Star Turns

One thing you find doing interviews is that everyone has something they don’t want to talk about. I’d known there was something about Richard Chamberlain ever since I’d been a kid in the 1970s. My family were then close to the owners of the Bear hotel at Woodstock. Kenneth More knew them, too, and was […]

I find it somewhat ageing to admit that I once interviewed an actress who had played the title role in Tess of the d’Urbervilles with the author himself in attendance. I have thus shaken the hand of a lady who had shaken the hand of Thomas Hardy. Dame Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies was celebrating her 99th birthday when I […]

TIM WALKER on Eileen Atkins and how she likes to disappear into a part as she feels stardom can be an encumbrance. Not long before lockdown, I went to a cheering lunch in Chelsea with Sir Ronald Harwood, the playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter. Men always love the sound of their own voices and we are […]

TIM WALKER recalls an interview with English film and stage actor Claire Bloom who became a star after starring opposite Charlie Chaplin. Occasionally stars give performances that are so convincing it’s hard to disentangle them from the people they really are. There are few better examples of this for me than Claire Bloom’s glacially cold […]

TIM WALKER on how José Ferrer found out the hard way that careers can end so abruptly. Stardom is not of course a lifestyle choice, but a phase that can sometimes be cruelly and inexplicably fleeting. José Ferrer could vouch for that. The Puerto Rican actor made it big in classic films such as I […]

TIM WALKER talks about the time the Amityville Horror star opened up about his depression In a kinder, gentler time in journalism – and in showbusiness – I used to phone up the press office of the Savoy and ask if they had anyone staying who’d make a good interview. No PR people involved, no […]

TIM WALKER looks back on the life of Stewart Granger and his real thoughts about acting. In Matthew Kneale’s brilliant novel English Passengers, your opinion of the leading characters is continually evolving as you see them from the perspectives of different people. It’s a bit like that after you’ve spent a few years interviewing actors. […]

TIM WALKER recalls his conversation with the famed King Kong actress. The producer told Fay Wray that she was going to have ‘the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood’ and she optimistically thought it might be Cary Grant. It turned out to be a giant ape – or at least an 18-inch model of one […]

TIM WALKER recalls working with the creative polymath Sir Peter Ustinov. If ever there was a model European, it was Sir Peter Ustinov. It was working for the first European newspaper – the one launched by Robert Maxwell in the 1990s – that I got to know him. Maxwell may have thought of Ustinov as […]

TIM WALKER examines the life of the actress who finally found contentment. When I interviewed Susannah York in the late 1980s, she was nudging 50 and going through a tough time. She had lately lost her elder sister Carolyn to alcoholism. She was making films like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and guest-starring in […]

Academy Award nominated Sarah Miles gave TIM WALKER a shock when the topic of the EU referendum came up mid-interview. Sarah Miles and I should really be friends. We established a great rapport four years ago when I journeyed to her 11th century manor house in the Sussex countryside. Interviewing film stars is normally a […]

TIM WALKER writes about his very special link with an actress from the golden age of cinema It’s almost 10 years since the last of the Mawby Triplets died, aged 90, at her home in Poole in Dorset. With her sisters, Claudette and Angella, Claudine had made 24 films in Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties […]

TIM WALKER on Kirk Douglas, the Hollywood legend in no mood to talk When Kirk Douglas died earlier this year at the age of 103, there was quite properly a great fuss made about him. The man who had dared to stand up to the McCarthyite right in America by insisting that the blacklisted Dalton […]

TIM WALKER writes of the esteemed actor and comedian Ronnie Corbett, a man full of life and enthusiasm. This is going to take a bit of explaining, but it was The Winslow Boy that introduced me to Ronnie Corbett. The late, great actor and comedian never appeared in the play, but his old friend Edward […]

TIM WALKER remembers his 1986 meeting with the distinguished star of stage and screen. When Richard Burton uttered the immortal words ‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy’ on his transmitter in the film Where Eagles Dare, it was Michael Hordern who picked up at the other end. For a distinguished stage actor whose career spanned more than […]

TIM WALKER recounts meeting Dame Vera Lynn, the singer of we’ll meet again. When it was said how wonderfully the Queen had uttered the words ‘we’ll meet again’ in her recent address to the nation, one woman would have had every reason to take umbrage. Dame Vera Lynn made them her own in innumerable concerts […]

TIM WALKER reflects on an interview with American actor and political activist Charlton Heston. Charlton Heston was appearing on the London stage in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. He was a big guy in a wig whose views on everything from gun control to gay rights had made him politically incorrect before the term had even […]

Dora Bryan was a brilliant and unpretentious British actress. But TIM WALKER says it was life’s miseries which made her a comedy genius. Dora Bryan, visiting Norfolk in 2005. Photo: Bill Darnell – Credit: Archant � 2005 Dora Bryan was cheerful, unpretentious and as British as fish and chips. She ran a rambling hotel on […]

TIM WALKER on a man who never lost that childlike need to please and to make people happy. I first met Donald Sinden in the mid-1980s when I showed up too early at his home in Golders Green in north London. He came to the door in his dressing gown and slippers and his hair […]

TIM WALKER looks into the life and career of Christopher Lee, best known for his portrayal Dracula. There are certain parts – and Dracula is one of them – that require of the actor playing them some sense of being in on the joke with film-goers. Christopher Lee never saw anything funny about what was […]

TIM WALKER recounts meeting Harry Andrews, an actor who never went public about his sexuality. When I arrived at the home of Harry Andrews in the Sussex countryside, I was greeted at the door by his lover of the past 30 years, who led me into the living room where the ‘tough guy’ star of […]

TIM WALKER recounts interviewing American actress Lauren Bacall, whose life remained shaped by Humphrey Bogart even after his death. Lauren Bacall’s publicist was adamant that the star would talk to me about any subject under the sun, except her first husband, Humphrey Bogart. ‘She feels she’s talked about him quite enough,’ he said. ‘So I’d […]

With no more plays to review, TIM WALKER reviews the stars he’s met, starting with Roger Moore and one role that really mattered to him The director Stephen Unwin has a question he puts to people who want to work for him on his productions. ‘Don’t you just love stars?’ he’ll say, smiling broadly. All […]