Allen Dace

'The Independent' reports the death of this solid character actor with a distinctive voice :

Patrick Allen
Imposing actor with tough looks
Published: 08 August 2006

Patrick John Keith Allen, actor: born 17 March 1927; married 1960 Sarah Lawson (two sons); died London 28 July 2006.

Patrick Allen was a prolific actor with an imposing presence. His tough, jut-jawed looks lent themselves to villainous or military roles, but his varied career also embraced Shakespeare and myriad parts in theatre, film, radio and television. He starred in the popular TV series Crane, and his distinctively resonant voice was heard on the hit single "Two Tribes", by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and gave him steady work in later years providing voice-overs.

Born in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1927, Allen was raised in Canada. He made his screen début as a soldier in Robert Aldrich's thriller World for Ransom (1953), though many sources list his next screen role, a three-word part in Alfred Hitchcock's version of the hit play Dial M For Murder (1954), as his first.

He had his first major screen credit as a lorry-owning racketeer in The Long Haul (1957), with Victor Mature and Diana Dors. Other film roles included an Army sergeant in Dunkirk and an officer in I Was Monty's Double (both 1958), prior to his first leading role, as a father whose young daughter is molested by an apparently upright citizen in Cyril Frankel's Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960), which dealt delicately with its sensitive subject, though audiences stayed away.

Allen also worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it was while appearing with the company that he met the actress Sarah Lawson, who became his wife in 1960. The couple, who had two sons, appeared together as a married pair in the film Night of the Big Heat (1967) and in the radio series Inspector West (1967-71), based on stories by John Creasey.

On television Allen had a recurring role as the Bos'n and best friend of a rascally tramp-steamer engineer (Thomas Mitchell) in the series Glencannon (1960). In 1963, while appearing at Stratford-on-Avon as Achilles in the RSC's Troilus and Cressida, he was offered the starring role in the series Crane.

As soon as the Shakespearean season finished, he journeyed to Morocco to begin filming the show. He played a successful businessman who, tired of his hectic life in London, moves to Morocco where he buys a run-down beachside café and bar near Casablanca, plus a boat with which he carries out minor smuggling activities. Always one step ahead of the chief of police (Gerald Flood), he was partnered by a colourful beachcomber Orlando (Sam Kydd), a character later given his own series. Crane ran for three years, and Allen stated, "I don't think I've ever enjoyed myself quite as much."

Later he starred in another series, Brett (1971), as a dubious writer turned tycoon whose shady past is revealed by extensive flashbacks. Filmed in Malta (doubling for Mexico), it ran for 19 50-minute episodes. He had the intermittently recurring role as wicked Colonel Sebastian Moran in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1973); won particular praise for his uncompromisingly intransigent Gradgrind in a four-part adaptation of Dickens's Hard Times in 1977; and played Sarah Ferguson's father in the TV movie Fergie and Andrew: behind palace doors (1992). His many action movies included The Night of the Generals (1966), When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969), The Wild Geese (1978), The Sea Wolves (1980) and Who Dares Wins (1982).

In the early 1970s, he made a series of striking commercials for Barratt Homes in which he was flown by helicopter to new housing developments. He also narrated two Public Information films in the "Protect and Survive" series, made in 1975 to advise on action to be taken in the event of nuclear fallout. On the Frankie Goes to Hollywood single "Two Tribes", which topped the UK charts for nine weeks in the summer of 1984, Allen performed a voice-over parodying the "Protect and Survive" narration.

He was voice-over artist for the 1990s comedy series The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and Vic Reeves' Big Night Out, narrated the first series of The Black Adder (1983, and appeared in the last episode) and narrated the children's animated series TUGS (1989), playing Captain Starr.

Last year, he became the voice of the youth-orientated television channel E4, providing its often irreverent self-advertising promotions, such as its film slogan "Big Shiny Films in Your Dinky Little Home".

Tom Vallance

Imdb entry.

julian_craster

Patrick Allen
Daily Telegraph


(Filed: 08/08/2006)






Patrick Allen, who has died aged 79, was a dashing and industrious actor on stage and screen, but was perhaps even better known for his resonant voice, which was a feature of many television advertising campaigns from the 1960s - at one time he was known as "The King of the Voice-Over".
Tall, dark and strong-jawed, Allen came to prominence in the early 1960s in the television series Crane, in which he played a Morocco-based adventurer and smuggler who, with his sidekick (Sam Kydd), eluded the investigations of the local police inspector (Gerald Flood) whilst enjoying the attentions of a voluptuous barmaid (Laya Raki). With holidays abroad not nearly so common as they are today, the exotic locations helped to make the programme a firm favourite with viewers.
Allen also achieved popularity on the small screen as the eponymous hero of Brett (1971), a drama about a business tycoon.
An accomplished stage actor, Allen was an early member of Peter Hall's newly-formed Royal Shakespeare Company, in the 1960s appearing as leading man to Vanessa Redgrave in As You Like It and The Winter's Tale. A decade later he was King Arthur in the RSC's four-hour epic of post-Roman Britain, The Island of the Mighty, which was disowned by its authors, John Arden and Margaretta d'Arcy, during its London run.
Other RSC roles included Antonio, a sea captain, to Dorothy Tutin's Viola in Hall's Twelfth Night; Antonio in Michael Langham's Merchant of Venice (with Peter O'Toole as Shylock); and Achilles - "ablaze with life as the champion of Greece", according to one critic - in Hall's famous revival, set in a sandpit, of Troilus and Cressida.
At the same time Allen proved a popular and arresting character actor in films such as The Long Haul (1957), The Night of the Generals (1967), The Wild Geese (1978) and Who Dares Wins (1982).
Throughout his long career, Allen's rich, distinctive voice was in demand from companies which recognised its potential in television commercials. Perhaps his best-known advertising campaign was that for Barratt Homes, in which he appeared as the thrusting executive helicoptered into impressive suburban housing developments.
Allen invested some £200,000 in a group of three companies that were geared to the "voice-over" phenomenon. By 1979 these companies handled around 60 per cent of all British commercials.
John Keith Patrick Allen was born on March 17 1927 in Nyasaland (now Malawi), the son of a tobacco farmer. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and Pat was brought to England by his mother, who was later to marry the 7th Marquess of Downshire. After the outbreak of war she took him to Canada, where he enrolled at McGill University, Montreal, to study Medicine.
After breaking an ankle in a skiing accident, Allen began to work for the campus radio station, which led to presenting work with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He abandoned his medical studies, and decided to try his luck in Hollywood, taking odd jobs that enabled him to be free for auditions during the day.
He worked as a hotel night clerk, an ice-cream salesman and as a night club photographer - until he got into trouble with the local "hoods" over some pictures he had taken and was advised to leave town ("I borrowed some money from the police, and in an attempt to hide away I worked as a lumberjack").
Having returned to Britain, Allen eventually made his film debut in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954); playing a policeman called Pearson, the craggy Allen can be seen at the end of the film holding Grace Kelly's handbag. He went on to play an assortment of rugged, good-looking heroes and villains in films such as 1984 (1955); High Tide at Noon (1957); The Long Haul (1958); Dunkirk (1958); and Never Take Sweets From a Stranger (1960).
In 1955 Allen was appearing on stage in The Ark when he met his future wife, the actress Sarah Lawson; she was in the audience, and was introduced to him backstage after the show. They married in 1960, and were to work together both on radio and in the theatre.
After leaving the RSC in 1962, Allen returned to films, where his credits included Captain Clegg (1962), When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969) and Puppet on a Chain (1971). He also began to specialise as a cinema narrator, for films such as The World at Their Feet; The Sword and the Geisha; Winter With Dracula; and Way Out East.
Although, on television, Allen was probably best known for his roles in Crane and Brett, he was nothing if not versatile: he gave a powerful performance as Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times and appeared as Auchinleck in Churchill and the Generals. He had parts in Bergerac and The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Trial of Lady Chatterley and The Dick Emery Show, and featured as narrator for the first series of Blackadder. He was the voice-over artist for the comedy series The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and for Vic Reeves Big Night Out.
Allen also narrated the British government's Protect and Survive series of instructional videos in the 1970s, designed to inform the population how to survive in the event of nuclear war; some of his lines from the series were incorporated in the single Two Tribes, a No 1 hit for Frankie Goes To Hollywood in 1984.
In 2005 Allen became the voice of the digital television channel E4, providing voice-overs for many of its trailers and promotions.
His passion was salmon fishing, and he pursued his quarry as far afield as Russia, Norway and Alaska. He fished for trout on the Itchen and the Kennet.
Patrick Allen, who died on July 28, is survived by his wife and their two sons.

julian_craster

The TimesAugust 08, 2006
Patrick Allen

March 17, 1927 - July 28, 2006
Actor who specialised in authoritarian film and TV characters and attracted a youthful following late in his career

PATRICK ALLEN was a square-jawed actor who specialised in authoritarian figures in a string of films and television series and was a master of the commanding voiceover. He featured on Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s No 1 hit single Two Tribes, and recently found a youthful following working with the comic Vic Reeves and on E4.
John Keith Patrick Allen was born in 1927 in Nyasaland (now Malawi), where his father was a tobacco farmer. After his parents returned to Britain he was evacuated to Canada during the war and stayed on to finish his schooling.
NI_MPU('middle');He spent two years studying medicine at McGill University, but a skiing accident interrupted his studies.
He found himself spending more and more time broadcasting on the university radio. This led to work as a narrator for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and he decided to become an actor. He went to Hollywood, where he had several bit parts before landing his first big film, Alfred Hitchcock’s version of Frederick Knott’s Dial M for Murder (1954), in which he played a police detective.
He came back to Britain in the late 1950s and joined the Shakespeare Memorial Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. He married the actress Sarah Lawson and they worked together on stage several times at Stratford and later appeared as a married couple in the science-fiction horror film Night of the Big Heat (1967) with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Allen then starred in the BBC radio series Inspector West, based on the John Creasey books. The series, which ran until 1971, featured Lawson as Roger West’s wife, Janet.
Earlier, while playing Achilles in Troilus and Cressida at Stratford, Allen landed the role of the eponymous Richard Crane in the Associated Redifusion television series. For 39 episodes, running from 1963 to 1965, Allen played the businessman who escaped the London rat race to run a bar in Casablanca, complete with an exotic helper, Halima, played by Laya Raki, and his partner in export/import/smuggling business, Orlando (Sam Kydd).
He later recalled that filming the series in Morocco was one of his happiest working experiences. Despite some tough action sequences, he avoided injury, until a bar stool was accidentally knocked over on the night before he was to return to Britain, breaking his toe.
In the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared in a handful of films, including I Was Monty’s Double (1958), with John Mills, Leslie Philips and Marius Goring; Tread Softly Stranger (1959), a melodrama with George Baker and Diana Dors; and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969). He also appeared in episodes of Dixon of Dock Green, The Avengers and The Saint.
During the 1970s he was in a series of television adverts for Barratt Homes, in which he would be seen apparently dropping into new housing developments by helicopter. He also narrated the Government’s Protect and Survive instructional videos, including two telling people what to do in the event of nuclear fallout.
To further his voiceover work he also set up and ran a recording studio as well as a video post-production house. His films at this time included Puppet on a Chain (1970), starring Sven Bertil Taube and Barbara Parkins, in which he played a Dutch police inspector, and the Africa mercenary adventure The Wild Geese (1978) with Richard Burton, Stewart Granger, Roger Moore and Richard Harris. Two years later he appeared with Moore again, as well as Gregory Peck, Trevor Howard and David Niven, in The Sea Wolves, a wartime adventure set in India.
In 1984 he re-recorded a few lines from his nuclear-fallout warning videos for the Frankie Goes to Hollywood antiwar anthem Two Tribes, which spent several weeks at No 1.
He was the narrator on the first TV series of Blackadder in 1983 and appeared in the last episode of the final series, Blackadder Goes Forth. His youthful following continued with Vic Reeves and also with irreverent voiceovers for E4 promotions.
For 14 years he was the compère of Advent in Knightsbridge, a carol concert in West London.
Off screen Allen was a complete contrast to the gruff military characters he often portrayed, being a soft and gentle man whose great love was fishing and the solitude and calm that it brought.
He is survived by his wife and two sons.
Patrick Allen, actor, was born on March 17, 1927. He died on July 28, 2006, aged 79.

dylan

jacobean

Wasn't he also voicing the 'We Love it!' advert campaign for the Sun newspaper only very recently?
Very sorry to hear this news

Fellwanderer

Always had a soft spot for Crane.

All the best
FELL

A signature is no substitute for a life

smudge

Sad news.

Another great character gone...

How will they sell houses in the future ?

Respect.

SMUDGE

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

Pam1927

An excellent actor... a wonderful voice that I always admired hugely... he will be missed.

It's nice to be nice...

Phil Turner

Sad news indeed. A fine character actor with such a distinctive voice. Reading the obituaries, he had such a varied career and will be much missed.

Regards
Phil Turner

John Llewellyn Moxey

Sad news indeed. Patrick, Sarah, and I had some great times together. Does anyone know how to contact her? I would be most grateful for the information. John Llewellyn

julian_craster

Obituary
Patrick Allen

Versatile actor blessed with a distinctive voice and considerable business acumen

Dennis Barker
Wednesday August 9, 2006
The Guardian

Though he always maintained that he was first and foremost an actor - for television and films, as well as for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the West End - Patrick Allen, who has died aged 79, spent the second half of his career primarily as the self-styled "grandfather of the voice-over" for TV commercials. This led him to the more profitable role of businessman, as part-owner of a Soho studio specialising in production services in that field.

Tall, gravel-voiced and with a jutting jaw, during the 1970s Allen was the visible voice of the helicopter pilot extolling the virtues of Barratt Homes, and the invisible voice behind commercials for, among others, Aquafresh, Boots the Chemist, the Sunday People and the Ministry of Defence. The MoD thought him the ideal voice to have on 20 Protect and Survive videos to be shown on television when a nuclear attack was imminent, giving viewers advice on such things as laying in three weeks' supply of food.


The child of a privileged background, Allen confessed that much of his motivation for avoiding the financial unpredictability of acting came from a wish to preserve the style of life he had as a boy. But though his childhood was prosperous, it was not particularly comfortable or conventional. His father, Edward Allen, was of Irish extraction, and involved in founding the House of Bewlay pipe and smoker's equipment firm, which, in the days when smoking was the norm, had a big chain of shops. At the time of Patrick's birth in the British protectorate of Nyasaland (now Malawi), Edward was a tobacco farmer, but he and his wife divorced while their son was still young. Patrick's mother took him back to Britain, where she eventually became the Marchioness of Downshire.

Patrick was evacuated to Canada at the start of the second world war, and studied medicine at Magill University, Montreal, for two years, until he suffered a skiing accident and began working for the campus radio station. Having played many parts in school drama - most of them, he would later joke, as girls - he revealed a talent that soon took him on to presenting work with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Abandoning his studies, he took off for Chicago, becoming one of the earliest actors in its television studios. He then headed for Hollywood.

While working in jobs that left him free for daytime auditions - as a hotel night clerk, an ice-cream salesman or a night-club photographer - Allen ran into trouble with the local mafia, who objected to some of his photographs. To get away, he borrowed money from the police and went off to earn an anonymous living as a lumberjack.

He arrived back in Britain in 1953, and promptly landed a small role in Alfred Hitchcock's film Dial M for Murder. Various stage and film roles, as heroes and villains, followed - he was particularly successful in conveying an air of slight menace - until, in 1961, he joined Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company, playing both at the Aldwych theatre in John Whiting's The Devils and at Stratford as a smouldering and enigmatic Achilles in Troilus and Cressida. He returned to the company in 1972 as King Arthur in the post-Roman epic Island of the Mighty, a production disowned by its writers John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy.
While Allen was an effective presence in such films as The Night of the Generals (1967), Alistair Maclean's Puppet on a Chain (1970) and Who Dares Wins (1982), his was not the sort of personality that led to conventional stardom. On television, he added to his off-centre appeal as an adventurer and intelligence freelance in the series Crane (1963), as a tycoon in the series Brett (1971) and as Dickens' fact-bound schoolmaster and MP Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times (1977).

But it was his commercial involvement, including in the US and the Middle East, that enabled him to prosper, especially in times when the entertainment industry sought safety in banal, rather than striking, personalities. Allen saw himself as an acting professional who could hire out his skills to the job of selling. In the mid-1970s, for instance, he accepted honorary membership of the Society of Snuff-Grinders, Blenders and Purveyors, having lectured more than 1,000 people on the joys of taking snuff as the result of an association with Fribourg & Treyer, the oldest snuff shop in London.

His financial acumen earned him Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and, at one time, homes in London (in a mews near Hyde Park Corner), Brighton (a five-storey Regency property) and Portugal. To create the London home for himself, his actor wife, Sarah Lawson, whom he married in 1960, and their two sons, he knocked two houses into one, working to his own plans rather than an architect's, and doing much of the work himself.

Allen never lost his niche as a voice of authority and reassurance, even if the contexts for his utterances changed. He was a narrator for the first Blackadder series in 1983; the following year some of his lines from the Protect and Survive campaign helped take the Frankie Goes to Hollywood single Two Tribes to number one in the pop charts; he provided the voice-over for Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer in their television series The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer (1993-95); and last year he became the voice of Channel 4's digital offshoot E4.
His wife and children survive him.

John Keith Patrick Allen, actor, born March 17 1927; died July 28 2006

David Brent

I always thought how much alike Patrick Allen and Stanley Baker looked - and their voices were also very similar
Patrick had a wonderful voice and must have made a fortune from voice overs and television commercials over the years.
Surprised to see that he shared the same birthday as myself - March 17th. St. Patrick's Day. Maybe thats why he was named Patrick.
A very sad loss.

Dave.

bitterblue

Patrick Allen's wife, Sarah Lawson, appeared in many TV series, films in the 60s and 70s, and she had a well known actor father whose first name escapes me. I seem to remember he spoke as if permanantly intoxicated, and that he had a real problem in this area.
Anyone help me jog my memory?

Rob Compton

Probably Wilfred Lawson

smudge

Wilf's daughter......?

Well blow me down if that's correct !

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...