Actor and broadcaster David Kossoff dies
deb...@comcast.net
(Ireland On Line)
23/03/2005 - 18:15:39
Actor, broadcaster and author David Kossoff died this morning at the
age of 85 following a battle with liver cancer, his family said today.
Kossoff, well known for his role as hen-pecked husband Alf Larkins in
Fifties TV series The Larkins, had been ill for a number of months.
Born in the East End of London, he was also famous for British films
such as A Kid for Two Farthings (1955) and for his role as Morry in The
Bespoke Overcoat (1956).
Kossoff, who started his working life as a draftsman and furniture
designer, also entertained millions of viewers in the Sixties by
presenting his Bible stories, which he had published, on TV.
The son of Russian parents, Kossoff experienced tragedy in his life
when his son Paul, guitarist with the rock band Free, died following
years of drug abuse, at the age of 25.
After Paul's death, Kossoff, who began acting through amateur theatre
in the 1940s, gave more than 350 performances around schools of his
one-man show warning of the dangers of drugs, Late Great Paul.
He said last year: "It's a dramatisation of Paul's life but
it's not just an explicit warning about drugs.
"It's a warning against waste of every kind. It's not intended to
attract applause, rather to leave a bruise."
His son Simon, 56, said: "He was a generous, peaceful and gentle
human being."
Brian Watson
<deb...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:1111610445.9...@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> Actor and broadcaster David Kossoff dies
> (Ireland On Line)
>
> 23/03/2005 - 18:15:39
>
> Actor, broadcaster and author David Kossoff died this morning at the
> age of 85 following a battle with liver cancer, his family said today.
Remarkable actor; I thought he was long gone (not having seen him in
anything recently).
Remembering him from the 1950s, he seemed old then!
--
Brian
"Anyway, if you have been, thanks for listening."
Michael Rhodes
<<The Times 24 Mar 2005>>
<<Character actor, Bible-interpreter and passionate campaigner against
the drugs that killed his son>>
THERE were three lives of David Kossoff - the actor, the Bible
commentator and the evangelist. In a way all three were very closely
connected, although his work with the Bible had practically nothing to
do with his evangelism - which, in turn, was disconnected from any
kind of conventional religious practice. But perhaps because of that
fact, it turned into a religious experience more sincere than many
garbed in tradition. His evangelism was a one-man effort - to call it
a one-man show almost belittles what he did - to rid the world of the
scourge of hard drugs, the kind that had killed his 25-year-old son
Paul.
Kossoff was not a religious man in any formal definition of the term
and yet in his two previous "lives" as the actor and as the Bible
commentator, he had seemed to epitomise many people's ideas of an Old
Testament prophet. Some of his greatest roles were playing, if not
rabbis, then rabbis manqués - grey-haired elderly men (he
specialised in aged characters even while still himself young) with
Russian-Yiddish accents living in London's East End.
That part, at least, was real. He was born in 1919, the son of Louis
Kossoff and his wife Anne in the centre of what was then regarded as
the teeming ghetto to which Jews like his parents had come after
stepping off the ships that had brought them from Russian persecution.
In film roles like those of the tailors in Wolf Mankowitz's two best
motion-picture productions, A Kid for Two Farthings and The Bespoke
Overcoat, he epitomised the wisdom and the suffering of men of the
generation he was supposed to be portraying. In the latter piece in
1957, he was repeating the role of Morry he had already played on stage
at the Arts Theatre in June 1953 and again at the Embassy Theatre,
Swiss Cottage, the following year.
There were many similar roles for him: as Mendele in The World of
Sholem Aleichem at the same theatre - a part he recreated in a South
African production in Johannesburg - as Nathan in The Boychik, also
at the Embassy, and as Schissel in The Tenth Man at the Comedy in April
1961. The following year, he played Mr Baker in another similar role of
the Jewish patriarch in the comedy Come Blow Your Horn at the Prince of
Wales. Then he was Morris Seidman in Seidman and Son at the Playhouse
in 1965. In New York, at the off-Broadway Fleur-de-Lys theatre he acted
the part of Cohen in Two Weeks Somewhere Else. Back in London, at the
Mermaid in January 1970, he played Morry Swartz in Enter Solly Gold,
and three years later, was Aaron Bromberg in the play Bunny at the
Criterion.
Despite those characterisations, he would say that he did not live a
terribly Jewish life. His wife, Jennie Jenkins, whom he married in
1947, was not of his faith. Indeed, those roles apart, he did not
totally restrict himself to Jewish patriarchs. One of his most famous
early radio roles was in the longrunning postwar series, Journey Into
Space. In the 1960s his most successful television part was as a
cockney in the longrunning The Larkins.
Kossoff was not an easy man to know. He could be abrasive and made it
very clear he had no intention of suffering gladly anyone he might
himself have regarded as a fool. He was as impatient as he was generous
with his talents.
He had had no intention of becoming an actor after leaving his East
London elementary school. He went to art school and set out to be an
interior designer, mostly of furniture. At the beginning of the Second
World War, he was working as an aircraft draughtsman.
His first stage appearance was at the age of 23 at the intensely
left-wing Unity Theatre in November 1942, playing the part of Juan Rojo
in the Spanish Civil War play The Spanish Village. He stayed with the
Unity, playing a variety of parts for three years, and directing as
well as acting in plays that were put on specially to entertain people
spending night after night in air-raid shelters.
Kossoff was almost as practised a hand at playing Russians as he was
portraying aged Jews. In any number of plays the sight of a
white-coated scientist speaking with a foreign accent signalled the
appearance of David Kossoff. But his most notable Russian role was as
Colonel Alexander Ikomenko in Peter Ustinov's The Love of Four
Colonels which he played at Wyndhams from November 1952.
He played a Russian again - this time a KGB spy - in the Katharine
Hepburn-Bob Hope film The Iron Petticoat. But although he had made his
film debut in 1950 in The Good Beginning, it was in The Bespoke
Overcoat and A Kid for Two Farthings that he shone. He also appeared in
Freud in 1962 and in The Ring of Spies two years later.
He had joined the BBC drama repertory company in 1945, and his
easily-recognised voice was heard in hundreds of radio plays. But it
was in 1961 that he scored his greatest success in the medium. He
started reading his Bible stories in Thought for the Day segments. They
became so popular that before long, he had several series in his own
right, each of which spawned bestseller pamphlets which in turn became
books. They later also formed a television series.
The stories were highly original interpretations of tales like the
Jonah and the Whale episode - told in what could fairly be described
as the Very Unauthorised Version According to Kossoff. Later, he
ventured not altogether successfully into the New Testament. He
admitted that he moved from Old to New with a degree of trepidation and
only after countless requests to do so from the BBC.
He also wrote his own individual prayer book, which he called You've
Got a Moment, Lord? In the early 1980s, he also wrote Stories From A
Small Town, based on the folk tales of 19th-century Jewish Russia.
At a charity variety performance in the mid-1950s Kossoff had declared
on stage, "I am proud to say that I am the father of two sons who are
NOT geniuses. They are just very normal." Alas, that was not true.
Paul, his elder son, who had achieved success as a rock musician, got
hooked on drugs and fell a fatal victim of the habit .It affected
Kossoff so intensely that he vowed to give up almost all his
professional work to devote his time to fighting the drugs trade and
the misery it brought. Free of charge, he began touring the country
soon after Paul's death with his show The Late Great Paul. It was far
from maudlin. He told jokes, enthralled audiences in professional
theatres and in small, draughty village hills alike with his folk
tales. With a white beard and the wisdom he dispensed, he seemed more
like a rabbi than ever.
Kossoff's wife Jennie died in 1995. He is survived by one son.
David Kossoff, actor, author and broadcaster, was born on November 24,
1919. He died on March 23, 2005, aged 85.
Hyfler/Rosner
Actor and storyteller who charmed audiences on stage,
screen, radio and in books
Dennis Barker
Thursday March 24, 2005
The Guardian
The actor, writer and raconteur David Kossoff, who has died
of cancer aged 85, could see the funny side of Jewishness,
religion, even of God. He entertained a wide public without
offence on this difficult tightrope because he could also
see the funny side of himself. And one of his radio
stories - he wrote dozens - ended with: "And Samson, giving
the performance of his career, brought the house down."
He made more than two dozen films, and, in 1956, gained a
"British Oscar" from the then Society of Film and Television
Arts for his performance in Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid For Two
Farthings, as the elderly confidant of a boy who believes
his one-horned goat is a unicorn. He played a similar role
in Mankowitz's short film The Bespoke Overcoat (1956), that
of Morry, which he had first given in 1953 at the Arts
Theatre in London.
His other movies included I Am A Camera (1955), The Mouse
That Roared (1959) and The Mouse On The Moon (1963). He was
also credible and creditable in John Huston's Freud (1962),
where the waspish, Old Testament prophet side of his
character came more into play than usual.
In the late 1950s, he was best known for playing the bucolic
old rogue Alf Larkin in the television series The Larkins.
It was often suggested to Kossoff that as an amiable
countryside oaf, Alf was hardly the sort of part that gave
full rein to his powers. He was sturdy in his defence. "Alf
earns 10 times as much as Kossoff, mate," he told one
journalist. "He helps Kossoff to choose the parts he wants
in straight plays and to say 'No' to the others. I like Alf
... A lot of hard work went into creating him. He's probably
the best thing I've ever done." He was even better pleased
when Alf recorded cockney songs on several LPs.
But, crucially, Kossoff was famous - and much loved - in the
1960s for his simple and humorous paraphrasing of the Bible
into his own stories, which he read on television and radio
in the rich tones of an understated Jewish comedian. Nothing
he did after it sustained his reputation at quite that
level.
He had sprung to prominence in 1952 when he played the
Russian Colonel Alexander Ikonenko in Peter Ustinov's West
End play The Love Of Four Colonels. He was well suited to
underline the weakness of the colonel, one of four allied
occupation colleagues, a man suddenly lost when
scientifically inexplicable events do not fit in with his
narrow materialism.
Kossoff was the son of a poor Russian East End garment
worker. The poverty in which he grew up made him determined
to better himself. He went to elementary school and the
Northern Polytechnic, London. After leaving it in 1937, he
spent a year as a draughtsman, took up furniture design, and
then announced to his horrified parents that he wanted to be
an actor.
Later, he asserted that he had sought out acting classes
because that was the sort of place where you met attractive
women. He also felt that the stage could offer more money.
His parents, wanting him to have the security they lacked,
were worried. Kossoff joked that they were the only parents
of a child of call-up age relieved by the outbreak of the
second world war.
But Kossoff began acting in 1943, and two years later joined
the BBC radio repertory company. He combined his acting with
illustrating and designing until his success in The Love Of
Four Colonels.
Small, bespectacled and prematurely white-haired, he was
never part of the glitzier aspects of show business. He
bought a dilapidated London house cheap, redesigned it
himself and also used his own furniture designs.
But his forte was really the broadcast or the live one-man
show, sometimes biblical, sometimes not. Once a restaurant
even employed him to join diners at their tables for a while
and then gradually slide into a partly extemporised cabaret,
drawn from meeting the fellow diners, and including them as
part of the performance. This idea did not have a long run,
but was in its way groundbreaking. He said it wasn't
demeaning - he was simply providing a kick for people who
wanted to meet someone they had seen on television.
Apart from the stage, cabaret, television, radio and
records, his biblical tales also achieved book form. He
wrote a string of books, mostly on related subjects and his
way with biblical and other religious themes often
underlined his own moral views. He believed that he had been
"pushed" in the direction of writing because he had never
encountered a rejection slip. His writing certainly had
single-mindedness. Often he corrected page proofs of his
books in his dressing room while fulfilling acting
engagements. When appearing as Cinderella's father, Baron
Hardup, at the London Palladium, he missed his cue twice
because he was working on his latest book. It did not
prevent him correcting proofs of another book in his
dressing room when he did a play with the singer Eartha Kitt
in the West End - even on the first night.
Kossoff married Margaret Jenkins. They had two sons, of whom
one, Paul, the guitarist with the rock group Free, died at
25 of a heart attack brought on by drug addiction. Kossoff
had promised to devote a year to drug and other charity
performances to celebrate his son's withdrawal from drugs,
taking no money himself. Instead, when the withdrawal from
drugs proved to be a fatally forlorn failure, he fulfilled
his promise as a tribute to his son's memory.
He could laugh at himself when being more financially
minded. He did several TV commercials, pointing out that
Bible stories didn't pay very well, but commercials did -
and that, anyway, "it just occurred to me that God might
have guided my hand to J Walter Thompson."
His wife predeceased him. He is survived by a son and a
daughter.
· David Kossoff, actor and writer, born November 24 1919;
died March 23 2005
Hyfler/Rosner
25 March 2005
David Kossoff, actor, writer and illustrator: born London 24
November 1919; twice married (one son, one daughter, and one
son deceased); died Hatfield, Hertfordshire 23 March 2005.
Actor, writer and story-teller, David Kossoff was an amiable
and versatile performer who had successes in theatre, film,
radio and television. On stage, he memorably created the
Jewish tailor of Wolf Mankowitz's The Bespoke Overcoat, on
television he had a hit series, The Larkins, and on screen
he won the British equivalent of an Oscar for his portrayal
of a kindly tailor in A Kid for Two Farthings.
A noted purveyor of Jewish lore, he demonstrated his skill
as a raconteur in several one-man shows in the theatre, and
through his readings of bible stories on radio and
television. Though the dapper, moustached actor was often
cast as the archetypal Jewish East-Ender, he invested such
characters with a warmth and humanity that avoided
stereotype. After his son Paul, the guitarist with the rock
group Free, died of heroin addiction, much of his later life
was given to campaigning against hard drugs.
Kossoff was born in 1919 to Russian parents in the East End
of London, where his father worked in a garment factory.
After training as a draughtsman at the Northern Polytechnic,
he worked as a furniture designer and aircraft draughtsman
while privately studying acting. He made his stage début at
the left-wing Unity Theatre in the play Spanish Village
(1942), about the Spanish Civil War, remaining with the
Unity until 1945, during that time writing and directing
many shows performed for members of the services and for
people sheltering from air-raids.
In August 1945, the Second World War over, he joined the BBC
Repertory Company, where he remained for six years, acting
in hundreds of radio plays - including the cult sci-fi
series Journey into Space. He returned to the theatre in
1952 to take over the role of Colonel Ikonenko in Peter
Ustinov's comedy The Love of Four Colonels. At the Arts
Theatre in 1953 he created one of his best-remembered parts,
that of the conscience-stricken tailor, Morry, in The
Bespoke Overcoat, adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from a Gogol
short story. Kossoff and his co-star Alfie Bass repeated
their acclaimed performances in Jack Clayton's film version
in 1955, which won the best short film prize at the Venice
Film Festival.
Other theatre appearances included Ustinov's No Sign of the
Dove (1953), Mankowitz's The Boychick (1954), as the
narrator Mendel in The World of Sholom Aleichem (1957), and
as part of a quorum formed to exorcise an evil spirit from a
young Jewish girl, in Paddy Chayevsky's The Tenth Man
(1961). He also had a notable personal success as the Jewish
patriarch in Neil Simon's comedy Come Blow Your Horn (1962),
shocked at the wild life style of his two sons and declaring
that any man over 30 who is not married is a wastrel.
His film career began modestly, with a small role in a
B-movie about the pitfalls of hire purchase, The Good
Beginning (1953), but the following year he made a strong
impression in Carol Reed's A Kid for Two Farthings. Adapted
by Wolf Mankowitz from his own short story, it told the
whimsical tale of a young boy who believes that his pet
goat, with its one horn, is actually a unicorn he has been
told about by a kindly tailor, Kandinsky.
Kossoff's flair for comedy resulted in roles in revue -
Stars in Your Eyes (1960) - and pantomime - Baron Hardup in
Cinderella (1971) - both shows at the Palladium. His other
films included Anthony Asquith's The Young Lovers (1954) and
Ralph Thomas's The Iron Petticoat (1956), playing a KGB spy
in the Cold War comedy starring Bob Hope and Katharine
Hepburn. In Philip Leacock's sensitive tear-jerker Innocent
Sinners (1958), he and Barbara Mullen were a kindly, hard-up
couple who, with the help of a lonely spinster (Flora
Robson) are able to adopt an unruly teenager. In the Peter
Sellers comedy The Mouse That Roared (1959), Kossoff played
Professor Kokintz, a role he reprised in the sequel, Mouse
on the Moon (1963), and in John Huston's Freud (1962) he
played Freud's father. His last film was Staggered (1994).
On television, Kossoff played the Sheriff of Nottingham in a
six-episode version of Robin Hood (1953), and the following
year he played Morry again in a television production of The
Bespoke Overcoat. In 1958 he created his best-known role,
that of Alf Larkin, the resourceful but henpecked cockney
husband of battle-axe supreme Peggy Mount in the television
series The Larkins, written by Fred Robinson. It was a hit,
and in 1959 he and Mount starred in a screen version, Inn
for Trouble, in which the couple inherit a decrepit pub
which they put on its feet by selling a particularly potent
beer.
Kossoff also had considerable success performing his own
material. In 1957 he compiled a one-man show at the Arts
Theatre, With One Eyebrow Slightly Up, and in 1963 he
performed another one-man show, Kossoff at the Prince
Charles, which he later took to Adelaide and New York, with
the title, A Funny Kind of Evening with David Kossoff. In
his own play On Such a Night (1969) he starred as an
actor-manager playing Shylock in a touring edition of The
Merchant of Venice.
In 1961 he started reading his own adaptations of bible
stories on "Thought for the Day" on the radio, and their
success spawned best-selling books. He also appeared on
television in his own series, Storytime, telling his bible
stories with an endearing wit and self-deprecating humour.
Asked by Who's Who in the Theatre to name his favourite
parts, he replied, "Big ones", and he described his hobby as
"writing best-sellers".
Tom Vallance