A History Of Liverpool Thespians - Tom Bell

 

Tom Bell was born on the 2nd of August 1933 in Liverpool, one of seven children born to ship's carpenter George Bell, at 33 Ramsey Road, Allerton, L19. George was also a merchant seaman in Depression-hit Liverpool and Tom saw little of his father and was evacuated during the Second World War to the Morecambe area, where he lived with three different families. He attended Euston Road secondary modern school in Morecambe, worked on the pier as a photographer during the holidays and began to act in school plays. Although his father wanted him to learn a trade, he left school at 15 to act with a local repertory theatre company, before training under Esme Church at Bradford Civic Theatre School where his fellow pupils included Billie Whielaw and Robert Stephens. Then came more work as he later worked in weekly rep, with a fit-up, or temporary, company in Liverpool and Dublin, with his younger brother Keith also becoming an actor. The director Peter Gill, who joined the Swansea Rep when Tom, then in his mid-20s was the leading man, said he represented a 1960s type before they existed. "In the theatre, Terry Stamp was the first, but Tom Bell had a Paul Newman quality that was rare - and still is - on the British stage. He had allure, and it was no wonder that he soon became the darling of the television producers of Armchair Theatre and so on. He was a troubled, smooth-skinned Liverpool boy, a more wholesome sort of John Lennon without the glasses."

Tom made his television debut in the TV series 'John and Paddy' (1956) and 'The Secrets of the Prairie'(1956), then as a boxer in a 1959 episode of the crime series 'Dial 999', but he really caught the attention of casting directors after his roles in two of ITV's 'Armchair Theatre' productions, as one of three sailors on shore leave in Liverpool in Alun Owen's 'No Trams To Lime Street' (1959) and as the young clerk Albert Stokes, whose controlling mother worries about him leading an 'unclean life' with girls, in Harold Pinter's first play for the small screen, 'A Night Out' (1960). This was a natural next step for Tom to act in the British 'new wave' feature films that gave a platform to working-class voices. His first film was the gritty drama 'The Criminal' (retitled 'The Concrete Jungle' in the US, 1960), but another, more symbolic of the period, was 'The Kitchen' (1961), the screen version of Arnold Wesker's Royal Court play. He also starred as the embittered Toby, sharing lodgings with a pregnant Leslie Caron in 'The L-Shaped Room' (1962). At an awards ceremony for the latter, he drunkenly interrupted a speech by Prince Philip as he yelled, "Tell us a funny story", to the obvious embarrassment of table companions Bryan Forbes and Richard Attenborough. While the Duke of Edinburgh apparently took the heckle in good humour, the incident added to Bell's reputation as a hellraiser, and did little to further his career. His other notable films of the decade included H.M.S. Defiant' (1962), 'A Prize of Arms' (1962), 'Ballad in Blue' (1965), 'He Who Rides a Tiger' (1965), 'The Long Day's Dying' (1968) and 'All the Right Noises' (1971). One unlikely brush with Hollywood put him off the bright lights for good as he called it "a total madhouse. They kept trying to get me laid, brought these girls with big tits up to my room. No way, couldn't relate to it at all." In that same year he played Uncle Philip in a film of Angela Carter's 'The Magic Toyshop' (1987), exuding a livid streak of self-righteousness that improved even on Carter's character.

as Adolph Eichmann

 

It was the 1970s when Tom really came into his own, taking roles that lesser actors were too worried about portraying. He was a man having a relationship with a young girl in 'All the Right Noises' (1971) and a scientist in parallel worlds finding love with Joan Collins in 'Quest for Love' (1971) and was notable in Hedda Gabler (1972). He was also in the new gritty psychological thriller from Hammer Films, 'Straight On Till Morning' (1972), The Protectors (1974) and 'Royal Flash' (1975) before he met his second wife Frances Tempest in 1976 and they had a daughter Polly and stepdaughter Nellie. Work remained plentiful in Britain, and he played the vengeful armed robber Frank Ross in the ITV series 'Out' (1978) as he grimly hunted down the informer who had helped put him behind bars, and received a BAFTA nomination for the series. His performance as Adolf Eichmann in the Emmy Award-winning series 'The Holocaust' (1978) won him international acclaim. However many viewers will also treasure performances such as Walter Morel in Trevor Griffiths' television adaptation of DH Lawrence's 'Sons and Lovers' (1981).
Tom's is the sort of career that needs a season at the National Film Theatre to do it justice, as he never gave a performance that was not instilled with truth and a rare sort of inner beauty. He found most of his work playing reprehensible men about whom nothing good could be said. His career was tough and uncompromising as well. More than once, he found himself cast in star-making roles that he walked away from without a backwards glance, and if he had any regrets about his professional decisions, he kept them to himself. Producers were often ruffled by an actor so indifferent to true fame and real fortune. After playing the Victorian tycoon Fergus King in 'King's Royal' (BBC 1982), and despite never being out of work, he appeared before a bankruptcy court over trouble with non-payment of £20,000 income tax. He was subsequently discharged from bankruptcy.
He bounced back with a late career renaissance, with villainous roles as Emily Lloyd's older lover in 'Wish You Were Here' (1987). 'Prospero's Books' (1991), and as Jack 'the Hat' McVitie in Peter Medak's film 'The Krays' (1990). In 1991, he played the dour owner of a run-down seaside waxworks museum in the sitcom 'Hope It Rains' which ran for two series comprising thirteen episodes and also in Swing (1999).

Although he tended to eschew live performance, his few stage appearances included a role in the 1979 UK première of 'Bent', a play about homosexuality, staged at the Royal Court Theatre. He played the character Horst, opposite Ian McKellen's Max. The play's examination of homosexual love, set in a Nazi death camp, was shocking for many theatregoers at the time and uncovered a previously little-examined area of Nazi brutality.

In the ITV series, Prime Suspect', Tom played Detective Sergeant Bill Otley opposite Helen Mirren in the first (1991), third (1993) and final series (2006). Otley starts life as an outright secondary antagonist in the first series, an unrepentant chauvinist who tries his hardest to undermine his boss Detective Chief Inspector, then Detective Superintendent, Jane Tennison, played by Helen Mirren. In series 3 he’s more inclined to accept her authority, and although he’s still portrayed as a bit of a renegade, they’re on the same side. He doesn’t appear again until the aptly titled 'The Final Act' when Tennison meets him in Alcoholics Anonymous. Here, fifteen years after he was first introduced, he apologises to Jane for trying to undermine her and wreck her career, and is then killed trying to protect her from an armed suspect when Jane runs into him at a hospital. This would be one of his last on-screen appearances and his gripping portrayal of the toxic character secured him his second BAFTA nomination, in 1993.
By the last decade of his life he had put his heavy drinking days behind him, living quietly in Brighton with his partner, Frances Tempest. He died in Brighton, East Sussex on the 4th of October 2006 of bronchopneumonia, a few days before the poignantly-timed broadcast of 'Prime Suspect. He was married to the actress Lois Daine from 1960 to 1976 with whom he had one son, Aran, who is also an actor. His partner from 1976 until his death was the costume designer Frances Tempest, with whom he had a step-daughter, Nellie, and a daughter, Polly.

see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2023/09/a-history-of-liverpool-thespians_18.html