julian_craster

The Times Obituary
September 21, 2005
Terence Morgan
December 8, 1921 - August 25, 2005
Leading man of Fifties cinema, who found television fame as Sir Francis
Drake

TERENCE MORGAN was one of British cinema’s leading men of the 1950s, playing
both heroes and villains opposite Diana Dors and Joan Collins in a string of
thrillers and melodramas. However, one of his greatest successes was on the
small screen as Sir Francis Drake in a rollicking adventure series aimed at
younger viewers.
Born in Lewisham in 1921, Morgan worked as a clerk with Lloyd’s of London
before pursuing his acting ambitions at RADA. He had a spell in the Army,
was invalided out and worked in repertory and in the West End. Laurence
Olivier cast him in several theatre productions and as Laertes in his 1948
Oscar-winning film of Hamlet. The fencing training he received would later
come in useful on Sir Francis Drake.

Morgan was given the chance of a lead role in the thriller Shadow of the
Past (1950), playing a man who becomes involved in nefarious goings-on with
a widower and a woman who appears to be both his prisoner and the double of
his dead wife. The following year he played Lieutenant Gerard opposite
Gregory Peck as Captain Horatio Hornblower in the Raoul Walsh adaptation of
C. S. Forester’s seafaring adventure. In 1952 he played the insensitive
father of a deaf girl in Sandy Mackendrick’s Mandy — one of few Ealing
dramas that has held its own against the more famous comedies.

During the 1950s Morgan typically made two films a year, usually in a
starring role. He was the hard-hearted husband who forced his wife, Glynis
Johns, to dive nightly into a blazing pool in Encore (1952); a drug-smuggler
thwarted by the bird-watcher Joyce Grenfell in Forbidden Cargo (1954); the
young singer’s lover in Svengali (1954); an impoverished Irish aristocrat
with a single racehorse in the comedy The March Hare (1956) and a London
gangster involved in vice and blackmail in The Shakedown (1959).

In 1961 Sir Francis Drake became the latest in a string of series with
historical settings, following on the heels of Robin Hood, William Tell and
Ivanhoe, with the hero embarking on a new self-contained adventure every
week.

Despite the success of Sir Francis Drake, Morgan’s career fell into a steep
decline. He had a starring role in Hammer’s The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
(1964), playing Ba, an evil Egyptian cursed to eternal life for murdering
his brother, but it was not one of the studio’s better films.

Morgan returned to the high seas in The Fighting Corsair (1966), a European
swashbuckler shot in Italian. It was released in the UK in a dubbed version
in 1970 and dismissed by the Monthly Film Bulletin’s reviewer in four lines.

The Penthouse (1967) was a modish psychological thriller, with Morgan
playing a married estate agent and Suzy Kendall his mistress. Their illicit
love nest is invaded by three thugs called Tom, Dick and Harry — a plotline
shared by Cul-de-Sac (1966) and Performance (1970), but against which The
Penthouse compares poorly.

Morgan appeared in the television series The Persuaders in 1972 and a
short-lived series, King & Castle, in 1986, playing a homosexual actor who
is being blackmailed. But he had more or less retired from acting.

Latterly he ran a hotel in Hove and was involved in property development. He
is survived by his wife and daughter.

Terence Morgan, actor, was born on December 8, 1921. He died on August 25,
2005, aged 83.

Marky B

[quote post='22039' date='Sep 21 2005, 02:02 AM' name='Steve Crook']
[img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif[/img]-->Sailor's motto. Never chuck out the slops bucket to windward.
It's all coming back to me!

Steve
[/quote]
[img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif[/img] [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cheers.gif[/img]
Ta Ta
Marky B [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsup.gif[/img]