George Cole (actor)
| George Cole | |
|---|---|
| Born | George Edward Cole 22 April 1925 Tooting, South London, England, U.K. |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1940–2008 |
| Spouse |
Eileen Moore (m. 1954–1962) (divorced) |
George Edward Cole, OBE (born 22 April 1925) is a veteran British film and television actor whose successful career has spanned over 70 years in show business.
He is probably best known as portraying Arthur Daley in the long-running ITV hit drama show Minder and Flash Harry in the early St Trinian's films.
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[edit] Biography
Cole was given up for adoption at the age of ten days and adopted by the Cole family. He left school to be a butcher's boy but landed a part in a touring musical, and chose acting as a career. He appeared in a film with British stage and film actor Alastair Sim, and Sim and his family took in Cole and his mother when he was 15. They helped him lose his Cockney accent and he stayed with the Sims until he was 27.[1]
Cole began appearing in films in the early 1940s, debuting in the 1941 film Cottage to Let. He attributes the success of his career to Alastair Sim, who became his mentor. Cole appeared in a total of 11 films with Sim, starting with Cottage to Let, and ending with the somewhat obscure 1961 independent film The Anatomist.
He also acted opposite Laurence Olivier in The Demi-Paradise (1943) and Olivier's film version of Henry V (1944). He and Renée Asherson are the last surviving members of the large cast of Henry V. His career was interrupted by his service in the Royal Air Force from 1944 to 1947.
He was well known for his lead role in the 1950s radio comedy A Life of Bliss where he played an amiable but bumbling bachelor with his dog Psyche, voiced by Percy Edwards.[2] This became a TV series in 1960.
He became familiar to audiences in British comedy films in the 1950s. Cole appeared with Sim in Scrooge (as the young Scrooge) in 1951, but his best known film role was as "Flash Harry" in the St Trinian's films (two of which also star Sim), and in the comedy Too Many Crooks (1958). He also starred in the 1973 film Take Me High alongside Cliff Richard and Deborah Watling.
[edit] Television roles
Cole later became a respected television actor. During the 1960s and 1970s, he played numerous character parts on British television, usually as a disturbed and/or pathetic villain or victim. The television series he appeared in included Gideon's Way ("The Firebug", 1965), Out of the Unknown ("The Last Lonely Man," 1969), UFO ("Flight Path", 1969), Menace ("Killing Time", 1970) and the BBC comedy series Don't Forget To Write.
His most memorable television role was as crooked used car dealer Arthur Daley in the Thames Television series Minder which he played from 1979 to the show's conclusion in 1994. The character became synonymous with the down-at-heel side of 1980s capitalism (along with Del Trotter of Only Fools and Horses). Cole played a similar character in late 1980s / early 1990s TV advertisements for the Leeds Permanent Building Society who was "Laughing all the way to The Leeds". In 1988, he voiced Vernon the mouse in the Children's ITV cartoon Tube Mice (in which Minder co-star Dennis Waterman also voiced a character).
Cole played Henry Root in the TV series Root Into Europe in 1992.
In 1995–1996, he starred as businessman-councillor Freddie Patterson in An Independent Man, in which his wife Penny Morrell also appeared. He also starred as Brian Hook in the BBC Comedy Dad in the late 1990s alongside Kevin McNally, who played his son, Alan Hook. In addition, he starred in the mid-1990s ITV comedy series My Good Friend, playing a mischievous pensioner, and he later appeared alongside Timothy Spall and Annette Crosbie in the 2003 Channel 4 drama 'Bodily Harm'. He also made a one-off appearance in New Tricks.
He is able to hide his London accent when playing upper-class characters, such as Sir Giles Lynchwood in the TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's novel Blott on the Landscape. In 2007, Cole appeared in the BBC drama A Class Apart, in which he played a grandfather who encourages his impoverished daughter to keep her son on the straight and narrow by means of a public school bursary and The Dinner Party, broadcast in September 2007.
[edit] Partial filmography
[edit] References
- ^ "STAR PROFILE: By George! What a career.". Coventry Evening Telegraph. 2004-02-14. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-113287559.html. Retrieved 2010-08-10.
- ^ Barry Took (1998). Laughter in the Air: An Informal History of British Radio Comedy. Robson Books Ltd. pp. 114. ISBN 978-0903895781. http://books.google.com/books?id=zO4tAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA114.
