Googie Withers obituary

Googie Withers in Dead of Night (1945). Photograph: BFI

Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers's striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. A bored wife, she gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, played by John McCallum, soon to be her real-life husband. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards.

What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped, she acquired great skill at playing wives in various states of dissatisfaction because of the implied sexual shortcomings of their husbands.

She was especially effective as the not entirely unsympathetic wife of a judge in the stage version of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea (1952). "Respectable" but emotionally unsatisfied, she throws herself at a weak and irresponsible ex-RAF wonderboy.

Another Rattigan creation that might have gone to Withers was the part of the wife of the dried-up and professionally despised schoolmaster in the film of The Browning Version (1951). In the event, Jean Kent provided one of the most harrowing moments to that date in British cinema when she tried to destroy her husband's remaining hopes with such vicious hatred that the scene was often booed and hissed in 1950s cinemas. Withers, while making the cause of the wife's frustration just as plainly sexual, might well have conveyed a certain residual warmth and humanity that would have transformed melodrama into drama.

Withers as firm but sensitive prison governor Faye Boswell in the ITV series Within These Walls, 1974-75. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features

Withers was a loss to the British stage and screen when she followed her husband to his native Australia in the late 1950s. They had married in 1948, and had two daughters, Joanna and Amanda, and a son, Nicholas. From 1955 onwards, she alternated between productions in the southern and northern hemispheres, including Broadway. But while her touring work focused more on Australia and New Zealand, she still made the first three seasons of a British TV series, Within These Walls (1974-75), as the governor of a women's prison, which provided her biggest national and international audience.

Georgette Lizette Withers was born in Karachi, in pre-partition India, to a British naval captain who hated the thought of his daughter going on the stage and a Dutch mother who quietly encouraged her. The captain, who tried to run a Birmingham foundry after leaving the Royal Navy through poor health, was a high-handed man who clashed with fellow directors whom he openly despised, and lost his job. His daughter inherited his imperious inability to keep his opinions to himself, but in her case it was softened by her feminine humour.

At 12, while a boarder at Fredville Park private school near Dover, she took dancing lessons, initially to straighten bandy legs. At the same age she made her first professional appearance, in the chorus of a children's show at the Victoria Palace, London. She persuaded her parents to send her to the Italia Conti school after she had worked her normal school day at the Convent of the Holy Family in Kensington.

A fall during dancing class permanently weakened an arm and indicated a less arduous form of dancing. She did cabaret in Midnight Follies at the Mayfair hotel and the Kit Kat Club. At 16 she was the youngest member of the chorus of Nice Goings On and was soon appearing in other popular musicals.

From 1935 onwards, she appeared in more than 60 films and television productions, including some of the finest movies of their time: One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), They Came to a City (1944, from the JB Priestley novel); Miranda (1948), in which Glynis Johns played the mermaid and Withers the all-too-normal woman; and Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), with Richard Widmark.

On the stage she was a beguiling Beatrice in Stratford-upon-Avon's production of Much Ado About Nothing (1958), and though her move to Australia often brought her under the umbrella of her husband's theatre management, she continued to play in adventurous work in Britain, including Ionesco's Exit the King for the Edinburgh Festival and the Royal Court theatre. A production of Somerset Maugham's The Circle at the Chichester Festival theatre in 1976 was so successful that it went to the West End, Canada and on tour in Britain. Withers's Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1979) at Chichester managed to step out of the shadow of Edith Evans's high-camp shadow without losing impact.

In the 1970s, when traditional leading ladies were less in demand, Withers's career became more variable. In 1971 she starred in a film produced and directed by her husband, and featuring her daughter Joanna, called Nickel Queen, otherwise known as Ghost Town Millionairess, an examination of socialites and riff-raff in an Australian town dominated by nickel production. It was not well received, one comment being that it was an appalling bit of Australiana that made Barry Humphries's film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) look like a refreshing can of Foster's.

The role of Faye Boswell in Within These Walls three years later proved to be a sounder vehicle. Giving her formidability a greyer hue, Withers played a prison governor striving to be, as well as a disciplinarian, as sensitive as possible to the problems of the prisoners. The series led to further successes in the 1980s, when on television she appeared in distinguished productions including adaptations of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac and Kingsley Amis's Ending Up.

She continued to be active in the 1990s, appearing in two highly praised films. Country Life (1994), directed by Michael Blakemore, was a version of Uncle Vanya set in Australia in 1919, showing what was on the collective mind of one part of the British Empire as Chekhov had shown what was on the minds of a fading Russian social class.

Shine (1996) was based on the career of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, beset by struggles against family pressures and mental instability. His real-life interpretation of Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto was used in the film and became a controversial attraction in the concert hall. Withers played the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, who helped Helfgott in his ambition to get away from his possessive father and to London for his higher musical training, but died before she could enjoy his success.

Withers was a great trouper of the old school who, coming back to England in 1967 to play the forceful mayoress in Shaw's Getting Married, found the country "changed and lacking in energy". The woman who was once called "the best bad girl in British films" was always prepared to help make up any deficiency in that respect. At 85 she was still commanding attention on the West End stage, in Lady Windermere's Fan.

In 1980 she was appointed AO, and in 2001 CBE. Her husband died last year, and she is survived by her children.

• Googie (Georgette Lizette) Withers, actor, born 12 March 1917; died 15 July 2011

View the original article here

Sherwood Schwartz obituary

The Brady Bunch: Mike Brady (Robert Reed), top centre, and his three sons; his wife Carol (Florence Henderson), below him, and her three daughters; and to Mike and Carol's left, the family's housekeeper, Alice (Ann B Davis), seen in 1970. Photograph: ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images

In the 1960s, no one had his finger closer to the pulse of the great American television-watching public than Sherwood Schwartz, who has died aged 94. Schwartz created both Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch, two shows that defied critical opprobrium to become hits, and through endless sequels and repeats in syndication have become icons of their era.

Looking back, it is possible to find some cultural weight in each. Gilligan, which, as its theme song, co-written by Schwartz, explained, was the tale of seven people on a "three-hour cruise" who wind up cast away on a lost island, was sold to the CBS network as "a microcosm, but a funny microcosm", and it made its debut in 1964.

As played by Bob Denver, the clumsy first mate Gilligan might be seen, when the show debuted in 1964, as a prototype hippie, interacting with an egghead professor and an arrogant millionaire. Schwartz loved casting broad comic actors: the millionaire was Jim Backus, and Gilligan also had a fraught relationship with Alan Hale as the ship's skipper.

The Brady Bunch, broadcast from 1969 onwards, reflected the decade's social changes. Schwartz read a newspaper item claiming that nearly one-third of American households included a child from a previous marriage. From that he spun off a comedy where Robert Reed marries Florence Henderson, each bringing three children along with them. The leads played straight man for the kids, while housekeeper Ann B Davis provided the broader strokes.

Sherwood Schwartz made a lifelong industry of recycyling his two winning formulas, quite unconcerned about critical scorn. As he put it, "I know what the critics love. We write and produce for people, not critics." Photograph: Frederick M Brown/ Getty Images

Comedy was a field Schwartz came to by accident. Born in Passaic, New Jersey, he grew up in Brooklyn and was a science student at DeWitt Clinton high. Graduating with a pre-medical degree from New York University, he took a master's in biological science at the University of Southern California. He lived with his brother Al, who was a writer on Bob Hope's newly launched radio show. In need of money, he began selling jokes to Hope, who in 1938 offered him a staff job. "I was faced with a major decision," he said, "writing comedy or starving to death while I cured those diseases. I made a quick career change."

Schwartz wrote shows for Armed Forces Radio during the second world war, and returned to radio sitcoms after the war. In 1952 he moved to TV, writing I Married Joan, starring Backus as a respectable judge tormented by his erratic wife. The following year he rejoined his brother as a writer for Red Skelton, with whom he stayed until 1962. Although Schwartz won an Emmy in 1961 as part of the writing team, his relations with Skelton were so bad that his contract specified he would never have to deal directly with the star. In Denver, Schwartz found a more agreeable version of Skelton's bumbling comic persona.

In 1963 he wrote for My Favorite Martian, another series about understanding different kinds of people. Much analysed in retrospect, Ray Walston's secret Martian identity is sometimes viewed as an allegory of closeted gayness. Sherwood had a sharp sense of satire: the SS Minnow, Gilligan's shipwrecked boat, was named after Newton Minow, the head of the Federal Communications Commission who famously called American TV "a vast wasteland".

In 1966 Schwartz began mining Gilligan with the launch of It's About Time, in which two astronauts travel back to a prehistoric time which conveniently looked exactly like the sets of Gilligan's Island. The cavemen included Imogene Coca, Joe E Ross and Mike Mazurki, but despite a shift halfway through the series which brought them to the 20th century, the show lasted only one season. In 1973, the Brady Bunch's final season, Schwartz created Dusty's Trail, a western Gilligan's Island with covered wagons. Denver starred as Dusty, with Forrest Tucker in the Alan Hale role. Although Denver considered it his best work, it also lasted only one season. Schwartz was writer-producer for the short-lived Harper Valley PTA (1978), based on the country-music hit, and developed, but failed to sell, two more series with Denver, Scamps (1982) and The Invisible Woman, eventually done as a TV movie in 1983.

Recycling Gilligan and Brady became a lifelong industry, often involving co-writing with members of his family. Gilligan's Island is sometimes cited as the most-rerun programme in TV history. It spawned three TV movies. One might have felt the first, Rescue From Gilligan's Island (1978) would have ended the franchise, but the third, The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981), certainly did. After a successful TV movie, The Brady Girls Get Married (1981), the series The Brady Brides (also 1981) lasted only six episodes, and after a Christmas special in 1989, The Bradys (1990) lasted only five. Schwartz did not work on the tongue-in-cheek Brady Bunch Movie (1995) with Gary Cole and Shelley Long, but threatened to disavow the film if the script updated the characters' dialogue to include swearing. It was a hit, and spawned a sequel and a TV movie, The Brady Bunch in the White House (2002).

Schwartz co-wrote a musical version of Gilligan's Island, and a 2006 play, Rockers, which ran at the Theatre West in Los Angeles. He was admired by Brady fans for his efforts to stop Paramount from harassing amateur theatre groups for copyright infringement when they staged productions based on the Brady Bunch.

He is survived by his wife of 69 years, Mildred, three sons and a daughter. The scorn of critics never bothered him. "I know what the critics love," he said. "We write and produce for people, not for critics."

• Sherwood Charles Schwartz, comedy writer and producer, born 4 November 1916; died 12 July 2011

View the original article here

Mani Kaul obituary

Mani Kaul's Duvidha (In Two Minds), 1975, with Raisa Padamsee and Ravi Menon. Photograph: Hyphen Films

Those who think of Indian cinema as the glitz of Bollywood on the one hand and the eloquent classicism of Satyajit Ray on the other miss a third important strand, manifested best by the radical director Mani Kaul, who has died from cancer aged 66. Kaul was a totally uncompromising film-maker who never sought popularity but pursued his own concerns, influenced by Ritwik Ghatak, his Bengali teacher and a great director in his own right, and by Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky among the foreign giants of the cinema. Watching Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), he once said, was one of the formative experiences of his life.

Mani Kaul in 1988. Photograph: Peter Chappell

He was, however, entirely his own man, who understood Indian art, music, literature and theatre as much as film. He was a stern critic of orthodox storytelling and especially the modern gyrations of Bollywood. "If film shows you something you already know," he once said, "where will it lead us?"

His own version of true cinema led to Kaul being admired by the more adventurous Indian and European critics and often adored by the film students he taught, but largely ignored by the public. Recently, opportunities were few and far between. In his last year, when he was fighting illness, he had a chance to direct a film about the Italian director Roberto Rossellini's visit to India in the 1950s. The screenplay was to be based on Dileep Padgaonkar's book Under Her Spell, but Kaul was too ill to start the shoot.

He was born in Jodhpur, in Rajasthan, to a Kashmiri family. His uncle was the actor-director Mahesh Kaul. Mani studied at film school first as an actor and then as a director. His first feature, Uski Roti (Our Daily Bread, 1970), became one of the key films of the new Indian cinema of the time. It tells the story of a woman who waits for her truck-driver husband every day with his food. When he doesn't appear, she begins to doubt his loyalty and finds out that he has a mistress in another town. The film is not an orthodox narrative, dealing instead with silence, mood and imagery. It caused a huge stir, even being lambasted in the Indian parliament by a member who said it was so boring she would never forget it. Kaul took the intended insult as high praise.

His most famous film was Duvidha (In Two Minds, 1975), an adaptation of a folktale from Rajasthan that visually copied the Rajasthani miniature style of painting. The story is simple. A merchant's son returns to his village with his bride but has to go away on business. She is left alone and a "ghost", possibly the product of her fertile imagination, assumes the form of her husband. When the real husband returns, the ghost is tied up in a leather bag, much to the woman's distress.

The film, beautifully shot, was shown widely in European arthouses. But India had and has no such cinemas, one of the main reasons why the films of Kaul, his fellow radical Kumar Shahani and many other talented film-makers could never make a real mark. Though funded by the Indian government's Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and given the promise of a screening on national television, the films of the Indian new wave were essentially on a hiding to nothing. They could not be shown in the huge cinemas where Bollywood's successful epics attracted full houses, and were often considered abstruse and uncommercial.

Kaul's group of documentaries, very unlike those put out by the FFC with sonorous, often English voiceovers, were as distinctive as his features. The best known is probably Dhrupad (1982), in which he examines one of the purest forms of Indian classical music. The film argues that both folk and classical idioms were derived, over some 2,000 years, from tribal music and the celebration of nature and the cycles of life. In the last shot, which extends for some six minutes, the camera pans eloquently over the skyline of Mumbai, looking at the slums and skyscrapers, accompanied by the Dhrupad form, to bring pattern and meaning to the chaotic existence of the sprawling city.

Although Kaul's body of work was considerable – he made two films, Nazar and Idiot (both 1991), based on the work of Dostoevsky – his inability to finance the films he wanted led him to teaching film in India, Europe and America, and also to studying the Indian music he loved. He became an accomplished singer in the process.

Although he took the hard road as a film-maker, achieving, at least latterly, far less than he deserved, his influence was considerable. It was once said of Kaul that he refused to be a passive carrier of the national artistic tradition and, with equal vehemence, was unconcerned with importing into India the western avant-garde experiment. Now that he has died, as is often the case in India, his work may well be studied with added appreciation. But not by the famous Bollywood director who once met him and said afterwards: "I simply didn't know what to talk to him about."

Kaul is survived by two sons and two daughters.

• Mani Kaul (Rabindranath Kaul), film director, born 25 December 1944; died 6 July 2011

View the original article here