Tom Bell rip

[fred kite]

british actor tom bell has died he was great in the 1990 film the krays and also in prime suspect.................................

[Marky B]

Yes,he was also good as Adolf Eichmann in Holocaust. Very sad news.

Mark

[Rennie]

What a great loss. Will be greatly missed.

[Hell_driver]

I'm truly shocked at this news.



Thought he was fantastic in the TV series Out.

[Ted Holmes]

Unforgettable in the BBC's Sons and Lovers back in the 70s. An exceptional actor.

[Merton Park]

In Out he was unforgettable as Frank Ross, fantastic performance. Very underrated excellent Actor, never really got the credit he deserved. If he was in something, you just knew he would deliver a really good performance.

[Nick Dando]

A shock.



I was really surprised at seeing him as a young man in Damn the Defiant. I'd only ever seen his more modern work, where he seemed to be somewhat typecast as a dangerous loner/troublemaker - the first Prime Suspect and Wish You Were Here, being good examples.



He always looked to be a man who never laughed, only simmered.



Nick

[DB7]

Was marvellous in The Long Day's Dying but seemed to become typecast later in film's like Wish You Were Here and The Magic Toyshop as a seedy letch; one often around teens.

[julian_craster]

Obituary : Tom Bell

Michael Coveney

Friday October 6, 2006

The Guardian



Tom Bell, who has died aged 73 after a short illness, was a naturally gifted and unusually reserved leading actor who never fulfilled the star promise of his breakthrough success as the unpublished writer in Bryan Forbes' 1962 movie, The L-Shaped Room. Whereas Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960), Alan Bates (A Kind of Loving, 1962) and Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, 1962) all went on to careers in the new British cinema, and theatre, Bell drifted into television, where he became a fixture in the 1970s and 80s. But although his glory days were long gone, he never stopped working; he took a leading role in last night's episode of Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire on BBC1.



He enjoyed huge popularity in his signature role of armed robber Frank Ross in the late 1970s TV series Out, written by Trevor Preston and produced by Euston Films. As a single-minded avenger, lately released from prison, he cut a terrific swathe through the villains and bent policemen who put him away. Tough, good-looking, uncompromising, he was one of the great characters of British television in this period, and he cemented his relationship with the viewing public as the sneering Detective Sergeant Bill Otley in Prime Suspect, for which he was nominated for a Bafta, and as the unbending father of Clive Owen in Chancer (1990).

Bell was famous for not mincing his words, and there are many who felt he scuppered his film career by heckling the Duke of Edinburgh at an awards dinner shortly after his first success. "Make us laugh, tell us a joke," he cried, to the dismay of industry bigwigs such as John Mills and Richard Attenborough. Very much his own man, he even managed to get out of national service a fortnight after being called up. And he often compelled writers to cut long speeches with which he was loath to bore the audience.

With this week's West End revival of Martin Sherman's Bent, it is poignant to recall Bell's performance in the original 1979 production at the Royal Court theatre, one of his rare, later stage appearances, in which he played Horst, the grimly saturnine companion to Ian McKellen's Max in Dachau; the illicit sexual liaison between the two prisoners in the stone-breaking compound brought a whole new meaning to the phrase "getting one's rocks off". Bell's quiet, mesmeric brand of acting was the perfect foil to McKellen's more demonstrative emotional quivering.

The director Peter Gill, who joined the Swansea Rep when Bell, then in his mid-20s, was the leading man, said he represented a 1960s type before they existed. "In the theatre, Terry Stamp was the first, but Tom Bell had a Paul Newman quality that was rare - and still is - on the British stage. He had allure, and it was no wonder that he soon became the darling of the television producers of Armchair Theatre and so on. He was a troubled, smooth-skinned Liverpool boy, a more wholesome sort of John Lennon without the glasses."

Bell was born into a large family, the son of a merchant seaman he hardly knew. As a child evacuee during the war, he lived with three different families in the Morecambe area. He attended Euston Road secondary modern school in Morecambe, worked on the pier as a photographer during the holidays and later trained as an actor in Bradford with the legendary Esme Church, whose pupils then included Robert Stephens and Billie Whitelaw. After that, he went into weekly rep, with a fit-up, or temporary, company in Ireland and Britain, before becoming part of the "kitchen sink" movement in the 1960s, firstly as Paul in the film of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen.

One unlikely brush with Hollywood put him off the bright lights for good - "a total madhouse," he told this newspaper in 1987, in a staccato style that was patently tongue-in-cheek: "Kept trying to get me laid, brought these girls with big tits up to my room. No way, couldn't relate to it at all." In that same year he played Uncle Philip in a film of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, exuding a livid streak of self-righteousness that improved even on Carter's character.

In 1978 he had come to worldwide attention as Adolf Eichmann in the Emmy award-winning series The Holocaust, but many viewers will also treasure performances such as Walter Morel in Trevor Griffiths' television adaptation of DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1981), or Jack "the Hat" McVitie in Peter Medak's film The Krays (1990). It is the sort of career that needs a season at the National Film Theatre to do it justice, for Bell never gave a performance that was not instilled with truth and a rare sort of inner beauty.

Although he did, in fact, play the Finney role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in the theatre, he never envied his friend's move to the National: "I wouldn't want to work there," he said in 1978, "Albie climbs mountains there. I'd rather think in terms of films. I photograph quite well." Indeed he did.

Bell is survived by his son, Aran, from an early marriage, and by his partner of 30 years, the costume designer Frances Tempest, with whom he had a step-daughter, Nellie, and a daughter, Polly.

Tom Bell, actor, born August 2 1933; died October 4 2006.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Times October 06, 2006



Tom Bell

August 2, 1933 - October 5, 2006

Character actor noted for an acerbic presence in films and on TV





TOM BELL was a hardworking film, television and stage actor who made a career out of rangy, seedy characters. His talents extended to major Ibsen roles both in the theatre and on television. On TV he was often to be found playing petty criminals, bitter, worn-out fathers or cynical police officers. Bell became best known latterly as DS Bill Otley, thorn in the side to Helen Mirren in the television series Prime Suspect.

He was in the original season in 1991 as the chief representative of the institutional sexism in the police that Mirren’s Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison has to combat while trying to catch murderers. This month Bell will be seen for the last time as Otley in a new two-part episode of the drama.

Thomas Bell was born in Liverpool in 1933. He was evacuated north to Morecambe during the war, and at 15 appeared in his first school play at Morecambe Secondary Modern School. He went on to train at the Bradford Civic Theatre with Robert Stephens and Billie Whitelaw.

Bell then spent some time in repertory theatre, including a spell in Wales, before launching his film career. Many of his early films were kitchen-sink dramas, including The Concrete Jungle (1960), The Kitchen (1960) and The L-Shaped Room (1962), adapted by Bryan Forbes from the novel by Lynne Reid Banks. In it Bell’s character Toby shares lodgings with a gay jazz musician (Brock Peters) and a pregnant Leslie Caron.

Bell made about 15 films before the end of the decade. At one point he shared a flat in London with fellow actor Tony Booth, now Tony Blair’s father-in-law.

Bell went on to make nearly 30 more films, including Royal Flash (1975) with Malcolm McDowell, Oliver Reed, Alan Bates and Britt Ekland, and Wish You Were Here (1987) with Emily Lloyd, a film about the growing pains of a teenage girl in a seaside town supposedly based on the early life of the former sex party hostess, Cynthia Payne.

In 1990 he appeared in The Krays with his former drama school classmate Whitelaw and starring Gary and Martin Kemp. Bell played the seedy, small-time criminal and murder victim Jack “the Hat� McVitie. He was also Antonio in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and starred in Preaching to the Perverted (1997), a crude satire on the sex industry in which Bell played an MP who employs a young computer expert to infiltrate the London S&M scene.

He gave a fine supporting performance in the powerful Let Him Have It (1991), which featured Christopher Ecclestone as Derek Bentley, hanged in 1953 after his juvenile friend shot dead a policeman. He was also in Swing (1999), with Hugo Speer and Lisa Stansfield.

In recent years he was much in demand and last year appeared as Billy the Cowboy in Dead Man’s Cards.

He had made his television debut in episodes of Armchair Theatre in 1959 and 1960 and later appeared in an episode of the Western The Virginian.

In 1978 he played Adolf Eichmann in the award-winning series Holocaust. The following year, in stark contrast, he made one of his most memorable appearances on stage, starring opposite Ian McKellen in the Royal Court premiere of Martin Sherman’s controversial drama Bent, about homosexuals in Dachau.



Tom Bell, actor, was born on August 2, 1933. He died on October 5, 2006, aged 73.

[julian_craster]

Obituary: Tom Bell



Daily Telegraph

07/10/2006



Tom Bell, who died on Wednesday aged 73, was a brooding character actor whose pinched, unsmiling looks brought him much work in films, television and the theatre; he was perhaps best known later in his career as the sexist detective DS Bill Otley, tormentor of DCI Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) in ITV's Prime Suspect (1991).

A quiet, diffident man, Bell first came to prominence with roles in two early "kitchen-sink" films, The Concrete Jungle and The Kitchen (both 1960). But his breakthrough came two years later with a starring role in another "new wave" film, The L-Shaped Room, in which his hammer-faced character Toby shared digs with a gay, black jazz musician (Brock Peters) and an unmarried but pregnant Leslie Caron.

Bell was tipped for the front rank of film stardom alongside Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay; but he never quite made it, partly because he failed to try his luck in Hollywood, and partly because of his unpredictable private life — he had a reputation for being difficult, and, as a young man, he was a heavy drinker.

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In 1963, some months after delighting audiences and critics in The L-Shaped Room, he was present, with Caron and the film's producer Richard Attenborough, at the British Film Academy awards at the London Hilton. The well-refreshed Bell heckled Prince Philip as he reached the end of his presidential speech, twice shouting: "Tell us a funny story." The Prince ignored the first intervention, but after the second turned to Bell and said: "If you want a funny story, I suggest you engage a professional comic."

The British film establishment was mortified. It fell to Miss Caron to apologise on Bell's behalf and explain that "Tom was a little merry".

The incident caused a tabloid flurry at the time and undoubtedly caused Bell's career to stall. It also sealed his reputation as a hellraiser.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this, the Sixties proved to be fruitful years for Bell; he made some 15 films during the decade and at one point shared a London flat with his fellow actor Tony Booth, father of Cherie Blair, with whom he had worked on The L-Shaped Room.

Thomas George Bell was born in Liverpool on August 2 1933, the son of poor parents who later emigrated to Rhodesia. When the Second World War broke out he was evacuated to Morecambe, Lancashire, and lived with three different families in the area; at 15, in 1948, he made his stage debut in the school play at Morecambe Secondary Modern School.

Having determined to become an actor, Bell trained at the Bradford Civic Theatre alongside Robert Stephens and Billie Whitelaw, and worked in repertory in Liverpool and later with the Shannon Players in Dublin, where he arrived with one penny in his pocket.

Bell kick-started his theatrical career in 1961 when he auditioned for — and landed — the starring role in Alun Owen's Progress to the Park; Alan Brien in The Sunday Telegraph hailed Bell as "a cocky, tough, tart young actor, who has muscles in his voice as well as on his bones". Another critic referred to "his Cherokee profile and face which is expressive even when it's frozen".

But it was Bell's television work that kept him in the public eye. In 1960 The Daily Telegraph praised his "painful realism" as the mother's boy in Harold Pinter's A Night Out on ITV; in the same year he also appeared in television versions of Love On The Dole (BBC) and Sebastian Shaw's tense thriller Cul de Sac (ITV).

In March the following year Tom Bell was due to star opposite his wife, the actress Lois Daine, in a BBC television play, Cottage For Sale. But two weeks before the (live) transmission, she gave birth prematurely to the couple's son, Aran, who weighed just 3lb 13oz, and another actress took over the part.

Other television roles followed over the years. In 1981 he was Walter Morel in the BBC's seven-part adaptation of Sons and Lovers, a part that led, the following year, to a starring appearance as the Victorian paterfamilias and whisky tycoon Fergus King in the 10-part family saga King's Royal.

It was shortly after this that Bell was in trouble over non-payment of income tax: in April 1982 he appeared in a bankruptcy court, saying he had no assets to meet debts of £21,574, mainly owing to the tax man. Before being declared bankrupt, Bell was asked by the deputy official receiver: "Were you being quite truthful when you swore on oath that, apart from a few pounds in your pocket, you had nothing in the world?"

"Yes," Bell replied. He was subsequently discharged from bankruptcy.

He made nearly 50 films in all, ranging from Restoration comedy, as in Lock Up Your Daughters! (1969), to the roistering Royal Flash (1975). His most memorable screen portrayals included Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop and Wish You Were Here (both 1987); the latter was based on the early life of the Streatham madam Cynthia Payne, with Bell playing her older, odious seaside lover. He also appeared with Billie Whitelaw in The Krays (1990) as the seedy, criminal loser Jack "The Hat" McVitie.

In 1991 the television critics unanimously applauded Bell's powerful characterisation in Prime Suspect, which was shot to look like an edgy documentary and dealt with entrenched male prejudice in the police; cast opposite Helen Mirren, Bell turned in a corrosive performance as her arch-enemy Otley, prompting The Daily Telegraph's Richard Last to exclaim: "I didn't know he could be so evil."

Bell worked until the end of his life, having recorded the last-ever Prime Suspect, due to be screened next week on ITV, and appearing as Nasica in Ancient Rome, currently on BBC1. He also stars in a new feature film, Friends and Enemies, set for release next year.

Perhaps the oddest appearance of Bell's career was in court, in July 1962, after he had been arrested at 2.45am on a Sunday morning picking flowers from someone's garden in Hampstead. "I am feeling romantic tonight," Bell told police, "and I am helping myself." He was given an absolute discharge.

Bell had long since put his drinking years behind him, and for the last 10 years or so had lived quietly in Brighton with his partner, Frances Tempest, a television costume designer.

Tom Bell's marriage to Lois Daine, with whom he had a son, was dissolved in 1976. With Frances Tempest, he had a daughter.



---------------------------------



Tom Bell

Actor with an air of menace

The Independent

Published: 07 October 2006



Thomas George Bell, actor: born Liverpool 2 August 1933; married Lois Dane (one son; marriage dissolved), (one daughter with Frances Tempest); died Brighton, East Sussex 4 October 2006.

Playing sinister characters with an air of understated menace became Tom Bell's stock-in-trade after he made his name in the 1962 "kitchen sink" film drama The L-Shaped Room as the brooding, bitter, young writer Toby, who falls for the pregnant, unmarried Frenchwoman played by Leslie Caron.

There were predictions of a great future for the lean, gaunt-faced actor - once described by the television critic Clive James as "reeking of bad diet" - following his performance in the ground-breaking film based on Lynne Reid Banks's best-selling novel.

But such forecasts were reined in when the actor's single-mindedness and anti-establishment nature led him to heckle the Duke of Edinburgh at the following year's British Film Academy Awards dinner: "Make us laugh, tell us a joke!" So, with a lack of leading roles coming his way in the cinema, he found most of his best parts on television.

Out (1978) saw Bell carrying his own series, starring as Frank Ross in the writer Trevor Preston's hard-hitting gangland drama about a bank robber who leaves jail and is obsessed with finding the informer who put him away. "I knew I was Frank Ross," said Bell, of his first reaction to reading the script. "I'm not an actor anyway. I just play myself."

He was on the other side of the law in the first Prime Suspect mini-series (1991), as Sergeant Bill Otley, the sexist policeman who leads the moans when Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) takes over a murder inquiry."I know how you must all feel," says their boss, Detective Superintendent Kernan (John Benfield), after giving in to pressure to award her the job, "but give her the best you've got." "I'll give the tart the best I've got, all right," says Otley in an aside.

As with Out, Bell refused to reprise the role - but relented when Prime Suspect 3 (1993) had Tennison moving from Southampton Row to Soho Vice Squad and found Otley on her team. "You don't like it, put in for a transfer," she tells him, but her former adversary admits he was previously "out of line" and knuckles under. Later this month [15 October], Otley and Tennison are reunited at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the first part of Prime Suspect: the final act.

One of seven children born to a merchant seaman in Depression-hit Liverpool, in 1933, Tom Bell was evacuated during the Second World War to the Morecambe area, where he lived with three different families. Although his father wanted him to learn a trade, he left school at 15 to act with a local repertory theatre company, before training at Bradford Civic Theatre School. Then came more rep.

Bell made his television début as a boxer in a 1959 episode of the crime series Dial 999, but really caught the attention of casting directors after his roles in two of ITV's "Armchair Theatre" productions, as one of three sailors on shore leave in Liverpool in the writer Alun Owen's No Trams To Lime Street (1959) and the young clerk Albert Stokes, whose controlling mother worries about his leading an "unclean life" with girls, in Harold Pinter's first play for the small screen, A Night Out (1960).

It was a natural next step for Bell to act in the British "new wave" feature films that gave a platform to working-class voices. His first film was the gritty drama The Criminal (retitled The Concrete Jungle in the US, 1960), but one more symbolic of the period was The Kitchen (1961), the screen version of Arnold Wesker's Royal Court play.

The L-Shaped Room (1962) made greater waves in the cinema but, after the fall-out of his outburst awards lunch, good roles on the big screen were few and far between for Bell. Ballad in Blue (1964) was little more than a vehicle for Ray Charles, although in He Who Rides a Tiger (directed by Charles Crichton, 1965) he pulled out a more three-dimensional character as a cat-burglar.

Although work in films remained steady, it was in television from the late 1970s that Bell began to find more satisfying roles. He played the 19th-century seaman coming home from his travels in The Sailor's Return (1978), Adolf Eichmann in the epic American series Holocaust (1978), the head of the Soviet secret police Felix Dzerzhinsky in Reilly: ace of spies (1983), the principled Commander Kenneth Crocker in The Detective (1983) and Old Tom in the television film Polyanna (2003).

Bell's dark side also fitted perfectly in two small-screen D.H. Lawrence dramatisations - he was the coalminer Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers (1983) and Old Tom, Ursula's grandfather, in The Rainbow (1988) - so it was a surprise to some when he made a rare switch to comedy to star as the cantankerous wax museum owner Harry Nash in Hope It Rains (1991-92).

The dark side was there for Bell's most memorable later film roles, though, as the controlling toymaker Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop (1987), Emily Lloyd's sleazy lover in Wish You Were Here (1987) and the petty thief Jack "The Hat" McVitie, whose murder brings down the East End gangster brothers in The Krays (1990).

Bell's stage appearances were rare, but he was rightly acclaimed for his performance as Horst, opposite Ian McKellen as the promiscuous Max, in the world premiere of Martin Sherman's Bent (Royal Court Theatre, 1979), an examination of Hitler's persecution of homosexuals, set in Dachau.

Anthony Hayward

[harryfielder]

A sad loss to all at still a young age. RIP.



Aitch,

[steve.blackpool]

I had the privilege of meeting Tom in Southport in 1991, when he attended a performance of a pantomime starring his friend Mark Eden. Tom was a perfect gentleman, taking the time to speak to all the cast members backstage, regardless of their standing in the acting community; young and old, experienced or beginner, star or chorus girl, he treated them all with the respect shown by one professional to another.



A great actor and true gent, he will be mourned and missed by all who knew him.

[David Brent]

I do not think that I ever saw Tom Bell openly laugh on screen. Even his smiles seemed to hold hidden menace.

That was what made him such a fine actor, he was believable and all his performances were convincing.

So much so that I sometimes used to feel uneasy just watching him on screen.



A very sad loss.



Dave.

[Dame Starry]

Tom Bell was an amazing professional who just acted from his heart giving incredible performances while making it all look so easy.

We will miss him.



Starry x

[Hackett]

name='steve.blackpool@talk']I had the privilege of meeting Tom in Southport in 1991, when he attended a performance of a pantomime starring his friend Mark Eden. Tom was a perfect gentleman, taking the time to speak to all the cast members backstage, regardless of their standing in the acting community; young and old, experienced or beginner, star or chorus girl, he treated them all with the respect shown by one professional to another.



A great actor and true gent, he will be mourned and missed by all who knew him.

I met him with Mark Eden in Birmingham 1985 when they were making "THE DETECTIVE" for the BBC.

My favourite Tom Bell film is a toss-up between "PAYROLL" 1961 and "A PRIZE OF ARMS" 1962.

[pustice]

I also rated Tom Bell as a class actor.



I remember meeting a make-up artist in maybe the late '70s who told me Tom had been blacklisted as he had insulted Prince Philip.

Anyone know that story?

[lordtednfs]

I have just finished watching "Out" and thoroughly enjoyed watching it. I was saddened to hear of Tom's death and will always treasure his acting. True Class.



_______________

Hooked off the line

[marker]

I remember Tom Bell in a serial on tv, he was a seaside photographer I enjoyed the program but cant remember what is was called I always thought he was a very good actor a bit gritty though, I always thought that tom bell would have made a good Marker in Public Eye

[Harleybloke]

Great Actor! 'Let Him Have it' and so many others. Having a problem teenage daughter myself I can empathise with his character in 'Wish you were here' as well.

[hankoler]

One of the best ,a great loss to the profession , i remember him well as jack the hat in the kray film , RIP.