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1-8 of 8
- Actor
- Producer
Sacha Dhawan was born in Bramhall, Stockport to Hindu parents though he attended a Roman Catholic secondary school, Thomas Aquinas College, in nearby Stockport. There one of the authors he studied for his final exams was Alan Bennett, by whom he was very impressed. He began as a child actor at the age of 12 and attended the Laine-Johnson School of Acting in Manchester. He is also an accomplished tap-dancer. His enthusiasm for Bennett was such that when auditioning for his play 'The History Boys' on the London stage, Sacha impressed the author not just with his acting but by reciting a poem he had composed about the play and its author. He has appeared in stage versions of 'The History Boys' around the world as well as in the 2006 film adaptation. On television he appeared in two high profile series 'In the Club' as an expectant father and 'Last Tango in Halifax' as a toy boy.- Wendy Hiller, daughter of Frank and Marie Hiller, was born on 15th August 1912 in Bramhall, near Stockport, Cheshire, England. She was educated at Winceby House School, Bexhill then moved on to Manchester Repertory Theatre. She appeared on stage in Sir John Barry's tour of Evensong, then as Sally Hardcastle in Love on the Dole. She toured extensively, playing in London and New York. She took leading parts in Pygmalion and Saint Joan at the Malvern Festival in 1936.
- Peter Butterworth's promising career in the British Navy Fleet Air Arm ended when the plane which he was flying was shot down by the Germans in WW II and he was placed in a POW camp. There he became close friends with Talbot Rothwell (later a writer on the "Carry On" series, on which Butterworth often worked) and the two began writing and performing sketches for camp shows to entertain the prisoners (and to cover up the noise of other prisoners digging escape tunnels). Never having performed in public he was petrified but gamely sang a duet with Talbot. This sparked his enthusiasm to enter show business after the war and Talbot helped and encouraged him and he soon became a familiar character actor in both films and television. He specialized in playing gentle, well-meaning but somewhat eccentric characters (which, by most accounts, is what he was in real life). He was married to impressionist Janet Brown, who he met while doing a Summer show at Scarborough and their son, Tyler Butterworth, also became an actor. Butterworth died suddenly in 1979, as he was waiting in the wings to go onstage in a pantomime show.
- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Roger Brierley (2 June 1935 - 23 September 2005) was an English actor. Brierley appeared in many television productions over a forty-year period. He twice appeared in Doctor Who, as Trevor in The Daleks' Master Plan (1965) and as the voice of Drathro in The Mysterious Planet (1986). Brierley appeared in the biopic Jinnah based on the life of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in the Granada television series Jeeves and Wooster as Sir Roderick Glossop, and as Michael Palin's Latin teacher in an episode of Ripping Yarns called Roger of the Raj, which first shown on BBC television in 1979. He played the part of Osborne in the 1977 episode "Suddenly At Home" in the TV series Rising Damp. He was also in an Only Fools and Horses episode (1982). Later work included portraying John Biffen in the TV dramatisation of The Alan Clark Diaries (2004). He also played the hotel manager in "Mr. Bean in Room 426" and appeared in A Fish Called Wanda as Archie Leach's secretary Davidson.
His acting was elegant and precisely tuned to figures of authority enjoying a brief moment of power. His arrival on screen promised either a crisp, professional denouement (from a judge, solicitor or doctor) or a piece of expert bloodymindedness (some bank manager, vicar or civic apparatchik). It was ironic that they were all upholding some kind of established system, since in life he prided himself on his stroppiness, questioning, curiosity and mischief. He managed to combine all these qualities - plus a near-legendary resistance to foreign travel and unfamiliar food - while retaining the love of his many friends. Well to the left of centre, he became a formidable negotiator for Equity, persuading the other side, by his scrupulously pinstriped appearance, that he must, surely, be one of them.
He was the son of Arthur, a chartered accountant, and Adela, an adjudicator of amateur drama. Adela's family had kept the Blossoms Hotel, a large pub on the main road south out of town, but her first love was the theatre. The implicit deal was that Roger was allowed to act on condition that he studied accountancy on leaving Cheadle Hulme school, where he was a pupil from 1943 to 1953. Being red-haired, skinny and tall for his age, he was mercilessly bullied at school, but it was a generous, broad-based institution and he suffered no lasting harm. By the time he did leave, he already had Shakespeare's Claudio (Much Ado About Nothing) and Oberon (Midsummer Night's Dream) under his belt, and had joined the student group of Stockport Garrick Society, a refuge for stage-struck adolescents and leading pioneer of the Little Theatre movement at the start of the century.
Not even National Service stopped him acting. After qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1959, he rejected the Pay Corps (too like accountancy), military intelligence (oxymoronic) and chose the education corps. Sent to teach at the Army Apprentice school in Carlisle, he discovered other middle-class boys trying to get thrown out of the army by behaving badly. In vain. The army in Carlisle welcomed diversity. They even faked his rifle-test to give him the sergeant's stripes, without which he could not teach. Roger always made it sound like a frontier-posting between Privates on Parade and MASH.
After two years at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, he joined Hornchurch Rep in 1963. Despite his great height (6ft 5in), commanding presence on stage and a season with Peter Brook's RSC ensemble, he never had much of a theatre career. He remained highly sceptical about Brook's methods of preparation for US (1966), the company-devised show about Vietnam. Television work - The Likely Lads, Doctor Who - came quickly. By 1966, he had settled in London and met the actress Gillian McCutcheon, with whom he enjoyed many years of happiness. They split in the 1990s.
Their son Oliver has followed his father's passion for Manchester United and become a spokesman for Shareholders United, which Roger had helped found to fight Murdoch's 1998 bid. Roger's passion for United was no nerdy sideline, but a serious cause: the continued independence of a great football club. The procedural clarity of his accountant's mind was as much a source of wonder to fellow shareholders and supporters as it had been to members of Equity a few years before.
He was a member of the Equity Council from 1984 to 1986, and actively involved in union affairs between 1977 and 1996. Most members thought acting had nothing to do with politics, but several issues threatened to drive them into civil war: fees for commercials; how to deal with apartheid South Africa; how actors should be paid for repeats of old programmes sold off to the new cable stations. In the end, most of the battles were lost, but they would have been lost far sooner if Roger and his colleagues in the Centre Forward group had not fought every inch of the way. For many years, he was also an invaluable joint treasurer of TACT, The Actors' Charitable Trust.
All his life Roger retained his enthusiasms and loyalties. While under no illusions about showbiz, he remained star-struck by the great comic actors with whom he had worked. Being introduced to the somewhat intimidating Coronation Street cast by Doris Speed, who played landlady Annie Walker, was as iconic a moment for him as when he saw Don Bradman come on with the drinks tray at Old Trafford in 1948.
Brierley featured regularly on British television. He appeared in the BBC series Casualty three times and also made appearances in The Ruth Rendell Mysteries and Shine on Harvey Moon (1982). He often played typical character actor roles such as vicars, judges, barristers or hotel managers.
He worked with Victoria Wood on several occasions over the years. Firstly on her series Wood and Walters (1981) in the early eighties, later in the mid eighties on the series Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985), then again in the late eighties in the series Victoria Wood (1989). Brierley worked with Wood a final time in 1994 in her TV film Pat and Margaret (1994).
Wood later remembered her previous work with Brierley and in her TV film Housewife, 49 (2005), she named a character after him. The character was played by Jason Watkins.
Brierley met Joan in 2001, an old school-friend on whom he had once had a crush. They decided to set up house together. It was like a sequel to Much Ado - not boring old Claudio this time, but a senior Benedick and Beatrice, after years of mutual loneliness, sparked up for an adventurous eighth decade. But Roger had lived with angina for 20 years and it was not to be. Brierley died of a heart attack on September 23, 2005.- Leslie Adams was born in Bramhall, Manchester, England, UK. He was an actor, known for The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976), Twenty-Nine (1969) and Mother Goose (1959). He died in 1993.
- Howard Agg was born in Bramhall, Cheshire, England, UK. Howard is known for Il tunnel (1958).
- Producer
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Derek Granger was born on 23 April 1921 in Bramhall, Cheshire, England, UK. He was a producer and writer, known for Country Matters (1972), Brideshead Revisited (1981) and A Handful of Dust (1988). He was married to Kenneth Partridge. He died on 29 November 2022 in London, England, UK.- Additional Crew
R.D. Catterall was born on 9 July 1918 in Bramhall, Cheshire, England, UK. He is known for It Could Happen to You (1976) and Doctors' Dilemmas (1983). He died on 5 May 1993 in London, England, UK.