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MARIANNE STONE
"I've just called temps!"
If actors are notorious for one thing, it's vanity. Even when a film star bites the bullet and takes a role as a lowly factory worker, it's always a heroic, sexy, well-lit factory worker with unfeasibly straight teeth. Which is why we love Marianne Stone, veteran of over 170 films, never approaching top billing (or, quite often, any billing at all), and with the least glamourous CV in filmdom - lazy waitress, cleaning woman, drunken woman, spinster, "plain woman", Madge, Peg, Mrs. Gubbins... not a list you can imagine Lesley Joseph taking on.
Born in London in 1924, Marianne (as Mary Stone) got her first taste of non-foreground stardom in Gainsborough fostering drama When the Bough Breaks as a shop assistant, a role which set the pattern for the majority of her future work. As a rule of thumb, if you see a black and white British film on telly which features secretaries, telephone operators, nurses, reporters or waitresses, chances are Ms. Stone will be among their ranks.
In 1947, around the time they appeared together in French Revolution second feature Escape Dangerous, Marianne married actor Peter Noble, who would go on to become a producer (casting his wife in a few productions, including the temptingly titled Fun at St. Fanny's), a noted film critic and, latterly, gossip columnist. Their daughter, Kara Noble, went on to do some unremarkable radio work with Jono Coleman, and take the notorious photo of Chris Tarrant and Sophie Rhys-Jones.
The imperial phase of Marianne's career ran from the late '50s to the early '70s, during which there can't have been many days when a film of hers wasn't showing somewhere in the country - in 1959 alone she managed to appear in twelve films, from I'm All Right, Jack to The Thirty-Nine Steps. Perhaps her biggest role was as playwright and "companion" of Peter Sellers Vivian Darkbloom in Lolita, a relatively major role... except she didn't have any dialogue. The Boultings, Ealing, the Doctor series, Norman Wisdom, Carry On (most famously as Maud in Convenience, being unimpressed by Bernard Bresslaw's chat-up lines, and as Contrary Old Crone in Dick, winding up Kenneth Williams' detective something rotten), Hammer, Amicus... you name a celebrated genre of British film, she'll be standing around somewhere in the background, often with a bucket.
As the '70s wore on and the British film industry gradually wore itself down, roles became fewer, and eventually, as they did to nearly every other British actor at the time, the likes of Confessions and Percy's Progress came knocking. Perhaps despairing of all this, Marianne decided to wind up her singular career, finally calling it a day after 1985's rotten supernatural Jaclyn Smith ballet melodrama Deja Vu (playing "Mabel"). But we prefer to remember her in her Bless This House-era prime, and on her eightieth birthday on August 23rd we hope you'll raise a glass with us, and toast the finest charwoman the movies ever had.
M is also for MONKHOUSE AT THE MOVIES
A King Cone's-eye view of Bob as leading man.
In common with most who spent their formative years in the Golden Age of the fleapit, Bob always professed his love of the flicks. His fondness for the Bob-'n'-Bing Road... movies is well-documented, and his collection of rare silent films from the likes of Laurel and Hardy constitutes one of the biggest archives of being funny very slowly in the world. Bob's own career on the silver screen, while never really taking off, did at one time look extremely promising. His first feature appearance came at the age of 24, with a small role as a barber in The Secret People, an Ealing thriller concerning a terrorist attack on London, alongside a pre-Roman Holiday Audrey Hepburn. But it wasn't until he had secured fame on the telly that he got a starring role - indeed, the role most people remember him for in the cinema - as lovesick Charlie Sage, the young cadet separated from new wife Shirley 'Goldfinger' Eaton in the first Carry On, Sergeant. Playing the romantic lead (ah, the days when Carry Ons had things like romantic leads!) Bob never stretched himself - in fact, short of Kenneth Williams' bookish snide, he was the least stressed character in the camp; Eaton's absence aside, nothing seemed to unduly trouble him, least of all the irascible William Hartnell. It's hardly Great Acting, we know, but we always feel he managed to get the role, such as it was, just right - the scene where a distracted Bob misses Hartnell's lecture on how to assemble a Bren gun, then gets called out for humiliation yet knows how to do it anyway, could easily have been a smug annoyance in the hands of anyone else (Jim Dale, we're looking at you).
More work in this vein quickly followed, with the burgeoning genre of the slightly naughty ensemble comedy crying out for funny-yet-sincere leading men to hold the plot together. Bob embarked on a short stint as David Cookson, the dental equivalent of Dirk Bogarde's character in the Doctor... series, in 1960's Dentist in the Chair, and the following year's Dentist on the Job, co-written by Bob himself with Hazel 'Crossroads' Adair. The films, especially the second one, where Bob and Kenneth 'Sergeant' Connor invent a revolutionary toothpaste and basically spend the entire film doing little sketches where they try to advertise it, are good fun, although you can see why they failed to take off like the Doctors and 'Ons did, due to a lack of eccentrics and grotesques in the cast (which included Ronnie Stevens, Eric Barker and Shirley Eaton again). More proto-Carry On fun was to be had by Bob and pals in Hammer's camping comedy A Weekend with Lulu, in which Lord M mucked in with the likes of Leslie Phillips, Shirley Eaton again, Sid James, Kenneth Connor again, and, er, Russ Conway, for a feather-light, plotless romp in a rural French location. Then came the slightest of all changes of pace, as Francis Oberon in the Anglo-Amalgamated murder comedy She'll Have to Go, with Hattie Jacques, Clive Dunn and Peter Butterworth.
This last didn't do much at the box office, and turned out to be Bob's last cinematic leading role, as writing and appearing on the box took up more and more of his attention. He did, however, find time to put in a vocal cameo as the compere in that silly Cliff Richard dream sequence in Thunderbirds Are Go! (saving Gerry Anderson a few shillings by doubling up as Space Navigator Brad Newman), and taking a, er, supporting role in Dickie Attenborough/Shirley MacLaine psychedelic bra-making comedy The Bliss of Mrs Blossom, as part of the obligatory galaxy of British stars, alongside John Cleese, Barry Humphries, Willie Rushton, Bob Godfrey and Marianne Stone. Then, after the inevitable cameo as a photographer at the end of Graham Stark's 1970 calling-in-favours-from-famous-mates silent short Simon Simon, that was it with Bob and the movies. The films had changed from those innocent days which he loved so much, and besides he never quite fitted into the discipline of making films - a live performer from the off, he thrived on the instant feedback he could get from working a crowd up-front. Still, the handful of stuff he did make is as watchable as ever, thanks to the same professional dedication he put into all his work - on stage, on screen or on the job, you never got less than 100% Bob.
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