R.I.P. Lionel Jeffries
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From London Times Online:
Lionel Jeffries appeared in more than 100 films and stole scenes in many of them, even from under the noses of such consummate and widely differing comedy artists as Peter Sellers, Bob Hope and Eric Sykes. His bald and usually shining pate, his expressive eyebrows and a voice once described as “like a rubber ball bouncing round inside an empty oil drum” made him one of the funniest film, and later, television actors.
Yet his genial if emphatic manner could vanish instantly to be replaced by genuine outrage if anyone dared to refer to his scene-stealing. He would vigorously deny it, saying that such a “crime” would be unprofessional. Nevertheless his fellow actors readily recognised that there could be no walking through a role when Jeffries was about.
However, funny as he was through 40 years at the top as an actor, he will probably be remembered most as the writer and director of one of the classics of family entertainment, The Railway Children. It made a star of Jenny Agutter and is regularly revived in the school holidays to become as enduring as many of the Disney favourites.
It was his daughter Martha, 8 years old at the time, who gave him the idea. She had just read E. Nesbit’s Edwardian classic and said: “You ought to read this, Dad, it would make a lovely film.” Jeffries agreed and immediately began fashioning a screenplay after spending £2,000 of his own money optioning the film rights.
For months he hawked the script around the studios, showing it to producers in Britain and the US. They said it was a wonderful idea and an excellent script, but it was not the time to make such a film. This was the late 1960s when fewer and fewer feature films for the family were being made and there was a big increase in X-rated sex-and-violence capers — a trend that the outspoken Jeffries strongly condemned.
One Hollywood suggestion was to revamp the story, set it in the Mid-West, make the children older and turn it into a musical so that Julie Andrews could play the lead.
Mercifully, Jeffries rejected this idea out of hand. It was his friend, another actor-turned-director, Bryan Forbes, then head of the EMI Studios, who read the script and advanced Jeffries the money to make the film. Jeffries admitted that in doing so Forbes displayed considerable financial courage.
Summing up his determination to make The Railway Children, Jeffries said: “I wanted a film with all the old- fashioned virtues. Simplicity, a strong story line, laughter and tears, a film the entire family could see and enjoy.”
Lionel Charles Jeffries was born in London in 1926. His father was a Salvation Army officer, his mother was a singer.
His interest in films began at school when his father bought an early cine-camera and encouraged him to make his own films on such subjects as “A Day at the Zoo”. While still a schoolboy his career as an entertainer began with an act he called “The Boy With a Thousand Voices”.
He later won a place at RADA, where he met his wife, Eileen. At the age of 22 Jeffries was the only bald student at the academy. His hair fell out in a single week when he was 19. He later recalled that he tried wearing a toupee but discarded it because “it looked like a dead moth on a boiled egg”.
He was able to take the loss philosophically because hairlessness helped him to win elderly roles, including playing a man of 80. During the war he was commissioned in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and served in Burma but he was disinclined to talk about his Service years.
Lionel Jeffries appeared in more than 100 films and stole scenes in many of them, even from under the noses of such consummate and widely differing comedy artists as Peter Sellers, Bob Hope and Eric Sykes. His bald and usually shining pate, his expressive eyebrows and a voice once described as “like a rubber ball bouncing round inside an empty oil drum” made him one of the funniest film, and later, television actors.
Yet his genial if emphatic manner could vanish instantly to be replaced by genuine outrage if anyone dared to refer to his scene-stealing. He would vigorously deny it, saying that such a “crime” would be unprofessional. Nevertheless his fellow actors readily recognised that there could be no walking through a role when Jeffries was about.
However, funny as he was through 40 years at the top as an actor, he will probably be remembered most as the writer and director of one of the classics of family entertainment, The Railway Children. It made a star of Jenny Agutter and is regularly revived in the school holidays to become as enduring as many of the Disney favourites.
It was his daughter Martha, 8 years old at the time, who gave him the idea. She had just read E. Nesbit’s Edwardian classic and said: “You ought to read this, Dad, it would make a lovely film.” Jeffries agreed and immediately began fashioning a screenplay after spending £2,000 of his own money optioning the film rights.
For months he hawked the script around the studios, showing it to producers in Britain and the US. They said it was a wonderful idea and an excellent script, but it was not the time to make such a film. This was the late 1960s when fewer and fewer feature films for the family were being made and there was a big increase in X-rated sex-and-violence capers — a trend that the outspoken Jeffries strongly condemned.
One Hollywood suggestion was to revamp the story, set it in the Mid-West, make the children older and turn it into a musical so that Julie Andrews could play the lead.
Mercifully, Jeffries rejected this idea out of hand. It was his friend, another actor-turned-director, Bryan Forbes, then head of the EMI Studios, who read the script and advanced Jeffries the money to make the film. Jeffries admitted that in doing so Forbes displayed considerable financial courage.
Summing up his determination to make The Railway Children, Jeffries said: “I wanted a film with all the old- fashioned virtues. Simplicity, a strong story line, laughter and tears, a film the entire family could see and enjoy.”
Lionel Charles Jeffries was born in London in 1926. His father was a Salvation Army officer, his mother was a singer.
His interest in films began at school when his father bought an early cine-camera and encouraged him to make his own films on such subjects as “A Day at the Zoo”. While still a schoolboy his career as an entertainer began with an act he called “The Boy With a Thousand Voices”.
He later won a place at RADA, where he met his wife, Eileen. At the age of 22 Jeffries was the only bald student at the academy. His hair fell out in a single week when he was 19. He later recalled that he tried wearing a toupee but discarded it because “it looked like a dead moth on a boiled egg”.
He was able to take the loss philosophically because hairlessness helped him to win elderly roles, including playing a man of 80. During the war he was commissioned in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and served in Burma but he was disinclined to talk about his Service years.