Bernard Miles

[fred kite]

did some great films.............smallest show on earth,heavens above ,in which we serve etc etc ...any one shed some info on this great actor .any interesting stories

[DB7]

Think his great love was the stage, he wrote a book and appeared in a documentary on the subject. Formed the Mermaid Theatre.



Seem to recall he was something of a Socialist but I'm not sure if that's fact or fiction stemming from Chance of a Lifetime.

[penfold]

Bernard Miles was one of the very first peers to come from such a humble background....his father was a farm labourer, his mother in service. He was left wing, in the moderate old labour/co=op movement sense. I've been reading some of his correspondence with similarly inclined Adrian Brunel, either side of WW2; the image you get through most of his films, of a generous spirit, with a wry sense of humour, comes through even more strongly in his letters.

[Rob Compton]

Bernard Miles was one of the very first peers to come from such a humble background....his father was a farm labourer, his mother in service. He was left wing, in the moderate old labour/co=op movement sense. I've been reading some of his correspondence with similarly inclined Adrian Brunel, either side of WW2; the image you get through most of his films, of a generous spirit, with a wry sense of humour, comes through even more strongly in his letters.

Penfold



This sounds interesting - is it in published form, Mark? I've searched Abebooks but can't see anything that looks like it.



I've always been an admirer of Bernard Miles, who gave much more to British theatre and cinema than is apparent from his films. Even in those films, his appearance is always distinctive, always worth while.



rgds

Rob

[Windthrop]

He was one of the very few actors to receive a peerage (Olivier & Attenborough the others) and concentrated on the Mermaid Theatre which I believe was the first new theatre in the country after the war. Directed a few movie - late forties and early fifties which showed some promise and then a short movie in the early sixties about the manufacturer of a country toilet bizarrely.



Made very few appearances as an actor after that - an Agatha Christie, a Barbara Cartland and a Tales of the Unexpected.



I do know that he was hard up at the end and living on charity because of lack of work and the fact that he sunk his own capital into theatre. He died in an a nursing home in Knaresborough.



Oh and he always wore a rollneck sweater never a shirt and tie !

[Automotivehistorian]

He was one of the very few actors to receive a peerage (Olivier & Attenborough the others)

You could I suppose add Brian Rix here, although his peerage was surely for his work with MENCAP? I am not sure if Miles was the first Actor-peer, and predated Olivier?

[Windthrop]

No Olivier was first

[fred kite]

watched chance of a lifetime on film four the other night.great british film ive never seen before.hattie jaques,basil radford kenneth more.......this was written by by mr miles wasnt it.....???

[Nick Dando]

A good little film, and with some top class talent - Basil Radford, Kenneth More, Bernard Miles, Hattie Jacques, Niall MacGinnis, Geoffrey Keen, Dr Who and Peter Jones.



Chance of a Lifetime (1950)



Directed and co-written by Bernard Miles, as was another great favourite of mine, Tawny Pipit.



Nick

[penfold]

Penfold

This sounds interesting - is it in published form, Mark? I've searched Abebooks but can't see anything that looks like it.



Rob

Sorry to get you excited....I've been ploughing through Adrian Brunel's personal papers at the BFI Library's Special Collections for some time, on an unrelated project.

[stevie boy]

A good little film, and with some top class talent - Basil Radford, Kenneth More, Bernard Miles, Hattie Jacques, Niall MacGinnis, Geoffrey Keen, Dr Who and Peter Jones.



Chance of a Lifetime (1950)



Directed and co-written by Bernard Miles, as was another great favourite of mine, Tawny Pipit.



Nick

Yes Bernard was very good and talented as an actor/writer/director. Loved him in Chance of a Lifetime,Tawny Pipit and Saphirre.

[Dave Rattigan]

I believe he went really downhill towards the end of his life - not sure whether it was senility or something. I remember someone who was in the filmed version of Miles's Treasure Island (1982) telling me how disastrous it was, and how Miles couldn't remember any of his lines - or something like that. Sorry, my memory is hazy. However, he recommended I watch the video just for laughs if I ever come across it!

[bertie]

Wonderful Joe Gargery in Lean's Great Expectations. Loved the bit with the hat balancing - or not - on the fireplace!

[Windthrop]

I believe he went really downhill towards the end of his life - not sure whether it was senility or something. I remember someone who was in the filmed version of Miles's Treasure Island (1982) telling me how disastrous it was, and how Miles couldn't remember any of his lines - or something like that. Sorry, my memory is hazy. However, he recommended I watch the video just for laughs if I ever come across it!

No he didn't go senile to my knowledge - there was quite a bit on him in the papers leading up to his death. When the Mermaid Theatre got into difficulties a business consortium got and he got ousted unceromoniously. He only got a few parts after that on TV and as I have said in a previous post he became hard up and ended up in a nursing home in Knaresborough paid for by a fund raising event at the mermaid. I believe he went blind but was a good story teller to the end according to the staff at the home. He died almost the same day as Peggy Ashcroft I believe and she rather stole the limelight in the obits.

[troubleshooter]

Blue plaque unveiled for Uxbridge actor

Sep 25 2009 By Dan Coombs



HILLINGDON'S third commemorative blue plaque has been unveiled, in honour of actor and director Lord Bernard Miles.



The plaque was displayed at 38 New Road, Uxbridge, where the famous theatre and film star once lived.



Hillingdon Council's plaque scheme was launched in February last year as part of the council's aim to celebrate an d remember people of national or local importance who have lived in the borough.



Lord Bernard Miles (1907-1991) was an actor, writer, and director, who was born in Uxbridge, and attended Bishopshalt School, in Royal Lane, Hillingdon.



He entered the theatre in the 1930s and appeared in many films including World War II classics, 'In Which We Serve' and 'One of Our Aircraft is Missing'.



Miles was, after Robert Newton, the actor most associated with the part of Long John Silver, which he played in a British TV version of Treasure Island.



He was in demand for voice-overs and was most well known for a series of comic monologues, often given in a rural dialect.



Lord Bernard Miles opened the Mermaid Theatre in London in 1959, the first new theatre opened in London since the 17th century.



He was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1953, was knighted in 1969, and was granted a life peerage as Baron Miles, of Blackfriars in the City of London in 1979.



He was only the second British actor ever to be given a peerage and died in Yorkshire in 1991.



Councillor Henry Higgins, cabinet member for planning and community services said: “It’s important to recognise Hillingon’s cultural heritage and people of importance who have been part of our community.



“The plaque for Lord Bernard Miles is part of our work to maintain the borough’s history and heritage.



"Alongside Manor Farm in Ruislip and the 1930s Uxbridge lido well underway, there is a lot to be proud of in this borough."



The plaque was officially unveiled by the Mayor of Hillingdon, Councillor Shirley Harper-O’Neil.



Source: Uxbridge Gazette

[narabdela]

About time too.

[Bernardo]

I am astounded and quite happy to show complete ignorance of his roots. I would have fallen in to the trap of placing him west of Uxbridge. One of those lucky ones,along with Burton & co, who was 'given' a voice and certainly deserves to have his memory preserved.

[CaptainWaggett]

From the DNB - though shame on Sheridan Morley for not mentioning Miles' brief but interesting career as a film director

Miles, Bernard James, Baron Miles (1907–1991), actor and theatre manager

by Sheridan Morley

© Oxford University Press 2004–9 All rights reserved



Miles, Bernard James, Baron Miles (1907–1991), actor and theatre manager, was born on 27 September 1907 at 1 Poplar Terrace, New Road, Hillingdon, Uxbridge, Middlesex, the son of Edwin James Miles, market gardener, and his wife, Barbara Hooper, née Fletcher, a Scottish cook. Brought up in a strict Baptist household, he learned from his parents the value of thrift and hard work, as well as a wealth of ancient countryside lore which he later used in a triumphant series of music-hall monologues about life on a farm.



Educated at Uxbridge county school, Miles won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a schoolmaster in Yorkshire. He abandoned this career in 1930 when he made his stage début as the Second Messenger in a Baliol Holloway revival of Shakespeare's Richard III. In 1931 he married the actress Josephine Wilson (d. 1990), who gave him unstinting support. They had two daughters and a son. The carpentry Miles had learned from his father came in useful during several subsequent years travelling the country with repertory companies, when his responsibilities ranged from building scenery to playing small parts. Towards the end of the 1930s he began to make a name in London, in music-halls and late-night cabaret theatres, where he perfected his comic monologues in Late Joys (1939) and three Herbert Farjeon revues.



During the war Miles found film fame in Noël Coward's In Which We Serve (1942) but also frequently toured with the Old Vic as Iago and directed John Mills in Men in Shadow (1942), later following Mills in the leading role. As the war ended he was back with the Old Vic company at the New Theatre for the 1947–8 season, playing the Inquisitor in Saint Joan and Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew.



From the late 1940s Miles's energies were focused on building the first Mermaid Theatre in his own garden in St John's Wood, a wooden playhouse faithfully replicating Shakespeare's Globe long before the birth of Sam Wanamaker's similar project. In its first (1951) season he played Caliban in The Tempest and, as producer and director, persuaded Kirsten Flagstad and Maggie Teyte to sing Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. The Mermaid then found a temporary home at the Royal Exchange in the City, before Miles and his equally tireless wife finally settled it in Puddle Dock, the first theatre to have been opened in the City for 300 years. They spent six years building the new Mermaid and it eventually opened in May 1959 with a triumphant Lionel Bart musical, Lock up your Daughters, based somewhat loosely on Henry Fielding's Rape upon Rape. Though he was to suffer all the architectural and financial problems only too familiar to anyone trying to build a theatre in Britain, or merely to keep one open, Miles's years at the Mermaid saw triumphant revivals of Treasure Island (in which he was always a definitive Long John Silver) and long-running musical celebrations of the songs of Noël Coward and Cole Porter. The Mermaid also gave birth to Side by Side by Sondheim in the late 1970s, and more classically was the venue for many notable Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare revivals, some of the latter in relatively modern dress. For his services to the theatre Miles was appointed CBE in 1953, knighted in 1969, and given a life peerage as Baron Miles of Blackfriars in 1979.



Miles was an old-fashioned actor, and was often out of tune also with modern directing techniques, but his ability to keep the Mermaid going on knife-edge finance, and frequently to retrieve it from the jaws of bankruptcy, was always admirable. If he sometimes cast himself in wildly unsuitable roles (Oedipus, for instance, or John Gabriel Borkman) he was nevertheless a memorable Schweyk in Schweyk in the Second World War (1963) and a formidable Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV (1970).



Like Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal a little further beyond the City in Stratford East, Miles worked with very slender resources and often scant critical acclaim; sadly, what should have been a triumphant rebuilding project when the Mermaid moved a few hundred yards inland in 1981 ended in bankruptcy, and in Miles's forced resignation as artistic director of the theatre he had built and still so loved. He and his wife had invested all their own money in the rebuilding project, and were forced to sell their London home to meet their debts. Following the death of his wife in 1990, Miles was moved into a nursing home with nothing more than his state pension, though funds were raised for him by an all-star Bernard Miles Celebration at the Mermaid on 3 March 1991, at which he made his last public appearance in a wheelchair, having recently fallen and broken a leg. He died at the Thistle Hill Nursing Home, Knaresborough, Yorkshire, on 14 June 1991. He was survived by his son and one daughter, his other daughter, Sally (who had joined her parents in the management of the Mermaid Theatre), having died of motor neurone disease.



Miles can still be seen in such major movies as Noël Coward's In Which We Serve (1942), Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), John Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Basil Dearden's The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), and Charles Crichton's Battle of the Sexes (1960). He was a pioneer of the ‘talking’ gramophone record in the 1940s; his Over the Gate monologues, of a mythical Buckinghamshire farmer, were released on several bestselling 78 r.p.m. discs (and he would also occasionally perform them live in the dying days of the music-hall). These were, for their time, if not scandalous then at least lusty, and during his management of the Mermaid Theatre in a still repressive theatrical era (when the lord chamberlain had to approve all scripts) he did his best to move the barriers of sexual tolerance slightly forward, in an always Falstaffian manner. He was also known to television audiences for a lengthy series of commercials on behalf of the Egg Marketing Board. Nevertheless his real legacy was the Mermaid Theatre. Though still standing just north of its original Puddle Dock site, the Mermaid enjoyed little success after he left it, and endured several periods of prolonged closure.



SHERIDAN MORLEY

Sources B. Miles and J. Wilson, The Mermaid Theatre (1951) · G. Frow, The Mermaid 10: a review of the theatre, 1959–1969 (1969) · The Times (15 June 1991) · The Independent (15 June 1991) · The Independent (20 June 1991) · The Independent (25 June 1991) · The Independent (1 July 1991) · WWW, 1991–5 · b. cert. · d. cert.



Archives GL, corresp. and publishers | BFI, corresp. with Ivor Montagu · NL Wales, letters to G. E. Evans









Likenesses D. Levine, pen drawing, 1967, NPG · R. Noakes, bronze head, 1969, NPG · photograph, 1971, Hult. Arch. [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in The Times · photograph, repro. in The Independent (15 June 1991)



Wealth at death under £125,000: probate, 8 Oct 1991, CGPLA Eng. & Wales