Michael Gough R I P

[dpgmel]

Sad sad news, Michael Gough has passed away.

R I P sir

Michael Gough has died

[Juniper]

A real shame but news has just broke that he has passed away.

[Moor Larkin]

A great man of Fifties theatre, and occasional TV and movies.
From 1954:

[dremble wedge]

Sad news indeed, it was always a pleasure to see him pop up.

[bruiser15]

Oh well another great character actor goes.

[Gerald Lovell]

Sad news, but a great age. Thanks for the years of wonderful entertainment, Michael.

[dicky2006]

He was a great character and a wonderful film, theatre & radio actor. He had a long career. He will never been equalled in the roles he played. Thank goodness we have his films still to enjoy.

[mrs_emma_peel]

Very sad news indeed ... Michael was an immensely gifted actor ... I particularly remember Michael playing
Dr Clement Armstong in The Cybernauts (1965) one of the finest of all Avengers episodes and the academic and cryptic crossword setter Dr Philip Ogleby in one the best episodes of Inspector Morse ... The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1987).
RIP Michael … we will miss you.
Emma

[David Challinor]

Loved his style .....ironic he has died so soon after T P McKenna who starred with him in To the Lighthouse.....

[TimR]

One of the most familiar faces for so many years - always a pleasure to watch.

[Merton Park]

Actor with an amazing range of parts and excellent in every one. From Horrors of the Black Museum, Edgar Wallace and Konga to Richard III and Julius Caesar to Batman. Great voice and played a great part in the Post War film industry.

RIP

[moonfleet]

A very sad news, liked him so much in Horrors of the Black Museum, The Go-Between (as the powerful father figure ), Women in Love, the Tim Burton's Batman(s) ...

[flynn]

very sad news. i dont think i have seen him in a bad film yet.always good to watch.

[jimw1]

Sad news' always a great Presence on the Screen R.I.P.

[julian_craster]

Obituary : Michael Gough



Daily Telegraph
17 Mar 2011
Michael Gough - Telegraph


Michael Gough, the actor who died on Thursday aged 94, achieved cult status for his roles in the Hammer horror films of the 1960s, but became better known as Alfred the Butler in Tim Burton’s Batman films; he was also an accomplished stage actor, bringing finesse, variety and passion to some of the longest, most difficult and sometimes dangerous roles in drama.

Poised and distinguished-looking, with an eloquent speaking voice and a long-lipped sneer, Gough deployed his talent for depicting seducers, serial killers and other well-bred villains to menacing effect as a deranged writer in Herman Cohen’s Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), a film which begins with a girl being killed by binoculars with steel spikes which shoot out from the eyepieces. Gough (whom Cohen referred to as “the cheaper version of Vincent Price”) also featured in Black Zoo (1963), Berserk (1967) and Trog (1970), and Konga (1961), as a mad scientist who turns a baby chimpanzee into a giant gorilla.

In his middle and later years, Gough tended to be cast as the archetypal remote British gentleman. He played Anthony Eden in the Ian Curteis television play Suez 1956 (1979) and Livingstone in the epic television series The Search for the Nile. But when Tim Burton was looking to cast Batman’s butler it was Gough’s role in schlock horror films, so bad that Burton had been unable to forget them, that commended him: “I know that man, he’s in terrible films!” Gough recalled Burton exclaiming.

Beginning with Batman (1989), Gough played Alfred Pennyworth in four Batman films and continued to work with Burton on such films as Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Alice In Wonderland. Yet he always regarded the stage as his true calling: “I’m essentially a jobbing actor. If I’m out of work, I’ll be the back end of a donkey.”

Michael Gough was born in Malaya on November 23 1916 and educated at Rose Hill School, Tunbridge Wells, and Durham College. He dropped out of Wye Agricultural College aged 19 to join the Old Vic Theatre School, playing small parts with the Old Vic Company and appearing in 1937 on Broadway in Love of Women.

His first West End work was in Harcourt William’s production of Dorothy Sayers’ The Zeal of Thy House. After the war he rejoined the Old Vic at its wartime refuge, the Liverpool Playhouse, acted at Oxford Playhouse and soon became a name to be reckoned with on the London stage, his swift rise to the top of his profession sometimes attributed to his resemblance to Stephan Haggard, a popular young actor who had been killed on active service.

It was his vigorous role in Frederick Lonsdale’s But For the Grace of God (1946) that made him famous overnight. He played a blackmailer righteously incensed by an American’s love affair with an Englishwoman while her husband was on active service. The play featured a violent encounter between blackmailer and victim (played by Hugh McDermott), at the end of which Gough supposedly died from a broken neck. In fact, during the play’s run, Gough suffered three broken ribs, an injury to the base of his spine and a cut lip, prompting the management to engage two professional boxers to teach him how to avoid injuries.

Among numerous West End productions in which he appeared over 40 years, one of Gough’s biggest successes was as Gregers Werle in Ibsen’s Wild Duck (1955), “oozing sincerity,” as Kenneth Tynan put it, “while letting the man’s neuroses seep through the facade”.

In 1975 he joined the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic and later on the South Bank, where his roles included the Governor in Phaedra Britannica, and Glen, the dying writer, in Osborne’s Watch It Come Down.

Towards the end of his theatrical career he won ecstatic reviews for a hilarious performance in Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce (1977) as a downtrodden husband frustrated in his attempts to celebrate his wedding anniversary by sharing a supper of pilchards on toast in bed with his wife. The play transferred to New York, winning Gough a Tony award. He also earned enthusiastic reviews for his portrayal of Baron von Epp in A Patriot For Me (1983, Chichester Festival Theatre), supervising a military “drag” ball in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the curtain rose, Gough was to be seen as an elderly “Queen Alexandra”, clad in a sumptuous gown with handbag, elbow-length gloves, fan and a tiara, getting ready to dance with Alan Bates’s Colonel Redl.

Michael Gough was married four times. His first three marriages, to Anneke Wills (who played Dr Who’s sidekick Polly during the 1960s), Anne Leon and Diana Graves, were dissolved. He is survived by his fourth wife, Henrietta, and by a daughter and two sons.

[Robin Davies]

I was watching him only last weekend in Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room.
R.I.P.

[cassidy]

What a shame. Ever reliable and so many films to choose from. Loved him in Let Him Have It and also took a good part in Dracula. As I said, so many to choose from. R.I.P.

[Windthrop]

RIP Michael - such a rich and varied career. I loved his segment with Chris Lee in Dr Terror's House of Horrors.

[smudge]

I was sorry to hear of Michael Gough's passing, but what a great innings and a wonderful legacy to remember him by...

Rest In Peace, Sir.

Respect,

Smudge

[Nick Dando]

From the Guardian.

Michael Gough obituary | Film | The Guardian

Nick

Michael Gough obituary
Actor with poise and presence, best known as Alfred the butler in Tim Burton's Batman

Eric Shorter
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 March 2011 19.38 GMT

The actor Michael Gough, who has died aged 94, was an arresting presence on stage, television and film for the entire postwar period, notably as the butler Alfred Pennyworth in Tim Burton's Batman movies. Eventually he just voiced roles, as with the Dodo Bird in the same director's Alice in Wonderland film last year, but always to striking effect.

Gough started in the Old Vic company in London before the second world war, but it took till 1946 for his career proper to get off to a flying start in the West End, in Frederick Lonsdale's But for the Grace of God. The fistfight-to-the-death scene was done with such startling verisimilitude that nearly all the stage furniture was demolished nightly, and Gough broke three ribs and injured the base of his spine. So copiously did blood flow from his lower lip at one performance that his adversary, played by Robert McDermott, held him up by the scruff of the neck for the audience to gape at the gore dripping over the footlights. Gough, as the degenerate black sheep of an English family trying to blackmail an American adulterer, would curl a long lip into a sneering smile, which became a characteristic of this fine actor's style. Whether villainous or heroic, romantic or sly, funny or frightening, he put that snarl to good use alongside his dark-brown voice and melancholy features in a wide range of parts.

He was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, where his father was a rubber planter. After attending Rose Hill school, Tunbridge Wells, and Durham school, he dropped out of Wye Agricultural College in Kent in order to study acting at the Old Vic. He came to be in great demand in the West End: in Sartre's Crime Passionel (1948), he dithered as a political assassin; later that year, in Daphne du Maurier's September Tide, he set about the seduction of his mother-in-law (Gertrude Lawrence) with a fascinating delicacy when it came to removing her glasses. He played an apt and indignant Laertes to Alec Guinness's Hamlet (1951), then a passionate and neurotic son to a possessive mother in Coward's The Vortex (1952). In Ibsen's The Wild Duck (1955), he was the sardonic idealist Gregers Werle – as Kenneth Tynan put it, "oozing sincerity while letting the man's neuroses seep through the facade". The same performance prompted Caryl Brahms to perceive Gough's "extraordinary capacity for keeping speech straining at the leash; for pent-up emotion; and for the cut and parry and flash of word-play".

Although Gough's mannered elegance was hardly suited to the social misfits erupting in the new wave of British drama or the theatre of the absurd, he did not ignore either movement. He took over from Alan Webb in Orson Welles's production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros when it moved with Laurence Olivier from Sloane Square to the West End in 1960; he appeared in the Royal Court's Brecht anthology in 1962; and in 1969 he toured two of Pinter's one-acters, A Slight Ache and The Lover, to South America.

A busy and regular film actor, he headed the bomb-disposal squad in the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger wartime drama The Small Back Room (1949), and in The Go-Between (1970) played the father of a headstrong young woman (Julie Christie). He developed a strong line in science-fiction and horror roles, and as a film-maker himself won a prize for one of the 10 best amateur films of 1978 with his Welcome to Washington. This was a newsreel documentary of President Carter and Queen Elizabeth visiting Washington, County Durham, to honour George Washington's ancestors.

At the National theatre, Gough excelled as a comedian. He played a resigned and rueful parent in Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce (1977), nibbling pilchards on toast in bed with his wife (Joan Hickson) in celebration of a wedding anniversary, their contentment ruined by a daughter with a marital crisis that Gough sneaked shrewdly away from. When the comedy transferred to Broadway the following year, he and Hickson won Tony awards.

One of Gough's funniest roles was as Baron von Epp in the 1983 revival of Osborne's A Patriot for Me. Presiding over a military "drag" ball in the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he wore a long gown and tiara, carried a fan and handbag, and as Queen Alexandra he moved among his guests with gravity and grace to bring the house down first at Chichester, then in the West End at the Haymarket.

Unafraid to go out on a limb – most notably as King Lear (1974) at the Belgrade theatre, Coventry, or as the old retainer Firs to Judi Dench's Madame Ranevskaya in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1990) at the Aldwych – Gough breathed humour and humanity into all his work. His marriages to Diana Graves, Anne Leon and Anneke Wills ended in divorce, and he is survived by his fourth wife, Henrietta Lawrence, his daughter, Emma, and sons, Simon and Jasper. His daughter Polly predeceased him.

Toby Hadoke writes: Michael Gough first made his cinematic mark as Nicholai to Vivien Leigh's Anna Karenina (1948), Michael Corland opposite Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit, and Martin Raynor in Michael Anderson's thriller Night Was Our Friend (both in 1951).

Gough had made it known he was slightly miffed that many high-profile thespians were taking up the minor roles in Olivier's Richard III (1955), leaving little room for actors like himself. He received a late-night phone call, replete with expletives, from an apparently outraged Olivier, accusing him of "stirring the shit". Olivier was in reality pulling his leg, having taken Gough's feelings on board, and offered him the choice of which of the Duke of Clarence's murderers to play. Gough immediately opted for "whichever one has the most lines".

He excelled in character roles on the big screen for more than five decades, drawing on his classical and theatrical resources for leading directors: for Ken Russell, he appeared in Women in Love (1969); for Derek Jarman, Caravaggio (1986); and for Martin Scorsese, The Age of Innocence (1993). His feline features and ability to lend gravitas to the otherworldly often took him into the realms of the fantastical. He worked for Hammer Films and Amicus in a number of genre productions that retain a cult following, notably Dracula (1958), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965) and Horror Hospital (1973). Many of these films were good, some not, but Gough was never less than committed, and always eerily memorable. It was these roles that gave him a serious cachet among a generation of film buffs who became movie makers, such as David Zucker, who cast him in the comedy spoof Top Secret! (1984); Wes Craven, in The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988); and Tim Burton, in Batman (1989).

Gough's character, Alfred Pennyworth, is the loyal butler and confidant to Bruce Wayne and his superhero alter ego, played in that film and its first sequel, Batman Returns (1992), by Michael Keaton. While Wayne was portrayed by Val Kilmer in Batman Forever (1995) and George Clooney in Batman and Robin (1997), Gough remained a constant, providing charm and quintessential Britishness to ground the various offbeat situations. Gough continued to work with Burton, in Sleepy Hollow (1999) and, as a voice artist, in The Corpse Bride (2005).

He was memorable on television as prime minister Sir Anthony Eden in Ian Curteis's Suez 1956 (1979), in the cameo role of Dr Grant in Brideshead Revisited (1981), in a splendid turn as Mikhel in Smiley's People (1982), and, most strikingly, as a dishevelled, bewhiskered, flatulent writer in Dennis Potter's Blackeyes (1989).

In Doctor Who, he played the Celestial Toymaker, who, despite appearing only once, opposite William Hartnell in 1965, became one of the programme's most iconic villains. A bored eternal, dressed as a Chinese mandarin, he lured unwitting space travellers to his domain to play apparently innocent parlour games with lethal consequences. The character proved memorable enough for Gough to be asked to reprise it in 1986, which he was happy to do, until Michael Grade decided to rest the show. In the interim, Gough had also played a devious old friend of the Doctor – by now, Peter Davison – in the 1983 story Arc of Infinity.

• Michael Gough, actor, born 23 November 1916; died 17 March 2011