Latest news with #RolandCurram
Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Roland Curram obituary: Sixties co-star of Julie Christie
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
The Guardian
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Roland Curram obituary
Roland Curram, who has died aged 92, was a versatile and well-groomed supporting actor for more than 40 years. He often sported a manicured moustache and was always dapper and charming. As indeed he was as Freddie Martin, the first out gay character in TV soaps, among a mixed bag of British ex-pats in the ill-fated 1992 BBC soap Eldorado. A fictional town was built on the Daurada coast south of Barcelona, where it remains to this day as a tourist attraction. The show itself – less of a crowd-pleaser – was axed in 1993. Still, Curram covered the waterfront as a light comedian on stage in Noël Coward, Alan Ayckbourn and Tom Stoppard, and was not above lending a touch of class to lowbrow British movies such as Every Home Should Have One (1970), starring Marty Feldman, or a rollicking sex comedy, Let's Get Laid (1978), with Robin Askwith, Linda Hayden and Fiona Richmond. His best-known performance, however, came in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965), as a gay photographer and companion to the luminous Julie Christie's good-time girl as she embraced the Swinging Sixties in London, Paris and Rome while toying with hedonistic lifestyle opportunities and the sexual affections of Dirk Bogarde's television director and Laurence Harvey's advertising executive. Much later, Curram appeared further down the cast list as a menswear salesman in Schlesinger's Madame Sousatzka (1988), starring an extraordinary Shirley MacLaine as an extravagant Russian-American piano teacher in London. In the intervening two decades, his stage career took him to the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych as an existential cleric in Jules Feiffer's hilarious black comedy Little Murders (1967) and to the Birmingham Rep in a 1982 revival of Coward's Design for Living, in which he played the morally upright art dealer, Ernest, married to an interior designer, Gilda, involved adulterously in a bohemian menage a trois. When the production transferred to the Greenwich theatre in London, Michael Billington opined that Curram endowed Ernest – usually an ostracised figure of fun – with 'such genuine moral passion and such quivering sense of hurt that you entirely see his point of view'. Curram had himself ventured on both sides of sexual engagement, as he revealed in his 2021 publication, Which Way to Love? He had met Schlesinger in the Carlisle rep in 1952 and had remained a lifelong friend through his similarly fast friendship with the Cornish landscape painter John Miller. In 1964, while playing Coward's heterosexually promiscuous matinee idol Gary Essendine in Present Laughter at the Pitlochry Rep, he met the actor Sheila Gish. They married in the same year and divorced 20 years later, after producing two daughters, Lou and Kay. Gish then began a relationship with the actor Denis Lawson and Roly, as he was widely known, moved in with Paul Linn, a singer and songwriter, in Chiswick. Curram felt liberated into his true self, he said, but remained close to his first family. His civil partnership with Linn was ratified in 2006, later dissolved, and he lived most recently with Clive Castle, an online tarot reader whom he met on holiday. Curram was born in Hove, East Sussex, the only child of Phyllis (nee Ashdown), a milliner and pub landlady, and her husband, Bernard Curram, an insurance agent. He was evacuated to Ayr in Scotland during the second world war, and educated at Ayr academy, then Brighton college. He entered Rada to train as an actor aged 16 – his father had died when he was seven – and played in rep between 1952 and 1958 in theatres in Carlisle, Nottingham, Eastbourne and Worthing. One of his early film roles was in Leslie Norman's Dunkirk (1958) – no less a movie, in its own way, than Christopher Nolan's 2017 version of the same wartime evacuation – and his first London bow was at the Royal Court in 1961 in Tony Richardson's revival of the Jacobean thriller The Changeling, a great play that had not been seen in London for 350 years, alongside Robert Shaw and Mary Ure. He appeared opposite Fenella Fielding's Titania as an imposing Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream at Regent's Park Open Air theatre; and in a series of high-class touring spin-offs out of the Theatre Royal, Bath: in Stoppard's Rough Crossing (1987), with Edward de Souza and Susan George; and in Ayckbourn's Time of My Life (1994), with Anna Carteret and Gareth Hunt. His last big tour, in 1995-96, was in an Australian imported production of High Society (presented by Paul Elliott), adapted from the screenplay by Arthur Kopit, with a Cole Porter songbook. He played 'a very naughty Uncle Willie', said the actor and producer Tracey Childs (who was playing Tracy Lord). Curram told the show's choreographer that he could not really dance but could, if pressed, execute an eccentric sort of 30-second slide. This party piece was incorporated into one big company routine and, said Childs, stopped the show every night. One of his first films, Up to His Neck (1954), a comedy starring Ronald Shiner, Hattie Jacques and Brian Rix, was described by one critic as 'embarrassingly bad', while his last, Michael Winner's Parting Shots (1998) was generally deemed 'one of the worst films ever made'. Everything else in between, including possibly Eldorado, kept him cheery, fun-loving and, above all, popular with everyone he worked with. Curram was predeceased by his daughter Lou. His partner, Clive, survives him, as does his second daughter, Kay, and two grandsons, Joe and Frank. Roland Kingsford Bernard Curram, actor, born 6 June 1932; died 1 June 2025
