Richard Todd: D Day Special
Below is a link to the News of the World’s very moving D Day Special video of Richard Todd’s trip back to Pegasus Bridge and Normandy. Unfortunately I am not allowed to post the YouTube clip on my blog, but I do recommend you take a look at one of the great man’s poignant last recordings.
Richard Todd and Catherine Bogle
During that time he played a number of roles, including, oddly enough, ‘The Yank’ in the stage version of The Hasty Heart and David in Claudia. With every performance his work improved, but Richard was fired with a burning desire to do something more than repertory work. He wanted to be a success for more reasons than one.
Catherine Bogle was an excellent actress in her own right and she played opposite him in Claudia. Richard fell in love with her. But he did not want one of those theatrical marriages where the wife is touring all over the country in one company, while the husband is touring in yet another, and travelling in the opposite direction.
A life such as this was not for Richard-he wanted a home. He wanted to get himself established as an artist so that he had something substantial to offer the girl he loved, before he asked her to marry him.
In Dundee, Richard began to think the right part would never come along, when Robert Lennard telegraphed him to come to London for a screen test. Richard arrived in London, took the test, and was immediately accepted for the part.
The eagle eyes of the casting director for Associated British Pictures saw a prospective star in Richard, his undoubted acting ability, plus his good looks, convinced Lennard that young Todd would go a long way. After the successful test he offered him a contract-a good one-Richard gladly accepted.
Associated British Pictures felt that in their latest twenty-eight-year-old contract player, they had a suitable artist for the role of Herbert in their new film, For Them That Tresspass. The part was that of a young tough, bed in the drab surroundings of poverty who finds himself convicted of a murder he did not commit. Although he eventually leaves prison a free man, there is a bitter hate and revenge in his heart against the real criminal and those who sent him to prison.
Richard was tested for the part and got it-this was indeed his big chance. The first day on the set was a gruelling ordeal for the young actor. He knew that his whole career depended on how well he played the part and naturally, he was nervous.
However it was soon obvious to everyone on the set that Richard knew his job. He brought real acting ability and strength of personality to the screen and in his capable hands the character of Herbert came to life. He was a success.
At that time Richard was living at one of London’s Airborne Clubs. It was jolly there and at night he would sit talking to some of his ex-army pals, chatting about old times, or discussing his ambitions for the future.
Richard puffed away at his favourite pipe and told his colleagues that if he was ever lucky enough to make good at this acting business, it was his ambition to own a stud farm. Another dream was some day to build a small repertory theatre in London where new plays and promising young actors and actresses could delight the London theatre-goers.
Richard was full of high hopes and dreams, but at that time he had a long way to go. He had only mounted the first step of the ladder. Still, like all young men he found it exciting to plan ahead and to dream. Some day he might be a star-but those evenings, as he sat talking to his army friends, he little imagined how soon his dream of stardom would be realised.
Associated British executives were so impressed with Richard’s performance in For Them That Trespass that when an actor was sought for the key role of ‘Lachie’ in The Hasty Heart, they immediately and unanimously put forward their young protégée’s name for the test. He was under contract to Associated British Pictures for seven years; his salary was a good one, but not enormous. They expected big things of Richard and it was agreed that his salary would increase each year, but not even top men in the motion picture business expected their young contract artist to jump to stardom in his second film!
Vincent Sherman, the American director had come to England to direct the test for The Hasty Heart. He brought with him Patricia Neal and Ronald Reagan who were to star in the film. The part of ‘Lachie’ a dour and embittered young Scottish convalescent soldier, was not easy to cast, but when Richard’s test was screened, Vincent Sherman slapped his knee and cried “That’s my boy!” So young Todd got the part. The test was flown to Warner Brothers’ Burbank Studios and back came the reply: “Sign Todd. He’s terrific.”
The part of the shy, surly, soured and friendless young Scot, who is doomed to die in a Burma military hospital, was so beautifully played by Richard Todd that it sent him rocketing to stardom. He was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. For the American public, The Hasty Heart had two Hollywood stars, but it was Richard who made the audiences sit up. The blazing sincerity of his acting claimed their sympathy even when he was in his bitterest mood.
He acted with his eyes, even when the rest of him was stonily still. His performance shook the top executives at Warner Brothers when the first rough cut of the film reached America. They could see that a great new British star had blazed into the celluloid sky, and it was clear from that one film that he was ready and able to hold his own with high-salaried, top-ranking stars from Hollywood.
As for Richard, he knew before the film was finished that he was doing a good job. He thought, when the picture was released, that it would be successful, but it never occurred to him that HE would be a sensation. When The Hasty Heart was finished, he had one day’s rest, and then started to play opposite Valerie Hobson in The Cord, at Riverside Studios.
Before the film was finished, director Alfred Hitchcock, who had see rushes of his previous films, offered him the leading part in Stage Fright.
Richard was extremely thrilled to be working for that great director and Stage Fright gave him the opportunity of sharing honours with such international stars as Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich and Michael Wilding. The film was to be made at Elstree Studios and the part of ‘Jonathan’ greatly appealed to Richard.
Considering that he had been less than fifteen months in the motion picture business, to be cast opposite such stars was really remarkable. He felt that now his success was fairly assured he could ask the girl he loved to marry him.
The Todds took a four-roomed flat in Park Street, Mayfair, London.
Click on the Label Richard Todd for more pictures and information.
Richard Todd
Thank you to Neil and Robin for their comments on yesterday’s news of the passing of film legend Richard Todd aged 90.
Yesterday my blog had an incredible 594 visitors, but it is a shame that it was on such a very sad occasion.
To read more about the life of Richard Todd please click on the 'Richard Todd' Label below.
Richard Todd (1919-2009)
It is with a heavy heart that I have to announce the death of Richard Todd aged 90. He died peacefully in his sleep on Thursday night (3rd December 2009) at his home in Grantham in eastern England.
“He had been suffering from Cancer,” his spokeswoman said, “an illness he bore with his habitual courage and dignity. His family were with him throughout.”
It is those two words, Courage and Dignity, which sum up for me this iconic film legend. He represented, as Michael Winner has said, “the best example of classic British film acting. He was a very fine actor but his style of acting went out of fashion, which was a pity because his contribution to British movies was enormous."
"Richard was also a very, very nice person. He was a good friend and wonderful to work with, utterly professional, very quiet, just got on with it. He was just a splendid person and a very, very good actor."
Born Richard Andrew Palethorpe-Todd in Dublin, Todd at first hoped to become a playwright but discovered a love for acting after helping found the Dundee Repertory Company in Scotland in 1939.
He volunteered for the British Army and graduated to the position of Captain in the 6th Airborne Division and took part in the famous D-Day landings of 1944 and was one of the first paratroopers to meet the glider force commanded by Maj. John Howard at Pegasus Bridge; he later played Howard in The Longest Day.
After being discharged in 1946, he returned to Dundee. His role as male lead in Claudia led to romance and then marriage to his leading lady, Catherine Grant-Bogle. A Scottish accent mastered while preparing for his role in The Hasty Heart proved a useful skill in his later film career.
He won praise for his performance in the film of The Hasty Heart, which included Ronald Reagan and Patricia Neal in the cast. The New York World-Telegram hailed Todd as "a vivid and vigorous actor" and the New York Herald Tribune said his performance "combined lofty stature with deep feeling, attracting enormous sympathy without an ounce of sentiment." Todd and Reagan later became close friends.
Todd was nominated for an Academy Award for the 1949 film A Hasty Heart and starred as U.S. Senate chaplain Peter Marshall in A Man Called Peter (1954). Marshall's widow Catherine said Todd "was just about the only film actor whose Scottish syllables would have met (her husband's) standards."
He also teamed up with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock to star in the thriller Stage Fright and went on to play Robin Hood and Rob Roy for Walt Disney’s live-action film productions in England. His portrayal as the outlaw Robin Hood will certainly never be forgotten on this web site.
Then came one of his best-known roles, playing Royal Air Force pilot Guy Gibson, in the classic war film The Dam Busters and later the epic The Longest Day in 1962, in which he relived the D-Day landings.
In Britain, James Bond author Ian Fleming picked Todd as his first choice to play 007 - but the actor turned down the role because of other commitments and it went to Sir Sean Connery instead.
The veteran star continued to act in the 1980s with roles in British TV shows including Casualty, crime series Silent Witness and sci-fi classic Doctor Who.
He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1993. Although many of us on this site believe a Knighthood would have been more appropriate.
Todd had a son and a daughter from his first marriage, and two sons from his marriage to Virginia Mailer. Both marriages ended in divorce.
His son Seamus from the second marriage, killed himself in 1997, and his eldest son also killed himself in 2005 following the breakdown of his marriage.
Todd said dealing with those tragedies was like his experience of war.
So how do I finish this short obituary to someone I have admired all my life. I suppose the only way is to use a line from Disney’s Story of Robin Hood which sums up for me the character of the great man.
His like you are not like to see,
In all the world again.
Patrick Barr as King Richard I
The Robin Hood Bank Manager
Mrs. Schmidt, 62, allegedly stole more than £1 million from her bank in Bonn because she "couldn't bear to see my less-fortunate customers go hungry," said her lawyer, Thomas Ohm.
"She did it out of compassion for people and now she is as poor as a church mouse herself," he said.
Mrs Schmidt worked for decades at a savings bank in the Rhineland city, rising from counter clerk to manageress. The fraud indictment against her says she began robbing from the rich to give to the poor in 2003.
Prosecutors say she interviewed all the people who she gave money to, checking that they were "needy cases", and insisted that they pay back the cash when they were on their feet.
In one year she handed out nearly £7 million - but only £6.5 million was paid back. All the cash for the poor was taken from the accounts of wealthy people.
By the time some of her customers noted that their deposits were not adding up the bank was short of £1.1 million.
Her house was seized and the court in Bonn was told the employee took no money for herself but was accused of allowing overdrafts for customers who would not normally qualify for them. She then used the money from richer customers to temporarily disguise the loans during the bank's monthly audit of overdrafts.
Mrs Schmidt has begun reimbursing the bank for the losses, reportedly from a small retirement pension. She could have faced a four-year prison sentence, but the German court decided on leniency. They noted that the employee did not take any money for herself, had confessed immediately, had lost her job and had started to pay the money back. It therefore gave her a 22-month suspended prison sentence.
I wonder if she is any good with a bow and arrow?
Television's First Robin Hood
Last week I posted an article about the very earliest television version of Robin Hood. It starred the late British actor Patrick Troughton (1920-1987) and only one episode, The Abbot of St Mary’s, survived from those early pioneering days. Neil has now pointed me in the direction of a wonderful website www.bbctv-ap.co.uk/robinhd.htm which covers the early days of the BBC when it was broadcast from Alexander Palace. The period covered is post-war from 1952 to 1963 and is constructed from the personal recollections and memoirs of Arthur Dungate. In addition there are some experiences of Lime Grove and Riverside Studios in the mid-1950s. His web site is worth a visit.
I hope Arthur doesn’t mind me copying part of his fascinating recollections of finding part of a Robin Hood episode from the very first series:
"Until the late 1970s the BBC was not an archiving organisation and thus had no requirement to keep material for posterity. While at Alexandra Palace in the early 1950s, I had a key to the film vault, and often I would go and see what was to be thrown away. Amongst several things, one item I found was part of an episode of Robin Hood, a serial for children shown in March 1953.
This was a half-hour programme eminating from Studio G (I think) at Lime Grove. No film location material was used, the whole of the action taking place live in the studio.
What I had found was a 16mm reduction print of Episode 2, The Abbot of St Mary's which Kays Labs at Finsbury Park had produced from the 35mm telefilm recording made while the programme was being transmitted.
However, only the beginning two sequences and the end sequence were there. The main story sequence had been removed for some reason, leaving only 8 minutes of the programme. Thus, although the episode is titled The Abbot of St Mary's, we never get to see the Abbot himself!
I spliced the two parts of the print together and since then it had remained in my loft for about 47 years, practically forgotten.
It was not until the autumn of 1999 that I came to realise that this is probably the earliest surviving example of a BBC Television drama series as it predates The Quatermass Experiment shown in July 1953 (of which only the first two episodes were recorded) by 4 months. Thus its historical significance is greater than I had thought, and I believe a Digi-Beta copy is now in the BBC archives."
Arthur Dungate's web site is at
http://www.bbctv-ap.co.uk/bbctvp1.htm
I hope Arthur doesn’t mind me copying part of his fascinating recollections of finding part of a Robin Hood episode from the very first series:
This was a half-hour programme eminating from Studio G (I think) at Lime Grove. No film location material was used, the whole of the action taking place live in the studio.
What I had found was a 16mm reduction print of Episode 2, The Abbot of St Mary's which Kays Labs at Finsbury Park had produced from the 35mm telefilm recording made while the programme was being transmitted.
However, only the beginning two sequences and the end sequence were there. The main story sequence had been removed for some reason, leaving only 8 minutes of the programme. Thus, although the episode is titled The Abbot of St Mary's, we never get to see the Abbot himself!
I spliced the two parts of the print together and since then it had remained in my loft for about 47 years, practically forgotten.
Arthur Dungate's web site is at
http://www.bbctv-ap.co.uk/bbctvp1.htm
Elton Hayes Songlist
Elton Hayes (1915-2001) played the part of the minstrel Allan-a-Dale in Walt Disney’s live action movie The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (1952).
Today he is sadly almost forgotten, but Hayes was very well-known to radio and television audiences of the 1950’s as ‘the man with the small guitar’ and Paul McCartney recollects that it was his song Whistle My Love from Robin Hood that influenced the Beatles composition Little Child in 1963. There is also a belief by some that a certain Reginald Kenneth Dwight of Pinner, Middlesex, changed his name to Elton John in respect of the actor and guitarist.
Recently I posted a list of Elton Hayes’s songs that have been released on record down the years. I knew it was incomplete and asked for help. Luckily I was contacted by our regular visitor Geoff Waite.
A while ago Geoff sent me a wonderfully detailed obituary of Elton Hayes by Evelyn Branston which is available to be read on this blog. Geoff is a fan of the film and has extensively researched Elton Hayes’s back catalogue. He has now very kindly helped me update my list of Elton’s recordings and sent some interesting facts to go with it.
Many of my readers have complained that there is no CD collection of Elton’s songs available and Geoff agrees:
“Except for two tracks, none of Elton’s recordings ever made it from 10 inch 78rpm and 45 rpm vinyl to CD. ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ continues to feature on an EMI ‘Hello Children Everywhere’ compilation CD whilst ‘Whistle my Love’ the only other Elton Hayes track to reach CD (again on an earlier ‘Hello Children Everywhere’ compilation) has not been available for some years now to my knowledge.
When I contacted them about the possibility of an Elton Hayes compilation, EMI told me that they now only own these two recordings, so a CD release of Elton’s Parlophone songs is sadly out of the question. It really is a great shame that his recorded music which amounts to some forty plus songs, not including the Robin Hood album, should be so shabbily overlooked by the CD generation.”
It certainly is a great shame that today’s children are unable to hear the wonderful songs of ‘the man with the small guitar.’ Surely something could be done to put some of his music onto CD!
ELTON HAYES SONGLIST
THE TABLE AND THE CHAIR / THE JUMBLIES
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1950
THE WILD COLONIAL BOY/ BACK TO HILO
78 RPM Melodisc Records 1950/51
JUST A WEARYIN’ FOR YOU/ THE PHANTOM
STAGE-COACH
‘Walt Disney’s Story of Robin Hood’
78 RPM 2LP Capitol US Released 1952
(Included 20 page colour story book)
(Included songs by Elton Hayes)
WHISTLE MY LOVE / RIDDLE DE DIDDLE DE-DAY
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1952
THE MILLER'S DAUGHTER / SPINNING WHEEL
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1952
I PASS ALL MY HOURS / COURTIN' IN THE KITCHEN
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1952
THE BROOM, THE SHOVEL, THE POKER AND THE TONGS / THE QUANGLE WANGLE'S HAT
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1952
THE LITTLE BLACK HORSE / NOT THE MARRYING KIND
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1953
LITTLE MOHEE / THE PHANTOM STAGE-COACH
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1953
THE DUCK AND THE KANGAROO / THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1953
ALL AROUND MY HAT/ THE UNQUIET GRAVE
78 RPM HMV B1052 Released 1953
(Recorded under the auspices of the English Folk Dance and Song Society)
A FROG HE WOULD A WOOING GO/OH THE CUCKOO SHE’S A PRETTY BIRD
78 RPM HMV B1053 Released 1953
GREENSLEEVES / JOE THE CARRIER LAD
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1953
I HAD A HIPPOPOTAMUS / ADELPHI ARCHES
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1954
MY HEART IS LIKE A NIGHTINGALE / BOLD BLACK KNIGHT
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1954
‘FOR THE CHILDREN’
EP Parlophone UK Released 1955
The Table and the Chair/ The Jumblies/The Broom, the Shovel, the Poker and the Tongs/ The Quangle Wangles Hat / The Duck and the Kangaroo / The Owl and the Pussycat.
JAQUELINE / LITTLE BRIDGET FLYNN
78 RPM Parlophone UK Released 1956
‘Folk Songs’
EP 45 World Record Club 1956/57
SWEET MAID IF YOU MARRY / OH GOOD ALE / I PASS ALL MY HOURS/ THE LONDON BEAU/
’TISS TRUE I NEVER WAS IN LOVE/ THE VAIN DREAMER
‘Songs for Children’
EP 45 World Record Club 1956/57
THE CUCKOO CLOCK / THE SOLDIER /THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE HIGHWAYMAN / TWO PIRATES
‘Elton Hayes Sings to his Small Guitar’
EP 45 Parlophone UK Released 1959
JOE THE CARRIER LAD / THE MILLER’S DAUGHTER
THE PHANTOM STAGE-COACH / RIDDLE DE DIDDLE DE DAY
‘The Story of Robin Hood’
LP 33 RPM EMI Music for Pleasure MFP 1285
UK Released 1963
(Movie Soundtrack)
RIDDLE-DE-DIDDLE-DE-DAY
COME SING LOW, COME SING HIGH
‘The Story of Robin Hood’
LP 33 RPM Disneyland DQ-1249 USA Released 1963
(Alternative Cover)
(Movie Soundtrack)
RIDDLE-DE-DIDDLE-DE-DAY
COME SING LOW, COME SING HIGH
‘Disneyland Doubles’
45 RPM Disneyland Doubles UK Released 1971
THE BALLAD OF ROBIN HOOD
(Reverse side was the Ballad of Davy Crocket)
‘Hello Children Everywhere Volume 4’
(Various Artists)
CD Disc EMI Released 1991
WHISTLE MY LOVE
‘Hello Children Everywhere’
(Various Artists)
CD 3 Discs EMI 6999605 Released 2005
THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT
If you see any errors or have any more information that can be added to the Elton Hayes Songlist please get in touch and if you are a CD producer how about releasing some of these gems!
Please click on the Label Elton Hayes to read more about his life.
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