Gene Wilder

   

Gene Wilder, the actor and director, who has died aged 83, became a favourite with children everywhere when he created the zany title role in the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971).

Based on Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the musical fantasy gave Wilder the perfect platform as the eccentric confectionery maestro, whom he played with sparky cynicism, a smile constantly tugging at the corners of his mouth as he devises one devilish scheme after another.

Wilder imbued his performance with an element of grand guignol, giving the film a macabre as well as an exuberant feel as Willy Wonka conducts a group of children around his dream chocolate factory; the film was shot in Germany and the factory exterior was actually the Munich gasworks.

He recalled that when he accepted the role, he had told the film’s director Mel Stuart that he did so on one condition: “When I make my first entrance, I’d like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself... but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.”

When asked why, Wilder responded,“Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.” The scene was duly included in the film.

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka

Although Willy Wonka defined Wilder as the quizzical, frizzy-haired comedy actor with windmilling arms and an air of demented babbling panic, his career both on- and off-camera was a patchy affair, with as many misses as hits; consequently his output was judged disappointingly uneven. 

 palpable hit, however, was Blazing Saddles (1974), the spoof Western written and produced by his friend Mel Brooks, in which Wilder featured as the alcoholic former gunslinger, the Waco Kid, a part he played by default after two older actors originally lined up for it pulled out. His next film, directed by Brooks, Young Frankenstein (also 1974),  another parody, this time of early horror films.

Gene Wilder and Teri Garr in Young Frankenstein

As well as coming up with the idea, Wilder collaborated with Brooks on the screenplay and also starred as the brain surgeon descended from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein of literary renown.

His partnership with the black actor Richard Pryor began in 1976 with Silver Streak, a parody of train mysteries like North By North-West, noted for its sensational finale – it was chosen for the Royal Film Performance in London attended by the Queen Mother in 1977 – and continued with Stir Crazy (1980), a raucous comedy that did well at the box office. But the pairing faltered with the abysmal romp See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) and disintegrated after Another You (1991), a third-rate farce that sank with all hands.

On the stage, he made his British debut in Neil Simon’s Laughter On The 23rd Floor (Queen’s, 1996), in which his permanently-glazed, spaced-out weariness proved, in the words of Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph, “a dream of a role”.

Low-key and reflective in private, Wilder admitted to writing “emotionally autobiographical” screenplays, but his serious off-screen manner contrasted with the manic exertions popular with his fans. “My quiet exterior used to be a mask for hysteria,” he was once quoted as saying. “After seven years of analysis, it just became a habit.”

Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles 

Gene Wilder was born Jerome Silberman on June 11 1933 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his Jewish father, who had migrated from Russia at the age of 11, made miniature whiskey bottles and imported novelties and souvenirs. His mother, of Polish descent, suffered a heart attack when Jerry was eight, leaving her a semi-invalid; he devised comedy skits to cheer her up.

After Washington High School, Milwaukee, he enrolled at the University of Iowa in 1951, acting in student plays and appearing in summer repertory during the holidays. As an actor, he had originally inclined to comedy parts but, inspired by Lee J Cobb in the original Broadway production of Death of a Salesman (1949-50), he refocused on more serious roles.

In 1955, after graduating with an arts degree, he moved to England and joined the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol where he learned judo, fencing, gymnastics and voice control, but left before studying acting technique. On his return to America, he served in the US Army, working in a military hospital neuropsychiatric ward by day and attending drama school in New York at the weekends.

On his discharge, and having taken the professional name Gene Wilder (Gene after a character in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, and Wilder after Thornton Wilder), he joined the Actors’ Studio and studied method acting with Lee Strasberg, financing himself by working as a chauffeur and toy salesman as well as by giving instruction in fencing, a skill which also led to his being hired as fencing choreographer in productions of Twelfth Night and Macbeth in 1961. In the same year he made his off-Broadway debut as Frankie Bryant in Arnold Wesker’s Roots.

His first Broadway appearance that November was as the comic hotel valet in Graham Greene’s The Complaisant Lover, a role that earned him an award for the most promising newcomer and turned him again towards comedy parts.

In 1963, appearing in another Broadway production, of Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children, he met Mel Brooks, who each evening called backstage to collect the play’s star, Anne Bancroft, whom he later married. Brooks promised Wilder a part in a film he intended to write entitled Springtime for Hitler.

Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in The Producers 

This turned out to be the role of the frenetic accountant Leo Bloom in The Producers (1969) for which Wilder was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor. In the meantime he had made his film debut in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as the terrified undertaker Eugene Grizzard, kidnapped by the outlaw couple and whisked away on a joyride, a fleeting cameo noted for its timing and restraint.

In The Producers, Wilder’s hilarious performance as the accountant was the one that established his screen persona, that of a low-key, well-balanced person transformed by the smallest crisis into a hysterical bundle of nerves.

In Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972), one of several films in which he played variations on this theme, he was a doctor who falls in love with a sheep, taking it to a hotel room and ordering wine, caviar and some green grass.

He moved into directing and screenwriting with another spoof, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), and The World’s Greatest Lover (1977), both stylish pictures laden with quirky humour which saluted the style of his mentor Mel Brooks.  Wilder’s third wife, the television comedienne Gilda Radner, featured in two of his films from the mid-Eighties, The Woman In Red (1984) and Haunted Honeymoon (1986), both of which were critically panned.

 His last major role was as the Mock Turtle in a television film version of Alice in Wonderland in 1999.

Wilder produced a memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (2005); a collection of stories, What Is This Thing Called Love? (2010); and three novels: My French Whore (2007), The Woman Who Wouldn’t (2008) and Something to Remember You By (2013).

Gene Wilder married, in 1960, the actress and playwright Mary Mercier, with whom he had appeared in a New York production of Roots. When the marriage ended in divorce, he married secondly, in 1967, Mary Joan Schutz, adopting her daughter from an earlier marriage.

Wilder’s third wife, Gilda Radner, whom he married in 1984, died from ovarian cancer in 1989 aged 42, after which he became actively involved in promoting cancer awareness.

His fourth wife, Karen Webb (née Boyer), survives him.

Gene Wilder, born June 11 1933, died August 29 2016

Gilli Smyth, 'Space Whisperer'

Gilli Smyth in 1968 29 AUGUST 2016 • 5:24PM

Gilli Smyth, who has died aged 83, was a co-founder, with her partner Daevid Allen, of Gong, an avant garde, anarchic musical ensemble which they launched in 1968-9.

The Australian-born Allen had been a co-founder and vocalist-guitarist of Soft Machine, the Canterbury group who, with their improvised, free-form musical style were pioneers of psychedelic rock. In October 1967, however, after a tour of France, Allen was refused entry to Britain, having previously overstayed his visa.

While his fellow Soft Machine members went on to international success, Allen settled in Paris “experimenting with his electric guitar and a boxful of 19th century gynaecological surgical instruments processed through an echo box and other effects”, according to his website. He soon began a relationship with Gilli Smyth, who was teaching at the Sorbonne.

With Allen playing guitar and Smyth reciting poetry and contributing “space whispers” (described on her website as an “ethereal method of atonal singing, vocalising and 'musical landscaping’ ”), the couple formed Gong with Ziska Baum on vocals and Loren Standlee on flute.

During the Paris student riots of 1968 – in which Allen participated, handing out teddy bears to policemen – they staged a “guerrilla gig” which made the news and brought them the unfriendly attentions of the French authorities.

Gilli Smyth with other Banana Moon Band members (Daevid Allen is behind, in black)

Thinking it was wiser to make themselves scarce, the pair decamped to the village of Deya in Majorca, where they found the saxophonist Didier Malherbe playing a flute in a cave on land owned by the author Robert Graves. After a brief period performing with the Banana Moon Band, they incorporated Malherbe into a reformed Gong. Gilli Smyth took on the name Shanti Yoni, while Allen became Bert Camembert (or sometimes Sri Cappuccino Longfellow), and Malherbe insisted that he be known as Bloomdido Bad De Grasse.  

The Banana Moon Band 

The band members moved to a rural farmhouse outside Paris, where they lived communally, and signed to the French label BYG. Their debut album Magick Brother came out in 1970, followed in 1971 by Camembert Electrique. In June the same year they appeared at Glastonbury, even though Allen was still not allowed into the UK. “I came through in a van with a photo of the Buddha on my passport,” he recalled. “Gilli undid the three top buttons of her blouse and that did the trick.”

In 1973 Richard Branson signed the group to his fledgling Virgin Records and the original members were soon joined by the British guitarist Steve Hillage, the synth player Tim Blake, bassist Mike Howlett and drummer Pierre Moerlen.

Gong’s first album for Virgin, Flying Teapot (1973), saw the band beginning the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy, about an imaginary planet called Gong, peopled by characters (Pothead Pixies, Radio Gnomes, Octave Doctors and so on) who were said to have been inspired by a vision Allen had had during the full moon of Easter 1966.

The follow-up albums in the trilogy, Angel’s Egg (1973) and You (1974), established Gong as hippie jokers who mixed adult fairy tales with free-jazz improvisation, psychedelic rock, folk and ambient electronic music. “Depending on your viewpoint,” observed one critic, “Planet Gong and its attendant mythologies are either a prog-tastic revolutionary allegory, or a terrible advert for the use of psychedelic drugs.”

In her spoken-word poetry on these albums, Gilli Smyth portrayed a prostitute, a cat, a mother, a witch, and an old woman, and sometimes dressed in character on stage. She had a strong creative hand in all Gong’s early albums, contributing songs as well as performing.

Gilli Smyth left Gong after the final album in the trilogy, in 1974. She was followed, in dramatic fashion, by Allen who, in April 1975, refused to go on stage for a gig at Cheltenham Town Hall, claiming that a force-field prevented him from performing, then hitchhiked away from the venue and out of Gong in his stage clothes and ultraviolet make-up.

Gilli Smyth and Mike Howlett of Gong performing in London in 2009 

Gillian Smyth was born on June 1 1933, and, according to her website, “grew up in a musical household, took three degrees at Kings College, London University, where she edited the college magazine, wrote controversial political stuff that hit the tabloids, did readings and musical and theatrical performances, as she had from an early age [and] published a couple of books of poetry”. Later she moved to Paris, where she taught at the Sorbonne.

After leaving Gong in the mid-1970s, neither Allen nor Gilli Smyth would play with the band again until the 1990s, apart from a reunion in Paris in 1977. Setting up home in Deya, and then France, the couple brought up their two sons, Orlando and Taliesyn, while pursuing their various artistic activities.

Gong developed into a family of bands, including Planet Gong, New York Gong, Camembert Gong, Gong Matrices, Gongmaison and Mother Gong, which Gilli Smyth founded in 1978 after the release of her solo album, Mother.

At around the turn of the decade Gilli Smyth and Allen separated, and in 1981 Allen returned to Australia. Gilli, meanwhile, married the musician and producer Harry Williamson, with whom she had formed Mother Gong, and with whom she too moved to Australia in 1982 after becoming disillusioned with Thatcherism.

Mother Gong, she explained, aimed “to explore the feminine principle in men, women and nature, to make people aware of the environment, but to try and do it with a bit of absurdity.” It released several albums and toured internationally from 1979 to 1981, then again from 1989 to 1991, either headlining or supporting other acts, including Bob Dylan.

By the late 1980s Gong’s albums from the 1970s were being claimed as an inspiration by a new generation of musicians and in 1990 the band (which had gone through several changes of personnel) reunited for a one-off television appearance. In 1992 they released the album Shapeshifter (aka Radio Gnome Invisible, part 4) and in 1994 most of the “classic” line-up reunited for performance in London including, for the first time since the 1970s, Gilli Smyth.

Gilli Smyth performing with Gong in London in 2010 

This formed the basis of the “Classic Gong” band which toured internationally from 1996 to 2001 and released the album Zero to Infinity in 2000 (with Allen, Gilli Smyth, Howlett and Malherbe plus Theo Travis on sax and Chris Taylor on drums). A reviewer observed that even though “Gong are still bonkers, and their music still entrenched in psychotropic noodlings”, they did not sound a bit jaded.

The “Classic Gong” line-up retired from regular touring in 2001, but there were several one-off reunions. In 2009 they released the album 2032 and played at the Big Chill festival in Herefordshire, at the Beautiful Days Festival in Devon, and at the Lounge on the Farm festival near Canterbury.

In 2014 Allen and Gilli’s son Orlando became the band’s drummer and Gong released a new album, I See You, with Gilli Smyth guest-performing a “sprinkled space whisper”.

As well as her music and poetry, Gilli Smyth appeared as a solo performer and lecturer at the Starwood Festival in America in 1992 and 1993, did voice-overs for commercials and audio cassettes, and gave lectures on voice projection.

Although Gilli Smyth and Allen had separated, they continued to work together until his death from cancer last year. Her marriage to Harry Williamson was dissolved in 1992. Her sons survive her.

Gilli Smyth, born June 1 1933, died August 22 2016

The Reverend Roly Bain, priest and clown

Roly Bain at the Holy Trinity Church in Dalston

The Reverend Roly Bain, who has died aged 62, was an itinerant priest-clown who performed in churches, hospitals, schools, prisons and open-air events around the country.

Dressed in an outsized dog collar, size 18 boots and a red nose, Bain exported his unusual preaching method through visits to America, Europe and Australia, at one time travelling more than 38,000 miles a year. He would proceed down the church aisle on a unicycle and conduct choirs with a pink feather duster.

 He blew bubbles during prayers to represent God’s promises and embellished the Bible message with a fondness for wordplay. “Zacharias of diminutive stature, Was reduced to a state of high rapture”, ran one favoured limerick: “He climbed up a tree, Took our Lord home for tea, And gave back more taxes than Thatcher.”

The service would often culminate in Bain attempting to deliver a sermon while balanced on a slack rope – an elastic cable fixed between two pillars topped with crosses. “It is a metaphor of the wobbliness of faith,” he explained. “It is ridiculous to try and get on and stay on the rope, yet it’s a wonderful thing.

Though his humour could occasionally be subversive – he claimed to have thrown custard pies at 10 bishops – Bain enjoyed broad support from the Church. Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, was a patron of the Faith and Foolishness Trust that funded Bain’s ministry.

Bain saw the clown’s work as part of a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages. His inspiration lay in the holy fools who would expose the weaknesses of earthly authorities, especially in the New Year celebration of the Feast of Fools, at which the lower clergy briefly assumed power over their superiors.

He also recognised the power of the clown to express vulnerability, giving the audience a space in which difficult feelings could come to light. The words of the Magnificat – “he put down the mighty from their seats and exalted the humble and meek” – were thus given life, he wrote: “and I suspect there is as much, if not more, need for this means of truth telling as ever there was”.

One of triplets, he was born David Roualeyn Findlater Bain on January 18 1954. His father was Richard Findlater, a theatre critic who had written a biography of the great 19th-century clown Joseph Grimaldi. His mother, Romany, was a freelance journalist. Aged eight David read a biography of the celebrated English clown Coco, which kindled his desire to become an entertainer.

Faith initially led him on a different path, however, and after St Paul’s school in west London he read Theology at Bristol University. He continued his studies at Cuddesdon theological college in Oxfordshire and was ordained in 1978. Four years later he helped to set up Holy Fools, an organisation for those interested in the clown ministry.

He resigned his parish in London in 1990 and spent a year at Fool Time (now Circomedia), a circus training college in Bristol. Having mastered juggling, high-wire balancing and the art of the pratfall, he devised his own make-up for his performances as “Holy Roly”: heavily rouged cheeks and a red nose, with a black cross on either side of the face. Like all professional clowns in Britain, his clown face then joined the official registry – made up of painted eggshells – at the Holy Trinity Church in Dalston, east London.

Roly Bain was the author of Clowning Glory (1995), a how-to guide for aspiring performers written with fellow Anglican Patrick Forbes, and of Playing the Fool (2001), a memoir. In 1994 he was named Clown of the Year by Clowns International.

Roly Bain married, in 1984, Jane Smith. They had two sons.

The Reverend Roly Bain, born January 18 1954, died August 11 2016

Kenny Baker, Star Wars actor

Kenny Baker 

Kenny Baker, the actor, who has died aged 81, starred alongside Alec Guinness and Harrison Ford yet remained forever out of sight, as the diminutive robot R2-D2 in the Star Wars films.

Standing at just 3 ft 8 in, Baker was both short enough to fit inside the metal costume and sturdy enough to operate the system of levers that propelled it. It was arduous work, with temperatures approaching 105 degrees Fahrenheit  on location in North Africa. Cut off from the outside world, Baker had no way of knowing whether a take was over. A crew member had to alert him by banging on the suit with a hammer. Even worse than RD-D2 for physical comfort was the furry, bear-like suit that Baker donned to play an Ewok in the third film, Return of the Jedi, an experience he compared to “being poached”.

C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars 

But it was as the mischievous but touchingly loyal R2-D2, who communicated using rather endearing electronic squeaks, that Baker found fame. His on-screen double act with the uptight humanoid robot C3PO was comic and occasionally poignant, although it later transpired that Baker’s relationship with Anthony Daniels, who played C3PO, was often strained. Baker thought that Daniels was rude and standoffish. “He really degraded me and made me feel small – for want of a better expression,” Baker later recalled.

Daniels retaliated in kind, downplaying Baker’s contribution in subsequent interviews: “I never saw him,” he said in 2011. “I mean, R2-D2 doesn’t even speak. He might as well be a bucket.”  The two avoided each other when not on set, and Baker took the opportunity to express his opinion of Daniels unchallenged on the convention circuit.

Kenny Baker (bottom) with Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Peter Mayhew in a publicity shot for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 

In later life such fan gatherings became Baker’s main source of income, as well as an opportunity to meet with some of the cast members whose company he most enjoyed. One of his closest friendships was with Peter Mayhew, the seven-foot actor cast as the hirsute alien Chewbacca. They had bonded on set over their mutual difficulties in finding well-tailored clothes, and Mayhew paid tribute to him in his illustrated memoir for children, Growing Up Giant.

As the Star Wars franchise evolved into a pop culture phenomenon, Baker’s role became more widely celebrated. The films’ director George Lucas joined the discussion in 1999, referring to the “element of humanity to Artoo that comes from having Kenny Baker inside”.

Kenneth George Baker was born in Birmingham on August 24 1934, to parents of average height. Both his mother and father were part-time musicians, and he was encouraged to dance and learn the drums. When he was eight years old, however, his mother Ethel ran off with an American GI, dispatching Kenneth to boarding school in Sevenoaks, Kent. His father, Harold, died just two years later after an operation led to pneumonia. Kenneth found solace with the Shaftesbury Society in London, which provided training and opportunities for young people with disabilities.

Kenny Baker with George Lucas at the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 

After leaving school aged 16 he began work at Burton Lester’s Midget Circus, before joining Billy Smart’s circus as a clown and ringmaster. For a time he toured with Holiday on Ice in Snow White, which played to the Queen at a Royal Gala performance.

Baker’s first commercial success came with the Mini-Tones, a comic dwarf double-act with fellow performer Jack Purvis. The two were still working together on Thames Television’s variety show Opportunity Knocks when the audition call came for Star Wars. Baker refused to accept the part until Purvis was also enlisted to play a variety of alien creatures. 

Kenny Baker (far left) with his fellow bandits and John Cleese (centre) in Time Bandits (1981) 

For the next 15 years  Baker worked steadily in film and television. He had bit parts in the cult classic Flash Gordon and in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (both 1980), before securing a main speaking role in Time Bandits (1981), Terry Gilliam’s comic adventure film about a troupe of tiny time-travelling robbers. Jack Purvis also starred with Baker.

As filming drew to a close, Gilliam realised that it lacked a suitable ending. Sean Connery had been scripted to feature in a climactic battle against a personified Evil, but his schedule would not permit it. Gilliam therefore elected to kill off Baker’s character, Fidgit, arguing that Purvis could be trusted to mourn him with sufficient pathos.

Between projects the pair continued to tour as the Mini-Tones, reaching Germany as the Cold War was ending. There they were approached by a “man in a long mac” who urged them to accept a job in the CIA. “He said we’d be brilliant because absolutely no one would suspect us,” Baker recalled. They declined the offer.

Kenny Baker and his wife Eileen with David Prowse (Darth Vader) and Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) in 1980 

After a brief flirtation with stand-up comedy in the 1990s, Baker returned to Star Wars – though technological advances threatened to make him redundant. An internet campaign orchestrated by fans of his character called on George Lucas to resist phasing out R2-D2’s jerky, hand-operated movements in favour of computer-generated effects. In any event, The Phantom Menace (1999) had him back in the suit for much of filming. By the sixth film, Revenge of the Sith (2005), however, several additional shots were done digitally to save on Baker’s travel expenses.

Kenny Baker’s wife Eileen, whom he married in 1970 and who played an Ewok in Return of the Jedi, died in 1993. They had two sons.

Kenny Baker, born August 24 1934, died August 13 2016

David Huddleston, actor

David Huddleston in The Big Lebowski

David Huddleston, who has died aged 85, was a busy character actor who played the mayor in Mel Brooks’s spoof Western Blazing Saddles (1974) and the title character in the Coen brothers’ Raymond Chandler pastiche The Big Lebowski (1998).

Huddleston specialised in big, burly, bluff, blustery characters who tended to make up in sheer volume for what they lacked in grey matter.

As Mayor Olson Johnson in Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’s comedy about a black sheriff (Cleavon Little) who teams with a washed-up gunfighter (Gene Wilder) to save a town of racists and bigots from evil politicians and businessmen, Huddleston gets up at a town meeting after a grizzled old timer makes an incomprehensible speech about “Sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswagglin’ cracker croakers” and the like, to address the assembled citizens of Rock Ridge. “Now who can argue with that?” he says, pointing out that the speech was delivered in “authentic frontier gibberish”.

“It was probably the most fun I ever had on a set,” Huddleston recalled.

In The Big Lebowski, he was the wheelchair-bound, hippie-hating millionaire for whom Jeff Bridges, as Jeff Lebowski, a laidback hippie known as “The Dude”, is mistaken by a gang of thugs. In a typical Coen brothers comic muddle, the Big Lebowski gets the Dude to act as a go-between with villains who have apparently “kidnapped” his trophy wife, Bunny (Tara Reid), in a plot which includes a gang of nihilists, a severed toe, pornographic films, a sadistic bowling rival and countless other diversions.

The Big Lebowski became a cult hit. “Your revolution is over, Mr Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost,” the Big Lebowski tells his laid-back namesake. In fact the bums, as embodied by the Dude, win.

David Huddleston was born on September 17 1930 at Vinton, Virginia. His father was an iron worker, and until he was 10 or 12 he grew up in a house with no electricity or running water. 

David Huddleston, left, with Dudley Moore in Santa Claus: The Movie, 1985

As a child he appeared in community theatre productions, minstrel shows and children’s pageants and, after serving as a mechanic in the US Air Force, he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on the GI Bill.

He began his career on the stage and appeared in several Broadway productions.

In 1984 he played opposite Dustin Hoffman’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman as Charlie, Willy’s only true friend, one critic describing him as “radiating a quiet benovolence as expansive as his considerable girth”. When he took the role of Benjamin Franklin in a 1997 Broadway production of the stage musical 1776, he regarded it as his “crowning achievement”.

He got his first break in Hollywood in the 1972 Civil War film Bad Company, in which he played a gang leader. But it was comedy for which he became best known. He took the title role in Santa Claus: the Movie (1985) opposite Dudley Moore. His other film credits included Fools’ Parade (1971), Family Reunion (1981) and The Producers (2005).

He worked twice with John Wayne, in Rio Lobo (1970) and McQ (1974), Wayne’s first “cop” picture, recalling how, on the last day of shooting, he had called by Wayne’s dressing room to thank him for casting him in the picture. “Well, by God, you’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?” the star replied.

Huddleston also made guest appearances in television series such as Gunsmoke and The West Wing and was nominated for an Emmy for his role as Grandpa Arnold in the ABC comedy-drama The Wonder Years.

He is survived by his wife Sarah Koeppe, a casting agent whom he met while making Santa Claus, though they did not marry until 1999, when they exchanged vows in the Tunnel of Love Drive-Thru in Las Vegas. He is also survived by a son, the actor Michael Huddleston.

David Huddleston, born September 17 1930, died August 2 2016

Vivean Gray, actress who played Mrs Mangel in Neighbours

Vivean Gray, who played the meddlesome Neighbours character Nell Mangel  

Vivean Gray, who has died aged 92, was a British-born actress who became familiar to television viewers of the 1970s and 1980s for her roles in a series of Australian television soap operas, including as Edna Pearson in Prisoner Cell Block H, as Ida Jessop in The Sullivans (which earned her a Logie Award in 1978 for Best Sustained Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role), and later, and most famously, as the loathsome busy-body Mrs (Nell) Mangel in Neighbours.

For years afterwards, Vivean Gray topped opinion polls as the nastiest television “baddie” of all time, with some of the more dedicated viewers of Neighbours failing to distinguish between the actress and the fictional character.

Aside from her work on the small screen, Vivean Gray enjoyed success on film, notably as Miss McCraw in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), which tells the story of the Valentine’s Day disappearance in 1900 of several Appleyard College students and their maths teacher (Vivean Gray) at Hanging Rock. The film, which was often mistakenly thought to have been based on a true story, won a BAFTA Award for Cinematography.

Vivean Gray, left, and Rachel Roberts in Picnic at Hanging Rock 

Vivean Gray was born Jean Vivra Gray on July 20 1924 at Cleethorpes, where she attended Thrunscoe Grammar School. She was the eldest of four children. Her father, Allan, was a fish merchant at Grimsby Docks. During the mid-1930s, the family moved to Kingston upon Thames, only to be evacuated back to Cleethorpes in 1941. The family moved backed to Surrey in 1945, settling in New Malden.

Vivean Gray always wanted to be an actress but found limited opportunities in Britain outside repertory theatre. Struggling to make it as a serious actress, she took a number of jobs, including as a local reporter and a photographer. Later she became a nurse and served with the Women’s Land Army, before emigrating to Australia in 1952.

From the late 1950s onwards Vivean Gray established herself as a reliable character actress, working in theatre and on film; her credits include A City’s Child (1972), Libido (1973), The Great MacArthy (1975), and Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) starring Richard Chamberlain.

Her height and skeletal frame made for easy stereotyping, and she was often cast as spinsters, nuns, doctors or interfering neighbours.

It was her long run as the next-door neighbour Ida Jessop in The Sullivans, set in Melbourne during the Second World War, which prompted producers to create the character of Nell Mangel, the arch nemesis of Madge Ramsay (played by Anne Charleston). Vivean Gray became an instant success in the series when she joined in 1986.

Every afternoon millions would tune in to watch her daily battles with the younger members of Ramsay Street, as well as her relationship with her fellow Christian and lodger Harold Bishop (played by Ian Smith).

Vivean Gray in 1980 

As the cantankerous and interfering Mrs Mangel, she constantly tried to make Harold see that Madge was an unsuitable woman for a man of his high moral standing, but nothing could deter him. Finally Harold stood up to Mrs Mangel’s snide remarks about “that Ramsay woman” on the morning of his wedding to Madge, when he told her that no matter what Mrs Mangel thought about the union, he was in love. It proved to be one of the most popular episodes in the shows history.

However, the actress suffered an astonishing amount of abuse from members of the general public, so convincing was her character. Ultimately, it was this which forced her decision to leave the soap opera in 1988, content that she had made more of an impression with her character in two years than most actors could achieve in a lifetime. The writers had Mrs Mangel marry retired dentist John Worthington (played by Brian James), leave Australia and settle at St Albans. In 2005, producers tried to persuade her to return for its 20th anniversary episode, but she refused.

Vivean Gray left Australia for Britain in the mid-1990s and settled at Shoreham-by-Sea, rejecting all requests for interviews or autographs from fans.

 Vivean Gray, born July 20 1924, died July 29 2016