Originally Posted by David Brent Does anyone remember the very sexy Jo Rowbottom who appeared in countless Brit television shows from the sixties into the nineties? She appeared as Mollie Dawson in the 1967 series of Dr.Who. She had a sultry gravel tone to her voice and was a real good looker. Shame there are not too many photos on the net that do her justice. Dave.

I had the pleasure of seeing Honeysuckle in Barnstaple....the Samantha Stewart character is clearly modelled on Deborah Kerr in Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and hasa very British sex appeal ......In her so called 'sexy picture' in the DAILY MAIL, Honeysuckle looks just like any other tart....

Honeysuckle Weeks had a wonderful Foyle's War but she wishes Sam - and her knickers - had been sexier

DAILY MAIL
By RICHARD BARBER - 10th April 2008

Almost a year has passed since Honeysuckle Weeks filmed her last scenes as Samantha Stewart in ITV1's concluding two episodes of Foyle's War. But she still misses the role that made her a household name. "In the end, I think we went on a little longer than the war itself," she says, "but I never wanted it to finish."
More recently, she's been touring the UK in a stage production of Henry James's Turn Of The Screw. It has been a less-than-happy experience. "Let's just say I've been to Hull and back," says Honeysuckle, rather pleased with her own joke.
Honeysuckle Weeks on her Foyle's War character: 'Sam's knickers would have put Bridget Jones to shame'
In Barnstaple, the dry-ice machine malfunctioned. "The result was that not only were the audience unable to see my entire performance, they couldn't hear me either as most of them were choking to death."
At 28, Honeysuckle is well on her way to becoming a full-blown eccentric. With a cut-glass accent that makes even the Queen sound a bit common, her conversation is peppered with the sort of salty phrases that might bring a blush to the cheek of the most hardened HGV driver. She has a habit of tilting her head back and looking at you down the length of her nose.
And then there's that name.
Honeysuckle was apparently growing around the door when her mother, Susan, gave birth. "I had my leg pulled at school [Roedean, as it happens] because of my first name, but there are worse things to be teased about, aren't there?"
She re-lights a rather sodden roll-up. "The coral that grows at the edge of the reef," she announces, "is always the strongest and most colourful because it faces the greatest battering. It's the same if you're called Honeysuckle. I'd have had a totally different life if I'd been called Mary.
"Anyway, it's really good to have so distinctive a name as an actress. No one ever forgets it. My sister and brother are called Perdita and Rollo.
"Actually," she confides, "my family calls me Hollyhocks."
And her husband? "Oh, he calls me Shrimp because he says I'm little and prawn-like." (He's wrong on both counts - Honeysuckle is 5ft 7in and had to wear flats throughout Foyle's War so that she didn't tower over Michael Kitchen, who plays DCS Foyle.)
Honeysuckle is huge fun. We are sitting in the market in Greenwich, South-east London, between that day's matinee and evening performances of Turn Of The Screw.
Despite the temperature, she wants to sit outside the pub so she can smoke her roll-ups. The backdrop to our conversation is the deafening clatter of market stalls being dragged over the cobbles and noisily dismantled. "It sounds like they're playing Pick-a-Sticks with metal tubes, doesn't it?" she says.
It's not difficult to see why she was cast as Sam. Anthony Horowitz, creator of Foyle's War, is an unashamed fan of the actress who breathed such vim and vigour into Sam, trusty driver to the eponymous hero of the drama.
"Honeysuckle was utterly perfect for the part," says Horowitz, "and I knew it the moment I met her. She's a 1940s woman in a 21st-century world. She has that extraordinary clipped, slightly eccentric quality, not to mention the bearing that takes you straight back to the war.

"She's also terribly nice. These are dark, sometimes depressing stories. What we needed was someone with a
relentlessly positive quality, an optimistic outlook. And that's exactly what Honeysuckle supplied. Of all the characters in Foyle's War, I had the most fun writing for her.
"She enjoys everything she does. She might be stuck in the middle of a field in the pouring rain, but she never complains. She has that World War II mentality.
"You can imagine regaining consciousness in Honeysuckle's arms and, despite your terrible injuries, thinking that maybe the world isn't such a bad place after all. After Foyle himself, there's no question that she's the star of the show, and especially among men of a certain age."
"Sam is very jolly hockey sticks," acknowledges Honeysuckle, adding wistfully, "but I did always rather wish she'd been a bit sexier.
"I never felt anyone would have been terribly interested in her getting her kit off. You certainly wouldn't have wanted to have seen her underwear: thick and scratchy and with knickers to put Bridget Jones to shame."
Sex might have liberated her, though. "It might, but none of that happened until the 1960s. I think her character is more readily identified with Florence, Ian McEwan's heroine in On Chesil Beach. Sex would have been something distasteful to her, something fearful almost. It's why I tried to give Sam an almost childlike innocence."
Michael Kitchen, the star of the series and an actor whom Honeysuckle worships, once told her that if she, too, wanted to be a star, she should make Sam more like herself.
"But I didn't want to. I was keen that she shouldn't lose her enthusiasm by being sexy and cool. She has not one feline quality about her. She's far more like a dog. You want to throw her chocolate drops."
In reality, Honeysuckle is, in her own estimation, quite different. "I like rock 'n' roll and fast cars. Last year I bought myself a classic Porsche."
It was also in 2007 that she married Lorne Stormonth Darling, the man she used to call her "luv-ah".
"I wore a dress that combined pre-Raphaelite with medieval. All my favourite people were under one roof. I cried an awful lot. I loved it. And Michael read one of the lessons. Then we left the reception in a hot air balloon. I wore a white leather jacket with epaulets. Very Jules Verne."
At 44, Stormonth Darling is sixteen years his wife's senior. When Honeysuckle was reading English at Pembroke College, Oxford, he'd turn up to bonfire parties, but romance didn't blossom until she graduated and almost immediately began filming Foyle's War. "A bit charmed, isn't it?" she says now. "My mother calls me the Luck Child."
Whether this good fortune will persist remains to be seen. By no stretch of the imagination could Stormonth Darling be described as ambitious.
"Oh, absolutely," says his wife. "Not what you'd call one of life's rabbit-catchers."
He has worked for the Getty Foundation restoring Tibetan monasteries, then he opened a shop in Knightsbridge selling Tibetan artefacts, but the crippling rent eventually did for that venture.
"Now he's training to be a mesmerist," says Honeysuckle. "He was told at a party that he had the perfect voice for hypnotism. I wonder if he's been hypnotising me all this time to fall in love with him. If that's the case, he's done a very good job."
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True love: Honeysuckle's wedding day
Perhaps, but it doesn't sound as though he's bringing home much bacon. "No, I do that," she says, "for as long as there's bacon to bring home."
It's a precarious profession. But Lorne has a plan. "He wants us to go to Bollywood. He thinks I could make a real go of it in a Bollywood movie because they're now starting to employ English girls. I'm a little less confident about the wisdom of all of this, though. But Lorne insists it's a real and positive thing."
Although her own parents' marriage ended in divorce when Honeysuckle was 14, she loves being married.
"It's so different from living together. And so liberating, too," she enthuses. "It removes any doubt, any uncertainty. It simplifies things which always leads to a happy life."
She's keen to have a family of her own. "Well, a dynasty actually. I'd like five." And yes, they'd all be saddled with unusual names. "I'm rather keen on Thisbe for the first girl," she says. And Pyramus, presumably for her eldest son.
But there's a serious point here. Does she not worry that with her much older husband currently not contributing to the couple's coffers, too much will fall on her shoulders, particularly if she stops to produce a family?
The head tilts back just a fraction further. "In a word, yes. Both our families are very supportive, though. And there are funds," she mutters darkly, "on his side, not mine.
"But I do think about what might happen in the future. As Bilbo Baggins was fond of saying: 'I'm in danger of having too little butter to cover too much bread.'"
She had rather hoped that Anthony Horowitz would dream up a spin-off series that saw Sam sailing into the 1950s. It's something he'd like to have done himself. "I had an idea," he says, "that, after the war, Sam would open a guest house in Brighton and deal with all the crooks and colourful people who came to stay under her roof. I think the character has limitless potential."
In fact, there is talk that some of the Foyle's War characters will transfer to a new series set in peacetime. Laura Mackie, director of drama at ITV, says: "Foyle is an iconic character that viewers love. We are very hopeful that we can bring him back to our screens sometime in the future."
But nothing is confirmed, so for now Honeysuckle must content herself with seven years of war. And she's not complaining.
"It was the most fantastic experience," she says. "Because the ending was all caught up in a story about VE Day, I felt a curious mixture of jubilation and my heartstrings being severely plucked."
As to the final ending, she's being understandably circumspect. "But a murder's involved," she reveals, "and right under Foyle's nose."
Michael Kitchen will always remain a part of her life, though. "I'm sure we'll work together again one day," she says. "I've learnt so much from him. He's the arch exponent of less-is-more in his style of acting. Occasionally, he'd say: 'A bit too Bunty, Honeysuckle.' In other words, I needed to tone it down. I respect him hugely."
She has recently filmed an episode of the Inspector Lynley Mysteries with Nathaniel Parker. "Like me, he's terrifically keen on horses. But then I was brought up on the Downs in Sussex - I'm a country girl at heart.
"It's why I go on marches against the banning of hunting. If you live in the countryside, you understand that hunting isn't just for toffs. It's for the farmers. It's for everyone's enjoyment."
With the single exception, of course, of the fox. "Oh, I'm not going to say it isn't cruel," says Honeysuckle, "because it is. Killing foxes is nasty, brutish and rather banal in its way. My argument is for the economic, cultural and sociological elements involved. And it helps keep you fit."
Last year, she ran the London Marathon in a very creditable time of five minutes under four hours, beating even Gordon Ramsay and Sally Gunnell along the way.
While she's keen to further her career, she draws the line at certain job prospects. "I was offered a role in the film, Mrs Henderson Presents, with Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins, all about the Windmill.
"It would have involved taking my clothes off and I couldn't quite face being butt-naked for four months."
But the work ethic runs deep. "Mrs Longley, our headmistress at Roedean, drummed into us the importance of a career. None of that business of finding a nice banker husband and settling down.
"We were also made to understand the importance of foolproof contraception. RE classes were little more than repeated advice on how not to get pregnant."
If she looks into the future - and she does - it's with the hope that one day she'll become a film director. "Acting's incredibly enjoyable but sometimes it doesn't feel quite enough.
"I've also written a script about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. This will make me sound like a female Kenneth Branagh but I can't think of anything nicer than directing myself from a script I wrote."

Originally Posted by julian_craster The other 'sexy' DAILY MAIL picture of Honeysuckle Weeks..... http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/200...4_468x1026.jpg

Originally Posted by cretancorrespo If I can see to type through the watery eyes of nostalgia, I would nominate, as they were in the 60s: Janet Munro June Thorburn Hazel Court Madeline Smith Amanda Barrie Off for a cold shower now.

Originally Posted by john audley Just to return to Tarzan for a moment. Only last week the press reported that cheetah was now 76 years old Surely the guy deserves a Hollywood Lifetime Achievement Award at the next Oscars

Originally Posted by SirOllyBolly Someone who has just turned up twice whilst I've been watching my DVD box set of 'The Professionals' - Pamela Salem

Originally Posted by batman The Spanish beat 'em to it ... "To celebrate his 74th, Cheeta was awarded the first movie award of his life last weekend when he received an International Comedy Film Festival of Peniscola award." source: online news

Originally Posted by batman You can see a lot more of her in The Bitch.