since the mid-1960s, he has been known primarily for his work in the theatre, although he received Academy Award nominations for Doctor Zhivago and the film adaptation of The Dresser (1983), which he had performed in the West End and on Broadway. He was created a Knight Bachelor in February 2001 for his services to cinema and theatre.
The year 1966 in television involved some significant events. Below is a list of television-related events in that year.
A miniseries is a television program that tells a story in a predetermined, limited number of episodes. The term "serial" is used in the United Kingdom and in other Commonwealth nations, though its meaning does not necessary equate to "miniseries" in its usage.
Amicus Productions was a British film production company, based at Shepperton Studios, England, active between 1962 and 1977. It was founded by American producers and screenwriters Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg.
Colleen Rose Dewhurst was a Canadian-American actress. She is known most for theatre roles, and for a while as "the Queen of Off-Broadway". In her autobiography, Dewhurst wrote: "I had moved so quickly from one Off-Broadway production to the next that I was known, at one point, as the 'Queen of Off-Broadway'. This title was not due to my brilliance, but, rather, because most of the plays I was in closed after a run of anywhere from one night to two weeks. I would then move immediately into another." She was a renowned interpreter of the works of Eugene O'Neill on the stage, and her career also encompassed film, early dramas on live television, and Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. One of her last roles was playing Marilla Cuthbert in the Kevin Sullivan television adaptations of the Anne of Green Gables series, and her reprisal of the role in the subsequent TV series Road to Avonlea. Dewhurst won two Tony Awards and four Emmy Awards for her stage and television work.
Harry Fleetwood Andrews, CBE was an English actor known for his film portrayals of tough military officers. His performance as Sergeant Major Wilson in The Hill alongside Sean Connery earned Andrews the 1965 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for the 1966 BAFTA Award for Best British Actor. The first of his more than 80 film appearances was in The Red Beret in 1953.
The Wednesday Play is an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured. The series gained a reputation for presenting contemporary social dramas, and for bringing issues to the attention of a mass audience that would not otherwise have been discussed on screen.
Hugh Leonard was an Irish dramatist, television writer and essayist. In a career that spanned 50 years, Leonard wrote nearly 30 full-length plays, 10 one-act plays, three volumes of essays, two autobiographies, three novels and numerous screenplays and teleplays, as well as writing a regular newspaper column.
Peter Barnes was an English Olivier Award-winning playwright and screenwriter. His most famous work is the play The Ruling Class, which was made into a 1972 film for which Peter O'Toole received an Oscar nomination.
Anthony Peter Dunne is an Irish former footballer who regularly appeared at left-back for Manchester United. He won 33 caps for the Republic of Ireland, playing for the national team during 1962–1975. He was Irish Footballer of the Year in 1969.
Michael William ffolliott Aldridge was an English actor. He was known for playing Seymour in the television series Last of the Summer Wine from 1986 to 1990 and he had a long career as a character actor on stage and screen dating back to the 1930s.
Robert Cecil Romer Maugham, 2nd Viscount Maugham, known as Robin Maugham, was a British author.
Lark Rise to Candleford is a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels about the countryside of north-east Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, England, at the end of the 19th century. They were written by Flora Thompson and first published together in 1945. The stories were previously published separately as Lark Rise in 1939, Over to Candleford in 1941 and Candleford Green in 1943.
Francis Matthews was an English actor, best known for playing Paul Temple in the BBC television series of the same name and for voicing Captain Scarlet in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.
Kenneth Haigh was an English actor. He first came to public recognition for playing the role of Jimmy Porter in the play Look Back in Anger in 1956 opposite Mary Ure in London's West End theatre. Haigh's performance in the role on stage was critically acclaimed as a prototype dramatic working-class anti-hero in post-Second World War English drama.
Ray Smith was a Welsh actor who played the tough-talking police chief, Detective Superintendent Gordon Spikings, in the television series Dempsey and Makepeace. He was the first actor to play Brother Cadfael for BBC radio.
Total Television was founded in 1959 by Buck Biggers, Chester "Chet" Stover, Joe Harris, and Treadwell D. Covington. They were executives in the advertising agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample who had the account for the General Mills food corporation. Total was formed to create cartoon characters encouraging children to buy General Mills breakfast cereals and other products.
Alan James Gwynne Cellan Jones is a British television and film director. Since 1963, he has directed over 50 diverse television series and films, specializing in dramas.
Stanley Price was a British novelist and playwright who wrote for the theatre, film and television since the mid sixties.
