Fred ('Nosher’) Powell, who died aged 84, worked as a stuntman on more than 100 films and television series and as a minder for J Paul Getty and Sammy Davis Jr, while portraying himself as a menacing south London “hard man” on the fringes of the underworld.
Casting himself as a lovable rough diamond — albeit, in his own words, “a big, ugly bastard” — he claimed to have turned down an offer to be the getaway driver on the Great Train Robbery. “As far as I could,” he explained in his memoirs, “I kept my nose clean, but I trod a dangerous line with all the villainy around me.”
During the 1960s, as the bouncer at two popular celebrity haunts in Brewer Street, Soho — Jack Isow’s New York-style deli restaurant and the Jack Of Clubs nightspot in the basement below — Powell kept order in an environment of prostitution, organised crime, protection and drugs rackets, repelling unwelcome incursions. Any trouble was “sorted” by Powell personally in an alley round the corner.
At his front-of-house command post behind bulletproof glass doors Powell, in black tie, was threatened by Maltese mobsters and faced down the Kray Twins when they turned up improperly dressed. He once had to apologise to customers affronted by Orson Welles’s malodorous farts after the great director had gorged himself on the house speciality, potato soup.
Powell’s contacts with regular clients from the film world were soon bringing him casual work as an extra and stuntman . During filming for Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965), he was Gert Fröbe’s stunt double, and had to hang by his fingertips from the wing of an upside-down biplane as it swooped above the English Channel .
Later, as a stuntman in Michael Bentine’s It’s A Square World on television, and clad in white tie and tails, he was filmed playing a piano lashed to the deck of a submarine as it dived beneath the Channel. Looking out for terrified runaway horses during filming of the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959) must have struck Powell as pedestrian by comparison.
Because there were no end-of-film credits for Bond stuntmen, the producers preferring to ignore their existence, Powell was an uncredited stunt double for Sean Connery in From Russia With Love (1963) and for Roger Moore, from his debut as 007 in Live And Let Die (1973) to A View to a Kill in 1985. He also performed stunts for other Bond films, including Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965), and was deafened in one ear by explosions in You Only Live Twice (1967).
In 1987 he starred in Eat The Rich, a black comedy for Channel 4, in which, as a Cockney Home Secretary named Nosher, he dropped out of the sky from a helicopter into a ploughed field in Kent, and urinated against a Palace sentry box after dinner with the Queen. He was astonished when the film became a cult classic.
When Powell took over the Prince of Wales pub behind Wimbledon dog track in the 1970s, he struck up a friendship with the chauffeur to J Paul Getty, then the world’s richest man, and was offered a part-time job looking after the American billionaire’s personal security. The post also involved driving Getty from the West End to his Tudor house, Sutton Place, near Guildford.
With Powell at the wheel of Getty’s Mercedes, the ageing plutocrat would often regale him with business problems. Sometimes, when they had arrived at Sutton Place, Getty would suggest a game of kalooki for modest stakes; Powell invariably won. He eventually left Getty’s payroll because he was expected to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
George Frederick Bernard Powell was born on August 15 1928 in Camberwell, south London. His father was a carter, delivering fish from King’s Cross to Billingsgate market in the middle of the night in a four-wheeler drawn by two Suffolk Punch horses. On account of Fred’s horselike appetite as an infant, his mother called him “Nosher”. The family was bombed out during the war when their house took a direct hit, and he was evacuated to Dorset, where he attended Swanage Grammar School.
On his return to London he started watching boxers in the ring at a derelict chapel opposite a pub in Blackfriars Road, where his father regularly competed in all-comers’ bouts on Sundays (10 shillings for an appearance, £1 for a win). Subsequently, in Jack Solomons’s gym off Shaftesbury Avenue, Fred spent a month as the sparring partner of the American boxer Joe Louis, then world heavyweight champion, who was in Britain for a series of exhibition bouts to entertain GIs.
While still a teenager, in 1944, Fred was offered his first film role, as one of 200 extras cast as knights at Agincourt in Henry V, filmed on Salisbury Plain and starring Laurence Olivier. With his experience of horses from helping his father, he was issued with a mount, lance and shield. A year later, with spear and loincloth, he played a centurion guarding the gates of Rome in the epic Caesar and Cleopatra (1945).
His first substantive job, as a porter at Covent Garden market, was interrupted by National Service. Having boxed with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Egypt, Powell turned professional on demobilisation, fought in some 50 bouts promoted by Jack Solomons — the last being against the Jamaican heavyweight Menzies Johnson in 1959 — and in the 1960s sparred with Muhammad Ali.
Between boxing fixtures, Powell kept up his film work. The director Lewis Gilbert hired him to teach Laurence Harvey to fist-fight for the film Wall Of Death (1951). This led to Powell’s being taken on as the Lithuanian-born actor’s part-time minder in the years before Harvey achieved stardom with Room At The Top in 1959. Powell hid him from the press when the actor was called as a witness at an inquest into the death of a man who had stepped into the path of his Jaguar in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was appearing in As You Like It. When a drunken Harvey assaulted the actress Hermione Baddeley at her flat in Chester Square, Powell called in Henry Cooper’s trainer to tend a disfiguring cut above her eye.
Powell also acted as minder to Frank Sinatra’s son, Frank Jr, on a British singing tour which had to be cancelled when Sinatra Sr turned up in London and heard about his offspring’s philanderings. Sinatra père recommended Powell to Sammy Davis Jr, who hired him as his own minder when he starred in a season at the London Palladium.
Powell’s memoirs, Nosher, were published in 1999. Although these were promoted under the rubric “Stand by for the hardest bastard of them all”, he was latterly complaining to his local paper about nothing more blood-curdling than litter in the street. “Britain has one of the highest crime rates in the world,” he wrote in 2001, “yet I can’t remember the last time I saw a copper walking down my avenue.”
Nosher Powell married, in 1951, Pauline Wellman, with whom he had two sons. The elder, Greg, doubled for Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton in two Bond films. His younger son, Gary, also has a lengthy track record on Bond films, as Pierce Brosnan’s stunt double — driving a runaway crane in GoldenEye (1995) and flipping a boat over in The World Is Not Enough (1999) — and as stunt coordinator in the latest Bond film, Skyfall (2012).
Fred (“Nosher”) Powell, born August 15 1928, died April 20 2013
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