Arts > TV series > 20th / 21st century > UK /
USA > Scriptwriters, directors, actors
The Persuaders! 40th Anniversary Blu-ray
Edition in HD
To mark the 40th anniversary of THE
PERSUADERS (PG),
Network has commissioned a High Definition digital restoration of all 24
episodes
for a new Blu-ray edition of the series with brand new special features
Betty
(Elizabeth Mary) Driver, actor and singer
1920-2011
Betty Driver
(...) was a gutsy and durable comic actor
who meant one thing to young audiences
and quite another to those who could remember
the second world war and the years immediately after it.
To the youthful, she will be remembered as Betty Turpin (later Betty Williams),
the barmaid, shoulder to cry on and wife of the policeman Cyril Turpin
in Granada television's Coronation Street,
whose cast she joined in 1969.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/oct/15/betty-driver
Dan Frazer, a
character actor whose Hell’s Kitchen upbringing
prepared him for a long run of roles as a blue-collar type or a cop,
most notably as the beleaguered supervising officer Capt. Frank McNeil on
“Kojak”
His father
raised racehorses, requiring him to move the family frequently,
uprooting Alan and his brother, John, from one school after another.
Alan Sues served in the Army in Europe during World War II.
Emmy-winning comedy writer,
director and producer known for creating “Julia,”
the first television series to center on the life of a black professional woman
Charles S. Dubin's career as a
daring director in television’s early years
stalled after he refused to answer questions before Congress about Communist
involvement,
then robustly rebounded as he went on to direct more episodes of “M*A*S*H” than
anyone else
Sherwood Schwartz created
“Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch,”
two of the most affectionately ridiculed and enduring television sitcoms of the
1960s and ’70s
with her writing partners for the classic sitcom “I Love Lucy“
she concocted zany scenes in which the harebrained Lucy
dangles from a hotel balcony, poses as a sculpture
or stomps and wrestles in a
vat full of grapes
Stephen J. Cannell
was one of
television’s most prolific writers and series creators.
His work encompassed the “The Rockford Files” and “Wiseguy”
to “The A-Team” and “The Greatest American Hero,”
For 30 years, beginning in the early 1970s and extending through the 1990s,
television viewers could hardly go a week without running into a show written by
Mr. Cannell.
His writing credits include more than 1,000 episodes of various series,
primarily crime dramas,
and he is listed as the creator of almost 20 series — some long-running hits
like “The Rockford Files,” and “The Commish,” others quick flame-outs like
“Booker. ”
Mary Fickett acted in theater, film and
prime-time television
before becoming a legend among followers
of the daytime drama “All My Children” as Ruth Martin,
a nurse unafraid to speak her mind
a stalwart British actress who won myriad
awards
for her stage performances, including a Tony,
but who was best known in the United States for her roles
in the public television series “The Forsyte Saga” and “I, Claudius”
Peter Falk marshaled actorly
tics, prop room appurtenances
and his own physical idiosyncrasies
to personify Columbo,
one of the most famous and beloved fictional detectives in
television history
an actress with a familiar if
not famous face on television for half a century,
who appeared on nearly 80 television series that spanned much of the medium’s
history
actor who became a recurring
presence on television in the 1960s and ’70s
after walking away from film and Broadway but who returned to the stage
to help found the American Place Theater, a successful Off Broadway house
music publisher of Brill
Building hits
like “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,’ ”
who later served as a deadpan Ed Sullivan for Kiss, the Ramones and others
with his 1970s television show, “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert”
Albert Franklin Rucker Jr. / Clay
Cole USA
1938-2010
his dance program “The Clay
Cole Show”
had a loyal following among adolescent television viewers in the New York area
in the 1960s
and gave many groups, including the Rolling Stones, early exposure on American
television
Emmy-winning television
director
known for bringing an understated touch to delicate subjects.
(...)
Mr. Johnson, the director of
more than 150 television shows, miniseries and movies of the week,
received 11 Emmy nominations during his 45-year directing career.
He won critical acclaim for “My Sweet Charlie” (1970), a look at tensions in
interracial relationships;
“That Certain Summer” (1972), one of television’s first attempts to explore
homosexuality;
and “Crisis at Central High” (1981), about the civil rights movement.
His 1975 television movie, “Fear on Trial,” examined the blacklisting of the
1950s,
a subject with which Mr. Johnson identified, having once found himself on such a
list.
Mr. Bosley is probably best
known for his decade, beginning in 1974,
as Howard Cunningham, the gruff but reliably kind father of teenage children in
1950s Milwaukee
in the nostalgic situation comedy “Happy Days.”
He also had significant roles on popular crime-solving dramas,
including the title character in “The Father Dowling Mysteries”
and Sheriff Amos Tupper, an ally of the sleuth and mystery writer Jessica
Fletcher (Angela Lansbury),
in “Murder, She Wrote.”
Barbara Billingsley (born Barbara Lillian Combes)
1915-2010
as June Cleaver on the television series “Leave It to Beaver”
[ 1957-1963 ] [ she ]
personified a Hollywood postwar family ideal
of the ever-sweet, ever-helpful suburban stay-at-home mom
a classically handsome movie star
who came out of the
Hollywood studio system in the 1950s
to find both wide popularity and critical acclaim in dramatic and comic roles
alike,
from “The Defiant Ones” to “Some Like It Hot”
a familiar figure on television beginning in the 1950s,
appearing in guest roles on numerous series
— dramas including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Wanted: Dead or Alive,”
“The Twilight Zone,” “The Defenders,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Lou Grant”;
and situation comedies like “My Three Sons,” “Maude” and “Barney Miller.”
In the early ’60s he had a regular role on the comedy “Pete and Gladys,”
and in the late ’60s he had a recurring part on the detective drama “Mannix.”
In the movies he appeared in “Onionhead,” with Andy Griffith,
and “The Sad Sack,” with Jerry Lewis.
In “The Birds,” Hitchcock’s classic horror film about avian madness in a
California town,
he played a traveling salesman who advises, “Kill them all!”
On television, she made many appearances in popular sitcoms,
notably as Lady Tapwater in four episodes of Orlando in 1968,
and in The Good
Life in the mid-1970s,
but she was best known as Judi Dench's first husband's sister
in Bob Larbey's As
Time Goes By;
she was in 14 episodes between 1993 and 2005, her last work in all media.
