WARREN MITCHELL

15 Nov

(14 January 1926 - 14 November 2015)

British actor of Russian stock who often played cockneys or shady foreigners, in radio, films and TV from 1951, taking character parts in Hancock’s Half Hour, Drake’s Progress, Big Guns, Nicholas Nickleby, Three Tough Guys, Danger Man etc. Haunted many low-budget British B-pictures playing waiters, shopkeepers, ambassadors and crooks. After Bootsie and Snudge, The Saint and The Avengers TV series along came Till Death Us Do Part and its sequels in which Johnny Speight’s scripts for Alf Garnett made Mitchell a star comic performer and earned him a BAFTA gong. Among award-winning stage appearances were his Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Pinter’s The Caretaker and The Homecoming and Arthur Miller’s The Price. Early on (1957) he wrote a couple of episodes of the BBC’s early family soap, The Grove Family.

MICHAEL DARVELL

Michael Darvell

Michael Darvell trained as a librarian at Watford and in Surrey before joining Ealing Libraries where he became Music Librarian for the borough. He edited Masthead, the magazine of the University of North London School of Librarianship, The Surrealist, the staff magazine of Surrey County Library, and contributed to the Assistant Librarian and London Librarian professional journals. A freelance film reviewer since 1970, he has written for Film, Films Illustrated, Film Review, Movie Maker and Radio Times, as well as editing Montage, the London film societies magazine, for ten years. A change of career saw him joining What’s On in London as Features Editor and he eventually stepped into the shoes of the late F. Maurice Speed (founding father of Film Review annual) as the magazine’s Editor. From 2007 to 2015, he was co-editor of the Film Review annual with Mansel Stimpson. As well as writing about films, Michael has reviewed theatre for The Stage newspaper, and has written about music theatre and cabaret for the Classical Source and Musical Theatre Review websites. He is also a former restaurant critic for the ViewLondon website. Michael has been a member of the London Film Critics’ Circle since 2005.

WARREN MITCHELL

SAEED JAFFREY

COLIN WELLAND