James Robertson Justice

[Steve Crook]

Originally Posted by Fareham_Bee Can I make the obvious joke that Emma and Jemima may have beards?

You can try. But be careful, they're both tough ladies

Steve

[Dame Starry]

Well, I really must dash - that 2 o'clock shadow's beginning to appear...........

Starry x.

[dremble wedge]

My favourite JRJ story has him being challenged to a drinking contest by Ernest Hemingway.

I believe the weapon of choice was Scotch and needless to say Mr Hemingway lost and collapsed whereupon JRJ left to deliver a lecture on Etruscan pottery no worse for wear!

I don't know if it's true but I want it to be...

[orpheum]

A biog of Hattie Jacques is to be published the same date as that of JRJ according to Amazon.

[Maralyn]

Thanks for the tip about the Hattie Jacques book I've been wondering what happend to that. Named my little dog after her.

Also I look forward to seeing Hoggers book in the shops about JRJ a great character actor and a great character!

from a recent member.

Maralyn

[DB7]

Doctor on the Rampage: The story of the fearsome James Robertson Justice
By GEOFFREY WANSELL - More by this author » Last updated at 22:02pm on 25th April 2008

With his unmistakable booming voice and vast red beard, James Robertson Justice was one of the pillars of the British cinema in the Fifties and Sixties.

The star of seven Doctor In The House comedies - as the irascible surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt - as well as playing Lord Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, this 6ft 2in, 19-stone actor was larger than life in every sense.

But, as a new biography reveals, he was also a deeply contradictory and troubled man - a selfish fantasist, an unrepentant socialist who nevertheless drove a Rolls-Royce and was a friend of the Royal Family, a man of Rabelaisian appetites for food and drink who let his mother die from malnutrition, and a relentless womaniser.

James Robertson Justice only added the middle name in his late 30s in order to sustain the myth of his Scottishness

Repeatedly during his 30-year career, which included 87 films, this ebullient ginger-haired actor invented endless stories about every part of his life, loving to create mysteries, which his friends claimed was an attempt to conceal the insecurities that lay behind his bluff, rumbustious exterior.

For example, Justice always said that he was born underneath a whisky distillery on the Isle of Skye in Scotland - when he was actually born in Lee, South London, and was brought up in Bromley, Kent.

Indeed, he wasn't even christened James Robertson Justice - only adding the middle name in his late 30s in order to sustain the myth of his Scottishness.

This huge man with a twinkle in his eye also liked to boast that he had a science degree from London University and a doctorate in philosophy-from Bonn University, in Germany, when, in fact, he had neither.

Despite such relentless fabrications, however, there was enough in his life to fill several biographies.

He worked for a time as a reporter for the Reuters news agency, was a teacher in Canada, played professional ice-hockey, drove racing cars, was a member of the German police force when the Nazis came to power, and was a founder member of the late Sir Peter Scott's Wildfowl Trust - achievements all made before becoming an actor.

A new biography reveals that Justice was a deeply contradictory and troubled man and a selfish fantasist

As his friend, the Duke of Edinburgh, says of him: "James was a large man with a personality to match. He lived every bit of his life to the full and richly deserves the title "eccentric"."

The two men first met in the Forties and shared a love of hunting with falcons in Scotland - a passion that Justice later helped to pass on to Prince Charles.

In his private life, he was constantly unfaithful to his first wife. She fell upon hard times after they separated and she finally forced him into bankruptcy.

Indeed, he was only saved from local authority care by the generosity of a friend.

So let us try, 33 years after his death at the age of 68 in 1975, to unravel the truth about this contradictory man.

One thing is clear above all others about the blustering, often rude, Justice - he never cared to be thought of as a film star.

"I am not a star!" he would insist, often at the top of his voice. "I am in this profession to make money."

As Richard Gordon, author of Doctor In The House, puts it: "He preferred to think of himself as a straightforward Scotsman who wore kilts, fished the lochs, flew falcons and knew those people over at Balmoral. Every performance was himself."

To understand the real James Robertson Justice, we need to return to his South London birthplace in June 1907, where he was the only child of a geologist who, ironically, despised everything about the Scots, even though he'd been born in Aberdeen.

His father, also called James, saw little of his son, as he was travelling the world.

By the time he returned to England in 1922, young James was already a boarder at Marlborough school in Wiltshire.

Not that Justice ever talked about his childhood. As his biographer, James Hogg, puts it: "Perhaps the absence of his father for long periods was too deep a wound to revisit."

But this was not the only part of his life that he liked to draw a veil over.

After Marlborough, Justice studied science at University College, London, but left after a year in mysterious circumstances and became a geology student at Bonn, where he acquired an appetite for languages, but left equally suddenly to return to England in the summer of 1927.

Still only 21, it wasn't long before he secured a job at Reuters news agency in London, where another reporter was the young Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.

His friend, the Duke of Edinburgh, said that Justice was 'a large man with a personality to match' and 'lived every bit of his life to the full'

But Justice was useless at the job. One colleague called him "quite unsuitable" - not least for his habit of turning up for a night shift in dressing gown and pyjamas.

After a matter of months, he then set off for Canada, where he sold insurance, taught English at a boys' school, became a lumberjack and mined for gold.

Feeling homesick, Justice worked his passage back to England by washing dishes on a Dutch freighter - or so he later maintained - and by 1931 he was playing for the London Lions ice-hockey team - another career that lasted barely a year.

Undeterred, he tried his hand at motor racing, entering a race at Brooklands in Surrey.

But, characteristically, he disappeared again - to become a policeman for the League of Nations in the Saar area of Germany.

Mystery surrounds this brief period in his life. One suggestion was that he was forced to leave after firing into a hostile crowd and killing someone with the ricochet.

Then there was his subsequent war service with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, which also came to an abrupt halt for no clear reason in 1943, although there were rumours of a knee injury from a German shell.

We next discover Justice, having married, living part of the year in Wigtown, Scotland, shooting geese and driving a Rolls-Royce.

It was at about this time that his acting career began and all the unanswered questions about his early life were quietly swept into the background.

Typically, Justice took up acting by accident after a visit to the Players' Club in London on one of his regular visits south.

The Players' regularly restaged Victorian music hall nights under the chairmanship of the late Leonard Sachs, who was later to reprise the role on BBC television's The Good Old Days.

Justice managed to stand in for Sachs on one occasion, and on the strength of that performance was recommended for a part in a film, For Those In Peril, in the summer of 1944.

He was 37, and, within four years, Justice was playing a leading role - that of the headmaster in the film Vice Versa, written and directed by the then 26-year-old Peter Ustinov, who cast him partly because he'd been "a collaborator of my father's at Reuters".

After that, Justice was given a contract by the Rank Organisation. By then, he'd added Robertson to his name.

Shortly afterwards, he was introduced to Prince Philip.

The two men became members of the infamous Thursday Club which met for lunch in Soho in the late Forties.

Other members included David Niven and Ustinov.

In between courses and copious bottles of wine, the latest bits of salacious gossip were traded, as were sexual revelations.

One member, harmonica player Larry Adler, was attacking British public schools for breeding homosexuals when Justice boomed: "Of course it's true. I was b******* in my first week, in the dormitory with all the others watching. It did me no harm whatever."

But it was through the club that Justice met one of the first of his many female conquests, even though his wife (former nurse Dilys Hayden, whom he'd married in Chelsea in 1941), had given birth to their son, James.

He would take great delight in parading around his young mistress's flat wearing only a sporran while playing the bagpipes.

Justice took up acting by accident after a visit to the Players' Club in London on one of his regular visits south

His success as Dr Maclaren in the 1949 Ealing Comedy Whisky Galore, cemented his reputation and enabled him to buy a mill house in Hampshire.

But, sadly, it was to become the scene of tragedy just a few months later, when his four-year- old son was drowned there.

His wife blamed him for not fencing off the stream that ran beside the house, but, typically, Justice would only tell his friends: "I don't talk about it."

By now, his career was taking off and the role of the demanding surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt in Doctor In The House turned him into an international star.

The film sold 17 million tickets in Britain in 1954, making it the most popular film of the year.

It also helped to spawn the Carry On series, which was launched four years later.

Justice's fee allowed him to buy a bungalow in the village of Spinningdale in Scotland, which was to be his home for the next two decades - and where he indulged his passion for collecting hawks, moths and orchids.

But the actor's selfish streak remained.

After his father's death in 1953, Justice's mother, Edith, had gone to live in Hampshire, but her only son was conspicuous by his absence.

Indeed, despite his own vast intake of food and fine wine, she was to die of malnutrition just a few years later - a "very sad and undeserved end", in the words of one local who knew her well.

Justice relished his reputation for eccentricity, taking pleasure in waking guests at his Scottish home by playing Mozart's horn concertos on a length of garden hose which he kept especially for the purpose.

His appetite for young women hadn't dimmed either, and, in the mid-Fifties, he pursued the outrÈ painter Molly Parkin, then a young art teacher but later to become one of the most renowned fashion journalists of the Sixties with a penchant for bedding several men at once.

He was almost 50, and still, legally, a married man.

"On our very first date," Parkin recalled, "we dined at The Ivy with stars of stage, screen and radio at every table, and there, within inches of everyone, James had his fingers in my Marks & Spencer's knickers under the table, almost all through the meal."

Justice wanted to marry Parkin and have children - in particular, another son - but she refused, and the relationship withered.

Accepting the inevitable, he and his wife officially separated in 1958.

Justice continued to have a procession of affairs with his leading ladies - including one with the married actress Irina von Meyendorff, who'd appeared opposite him in The Ambassadress.

By 1967, the couple were living together, and the following year, during his eventual divorce from the long-suffering Dilys, she was cited in court papers.

But Justice refused to marry her, even though he called her his "great love".

Not long after completing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968, however, Justice suffered a severe stroke, and the following year, his career was over.

As his new biographer puts it: "The boisterous, larger-than-life figure of just a few years before was gone, he was a shadow of his former self."

He was to suffer a further series of strokes, which served only to make him even angrier.

Frustrated at his incapacity, he would take his anger out on Irina.

Yet, ironically, it was his former wife who brought his final humiliation - suing him for his failure to pay the £50-a-week maintenance he'd promised.

She forced him into bankruptcy and into selling his beloved home in Scotland.

Now destitute, it was his friend, Toby Bromley, heir to the Russell & Bromley shoe fortune, who saved him - offering Justice a cottage on his Hampshire estate, where the two men went on to make two wildlife documentaries about their love of falcons and trout fishing.

But by then, according to fellow actor Leslie Phillips, "his mind had very little control over his body" and Justice was suffering "bouts of depression and loneliness".

This once irrepressible figure was reduced to sitting immobile in his chair, furious at his inability to make an impact on life.

Then, in a final twist to the drama of his life, on June 29, 1975, and knowing that he was dying, James Robertson Justice married Prussian-born Irina who had suffered his selfishness for so many years.

Just three days later, Justice, a crippled, penniless ghost of his former self who was nevertheless remembered by so many with such pleasure, was dead.

It was a miserable finale to a luminous career.

• James Robertson Justice: What's The Bleeding Time? by James Hogg with Robert Sellers and Howard Watson, is published by Tomahawk Press.

[stevie boy]

another larger than life character, he played many good roles, but I like him best in the Miss Marple one with Margaret Rutherford. 2 characters together on film,fabulous