moonfleet

Where can I find a biography of Donald Pleasence ??
(except wilkipedia)

Moon.

"Very difficult !" "Craazy!"

CaptainWaggett

Here's his entry from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Pleasence, Donald (1919–1995), actor
by Eric Shorter
© Oxford University Press 2004–8 All rights reserved

Pleasence, Donald (1919–1995), actor, was born at 62 Potter Street, Worksop, Nottinghamshire, on 5 October 1919, the son of Thomas Stanley Pleasence, a railway clerk, and later a station master, and his wife, Alice, née Armitage. During a peripatetic childhood, when the family moved round the north of England from one railway station to the next, he attended many schools. His extrovert personality brought a taste for performing. He enjoyed reciting poetry at local festivals. Before he was eight he decided to be an actor. When he left Ecclesfield grammar school in Yorkshire, he applied unsuccessfully for a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He became a railway booking clerk, but in 1939 he found a job as assistant stage manager at the Playhouse, Jersey, where as Hareton in Wuthering Heights he made his first professional stage appearance. Three years later he made his London début as Curio in Twelfth Night, at the Arts Theatre Club.

As a conscientious objector, Pleasence was sent to the Lake District as a forester, but when fellow pacifists seemed unmoved by the German bombing of London, he joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 as a wireless operator. Shot down after sixty missions in 1944, he organized entertainments at a prisoner-of-war camp run, he said, by a ‘psychotic German killer’ (The Times, 3 Feb 1995). When he was demobilized as a flight lieutenant in 1946 he returned to the stage in Peter Brook's productions of The Brothers Karamazov (Lyric, Hammersmith) and Sartre's Vicious Circle (Arts), in which his smiling, self-effacing bellboy from hell anticipated his sinister performances to come. After playing Starkey in Peter Pan (Scala) that Christmas, he joined the Birmingham repertory theatre for two seasons before he moved to the Bristol Old Vic.

In 1951 Pleasence returned to the Arts as the Revd Giles Aldus in John Whiting's Saints' Day, and he joined Laurence Olivier's company as a walk-on in Caesar and Cleopatra, which toured to New York. Back at the Arts in 1952 he played Willie Mossop in Hobson's Choice, and he then acted in his own play, Ebb Tide, at the Edinburgh Festival. It transferred to the Royal Court. He then joined Michael Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft in Antony and Cleopatra as Lepidus at Stratford upon Avon, transferring to London (Prince's, 1953). Back once more at the Arts he acted in Goldoni's The Impresario from Smyrna before he discovered a favourite part, Leone Gola, in Peter Hall's revival of Pirandello's The Rules of the Game. Not that there was yet any sign of the idiosyncratic or eerie character that was to make Pleasence's name. He was good as the Dauphin to Dorothy Tutin's Joan of Arc in Anouilh's The Lark and amusing as Gunner (another favourite part) in Shaw's Misalliance (both at the Lyric, Hammersmith, 1955–6). It was during the period that he hosted a Sunday night television series, Armchair Mystery Theatre, that Pleasence was sent the part of Davies the tramp to read in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker (Arts and Duchess, 1960; New York, 1961). He sensed that, for all the oddness of the dialogue, it was a masterpiece. As that artful, unexpected house guest on the road to Sidcup, Pleasence made his name as an actor of menace and sinister insinuation. Bald, small, hunched, with pale blue eyes and a psychotic stare, he was by turns comic and cunning. He filled the small stage with fear. His timing, poise, and nervy, high-pitched voice added to the mood of foreboding. Pleasence's astute and subtle performance as Davies set the tone, with variations, for the rest of his career on stage and screen. He never found a more effective part.

In Anouilh's Poor Bitos (Arts, Duke of York's, and New York, 1964) a critic likened Pleasence's performance as a prosecutor of war collaborators to ‘a little scurrying, scratching marsupial of a man, unattractively bright’ (The Times, 3 Feb 1995), and in Robert Shaw's The Man in the Glass Booth (St Martin's, 1967; New York, 1968) he brought a powerful intensity to the part of a mad Jewish millionaire impersonating a Nazi war criminal; the latter part won him the London Variety award as the year's best actor. In a double bill of Pinter's one-act plays, The Basement and Tea Party, on the stage where his tramp in The Caretaker had first triumphed (Duchess) ten years earlier Pleasence had another personal success. He had only one outright theatrical failure. In the New York production of Simon Gray's Wise Child (1972) he played a transvestite, Mrs Artminster. The play was withdrawn in the week that it opened. Pleasence turned more resolutely to films and television, though in his early seventies, in a revival of The Caretaker (Comedy, 1991), he discovered, thirty years after his creation of the part of Davies, an even stranger blend of merriment and evil.

Ever haunted by a dread of unemployment, Pleasence, a most affable, amusing, and relatively uncomplicated character off stage, never allowed his film career to lapse as he did that of the theatre: ‘I make films for money. I never ever watch them’, he said (The Independent, 3 Feb 1995). After cameos in over 200 variable feature films he claimed to lose count. Whatever the genre—Western, biblical, horror, or thriller—Pleasence could be counted on to hold the attention, and as chilling historical figures such as Dr Crippen, Himmler, Lenin, and Pontius Pilate he could be compelling. Ranging from a nineteenth-century grave robber in The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), a schoolmaster fond of corporal punishment in Spare the Rod (1961), a forger of documents in The Great Escape (1963), and a sexual deviant in Roman Polanski's Cul-de-Sac (1966), to a deeply disfigured villain, Ernst Blofeld, in a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967), or a sly Thomas Cromwell in Henry VIII and his Six Wives (1972), Pleasence enjoyed the chances films brought to travel and to ring the changes on the theme of terror. He was a twitchy paymaster in the spy thriller The Black Windmill (1974), a psychiatrist haunted by evil in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), and variously nasty types in Dracula (1979), Alone in the Dark (1982), and The Devonsville Terror (1983). Apart from hosting the Sunday night Armchair Mystery Theatre, his television appearances, from 1946, included Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), a part as a retired spy in Dennis Potter's Blade on the Feather (1980), the role of the Revd Septimus Harding in The Barchester Chronicles (1982), and another Dr Samuel Johnson in The Falklands Factor (1983).

Pleasence was married four times. His first wife was Miriam Pansy Walker (b. 1917/18), also known as Miriam Raymond, an actress, daughter of Frank Torkington Walker, an engineer's mechanic. They married on 7 August 1941, and had two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1958. On 15 May the following year Pleasence married Josephine Martin Crombie (b. 1931/2), a state registered nurse, and daughter of Alexander Scott Crombie, a composing room overseer; they also had two daughters. They divorced in 1970. On 10 October 1970 Pleasence married Meira Shore (b. 1946/7), a divorcee, formerly known as Meira Friedman, daughter of Willi Schor, a civil servant. There was one daughter, and again the marriage ended in divorce. Pleasence's fourth and last wife was Linda Woollam, whom he married in 1989, and with whom he lived in retirement in St Paul de Vence, France. There were no children of this fourth marriage.

Bedtime stories told to his five daughters inspired Pleasence to write two books, Scouse the Mouse (1977), and Scouse in New York (1978). Appointed OBE for his services to theatre and film in 1994, Pleasence died in St Paul de Vence on 2 February 1995. He was survived by his fourth wife and his five daughters.

ERIC SHORTER
Sources J. Parker and others, eds., Who’s who in the theatre, 12th–17th edns (1957–81) · P. Barnes, A companion to post-war British theatre (1986) · J. Walker, ed., Halliwell's film and video guide, 14th edn (1999) · T. Pettigrew, British film character actors (1982) · The Times (3 Feb 1995) · The Independent (3 Feb 1995) · WWW, 1991–5 · personal knowledge (2004) · b. cert. · m. certs. · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1996)

Archives
FILM BFI NFTVA, actuality footage · BFI NFTVA, documentary footage · BFI NFTVA, performance footage



Likenesses photograph, 1960, repro. in Theatre world annual, no. 11, 149–50 · Vivienne, photograph, 1960–69, NPG [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in The Times · photograph, repro. in The Independent · photographs, Hult. Arch.

Wealth at death £213,536: probate, 20 Feb 1996, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



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© Oxford University Press 2004–8 All rights reserved

Eric Shorter, ‘Pleasence, Donald (1919–1995)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2008 [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 17 Aug 2008]

Donald Pleasence (1919–1995): doi:10.1093/refdnb/58008

moonfleet

You're most kind, captain, thank you
Moon.

"Very difficult !" "Craazy!"