August 10 - Ken Annakin

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On this day, in 1914, Kenneth Cooper Annakin was born in Beverly, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. As a young man, Ken was in training to be an income tax inspector (the British equivalent of an IRS agent who shows up at your office and starts confiscating things) in the city of Hull when he decided that maybe that wasn’t the life for him. Financed by an unexpected win at the racetrack, he immigrated to New Zealand and spent a good chunk of his twenties bouncing around the world doing whatever work he could find. The onset of World War II drew him back home to England where he joined the Royal Air Force as a mechanic. Ken was injured in the blitz of Liverpool and discharged in 1942 but he didn’t go far. He became a camera operator in the arm of the RAF that was making training films.

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It didn’t take Ken long to graduate to assistant director and then director. His first gig at the helm of a film was for the short documentary London 1942, which showcased the plucky spirit of Londoners under the hardships of war. Three years later, he directed his first feature length project, the 1945 documentary Make Fruitful the Land. As the British war machine began winding down, Ken continued to make new training films for it until the head of the company that produced his documentaries asked him for a favor. They were starting a new studio to produce fictional films, would Ken like to direct one of those? The result, Holiday Camp, was a fairly bland comedy about a Cockney family who encounters mild mayhem on vacation. Holiday was released at exactly the right time, however. It struck a chord with war weary audiences, became a decent hit and spawned three sequels, all of which were directed by Ken. His career in the cinema was now well established.

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Ken worked steadily for the next three decades. He made comedies like 1948’s Miranda, starring Glynis Johns as a mermaid, and the 1965 classic Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. He directed thrillers like 1950’s Double Confession with Peter Lorre and 1957’s Across the Bridge with Rod Steiger. He helmed war movies like the comedy Hotel Sahara with Peter Ustinov and David Tomlinson in 1951 and was one of the five directors on the star studded classic, The Longest Day, in 1962. By the mid-Seventies, Ken’s career was starting to slow considerably and he even took a few dips in the smaller pond of television (not nearly the prestigious waters it’s considered today), directing the CBS miniseries The Pirate and a made-for-tv movie called Institute for Revenge.

Image courtesy filmsofthefifties.com

Over the course of that career, Ken did several high profile pictures for the Walt Disney Company. His first came in 1952 when Disney produced their first version of The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men. Next came The Sword and the Rose, also starring Glynis Johns (who would be a frequent star of Ken’s over the years), and Third Man on the Mountain, a thriller set in the Swiss Alps which inspired Walt to build the Matterhorn Bobsled ride in Disneyland. Ken’s biggest hit with Disney (and one of his biggest hits period) was the 1960 adventure Swiss Family Robinson, which starred  John Mills (Hayley’s father) and inspired its own walk-through attraction in two Disney theme parks, the Swiss Family Treehouse. For all these contributions to Disneyana, Ken was officially declared a Disney Legend in 2002, only the second director to receive the honor.

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In 1978, near the end of his career, Ken made a physical move to Los Angeles, where he would spend the rest of his life. He directed a handful of forgettable films during the Eighties. In 1992, his final project would go unfinished. It was a biopic of Genghis Khan starring Charlton Heston. They were filming in Kyrgyzstan when the Soviet Union fell apart and everyone had to get out of Dodge before they were finished. They never got the chance to go back. Someone bought the footage in 2010, intending to make something out of it, but that film has never materialized either.

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Ken lived his remaining years in Beverly Hills, California, occasionally giving interviews or advising young filmmakers who sought him out. In 2002, he was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contributions to British cinema and also received an honorary degree from Hull University (who was apparently okay with the fact that he’d abandoned the city’s tax inspection needs so many years before). In February 2009, Ken suffered a heart attack one day followed by a stroke the next. He would linger for two more months but never recover. On April 22, 2009, the director of over 50 popular films passed away quietly at home. He was 94.

June 11 - Richard Todd

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On this day, in 1919, Richard Andrew Palethorpe Todd was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Andrew, was a doctor, an officer in the British Army and an international rugby player for Ireland. Part of Richard’s formative years were spent in India, where his father was stationed for a while, with the bulk of his youth taking place in Devonshire, England. Upon graduating from the historic Shrewsbury School, he began studies at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst with the intent of following in his father’s footsteps. That intent didn’t last long and soon he was student at the Italia Conti Academy in London training for a life in entertainment instead. The change in careers put additional strain on an already rocky relationship he had with his mother. When he learned that she committed suicide a year later, he later admitted he didn’t grieve much (a sentiment that would come back to haunt him as we’ll see).
 

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Richard’s first professional gig as an actor came in 1936 in a production of Twelfth Night at the Open Air Theater in Regent’s Park. He bounced around regional theaters for a few years before co-founding the Dundee Repertory Theatre in Scotland in 1939. During the same time period, Richard had begun winning small roles, all of them uncredited, in British films, beginning with Good Morning, Boys in 1937. He would have continued to slowly build his acting career, except for something else that was building at the time: World War II. It turned out that Richard was going to follow in his father’s footsteps after all.


Richard joined the British Army as a commissioned officer in early 1941 as part of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He later became part of the 7^th Light Infantry Parachute Battalion and was among the first British soldiers to land in Normandy on June 6, 1944 as part of Operation Tonga during the D-Day campaign. He was part of the battalion that met John Howard on the Pegasus Bridge near Caen and repulsed several German attempts to retake it. He managed to survive the liberation of France and was honorably discharged in 1946
.

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Upon his return to Britain, Richard once again found himself in Dundee, Scotland and began performing with the Rep once again. His agent arranged for a screen test with the Associated British Picture Corporation and, in 1948, they awarded him a long-term contract. His first film for ABPC was the 1949 crime drama For Them That Trespass. Richard’s performance as the movie’s lead helped make it a moderate success and launched his career on the big screen. Earlier in the year, he’d played a supporting role in a Rep production of The Hasty Heart. When the production moved to London, Richard was moved into the lead role of Cpl. Lachlan McLachlan. That casting change led to his star turn in the Warner Brothers film adaptation that also came out in 1949, costarring Ronald Reagan and Patricia Neal. Richard was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for Heart and won Favorite Male Star in the British National Film Awards. 

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Richard followed that up with a string of thrillers, including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950 film Stage Fright, that earned mixed reviews. In 1955, he starred in the two films he is most remembered for. The first, for 20^th Century Fox, was titled A Man Called Peter and cast Richard as US Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall. The second, and even more popular, was The Dam Busters, about the RAF’s mission to destroy key German dams using so-called bouncing bombs. Busters easily became the highest grossing film in Britain that year. Over the next several years, Richard starred in a variety of films, mostly period pieces or World War 2 stories, that were popular but never quite lived up to 1955. 

Richard became part of the Disney family early in the company’s shift to live action movies. His first role came in the second fully live film Disney produced, 1952’s The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (obviously the title department still had some work to do). Playing Robin Hood himself, Richard was surrounded by a great cast and the film, while not quite up to the level of the previous Errol Flynn version, proved to be quite popular with audiences and critics alike. The following year, Richard and Robin’s director, Ken Annakin, would team up again for The Sword and the Rose. Also starring Glynis Johns (she played Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins), Rose tells the story of Mary Tudor, a younger sister of King Henry VIII. Rose did not do as well as Robin Hood, but was popular enough in Europe to bring Richard back for a third Disney film later that same year. For 1953’s Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue, he was once again in the title role and was critically deemed a better than decent Rob. However, Rob Roy, like Rose, didn’t perform up to expectations in the United States and soured Walt on making any more period pieces, thus beginning the era of light comedies that the company excelled at. One other notable aspect to Rob Roy is that it was the last Disney film distributed by RKO Pictures. Everything from that point on was distributed in house by Buena Vista Distribution. For his live action pioneering work in those three films, Richard was declared an official Disney Legend in 2002.

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As the counter-culture vibe took over in the mid Sixties, Richard’s roles began to get fewer and farther between. His solid, dependable and definitely establishment persona fell out of vogue. One highlight from the decade came in 1962 for the star studded The Longest Day. Richard played John Howard, the Major he met up with in real life to defend the Pegasus Bridge, while, in a move that had to add extra layers of surrealism to the shoot, someone else played him. Throughout the Seventies, Richard’s voice could be heard as a reader on Radio Four’s Morning Story in Britain. During the Eighties, he appeared on a handful of television shows including episodes of Silent Witness, Doctor Who and Murder, She Wrote. His final appearance happened well into his own eighties, in an episode of Heartbeat in 2007 on the BBC.



The end of Richard’s life was marred by personal tragedies, when not one but two of his sons (he had five children by three different mothers) committed suicide, Seumas in 1997 and Peter in 2005. He rarely spoke of either incident but both made him think of his mother’s end and how his career ended up with terrible book ends. Richard passed away himself on December 3, 2009 and was buried between his two sons, in a gravesite he’d regularly visited over the last several years. He was 90.