Πέθανε ο βρετανός ηθοποιός και σκηνοθέτης Λάιονελ Τζέφρις

Πέθανε σήμερα σε ηλικία 83 χρόνων, ο βρετανός ηθοποιός, σεναριογράφος και σκηνοθέτης Λάιονελ Τζέφρις, που έγινε ευρύτερα γνωστός από τη μεταφορά στην οθόνη του ομότιτλου βιβλίου «Τα Παιδιά του Τρένου» το 1970 και το ρόλο του στην ταινία «Τσίτι Τσίτι Μπανγκ Μπανγκ», μετέδωσε το BBC.

Ο Τζέφρις εμφανίστηκε σε περισσότερες από 70 ταινίες μεταξύ των οποίων «Η ζωή ενός ανθρώπου» (1956), «Οι εντιμότατοι κύριοι του κελιού 13» (1960), «Ο Αιχμάλωτος της Τζέντα», «Η Κόκκινη Θύελλα»", «Τσίτι Τσίτι Μπανγκ Μπανγκ» και «Τα παιδιά του τρένου».

Γνωστός για το τελείως φαλακρό κεφάλι του, τη βαρύτονη φωνή του και το παχύ μουστάκι του, ο γεννημένος στο Λονδίνο ηθοποιός εμφανίστηκε για πρώτη φορά στην οθόνη το 1950.

Αρχισε να μετέχει σε τηλεοπτικές παραγωγές στα μέσα της δεκαετίας του '80 στο δημοφιλές αστυνομικό θρίλερ «Επιθεωρητής Μορς».

From The Times, February 20, 2010

Lionel Jeffries: actor, screenwriter and film director

(Warfield/United Artists/The Kobal Collection)

Jeffries in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ? he played Dick Van Dyke?s father

Lionel Jeffries appeared in more than 100 films and stole scenes in many of them, even from under the noses of such consummate and widely differing comedy artists as Peter Sellers, Bob Hope and Eric Sykes. His bald and usually shining pate, his expressive eyebrows and a voice once described as “like a rubber ball bouncing round inside an empty oil drum” made him one of the funniest film, and later, television actors.

Yet his genial if emphatic manner could vanish instantly to be replaced by genuine outrage if anyone dared to refer to his scene-stealing. He would vigorously deny it, saying that such a “crime” would be unprofessional. Nevertheless his fellow actors readily recognised that there could be no walking through a role when Jeffries was about.

However, funny as he was through 40 years at the top as an actor, he will probably be remembered most as the writer and director of one of the classics of family entertainment, The Railway Children. It made a star of Jenny Agutter and is regularly revived in the school holidays to become as enduring as many of the Disney favourites.

It was his daughter Martha, 8 years old at the time, who gave him the idea. She had just read E. Nesbit’s Edwardian classic and said: “You ought to read this, Dad, it would make a lovely film.” Jeffries agreed and immediately began fashioning a screenplay after spending £2,000 of his own money optioning the film rights.

For months he hawked the script around the studios, showing it to producers in Britain and the US. They said it was a wonderful idea and an excellent script, but it was not the time to make such a film. This was the late 1960s when fewer and fewer feature films for the family were being made and there was a big increase in X-rated sex-and-violence capers — a trend that the outspoken Jeffries strongly condemned.

One Hollywood suggestion was to revamp the story, set it in the Mid-West, make the children older and turn it into a musical so that Julie Andrews could play the lead.

Mercifully, Jeffries rejected this idea out of hand. It was his friend, another actor-turned-director, Bryan Forbes, then head of the EMI Studios, who read the script and advanced Jeffries the money to make the film. Jeffries admitted that in doing so Forbes displayed considerable financial courage.

Summing up his determination to make The Railway Children, Jeffries said: “I wanted a film with all the old- fashioned virtues. Simplicity, a strong story line, laughter and tears, a film the entire family could see and enjoy.”

Lionel Charles Jeffries was born in London in 1926. His father was a Salvation Army officer, his mother was a singer.

His interest in films began at school when his father bought an early cine-camera and encouraged him to make his own films on such subjects as “A Day at the Zoo”. While still a schoolboy his career as an entertainer began with an act he called “The Boy With a Thousand Voices”.

He later won a place at RADA, where he met his wife, Eileen. At the age of 22 Jeffries was the only bald student at the academy. His hair fell out in a single week when he was 19. He later recalled that he tried wearing a toupee but discarded it because “it looked like a dead moth on a boiled egg”.

He was able to take the loss philosophically because hairlessness helped him to win elderly roles, including playing a man of 80. During the war he was commissioned in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and served in Burma but he was disinclined to talk about his Service years.

He entered films in the early 1950s and began to get noticed in cameo roles — as a bumbling solicitor or crafty dealer — for which his mobile face and darting eyes were ideal. He appeared in Bob Hope’s Call Me Bwana and in two of Peter Sellers’s funniest vehicles, The Wrong Arm of the Law, as a bungling policeman, and Two Way Stretch, as a swaggering and equally inefficient prison warder.

He was in The Spy with the Cold Nose with Laurence Harvey and Eric Sykes and played Dick Van Dyke’s father, Grandpa Potts, in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, despite being younger than Van Dyke by six months. But he did not only play the sly, the pompous, the blustering incompetent or the crazy old coot. He could and did take on dramatic roles, sometimes with a streak of menace, as in The Colditz Story and The Prisoner of Zenda.

He impressed the critics with his portrayal of Lord Queensbury in the film The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) with Peter Finch as Wilde. He also impressed MGM and he was signed up to play the botanist in the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard. But he soon discovered that he loathed Hollywood and asked to be released from his contract even though it meant giving up a generous fee and six months in Tahiti.

He later explained why he hated the film town so much, referring to the constant piped music, the neon advertisements for crematoriums and being contacted by a call girl agency the day he arrived. “Full of cardboard people; Shepherd’s Bush wrapped in Cellophane,” was his blunt description. But he did venture back in 1967 to appear in Camelot with Richard Harris.

After The Railway Children, he directed Baxter, with Patricia Neal, the story of a 12-year-old boy with a speech defect which won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin festival. The Water Babies, with James Mason and Billie Whitelaw, and a ghost story, The Amazing Mr Blunden, were acceptable family fare, but Wombling Free was a disastrous attempt to adapt the popular TV series.

When there were fewer film parts he was wooed, albeit reluctantly, to television. He starred in Dennis Potter’s play Cream in My Coffee (1980) and more than held his own against the redoubtable Peggy Ashcroft. They played an elderly couple looking back on their younger, happier lives. He appeared in the situation comedies, Tom, Dick and Harriet and Father Charlie, but did not enjoy the experience: “That awful cackling from the studio audience is an insult to intelligence.”

His West End stage appearances included Hello Dolly (1984), and the farces See How They Run, Two Into One and Rookery Nook, and he appeared in a revival of Pygmalion on Broadway in 1987, but the theatre was never his main outlet.

In later years he spent his time at the family thatched cottage in Essex, writing film scripts, mostly based on children’s classics, and trying to get them made. Otherwise he liked to potter around the garden picking apples for his wife’s renowned chutney.

He broke off for the occasional film, such as Michael Winner’s 1989 version of the Alan Ayckbourn play, A Chorus of Disapproval, and was back on stage in 1990 to play the disgraced Ekdal in a West End production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. His last significant television role was the loveable Grandad in the children’s series, Woof! in 1993.

• Jeffries is survived by Eileen, his wife of nearly 60 years, and their three children.

• Lionel Jeffries, actor, screenwriter and film director, was born on June 10, 1926. He died on February 19, 2010, aged 83