Denis Quilley, OBE (1927-2003)
Michael Rhodes
"Evil Under the Sun" and "Privates on Parade" died at his home, 6
October, 2003, at the age of 75. He had been suffering from cancer of
the liver.
Denis Clifford Quilley was born on Boxing Day 1927, Quilley
established himself an immense and valuable reputation as an
anchorman-actor, one who held a production together and was often its
central pillar without necessarily also being its star. That
reputation though, was only acquired after he'd thrown off an
infinitely less promising one as an eternal juvenile lead in the
disintegrating world of English musical comedy.
After a classical start at the Birmingham Rep in 1945, working
alongside Paul Scofield and (Sir) Stanley Baker and Alun Owen in a
season directed by the then 20-year-old Peter Brook, Quilley did his
national service in Khartoum, returned to understudy Richard Burton in
"The Lady's Not For Burning" and then drifted off into a succession of
light musicals of which "Irma la Douce" was far and away the best and
there was considerable competition for the worst. Undaunted, he then
went to Australia and had a 2-year triumph in a television crime
series which he described as: "Z Cars by Sydney Harbour Bridge". Back
in his native LOndon in 1969, howeverm he found himself remembered
largely if not solely for the kind of musicals they weren't doing any
more.
So he went up to Nottingham and took over Macbeth from Barry Foster,
and played "The Entertainer", and then by a sort of miracle, his agent
rang him and said Olivier wanted to interview him at the Vic. Quilley
knew that Olivier was thinking about a revival of "Guys and Dolls",
and although he wanted to escape the musical tag it was still too good
a chance to miss, so he went along to the Vic, where Olivier offered
him the part of Aufidus to Anthony Hopkins's Coriolanus.
He spent three and a half years at the Old Vic in what Quilley called
"the marvellous sunset" of the Olivier regime, playing everything from
"Long Days Journey into Night" through "The Front Page" to "School for
Scandal", and doing all his best work for Michael Blakemore.
Quilley's films include "Life at the Top" (1965); "Anne of a Thousand
Days" (1969); "Murder on the Orient Express" (1974); "The Black
Windmill" (1974); "The Antagonists" (1980); "Evil UNder the Sun"
(1981); "Privates on Parade" (1982); "King David" (1985); "Foreign
Body" (1986); "The Shell-seekers" (1989); "Mr Johnson" (1990); "A
Dangerous Man" (1991).
He was appointed OBE in 2002.
He married in 1949, Stella Chapman, by whom he had one son and two
daughters.
Hyfler/Rosner
"Michael Rhodes" <mig73alle...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:beb1d3e8.03100...@posting.google.com...
> Stage and screen actor Denis Quilley, OBE, whose films roles include
> "Evil Under the Sun" and "Privates on Parade" died at his home, 6
> October, 2003, at the age of 75. He had been suffering from cancer of
> the liver.
DENIS QUILLEY
<independent obit>
TONIGHT'S WEST End opening of the National Theatre's lovingly joyous revival
of Cole Porter's Anything Goes will be clouded by the news of the death of
Denis Quilley, one of the National's most loyal and most loved actors; under
its various directors he worked consistently for the National for over 30
years. He played the rantipole Elisha Whitney in Anything Goes at the South
Bank but ill-health prevented his joining the Drury Lane cast.
Few theatrical careers have been as varied as Quilley's. He was a musical
star from the days of the tinklingly gentle British musical of the 1950s
through Leonard Bernstein and Noel Coward to his Stephen Sondheim triumphs
in the title role of Sweeney Todd in the original UK production (Drury Lane,
1980) and as the tortured Judge in its National Theatre revival (1993).
Commercial theatre work in the West End included revivals and new plays,
while his classical appearances in his early years with the Old Vic and
subsequently at the Chichester Festival Theatre and at the National Theatre
covered an astonishing range.
Although his later work included starring roles in lavish West End
musicals - including La Cage aux Folles (Palladium, 1986) - it was
pleasingly fitting for an actor so strongly wedded to the company ideal that
throughout the 1990s and into a new century his work should be predominantly
company- based, first with Peter Hall at the Old Vic and then as a valued
and versatile member of the ensemble formed by Trevor Nunn at the National
Theatre in 1999-2000.
London-born, Quilley was passionate about the theatre from boyhood, playing
truant from school to audition for the redoubtable Sir Barry Jackson, then
running the Birmingham Rep. At 17, Quilley joined the company as a lowly
assistant stage manager and understudy, but his timing was miraculous;
Jackson was sympathetic to young talent and had just given early breaks to a
new young director and an unusual young actor, Peter Brook (then 20) and
Paul Scofield. Gradually, from tiny roles Quilley moved up, trusted with
some stretching parts at Birmingham, including Lyngstand in Ibsen's The Lady
from the Sea.
A first West End break came when he was cast to replace Richard Burton in
John Gielgud's production of Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning
(Globe, 1950). This much-admired performance, a useful showcase for both
Quilley's strong physical presence and his richly timbred voice, took him to
the Old Vic during the 1950/51 season where his parts were comparatively
unrewarding - Fabian in a lacklustre Twelfth Night and Gratiano in The
Merchant of Venice - but his work impressed and it looked as if he was set
fair for a rewarding classically based career.
The next few years, however, saw Quilley begin to flex his muscles in
musical theatre. At a time of costive restraint in the British musical, his
communicable energy, ebullient high spirits and virile voice marked him out
as something unusual then; he shone in a series of sentimentally anodyne
trifles including Wild Thyme (Duke of York's, 1955), A Girl Called Jo
(Piccadilly, 1955) alongside the long-running but somewhat arch revue Airs
on a Shoestring (Royal Court, 1953). Somewhat more adventurously, he had a
strong leading role in the Venice Film Festival-set Grab Me a Gondola
(Lyric, Hammersmith and Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, 1956), another
long-runner.
Musicals continued to claim him: he took the title role in Bernstein's
Candide (Saville, 1959), a London flop as over-directed by Tyrone Guthrie,
before replacing Keith Michell in Irma la Douce (Lyric, 1960) and also
following Michell as the loveable and lovelorn Nestor-le-Fripe on Broadway
(Plymouth Theatre, 1961). Determined to return to his classical roots, he
turned down lavish sums to play a season at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's
Park (of which he was always a committed supporter) playing an elegant,
witty Benedick surprised by later-flowering love in Much Ado About Nothing.
Returning to musical theatre, he was by far the best thing - as Antipholus
of Ephesus - in a misbegotten and apparently hastily cobbled-together
revival of Rodgers and Hart's The Boys from Syracuse (Drury Lane, 1963).
Another distinctly muddled musical production, an ill-advised musicalisation
of Coward's Blithe Spirit as High Spirits (Savoy, 1964), starred Quilley as
Charles Condomine (even less rewarding a part in the musical than in the
play) opposite an embarrassingly over-mugging Cicely Courtneidge as Madame
Arcati. There was a good deal of screaming and shouting, not to mention
sackings and walk-outs, on this show; Coward bitchily described Quilley as
having "all the animation of a billiard-table leg" (which Quilley loved
gleefully to quote) but the fault lay more with the show, which unwisely
"opened out" resolutely closed text.
For a few years thereafter Quilley's career was subject to the unpredictable
ebbs and flows of the actor's life. He took himself off to Australia to play
Robert Browning in the romantic musical Robert and Elizabeth (1966) and to
regional theatre to tackle Laurence Olivier's old role of Archie Rice in a
revival of The Entertainer (Nottingham Playhouse, 1969). He followed this
with one of his very best performances, in a touching version of Marie
Lloyd's story as Sing a Rude Song (Greenwich and Garrick, 1970). Opposite
Barbara Windsor's feisty Marie - and despite the somewhat bizarre casting of
the Bee Gee Maurice Gibb as one of Marie's husbands - Quilley gave a
beautifully gauged performance as the musical director always secretly in
love with the star (his singing of a ballad analysing his inarticulacy -
"Haven't the Words" - was a high-spot of the show).
Throughout the 1970s - a Quilley golden age - he was genuinely a pillar of
the National Theatre during Olivier's regime, his roles including Aufidius
in the Brechtian Coriolanus (1971), a beefily watchful Bolingbroke in
Richard II (1972), a cheerfully tattling Crabtree (finding his way into the
character, hugely helped by the director Jonathan Miller's suggestion of Ned
Sherrin as a template) in The School for Scandal (1972), Lopakhin in the
heavily elegiac Michael Blakemore production of The Cherry Orchard (1973)
and Luigi in Franco Zeffirelli's exuberant take on Eduardo de Filippo in
Saturday, Sunday, Monday (1973).
Unforgettably Quilley was a key cast member of two National productions
deservedly described as legendary. His Hildy Johnson in The Front Page
(1972), hands restlessly fidgeting as if always searching for the nearest
typewriter, and full of fizzing, high-octane energy, was as memorable as his
Jamie, the elder brother corroded by self-loathing in Blakemore's
magisterial production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night
(1971), alongside Olivier and Constance Cummings and Ronald Pickup as the
other haunted Tyrones.
His loyalty to the National concept continued into Peter Hall's regime when
he was a genially ruddy, opportunistic Claudius to Albert Finney's Prince in
Hamlet (1976), Bajazeth in Hall's sweeping, barbaric scrutiny of Tamburlaine
(1976), also with Finney, and a very human, riven Hector in Troilus and
Cressida (1976).
Crossing the river to join the RSC, Quilley's debut with the company gave
him perhaps his richest - certainly his most enjoyable - role when he played
the outrageous Captain Terry Dennis in Peter Nichols's Privates on Parade
(RSC and Piccadilly, 1977). Fully inhabiting all the majestic camp of the
role ("That Bernadette Shaw - what a chatterbox!") and, of course, handling
all of Denis King's pastiche songs (Coward, Dietrich et al) with insouciant
aplomb, he found too a core of genuine pathos inside this rouged exquisite
but constantly charged the evening with an unexpectedly moving ruefulness.
Privates certainly helped establish Quilley as a commercial star; he
appeared as Morrell in a Candida revival opposite Deborah Kerr (Albery,
1977), as the deviously manipulative author in Ira Levin's thriller
Deathtrap (Garrick, 1978) and then, in another magnificent musical
performance, as the demonic barber at the dark heart of Sondheim's Sweeney
Todd (Drury Lane, 1980).
After seasons at Chichester - including an oddly unsatisfactory Antony and
Cleopatra (1985) with Diana Rigg and a less than convincing revival of Fry's
Venus Observed (1992) - Quilley returned to the National, initially once
more in Sweeney Todd (1993), this time as the Judge in Declan Donnellan's
pared-down version, poles apart from the florid Harold Prince West End
production, and then as a wonderfully self- deluding Falstaff in Terry
Hands's realistically detailed version of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1996).
Company work continued to draw him. For Peter Hall at the Old Vic he was
luxury casting as a formidably cruel Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, Horsham in
Granville-Barker's Waste and a fallen oak of a Gloucester in an undervalued
King Lear with Alan Howard (all 1997).
Another Quilley annus mirabilis saw him as part of the Nunn company back at
the National during 1999 and 2000. Demonstrating his mastery of even the
most daunting spaces, his vigorous Nestor in Troilus and Cressida (there was
much fuss about Nunn's miking of the Olivier Auditorium - quite unnecessary
in Quilley's case) was refreshingly free from the usual old greybeard
pedantry. He also played the Baron in his second appearance in Candide
(considerably reworked since the Guthrie production) and Sir John Vesey, a
slyly etched performance in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Money.
He returned to the South Bank to give a superb performance as Diana Rigg's
coarse-grained lover - complete with a memorable prosthetic penis - in
Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy, which transferred to the West End (Gielgud,
2001). It was particularly apposite that his final appearance on the stage
should be for the National, when last winter he played the wheezy but
sprightly Elisha Whitney in Anything Goes.
Films never gave Quilley particularly rewarding chances - although he had
showy parts in two all-star Agatha Christie adaptations, Murder on the
Orient Express (1974) and Evil Under the Sun (1982) - and it was a
disappointment that the movie version of Privates on Parade (1982), even
with a cast including John Cleese, failed to transfer happily to the screen.
Quilley's career was inevitably studied with television work ranging from
the heights of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral to the kind of
journeyman series most actors prefer to forget. But he was especially
pleased to be part of the series Time Slip (1970) - playing Commander
Charles Traynor, an apparently urbanely charming scientist who emerges as
ruthless in his quest for progress - which introduced him to a whole new
generation of viewers.
His profoundly happy marriage to Stella Chapman - equally at home in musical
theatre (as a director) as her husband and just as enthusiastic - was famous
in the theatrical world for both its longevity and its transparent radiance.
Denis Clifford Quilley, actor: born London 26 December 1927; OBE 2002;
married 1949 Stella Chapman (one son, two daughters); died London 5 October
2003.
Robert Feigel (aka Bob)
wrote:
>
>"Michael Rhodes" <mig73alle...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:beb1d3e8.03100...@posting.google.com...
>> Stage and screen actor Denis Quilley, OBE, whose films roles include
>> "Evil Under the Sun" and "Privates on Parade" died at his home, 6
>> October, 2003, at the age of 75. He had been suffering from cancer of
>> the liver.
>
>
>DENIS QUILLEY
>
><independent obit>
>
>TONIGHT'S WEST End opening of the National Theatre's lovingly joyous revival
>of Cole Porter's Anything Goes will be clouded by the news of the death of
>Denis Quilley, one of the National's most loyal and most loved actors; under
>its various directors he worked consistently for the National for over 30
>years. He played the rantipole Elisha Whitney in Anything Goes at the South
>Bank but ill-health prevented his joining the Drury Lane cast.
A bittersweet article from last year:
<http://makeashorterlink.com/?H62624026>
Hampstead & Highgate Express Online (Archived 19/07/02)
Quilley takes up pen
TOO often the gong comes at the end of an illustrious career, and
little remains to look forward to besides a quiet life of watering the
hollyhocks and strolling the prom.
But Denis Quilley, the veteran actor who lives in Willow Road,
Highgate, still bubbles over with enthusiasm despite having picked up
an OBE in January to recognise his 45 years in the business.
His current show, Humble Boy, is transferring from the National to the
Gielgud Theatre and then, like all old stalwarts of the stage, he will
settle down to write his memoirs.
"But by September, I know I’ll be raring to go, itching to get my feet
back on the boards," he laughs.
"I count myself as fantastically lucky to have spent all these years
doing the thing I love most in the world."
Mr Quilley also enjoyed his trip to the Palace. Most people would feel
nervous setting out for Buckingham Palace, and even the 74-year-old
actor felt "a bit shaky being inside the palace with footmen and
flunkies in every corner".
But when he stepped forward to receive his award from Prince Charles,
he was greeted with the cheery words: "We last met in Felicity
Kendal’s dressing room, if I’m not mistaken."
Mr Quilley tells Heathman that he first struck up "an ongoing
relationship with Prince Charles" when they met backstage after the
prince came to see him in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into
Night.
The two men share an interest in environmental matters, and so the
conversation naturally drifted from theatrical anecdotes to the
prince’s organic food venture, Duchy Originals.
Mr Quilley confesses that he and his wife are "tremendous fans of
Prince Charles" and, clearly, the admiration is mutual since the
prince also came to see Humble Boy.
Mr Quilley has appeared in the last four National Theatre productions
back-to-back, but he is in no mood to take things easy and his next
big ambition is to play Lear.
Mr Quilley says he mused absent-mindedly about the merits of
retirement while visiting Chichester last year. "But my wife just
burst out laughing. She said, ‘You’ll keep going till they carry you
out.'"
********
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For email change @earthsea.co.enzed" to "@earthsea.co.nz"
Terrymelin
which is one of those guilty pleasure movies that I always enjoy watching.
Terry Ellsworth
Iceman
>Sorry to hear that. He was such an elegant presence in "Evil Under the Sun"
>which is one of those guilty pleasure movies that I always enjoy watching.
There's nothing to feel guilty about. Intellectual moviegoers can
surely find something of interest there.