Roland Curram obituary: Sixties co-star of Julie Christie

Times

10-07-2025

There is a scene in Darling (1965), John Schlesinger's triple Oscar-winning paean to the Swinging Sixties starring Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey, in which Roland Curram's character Malcolm goes on a Mediterranean holiday with Julie Christie's Diana, his platonic companion. One morning during breakfast a waiter makes eye contact with Malcolm, a sweetly effeminate fashion photographer, and that night Diana spots them riding away together on a scooter.
'They're going to have sex, even I knew that,' Antony Sher, the actor and director, wrote in The Guardian. The censor in Sher's native South Africa did not. 'He probably thought the waiter was taking Curram to the family home for prayers and teacakes,' Sher added. 'But it was the moment of eye contact over breakfast that really electrified me.'
Darling was an electrifying film, one of the defining movies of the decade, and marked the high point of Curram's acting career. By poignant coincidence it was re-released for the 60th anniversary only days before his death.
Elsewhere Curram played some of the first gay characters on television including Terry, a resident of a select housing estate in The Crezz, a 12-week Thames TV comedy drama in 1976 starring Peter Bowles. He was also Freddie Martin, a middle-aged and lonely retired nurse, in Eldorado, the shortlived BBC soap opera set on the Costa del Sol. 'Freddie is a conservative man, it would be anathema to him to be a political gay. He is a man of my generation,' Curram explained.
It was not until the 1990s, having been married for 21 years with two adult daughters, that the actor himself came out. According to Mark Cunliffe, a contributor to The Geek Show website, Schlesinger (obituary, July 26, 2003) may have cast Curram as Malcolm in Darling because he knew the actor was gay and hoped that playing the character would encourage him to accept the fact.
Curram described his adjustment to gay life, and his 'racy, painful and sometimes hilarious adventures struggling with the gods of love and lust', in a self-published memoir, Which Way to Love? (2021). However, his homosexuality came as no surprise to his family because, according to his daughter Lou, 'he had brought us up on a diet of Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbra Streisand'.
Roland Kingsford Bernard Curram was born in Brighton, East Sussex, in 1932, the only child of Bernard Curram, an insurance agent who died when his son was seven, and his wife Phyllis (née Ashdown), a milliner and publican. During the war he was evacuated to Scotland and educated at Ayr Academy, later completing his education at Brighton College before entering the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at 16.
After several repertory seasons around the country he began appearing on television, including in two 1963 episodes of Dixon of Dock Green. His early film work included Dunkirk (1958), Leslie Norman's wartime dramatisation starring John Mills and Richard Attenborough. He was also seen in Michael Forlong's motor-racing drama The Green Helmet (1961) with Bill Travers and Sid James and gave a sympathetic performance in The Silent Playground (1963), a thriller in which he played a childlike psychiatric outpatient who inadvertently hands out drug-laced sweets to children at a playground.
In 1964 Curram married Sheila Gish, an actress whom he had met when they were both appearing in Noël Coward's Present Laughter at Pitlochry. Sheila had a cameo role in Darling and they later worked together on the television play My Secret Husband (1972) for which they auditioned separately and were offered their respective parts before anyone realised they were real-life husband and wife.
The marriage was dissolved in 1985 and a decade later Gish won an Olivier award for her role in a revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Company. She died in 2005 and their daughter Lou, who was an actress, died from cancer the following year. He is survived by their younger daughter Kay, a restaurateur.
Shortly after his marriage, Curram joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in 1967 as Henry Dupas, a permissive pastor who is required to conduct a God-free marriage ceremony in Jules Feiffer's Little Murders, a savagely satirical comment on the American way of life. He was also seen in West End stagings of Noises Off, Ross and Design For Living, and in several roles for the RSC and at the National Theatre. His other television credits include the 1976 drama Bouquet of Barbed Wire and a 1978 appearance in the sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em.
His later films included such lowbrow titles as Ooh … You Are Awful (1972) with Dick Emery, the pornographic memoir Hardcore (1977) and the similarly X-rated Let's Get Laid (1978) with Robin Askwith and Fiona Richmond.
The fare was not much better back on the small screen. In Big Jim and the Figaro Club (1981) his accident-prone character, Harold Perkins, was almost blown up on one occasion and nearly drowned on another. 'The script was so fraught with peril that I asked the special effects unit to take special care,' he said.
After coming out Curram entered into a civil partnership with Paul Linn, a singer-songwriter. That was dissolved and latterly he was living in west London with Clive Castle, an online tarot reader he met on holiday in Gran Canaria six years ago. Having left acting in the 1990s he reinvented himself as a novelist, publishing five books.
Until recently he was still visiting the gym near his home in Chiswick and was frequently seen at first nights in the West End. 'He was theatre to his soul,' said his daughter, Kay.
Roland Curram, actor, was born on June 6, 1932. He died from kidney failure and prostate cancer on June 1, 2025, aged 92