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Escape to Victory
Now let me explain why I’m watching a film that is some 28 years old. As I suspect is true of most parents, I’m living vicariously through my children. From visiting lower league football grounds to watching old films unwatched in decades, I’m using the fact that I have a 12-year old son as an excuse for some fairly…
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Bob Hoskins
Short, bad baldie who rose to fame in The Long Good Friday, Hoskins was born in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk in 1942 where his mother had been sent to escape the Blitz. They couldn’t have enjoyed it too much because Hoskins was sent back to London with his mother when he was only two…
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Charles Dance
Walter Charles Dance was born in Birmingham, England, in 1946, son of a parlour maid and a civil engineer who died when he was four. When the son was four that is, not the father. Dance junior dropped Walter from his name because he didn’t fancy having the initials WC. He was a nervous child…
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Michael Caine
Born Maurice Mickelwhite – not a lot of people know that – actually everyone knows that – in St Olaves Hospital in South London in 1933. In 1986, the same building became Bob Hoskins’ production offices for the making of Mona Lisa, which starred Hoskins and Caine. The son of a fish market porter, Maurice…
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Gabriel Byrne
Born in Dublin in May, 1950, Gabriel Byrne set out to become a priest but was somewhat put off by being molested by his Latin teacher while at an English seminary preparing for the cloth. That was enough to send him on a number of different career paths from archaeologist and schoolteacher, short-order cook and…
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Lee Marvin
Born February 19, 1924, in New York City, Lee Marvin quit high school to enter the Marine Corps and while serving in the South Pacific was wounded in the Battle of Saipan. That sounds pretty heroic until you realise he was wounded in the buttocks. He spent a year in recovery before returning to the…
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Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle
A comic genius from the golden age of the silent cinema, the Prince of Whales was the first comedian ever to be hit by an on-screen custard pie. He was working as an overweight plumber in 1913 when he was discovered by Mack Sennett. He had come to unclog the film producer’s drain but Sennett…