Harry Fowler (1926-2012) RIP

[Marky B]

Harry Fowler - RIP
Mark

[paul kersey]

Only two nights ago, I watched Harry Fowler in an episode of "Gideons Way" entitled ""The Housekeeper". He played the part very well and I made a mental note to see what had happened to him since, sadly now I know. RIP Harry and thanks for all of your work.

[MrT]

What very sad news. Watching "Hue and Cry" way back in the 1960s was one of the films that got me hooked on British films. Thank you Harry, you made contributions to so many wonderful films, RIP.

[Tigon Man]

One of our great character actors, as British as a cup of tea and a fish supper. Excelled as Cockney wide boys and spivs very much in the manner of Sydney Tafler and George Cole.
Would have made a great Flash Harry in the St Trinians movies or Arthur Daley in Minder if George Cole hadn't got there first. He did appear in the latter in the 1982 episode Dead Men Do Tell Tales as the not surprisingly dodgy Monty Wiseman.
RIP Harry.

epsguide_S03E01_DeadMenDoTellTales.jpg

[harryfielder]

Much respect to Harry......and thank you.....

[Johnallan]

I’ve just come across this really sad news. He had such a long career and made such an impact in his roles, be they big (or more usually small), that it was comforting to know he was still around all these years later. I always mentally bracketed Harry Fowler with Michael Medwin but now there is only one left.
So thank you Harry for the great entertainment you gave us Britmovie fans – your work will be appreciated by us for many years to come. RIP.

[phil]

RIP Harry, one of the last of the great British character actors of his time.

[alan french]

Again I am sad. Please rest in peace Harry.

Alan French.

[julian_craster]

Harry Fowler: Prolific screen actor known for his 'cheerful cockney' characters




by Anthony Hayward

Monday 09 January 2012
INDEPENDENT
Harry Fowler: Prolific screen actor known for his 'cheerful cockney' characters - Obituaries - News - The Independent



The archetypal "cheerful cockney" on screen, Harry Fowler was also the quintessential character actor.

After almost a dozen film roles in his teens, he made his breakthrough in the 1947 picture Hue and Cry, as the leader of a gang of East End children taking on thieves who are using their favourite comic to communicate their crime plans.

Directed by Charles Crichton and featuring Alastair Sim in the adult cast, Hue and Cry has gone down in film history as the first of the Ealing Studios post-war comedies, although it was more of a well-made thriller for children, enhanced by location filming amid the bomb damage of post-war London.

Fowler was firmly at its centre, set on his road to a long and successful career on screen. Taking the advice of Jack Warner, another of the adult stars of Hue and Cry, he never turned down any roles offered. He was not an A-list star, but this policy guaranteed him permanent employment as a character actor.

In addition to more than 80 film roles, he was memorable on television after joining The Army Game as the Cockney wide-boy Corporal "Flogger" Hoskins (1959-60). The sitcom, set in Hut 29 of the surplus ordnance depot and transit camp at Nether Hopping, caught the imagination of the nation just a decade after the Second World War ended and with National Service still in existence.

Fowler had to carry around a kit bag in his first episode and – because the programme was broadcast live – battled on bravely after discovering that a practical joker had weighed it down with lead.

Later, in the sitcom Our Man at St Mark's, whose stories revolved around a country vicar, he was the sexton and gravedigger Harry Danvers (1964-66), known as "Harry the Yo-Yo" because he had spent most of his life in and out of prison.

"Most of my roles throughout my working life, certainly up until the Sixties, had me as the obligatory Cockney, just as you had the obligatory negro in American films," explained Fowler in Brian McFarlane's book Sixty Voices. "My idol was Jimmy Cagney, but there were no Jimmy Cagney pictures made here, so I had no aspirations regarding roles."

Born in Lambeth, south London, in 1926, Fowler left school with little education and was working as a paper boy for eight shillings a week by his early teens. After hearing his Cockney accent in a radio interview about his wartime experiences, British National Films cast the 15-year-old as an evacuee leaving London for an earl's country home in the 1942 picture Those Kids from Town, which also featured a young George Cole.

He then found himself on film sets as the stock Cockney and swiftly moved from one production to another, appearing in up to 11 a year, both main features and B-movies. Towards the end of the Second World War, he was called up for service in the RAF (1945-47) but was allowed leave to act in Hue and Cry.

Later, Fowler stood out on screen as Sam Weller, the Cockney boot cleaner at the White Hart Inn, in The Pickwick Papers (1952) and had roles of varying importance and screen time in Lucky Jim (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (directed by David Lean), The Longest Day (both 1962), Doctor in Clover (1966) and The Prince and the Pauper (1977).

His appearances were not always fleeting. For I Believe in You (1952), he spent two nights in a Borstal to prepare for the film about delinquents and probation officers, which provided him with both a leading role and Joan Collins as a love interest.

Much of Fowler's film career came before the "kitchen sink" films of the 1960s started depicting the lives, language and sexuality of the working classes, beyond the maids, taxi-drivers and comic characters traditionally portrayed in pictures written by, and featuring, the middle- and upper-classes.

So, inevitably, his prolific list of credits included those such as "amorous youth", "first novice biker", "street photographer", "airman", "barrow boy" and "Covent Garden porter". But Fowler had the chance to work with directors such as Basil Dearden, Lewis Gilbert, Ken Annakin, Val Guest, John Paddy Carstairs and the Boulting brothers, who provided a flow of British films for cinemas.

After his final appearance on the big screen, in the disappointing Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1990), Fowler continued to be seen on television for two decades. Having taken character roles in many major series, he appeared on and off as the milkman Harry, alongside Warren Mitchell, in the Till Death Us Do Part sequel, In Sickness and in Health (1985-92). His last acting role was in the sketch show The Impressionable Jon Culshaw, in 2004.

Fowler's voice was also heard in commercials and narrating the 1975 cartoon Great: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which won an Oscar as Best Short Film (Animated) and a Bafta award for Best Animated Film.

In 1951, Fowler married Joan Dowling, an actress who made her screen debut alongside him in Hue and Cry. After just three years of marriage, when her career was failing, she was found in a gas-filled room after taking her own life. Fowler subsequently married Catherine Palmer, who survives him. He had no children.

Henry James Fowler, actor: born London 10 December 1926; MBE, 1970; married 1951 Joan Dowling (died 1954), 1960 Catherine Palmer; died 4 January 2012.

[julian_craster]

Joan Dowling and Harry Fowler in Hue and Cry :



Joan Dowling on Wiki:
Joan Dowling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joan on Pathe News- "A STAR IN THE MAKING" from 1947. So sad.....:

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=48481

Titles read: "A STAR IN THE MAKING".

Uxbridge, Middlesex.

Various shots show young actress Joan Dowling at home, at work and at a party.

We first see Joan clad in jumper and slacks, trimming the hedge of her family's garden. Her mum calls her in to help with the washing up. In the kitchen Joan looks down at her dog and decides to take him out for a walk instead. She marches off along the road while the dog runs off in the opposite direction.

Commentator talks of Joan's success in the play of 'No Room At The Inn'. C/U of theatre bill showing Joan's name. We see a brief excerpt from the play (or could be from the forthcoming film) featuring Joan with Mary Kimber.

We then see Joan trying on her first evening frock for her 18th birthday party. A man with glasses adjusts the dress as Joan parades about. At her party we see Joan talking to Robert Atkins, who gave her her first stage part. Film star novelist Rene Ray gives Joan a copy of her first book as a birthday present.

In an office we see Joan signing a contract with Associated British Pictures as a talent scout from the film company and another gentleman look on.

Cataloguer's note: Joan Dowling appeared in several films in the late 40s and early 50s, starting with 'Hue and Cry' in 1946 where she met her future husband Harry Fowler. She died tragically in 1954.

[flynn]

sad news.I enjoyed every film he was in.

[julian_craster]

Harry Fowler



Harry Fowler (left) as Corporal 'Flogger' Hoskins, with Dick Emery

Daily Telegraph
09 Jan 2012
Harry Fowler - Telegraph


Harry Fowler, who has died aged 85, was a quintessential Cockney actor and made many film and television appearances, notably in the ITV comedy series The Army Game (1957-61). He joined the show in 1958 as Corporal “Flogger” Hoskins in a large ensemble cast playing a motley group of reluctant Army conscripts all seeking to dodge the column as they struggled to adjust to military life.

The show was at the height of its popularity when Fowler arrived, part of a new intake following the departure of many of the original cast after the first two series. In 1958 its theme tune reached No 5 in the pop charts, and the same year saw the release of a spin-off film called I Only Arsked! — one of the programme’s many catchphrases. (Fowler himself had one such well-worn slogan — “Follow Flogger!”)

He was cast as a skiving Cockney wide boy to replace Michael Medwin, who had played the departed Corporal Springer. Like many of the actors, Fowler could draw on his personal experiences as a wartime conscript, having served as an aircraftman in the RAF.

Originally broadcast live, the show was at the mercy of practical jokers among the cast. Once, Fowler had to exit and return quickly equipped with a haversack. But the others had loaded it with a stage weight, and Fowler had to stagger on with an extra 25lb on his back.

Although it seems dated now, The Army Game was a television phenomenon in its time; when it started, National Service was still compulsory, and wartime memories were fresh.

Henry James Fowler was born on December 10 1926 in Lambeth Walk, south London, and educated at the Central School in Lollard Street, Kennington. His childhood was hard: his grandmother, who had brought him up, was killed in the Blitz in 1940 when Harry was 13, and thereafter he had to fend for himself.

A year later he left school to take over a news-stand in Piccadilly Circus selling the now-defunct evening newspaper The Star. The job taught him how to use his lungs and larynx to full effect as he hawked his wares over the roar of London’s traffic.

Selling his papers at the gentlemen’s clubs nearby, he found that by warbling a few sotto voce lines from the Victorian Cockney song My Old Dutch he would get “half a dollar for a penny paper”.

After one such encounter a BBC official got him to “chat away on the wireless about the vicissitudes of an itinerant newspaper vendor in the metropolis” on the radio programme In Town Tonight.

This led to a film director offering him the part of a brash Cockney evacuee in Those Kids From Town (1941). Fowler followed this with an appearance in the morale-boosting Salute John Citizen (1942).

During the war years Fowler appeared in other propaganda films, notably Went the Day Well? (1942). He was later called up by the RAF, and would reprise his role as an aircraftman in the film Angels One-Five, released in 1952. By the time he was demobbed the late 1940s he was playing juvenile leads, notably the insouciant street kid in Hue and Cry (1947).

Starring Alistair Sim and Jack Warner, this was the first of the Ealing comedies and concerned a gang of street boys who foil a master crook. Unknown to the writer or to the printer of a weekly comic strip for boys, the criminal sends coded orders for robberies by cunningly altering the strip’s wording each week.

Despite the improbable plot, the film proved a critical and commercial success — “an adventure relating the fantasy of popular 'penny bloods’ to a credible situation in reality,” declared one reviewer, “the story of a schoolboy thriller which comes to life”.

Fowler’s other film credits include A Piece of Cake (1948), The Pickwick Papers (1952), Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956), Lucky Jim (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1990).

On television he appeared in Dixon of Dock Green, Z-cars, Minder, Doctor Who, The Bill and Casualty. He also played Harry Danvers in the clerical comedy Our Man at St Mark’s (1965-66), and his voice was often used in television commercials.

A Labour supporter, Fowler considered standing for Parliament, but decided against it: “I found there was little room for laughter in politics.”

He was appointed MBE in Harold Wilson’s resignation honours list of 1970.

Harry Fowler’s first wife, the actress Joan Dowling, his co-star in Hue and Cry, committed suicide in 1954. His second wife, Catherine, survives him.

Harry Fowler, born December 10 1926, died January 4 2012

[KAR120C]

I was saddened to read of Harry's passing, very sad news indeed.

Now I wonder if someone can confirm this for me. Did he way back do a children's TV series called 'Anything You Can Do' with The Golden Shot's Ann Aston?

[Nick Dando]

Harry was featured on BBC Radio 4s Last Word programme on Friday. The repeat is this Sunday 15/01/12 at 20:30.

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Last Word, Sir Robert Horton, Clive Robbins, Sir Roger Jowell and Harry Fowler

Nick

[Windthrop]

Harry was featured on BBC Radio 4s Last Word programme on Friday. The repeat is this Sunday 15/01/12 at 20:30.

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Last Word, Sir Robert Horton, Clive Robbins, Sir Roger Jowell and Harry Fowler

Nick

Yeah, Matthew Sweet did a nice piece on him.

[kelp]

Sad Loss. RIP Harry.

[John Llewellyn Moxey]

I did have the great pleasure of working with Harry many moons ago. Never to be forgotten. RIP Harry