Richard Todd; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
role as Guy Gibson in 'The Dam Busters'
By Tom Vallance
Saturday, 5 December 2009
A major star of the British cinema in the 1950s, Richard
Todd won an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a taciturn
dying Scot in The Hasty Heart (1949), played Robin Hood and
Sir Walter Raleigh on screen, and was Ian Fleming's first
choice to play his creation, James Bond.
But the short, stocky actor will be best remembered for his
portrayal of Wing Commander Guy Gibson in the acclaimed war
film, The Dam Busters. Todd was himself a war hero, one of
the first British officers to parachute into Normandy during
the D-Day landings in 1944, and he re-lived some of that
experience when he played Major John Howard in the film The
Longest Day (1962). His private life was marked by the
tragic suicides of two of his sons.
The son of a physician, he was born Richard Andrew
Palethorpe-Todd in 1919 in Dublin, where his father, Andrew
William Palethorpe-Todd, was celebrated as an international
rugby union player who won three caps for Ireland. Todd
spent his early childhood in India, where his father served
as an army doctor, but later the family moved to West Devon.
After attending Shrewsbury Public School, he was expected to
follow his father in a military career, and trained at
Sandhurst, but left to study acting at the Italia Conti
Academy.
He made his stage debut as Curio in Twelfth Night (1936), at
the Open Air Theatre in Regents Park, and after gaining
experience in regional theatres he co-founded the Dundee
Repertory Theatre in 1939, but his stage career was
interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1941
he received a commission in the Army, serving in the King's
Own Yorkshire Light Infantry before joining the Parachute
Regiment as part of the British 6th Airborne Division. His
battalion parachuted into Normandy on 6 June, 1944 as
reinforcements after glider troops had landed, and he later
helped Major John Howard secure Orne Bridge (now called
Pegasus Bridge) in Caen, fighting off several German
counter-attacks.
On demobilisation, he returned to Dundee Rep before signing
a seven-year contract with Associated British Films. He made
his screen debut in Cavalcanti's For Them That Trespass
(1949), giving a strong performance as an ex-convict wrongly
imprisoned for murder. "My first film didn't light any
fires," he told the historian Brian McFarlane, "but
Cavalcanti taught me a great deal about techniques to
overcome my faults and, really, the rudiments of screen
acting."
On the last day of shooting at Elstree Studios, Todd was
spotted by director Vincent Sherman, who was preparing a
film version of John Patrick's play The Hasty Heart and felt
that Todd would be ideal casting as the dour, truculent
soldier Lachlan McLachlan, who initially rejects the
attempts at friendship made by fellow patients in a military
hospital in Burma (the Scottish actor Gordon Jackson had
already been tested for the part.) Though his co-stars,
Ronald Reagan and Patricia Neal, gave fine performances,
Todd was outstanding as the dying Scot, later commenting, "I
had seen boys in the war in much the same state and I knew
what he was feeling," and he won an Academy Award nomination
as best actor (losing to Broderick Crawford in All The
King's Men).
"I got the impression that Ronnie Reagan was sizing me up a
bit at the beginning, but I think his misgivings faded when
he saw I could handle the part all right; he was extremely
nice and helpful." Patricia Neal said, "I respected Todd
immensely as an actor, and later when I lived in England, I
always saw him whenever he played Oxford."
In Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) Todd played a
villain on screen for the first time, as the former
boy-friend of an acting student (Jane Wyman) who comes to
her for help, describing in a vivid flashback his
involvement with a musical star (Marlene Dietrich) who has
killed her husband. Hitchcock's use of a flashback that
turns out to be a lie was heavily criticised, and despite a
strong cast the film is not among the director's best, with
Todd a dour killer.
"Hitchcock was a strange man," he recalled, "not a lot of
help to his actors." Todd was also a not very sympathetic
character in his first Hollywood-made film, King Vidor's
mystery drama Lightning Strikes Twice (1951), as a man
wrongly suspected of killing his wife, but he regained his
popularity with three period romps for Walt Disney, The
Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1951); The Sword and
the Rose (1953), a fanciful account of the love of a
commoner (Todd) for Mary Tudor (Glynis Johns), sister of
Henry VIII; and Rob Roy - The Highland Rogue (1953), for
which Todd once more assumed a Scottish brogue.
In 1953 he told the BBC of his ambition to play Heathcliff
in Wuthering Heights, and a television version was quickly
arranged, with Nigel Kneale given one week to write the
script. Todd returned to Hollywood to star as the Reverend
Peter Marshall, the Scotsman who became chaplain for the US
Senate, in the screen biography, A Man Called Peter (1955).
Todd was superb as the charismatic preacher, delivering his
sermons with flair and fervour, dealing with tuberculosis
and maintaining a warmly loving relationship with his wife
(Jean Peters). The film was a big hit in the US, and Todd
then co-starred with Bette Davis in The Virgin Queen (1955),
as Sir Walter Raleigh, with Joan Collins as Raleigh's
sweetheart. The film was initially titled Sir Walter
Raleigh, and planned as a starring vehicle for Todd and
Collins, but when Davis was cast the emphasis shifted to her
character and the title changed (though her role took only
12 days to shoot).
Todd then returned to the UK to star in his most famous
role, that of Guy Gibson in The Dam Busters (1955), which he
considered "the best military war picture ever made". Gibson
trained the crews of the aeroplanes with the responsibility
of precisely releasing the "bouncing baby bombs" that would
destroy the hitherto unassailable Ruhr dams that supplied
the power needed to run the large German factories. Though
Todd never met Gibson, he spent time with the inventor
Barnes Wallis. "They got the technical details about the
bomb itself from him, although some of that had to be
cheated a bit because it was still secret."
Todd returned to the Normandy landings again when he starred
in D-Day, The 6th of June (1956), with Robert Taylor and
Dana Wynter as the other sides of a triangular love story,
and he was a sea captain during the Chinese civil war of
1949 in Yangtse Incident (1957). He was Dunois in Otto
Preminger's ill-fated filming of Shaw's Saint Joan (1957),
then starred in three good thrillers.
Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958), a gripping study of deception
and murder, co-starred Anne Baxter, whom Todd considered
"highly professional and a very intelligent actress". Intent
to Kill (1958) was a breathlessly paced hospital drama in
which Todd was a surgeon operating on a South American
leader who is the object of an assassination attempt, and
Danger Within (1959) was a whodunnit that neatly blended
tension and humour in the setting of a prisoner-of-war camp.
Todd enjoyed his role in Never Let Go (1960) starring Peter
Sellers ("I loved doing it because it was a character part
for me, playing a scruffy little salesman whose car has been
stolen"), but he "loathed" making the screen version of the
play The Long, the Short and the Tall (1961). "I didn't
enjoy working with Laurence Harvey... I took it for granted
that they would cast Peter O'Toole, who was marvellous on
stage, but they said they wanted a 'name'."
It was around this time that Ian Fleming stated that Todd
would be his first choice to play James Bond on the screen,
but "scheduling conflicts" prevented his being in
contention. After more military roles - his
semi-autobiographical part in The Longest Day, an army
investigator in Death Drums Along the River (1963), and one
of the army officers seeking the sites of Nazi rockets in
Operation Crossbow (1965) - Todd returned to the stage in
1965 to play Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband at the Strand
Theatre, with a starry cast including Margaret Lockwood,
Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray and Roger Livesey, after which
he toured in the play in South Africa.
In 1967 he was one of the stars in an exquisite revival of
Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus at the Haymarket Theatre, then he
formed Triumph Theatre Productions, producing and acting in
many productions in the UK and all over the world. In
1972-73 he toured Australia and New Zealand in Sleuth, and
in 1975 he played Martin Dysart in Equus for the Australian
National Theatre, which he later described as his favourite
stage production. In 1983 he started a run of eight years in
The Business of Murder at the Mayfair Theatre in London. His
television appearances included a Doctor Who story, "Kinda"
(1982), opposite Peter Davison as the Doctor, and episodes
of Virtual Murder and Silent Witness, and in 2004 he took
part in a musical remembrance of the 60th Anniversary of the
D-Day landings. His last television appearance was in an
episode of Heartbeat in 2007. He published a volume of
memoirs, Caught in the Act, in 1986. In 1993 he was awarded
the OBE.
Todd married twice, first to Catherine Grant-Bogle, an
actress he met in the Dundee Repertory Company, and secondly
to Virginia Mailer, a model, each union producing two sons.
In 1997 a son from his second marriage, 20-year old Seamus
Palethorpe-Todd, shot himself in the head, an inquest
concluding that the suicide might have been a depressive
reaction to a drug he was taking for severe acne. In 2005
the eldest son from his first marriage, Peter, killed
himself in a car with a shotgun after problems with his
health and his marriage. Todd regularly attended the
adjoining graves of the two boys.
Richard Andrew Palethorpe-Todd, actor: born Dublin 11 June
1919; married 1949 Catherine Grant-Bogle (divorced, one son
deceased, one daughter); 1970 Virginia Mailer (divorced, one
son, and one son deceased); OBE, 1993; died near Grantham,
Lincolnshire 3 December 2009.