julian_craster

From Roger

R.I.P. Derek Aylward

Actor who performed for 'Binkie' Beaumont in the 1950s West End
and had an extended career in some very dodgy British films of the 1970s....

The longevity of his career is amazing - and that he was able to keep it up for so long. A most versatile performer !

A cautionary note: This obituary, as it appeared in 'The Independent', is
certified 18R and is deemed unsuitable for minors.......

The Independent Obituary
Derek Aylward
'Gentleman' star of British 'saucy cinema'
Published: 06 September 2005


Derek Anthony Aylward, actor: born Maidenhead, Berkshire 29 October
1922; died 9 July 2005.

The curious career of Derek Aylward encompassed the sophisticated,
long
vanished world of pre-Osborne West End theatre, the formative years of
television drama in Britain and hard-core pornography. Resembling a
perennial 1950s juvenile lead, with Brylcreemed hair, velvet voice,
debonair
manner and increasingly crinkly good looks, Aylward was once told by
Noël
Coward that he was "a gentleman to your fingertips", and he retained a
gentlemanly aura always, despite the unlikely circumstances he found
himself
in.

Aylward was born in 1922 in Maidenhead, and trained at the Italia
Conti
School, where particular attention was given to refining his voice,
both for
speaking and singing. He had minor, unbilled film roles in Knight
Without
Armour (1937) with Marlene Dietrich, the Anglo-American production A
Yank at
Oxford (1938) and the Will Hay vehicle The Ghost of St Michael's
(1941). In
1944, he was in a touring production of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit
for
Ensa, supervised by the omnipotent producer Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont,
and
Beaumont gave him his West End début, in Coward's uncharacteristic
Peace in
Our Time, dealing with a Nazi-occupied Britain, at the Lyric in 1947.

From 1948 to 1950, and again for Beaumont, at H.M. Tennent's, Aylward
was
the juvenile lead at the Criterion in Traveller's Joy, a frivolous
comedy by
Arthur Macrae, starring Yvonne Arnaud and Dora Bryan. Despite his
junior
position, Aylward insisted on being paid in guineas rather than
pounds,
quoting Sheridan's comment that it was "the difference between being
treated
as a gentleman and being treated like a tradesman". Beaumont agreed,
but it
marked the start of a tense relationship between the actor and his
employer.

It was constantly rumoured that Beaumont had his own particular
reasons for
employing certain handsome young actors, but Aylward insisted, when
interviewed for Richard Huggett's biography Binkie Beaumont: eminence
grise
of the West End theatre, 1933-1973 (1989), that

we were never in any way lovers. I just wasn't his type. There was a
sort of
self-importance he carried around with him which I suppose comes from
having
too much power, and it slightly irritated me.

During the London heatwave of 1949, Aylward was reprimanded for
wearing
shorts and an open-necked shirt, Beaumont insisting that his actors
should
wear a suit and tie at all times. Most unforgivably in the producer's
view,
Aylward, who was reputedly well endowed, kept a plaster cast of his
penis in
his dressing room, where it elicited more than a few chuckles from
visitors;
Beaumont confiscated this, telling Aylward, "I gather the cleaners
were
deeply shocked." Aylward discovered later that Beaumont kept the
plaster
cast at his country retreat and had turned it into a table lamp.

Aylward was blacklisted by Beaumont, and this effectively ended his
career
in the West End (although he did appear in the stage version of Harold
Pinter's television play Tea Party, at the Duchess Theatre in west
London in
1970, with Donald Pleasence). Instead, he concentrated on the new
medium of
television, in the live days with the BBC as the only channel. He had
made
his début in 1947 in a play, Blow Your Own Trumpet, as a character
called
Dick. He became a regular, as a scout named Brayton Ripley, in The
Cabin in
the Clearing (1954), a BBC western serial for children, and guested
in the
now unintentionally hilarious Fabian of the Yard (1954), and a No
Hiding
Place (1959) that was recovered in 1999 as part of the British Film
Institute's "Missing Believed Wiped" initiative.

One of his best-remembered roles was in Quatermass II (1955), as a
nice
young public relations man who perishes after falling into a vat of
alien
slime; he worked for Rudolph Cartier in Anna Karenina (1961),
supporting
Claire Bloom in the title role and Sean Connery as Vronsky, and the
subsequently wiped Rembrandt (1969), as Banning Cocq, with Richard
Johnson.
Classic serials included Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1959), as
Godfrey
Ablewhite, with Patrick Troughton, plus some popular swashbucklers:
William
Tell (1957), Ivanhoe (1958) and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot
(1956). There
were two appearances during Dixon of Dock Green's long run, and
Aylward
played an incompetent professor's assistant in a one-off sci-fi
comedy,
Bellweather Nine (1959). Later, he was a semi-regular in the
forgotten BBC
soap Compact (1963), had Patrick McGoohan under surveillance in an
episode
of The Prisoner (1967), and played a military attaché in Stiff Upper
Lip
(1968), a Comedy Playhouse entry adapted by Barry Took from a Lawrence
Durrell short story.

Aylward had a leading role in the Methodist-sponsored John Wesley
(1954), in
which he played the church's founder's brother Charles. His other
films
included The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), in which he played Percy
Douglas,
Bosie's brother; and The Verdict (1964), one of the popular series of
B
movies made at Merton Park Studios, from stories by Edgar Wallace;
and he
was a guest at a swinging party in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965).

But he eventually became fixture casting in the tatty exploitation
films of
the director Pete Walker, whose later horror work (in which Aylward
did not
appear) has become a minor cult. Aylward described I Like Birds
(1967), in
which he played a hypocritical puritan publisher, as "not just the
worst
film I ever starred in, but the worst film ever made", adding
that "it was
hell trying to remember your lines with all these distractions".
Walker was
to admit that, when he cast Aylward, he mistook him for Tony Britton.
Despite this, he gave Aylward top billing, albeit with a daily salary
of
£20, on School for Sex (1968), as an embittered divorcee declaring
that
man's Achilles' heel is "crumpet . . . sex". Strip Poker (1968),
allegedly
written by Walker in one night, Man of Violence (1970, later retitled
The
Sex Racketeers) and Cool It Carol! (1970), starring the inevitable
Robin
Askwith, and Aylward as a lecherous modelling agency boss, all
followed.

After an unbilled bit part as a diner in Peter Cook's satire The Rise
and
Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), Aylward was largely concerned with
military
recruitment documentaries. Then, as a lecherous politician in the
slipshod
but enormously profitable Come Play With Me (1977), he took part in a
genuine hard-core sequence, cut from the film's British release
print, with
Lisa Taylor, a model almost three decades his junior. Of this
startling new
occupation, he was to say later,

I started off my career singing Carmen in Covent Garden in the 1930s
and now
I was offered this. I thought, "Sod it, of course I'll do it", and it
was
very liberating.

The director George Harrison Marks stated that he "didn't have to
persuade"
Aylward in any way.

Aylward next did several illegal hard-core loops shot on 8mm, with
titles
like Super Sex Shop and Wet Dreams, rounding it off by being massaged
by
Mary Millington in the soft-core feature The Playbirds (1978); he
also took
part in several nude layouts with her in the magazine of the same
name,
posing in other adult titles like Penthouse and Knave at the same
time,
despite his age and background.

Interviewed for the second edition of Simon Sheridan's Keeping the
British
End Up: four decades of saucy cinema (published this year), Aylward
had no
regrets or embarrassment. He said that when watching previous British
porn
efforts he had "always been appalled by the quality of the acting"
and that
he himself had provided "dick and proper diction".

After retiring in 1982, he lived contentedly on the Sussex coast,
where he
was cordial and amusing whenever contacted in recent years by show-
business
researchers.

Gavin Gaughan

Gavin Gaughan

Well, glad you liked it, and thank you for the plug!