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1-35 of 35
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Trystan Gravelle was born on 4 May 1981 in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales, UK. He is an actor, known for Anonymous (2011), Beast (2017) and Utopia (2013).- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Keith Allen was born on 2 September 1953 in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales, UK. He is an actor and director, known for The Others (2001), 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Beautiful, swift and tough-tongued British character actress Rachel Roberts gained notice for her roles on the English stage, before she hit it largely in films. Born in Wales and married to actor Rex Harrison in 1962, Roberts made her film debut in a key role in J. Lee Thompson's Young and Willing (1954) a drama film about the life of women in prison. Around the early sixties, it wasn't uncommon to see a British actress in feature films, usually such an actress would remain on the British screen for such time, but Roberts continued going strong, she's hard to forget as the cankerous housewife in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).
After her divorce from Rex Harrison in 1971, Roberts continued such supporting roles usually as tough authority women characters or villainous beauties in films including Doctors' Wives (1971), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Foul Play (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979) and Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981). Although never far from the screen, she was occasionally seen on television, such as Mrs. Bonnie McClellan in the 1976 series The Tony Randall Show (1976). She probably achieved her greatest success as Richard Harris's love interest in the film This Sporting Life (1963) which earned her an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. Rachel Roberts committed suicide in November of 1980 of a "barbiturate overdose" at her home in Studio City, California. Roberts was only 53 years old.- Actress
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Annabel Schofield was born on 4 September 1963 in Llanelli, Dyfed, Wales, UK. She is an actress and producer, known for The Brothers Grimm (2005), Doom (2005) and City of Ember (2008).- Elizabeth Morgan was born on 7 February 1930 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. She is an actress and writer, known for Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967), Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1995) and Mapp & Lucia (1985). She was previously married to Derek Chittock.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
William John Hughes was Wales' first Broadway and Hollywood star! He began acting at a very young age, first in Wales, then later at 17 years of age he went to London to pursue his passion for acting. He later joined the Welsh Players and traveled on tour with them to America. When they returned to the UK (the tour was a flop) he decided to stay on in America and eventually became very successful on Broadway. He appeared in many productions such as "Little Miss Llewellyn", "Change" and a play by J.M. Barrie called "The New Word", and later went on to star in a film based on another book written by Barrie, Sentimental Tommy (1921). Even though he had already appeared in many films before, he always regarded "Sentimental Tommy" as his favorite and most successful. He made 45 films altogether, spanning 1918 to 1931, and was also the Welsh dialect coach on The Corn Is Green (1945) with Bette Davis (another Welsh connection). His stage name was Gareth Hughes, and at the height of his popularity he was earning as much as $2000 a week. He was under contract to such major studios of the time as Fox and MGM. He, like millions of others, lost his fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash and was left penniless. He continued to make films, though, until 1931 when, after finishing Scareheads (1931), he decided to leave Hollywood and return to his first love, the theater. His last performance ran for 18 weeks in 1938 at the Hollywood Playhouse and University of Michigan, where he starred as Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice". In the early 1940s he decided it was time to leave acting and the secular life altogether--he had come to the conclusion that, having led a full and exciting but also lavish and selfish life, he now wanted to change and give something back to others. Adopting the name of Brother David, he became a missionary to the Paiute Indians on the Pyramid Lake Reservation of Nevada. He spent almost 14 years (1944 to 1958) with his "children", as he liked to call them, and is still loved and remembered as Bro to this day. In 1958 he decided to return to Llanelli to spend his last years there. He longed for the sunshine of California, however, and after five months he returned to the US. He went on to spend his retirement at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, California, where he died on October 1, 1965, after a long illness. His remains are at the Masonic garden of remembrance in Reno, Nevada.- Imogen Thomas was born on 27 November 1982 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. She is an actress, known for Loserville (2012), Big Brother Uncut (2003) and Hot Property (2019).
- Actor
- Writer
D. N. Rudall was born in Llanelli, Wales in 1940. He received his B.A. from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from Cornell. He has been a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago since 1965. Rudall succeeded James D. O'Reilly as Director of Chicago's Court Theatre and has appeared in or directed over 60 theatrical productions in Chicago and beyond.- Terry Griffiths was born on 16 October 1947 in Llanelli, Wales, UK.
- Derek New was born on 10 November 1932 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. He was an actor, known for The Boy David (1957), The Barchester Chronicles (1982) and Sorrell and Son (1984). He was married to Anne Dickins. He died on 10 June 2001 in Berkshire, England, UK.
- Basil Jones was born on 18 September 1919 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. He was an actor, known for Thirty-Minute Theatre (1965) and The Gunpowder Plot (1968). He died on 25 September 1998 in Truro, Cornwall, England, UK.
- Huw Thomas was born on 14 September 1927 in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, South Wales, UK. He was an actor, known for The Plane Makers (1963), New Scotland Yard (1972) and That's My Boy (1963). He was married to Anne. He died on 12 March 2009 in Kensington, London, England, UK.
- Marjorie Waddell was born on 14 May 1911 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. She was a writer, known for Your Own Time (1955). She died on 15 February 1984 in Hampshire, England, UK.
- Writer
- Actor
James Rourke was born in Llanelli, West Wales, Wales, UK. He is known for Hidden (2018), Boudica Bites Back (2009) and Thicker Than Water (1993).- Music Department
- Writer
- Actor
Ronald Cass was born on 21 April 1923 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for Summer Holiday (1963), Swingers' Paradise (1964) and Wonderful to Be Young! (1961). He was married to Valerie Carton. He died on 2 June 2006 in London, England, UK.- Tom O'Brien was born on 17 August 1900 in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, South Wales, UK. He died on 5 May 1970 in London, England, UK.
- William Halford Barrington-Coupe (born 1931 in Wales, died 19 October 2014 in Royston, England) was a Welsh record producer and music impresario.
Married in 1956 to concert pianist Joyce Hatto, he was jailed for a year in 1966 for "blatant and impertinent frauds". He attained further notoriety in 2007 when he confessed that a large number of piano CDs that he had sold on his Concert Artist/Fidelio Recordings label were not in fact performed by his wife but were copies, in some cases digitally manipulated, of commercially available recordings by other pianists.
In the early 1950s Barrington-Coupe worked in London as a classical musicians' agent. A directory from 1953-1954 showed him with two exclusive artists on his books. A 1955 article in Billboard magazine refers to Barrington-Coupe, as President of Concert Artists, licensing Mozart recordings by the "London Mozart Ensemble".
The Saga Films and Records Company, of which he was an employee, collapsed in 1960, with the Official Receiver declaring that Barrington-Coupe was chiefly responsible for the company's demise.
Following the Saga collapse in late 1960, he created the Lyrique record label with Marcel Rodd, who had a record-pressing factory, and began to release records by artists under different pseudonyms, a not uncommon practice of the era. "The repertoire was from the variety of master tapes now in Rodd's tape library," wrote Ted Perry, one of Barrington-Coupe's former colleagues in an unpublished autobiography. "It was also, possibly, from some of Coupe's own tapes since he always seemed to have a lot of recorded material of unknown, not to say dubious, provenance."
Recordings of classical works issued on his Delta label were believed to have been copied from radio broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain, mixed to disguise the sources. Private Eye has claimed that on one recording of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, he made the mistake of inserting a number of bars backwards.
A recording issued featuring the Danzig Philharmonic was in stereo, when it was known that that orchestra had ceased to exist a decade or more before stereo recording was common. He also made up artists' names: "Wilhelm Havagesse" was the falsely-named conductor of the "Zurich Municipal Orchestra" in a recording of Scheherazade released on Barrington-Coupe's Fidelio label in 1962 (ATL 4006).
Charles Haynes, who worked with Barrington-Coupe at Delta, recounted that "quite often they used to 'monkey around', hence conductors Havagesse and Homer Lott and the soprano Herda Wobbel", lamenting that the practice stopped when "the Trades Descriptions Act threatened the continuing existence of these fine artists: 'End of the Road for Musician Havagesse' proclaimed the Daily Telegraph's headline."
Barrington-Coupe set up a further label, on 25 February 1960, with Major Wilfred Alonzo Banks's financial backing: Triumph Records. This time his collaborator was Joe Meek, a record producer who became best known for "Telstar", the 1962 hit by the Tornados. The two men later fell out and Meek left the company, which subsequently went into liquidation. Meek was followed by David Gooch, who produced a number of extended-play and long-playing records on a new label, Dial Records. This association was terminated when Barrington-Coupe had obvious financial difficulties. Desperate to make ends meet, he began importing radios from Hong Kong, which he sold in London markets and by mail order, but became the subject of legal action when he failed to pay purchase tax.
On 17 May 1966, after what was then the longest-running and most expensive trial at the Old Bailey, costing the British taxpayer £150,000, Barrington-Coupe and four other defendants were found guilty of failing to pay £84,000 in purchase tax (over £1 million in 2007 currency). Barrington-Coupe was fined £3,600 and jailed for 12 months. His company, W.H. Barrington-Coupe Ltd, was fined £4,000 and finally wound up in 1971. Summing up, Judge Alan King-Hamilton said: "These were blatant and impertinent frauds, carried out in my opinion rather clumsily. But such was your conceit that you thought yourself smart enough to get away with it."
After he was released from prison, Barrington-Coupe was reunited with Hatto. While she began to earn a modest reputation for her recitals of Liszt and Chopin, Barrington-Coupe maintained a lower profile. In the 1970s, the couple disappeared from the public eye, becoming virtual recluses in their detached modern home in Royston, Hertfordshire.
It was not until 2002 that they were heard of again. During the previous 13 years they had apparently recorded another 103 CDs of Hatto's playing, which Barrington-Coupe began issuing on his Concert Artist label. In 2007, these CDs were found to be fraudulent copies of recordings of other artists issued by other labels. Barrington-Coupe initially denied any wrongdoing but subsequently admitted the fraud in a letter to Robert von Bahr, the head of the Swedish BIS record label that had originally issued some of the recordings plagiarised by Concert Artist.
Bahr immediately shared the contents of the letter with Gramophone magazine, telling journalist Jessica Duchen afterwards that he "had given a lot of thought" to suing Barrington-Coupe for damages, but was inclined not to do so, on the assumption that the hoax recordings were "a desperate attempt to build a shrine to a dying wife".
A biopic called Loving Miss Hatto was screened on BBC television on 23 December 2012. The screenplay is by Victoria Wood and the film was made by Left Bank Pictures and filmed in Ireland. Joyce Hatto was portrayed by Maimie McCoy and Francesca Annis. Rory Kinnear and Alfred Molina played her husband. - Actor
- Director
- Cinematographer
Cerith Wyn Evans was born in 1958 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. He is an actor and director, known for Degrees of Blindness (1988), Ear Say (1984) and The Angelic Conversation (1985).- Writer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Julian More was born on 15 June 1928 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. He was a writer, known for The Boat That Rocked (2009), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Irma la Douce (1963). He was married to Sheila Hull. He died on 15 January 2010 in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.- Writer
- Composer
- Music Department
Donald Ibrahím Swann (30 September 1923 - 23 March 1994) was a Welsh-born composer, musician and entertainer. He was one half of Flanders and Swann, writing and performing comic songs with Michael Flanders.
Donald Swann was born in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales. His father, Herbert Alfredovich Swann, was a Russian doctor of English descent, from the expatriate community that started out as the Muscovy Company. His mother, Naguimé Sultán Swann (born Piszóva), was a Turkmen-Russian nurse from Ashgabat, now part of Turkmenistan. They were refugees from the Russian Revolution. Swann's great-grandfather, Alfred Trout Swan, a draper from Lincolnshire, emigrated to Russia in 1840 and married the daughter of the horologer to the Tsars. Some time later the family acquired a second 'n' to their surname. His uncle Alfred wrote the first biography of Alexander Scriabin in English.
The family moved to London, where Swann attended Dulwich College Preparatory School and Westminster School (where he first met Michael Flanders).
In 1941 Swann was awarded an exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford, to read modern languages. In 1942 he registered as a conscientious objector and served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit (a Quaker relief organisation) in Egypt, Palestine and Greece. After the war, Swann returned to Oxford to read Russian and Modern Greek.
A chance meeting between Swann and Flanders in 1948 led to the start of their professional partnership. They began writing songs and light opera, Swann writing the music and Flanders writing the words. Their songs were performed by artists such as Ian Wallace and Joyce Grenfell. They subsequently wrote two two-man revues, At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat, which they performed all over the world until their partnership ended in 1967.
At the same time, Swann was maintaining a prolific musical output, writing the music for several operas and operettas, including a full-length version of C. S. Lewis's Perelandra, and a setting of J. R. R. Tolkien's poems from The Lord of the Rings to music in The Road Goes Ever On collection. In 1953-59 Swann provided music for seven plays by Henry Reed on the BBC Third Programme, generally known as the Hilda Tablet plays for one of the fictional characters, a lady composer of avant-garde "musique concrete". Besides incidental music, Swann composed for this character an opera, "Emily Butter" and several other complete works.
A lifelong friendship with Sydney Carter resulted in scores of songs, the best known being "The Youth of the Heart" which reappeared in At the Drop of A Hat, and a musical Lucy & the Hunter. After his partnership with Flanders ended, Swann continued to give solo concerts and to write for other singers. He also formed the Swann Singers and toured with them in the 1970s. Throughout the 1980s and early '90s he continued performing in various combinations with singers and colleagues and as a solo artist. In the later years of his life he 'discovered' Victorian poetry and composed some of his most profound and moving music to the words of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and others. He wrote a number of hymn tunes which appear in modern standard hymn books.
Donald Swann was married twice; he married Janet Oxborrow in 1955 and they were divorced in 1983; his second wife was the art historian Alison Smith. In 1992 he was diagnosed with cancer. He died at in South London on 23 March 1994, survived by both wives and two children from his first marriage: Rachel and Natasha.
It is estimated that Swann wrote or set to music nearly 2,000 songs during his career.- Richard is a TV presenter, author and security pundit for programmes such as the One Show (BBC One). He is best known for his work on the Channel 5 TV series It Takes a Thief to Catch a Thief (2014).
Credits and Work.
TV:
Channel 5 - It Takes a Thief to Catch a Thief - 6 Episodes (Optomen). Channel 5 - The Wright Stuff. Sky News - Sky News. ITV - Carlton Central.
Radio:
Galaxy FM. BBC Radio WM. BBC Radio 2 - Steve Wright. BBC Radio 5 Live - Jeremy Vine. BBC Radio Wales.
Public Speaking:
Burchell and Edwards Ltd. Leicestershire Police. Cambridgeshire Constabulary Conference. National Neighbourhood Watch Conference. Numerous Golf Dinners and Charity events. Public Appearances for MK Response
Writing:
Media/magazine writing for DIY Chain. Direct Line Insurance. Security articles and advisor to DIY stores.
Richard contributes largely as a security expert providing solutions in fighting crime. - Elwyn Bowen Jones was born on 21 July 1912 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. He was a writer, known for Westward Ho! (1953). He died in 2006 in Cardiff, Wales, UK.
- Alice John was born in 1881 in Llanelly, Wales, UK. She was an actress, known for These Thirty Years (1934). She died on 9 August 1956 in Binghamton, New York, USA.
- Robert Buckland was born on 22 September 1968 in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales, UK. He has been married to Sian since 1997. They have two children.
- Kenneth Bowen was born on 1 August 1932 in Llanelli, Wales, UK. He was married to Angela Evenden. He died on 1 September 2018 in Cheltenham, England, UK.