Joenoir

George More O'Ferrall is dead now and he had a very short film career - his nickname used to be 'More and More Awful'. I'll tell you how sensitive he was. In The Woman for Joe there was a very difficult scene where I had to pick up Jimmy Karoubi, the midget, and throw him against a caravan. Just as I was about to throw him, someone in the studio made a noise and More O'Ferrall blew his top. He yelled, 'Will you be silent! Isn't it enough that the little man's deformed?!'
William Fairchild was really a writer and he went back to writing after he directed a couple of films. He wasn't a bad director but he was a very good writer. Absolutely everybody was in that film I did with him, The Extra Day, including Richard Basehart. Basehart was quite a drawcard then because he had done Fourteen Hours and he'd just done - or been about to do - Moby Dick as Ishmael. We did an awful lot of bringing over Americans to do British films; that was when the industry had started to decline and those people were really doing 'B' pictures. I did one myself, for Don Sharp, who did some very good films like Bear Island. We did The Curse of the Fly with Brian Donlevy, who was way past his prime and couldn't handle it at all, and was having trouble with his lines, although at sixty-six he looked pretty good. He'd had great success with the Quatermass films about ten years before.
Cyril Frankel is an extraordinary man. Why he wanted to direct, I really don't know. He was rich enough not to have to work, but he directed about four or five quite good films. I think he had an idea about what theatre and films meant to him and it actually had nothing to do with the reality of what theatre and film were about.
Gordon Parry was a throwback, really. I liked Gordon and I think Tread Softly Stranger was quite a good little film. It was the first time in films that I was allowed to use an accent - I played it with a Yorkshire accent, if you remember. In a way, it helped me to step out of the mould. This was the moment the casting people in various media changed their minds about me - that I wasn't just the pretty doctor, I could actually act. Gordon was always very civilised and urbane; he was one of those people who went into the industry as a tea-boy and had moved quietly through it as though it were an office job, doing it perfectly well.

Taken from An Autobiography of British Cinema by Brian McFarlane (Methuen 1997)

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.

JohnB_Toronto

Very nice - I love this sort of stuff!

Marky B

Has this something to do with George Baker,the actor as in Inspector Wexford.
Ta Ta
Marky B

I am special. The heavens always open for me.

Joenoir

I'm not sure what it is you find confusing. It's just a piece in which George Baker (aka Inspector Wexford) talks about directors he has worked with.

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.