Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Gunfighters

The Doctor (William Hartnell) pays a visit
to the dentist in 19th century Tombstone,
and is treated by gunslinger
Doc Holliday (Anthony Jacobs) and
saloon singer Kate (Sheena Marshe)
Four episodes (A Holiday for the Doctor, Don't Shoot the Pianist, Johnny Ringo, The OK Corral)
First broadcast Apr 30 to May 21 1966
Average audience for serial: 6.25m
REGULAR CAST

William Hartnell (The Doctor) Jan 8 1908 to Apr 23 1975 (heart failure after a series of strokes) For a full career biography for William Hartnell, click here.

Peter Purves (Steven Taylor) Born Feb 10 1939 For a full career biography of Peter Purves, click here.

Jackie Lane (Dodo Chaplet) Jul 10 1941 to Jun 7 2021 For a full career biography for Jackie Lane, click here.

GUEST CAST

John Alderson (Wyatt Earp) Apr 10 1916 to Aug 4 2006 (natural causes)
Career highlights
John appeared in over 100 productions, mostly Westerns, with his long CV starting with The Highwayman (1951) and including Space Patrol (1952-53), Moonfleet (1955), Boots and Saddles (1957-58, as Sergeant Bullock), Texas John Slaughter (1958-59), The Untouchables (1962), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964), The Man from UNCLE (1965), The Time Tunnel (1966), The Wild Wild West (1967), Mission: Impossible (1970), The Onedin Line (1972), The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976), The Cat from Outer Space (1978), Evil Under the Sun (1982), Automan (1984), Boon (1987) and Young Guns II (1990).
Facts
John, nickname "Basher", started life as a miner, but quit after two weeks to join the British Army, where he rose to the rank of major, before marrying an American General's secretary and getting into acting.

Richard Beale (Bat Masterson) May 13 1920 to Mar 27 2017
Doctor Who credits
Played: Refusian voice in The Ark (1966)
Played: Bat Masterson in The Gunfighters (1966)
Played: Broadcaster in The Macra Terror (1967)
Played: Minister of ecology in The Green Death (1973)
Career highlights
Richard's career began in The Battle of the River Plate (1956), followed by roles in Private Investigator (1958), Madame Bovary (1964), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1965), The Mating Machine (1970), Jude the Obscure (1971), Emmerdale Farm (1972), Special Branch (1974), Treasure Island (1977), Blake's 7 (1978), Secret Army (1979), Camille (1984), CATS Eyes (1985), The Tripods (1985), Return to Treasure Island (1986), Agatha Christie's Poirot (1990), EastEnders (1990-91), Lovejoy (1994), Family Money (1996), Down to Earth (2001) and Afterlife (2005). He also regularly played Edward Derwent in A Horseman Riding By (1978).
Facts
After leaving the Royal Navy, Richard worked for his father's print firm for a decade until becoming an actor. He retired from the profession in 2005, aged 85, but continued this love of sailing and racing single-handedly until he turned 90. In 2015 he released a memoir entitled One Man's War.

Victor Carin (Virgil Earp) Oct 1 1933 to Jan 2 1981 (cancer)
Career highlights
Other work includes Storm in a Teacup (1962), A Man Like That (1966), Flash the Sheepdog (1966), The View from Daniel Pike (1971), How's Your Father? (1975), Raffles (1977), The Omega Factor (1979) and Doom Castle (1980). He regularly played Inspector Menzies in Sutherland's Law (1973-76). He also script edited Take the High Road (1980) and wrote a 1966 TV play called Friday Night's the Best Night.
Facts
Victor's final TV appearance was in the BBC documentary The Four Seasons: The Last Taboo, which followed his final days facing up to his cancer with dignity, wit and cynicism. Victor is seen at home with his teenage daughter Kate, as well as seeking peace at a monastery, and at the hospice where he died. The programme attracted some controversy at the time of its broadcast in September 1981 as some believed it was an invasion of a dying man's privacy.

David Cole (Billy Clanton) Apr 8 1936 to May 23 2007
Doctor Who credits
Played: Billy Clanton in The Gunfighters (1966)
Played: Citizen in Full Circle (1980, uncredited)
Career highlights
His other credits include Quality Street (1947), Quartet (1948), Christopher Columbus (1949), David Copperfield (1954), The Royalty (1958), Little Women (1958), Emergency Ward 10 (1960-61), William (1962), Orlando (1966), Man in a Suitcase (1967), Room 222 (1970), Isis (1976), Fiona (1977), Butterflies (1979), The Old Men at the Zoo (1983), Brotherhood of the Rose (1989) and Chunuk Bair (1992).

Reed De Rouen (Pa Clanton) Jun 10 1917 to Jun 11 1986
Career highlights
American Reed's other acting credits include The Case of the Frightened Lady (1948), The Third Man (1949), The Six Men (1951), The Count of Monte Cristo (1956), Interpol Calling (1960), Ghost Squad (1964), The Troubleshooters (1966), The Revolutionary (1970) and Baxter! (1973). He was also a prolific writer, for The Six Men, Ghost Squad, The Avengers (1963), Orlando (1965) and Man in a Suitcase (1968).
Facts
Reed - who was of half-Native American (Oneida) extraction - submitted a speculative seven-episode script to the Doctor Who team in the summer of 1970, in conjunction with Jon Pertwee, entitled The Spare Part People (aka Labyrinth and The Brain Drain). It involved the Doctor posing as a Cambridge don to investigate a series of disappearances, but the Doctor himself is kidnapped and taken away to a secret civilisation beneath Antarctica. He also published a science-fiction novel in 1955 entitled Split Image, another called The Heretic in 1964, and collaborated on the crime novel Death List in 1979.

Maurice Good (Phineas Clanton) Jun 8 1932 to May 10 2013
Career highlights
Irishman Maurice's first screen credit was in The Rising of the Moon (1957), then The Never Never Murder (1961), Z Cars (1964), The Deadly Bees (1967), Softly Softly (1970), New Scotland Yard (1973), The New Avengers (1977), The Wars (1983), Night Heat (1985-86) and The Taming of the Shrew (1988). It's believed Maurice continued to take small parts into the 21st century, including The Phantom Menace (1999).
Facts
Maurice moved to Canada in 1975 and in 1989 became a teacher at the Sir Wilfred Grenfell College of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, as well as getting involved with the Stratford Festival. He also wrote Every Inch a Lear, a journal of a production of King Lear starring Peter Ustinov and directed by The Keys of Marinus's Robin Phillips, in Canada in 1982. Maurice's mother Mary Donovan was the niece of Irish author and journalist Standish O'Grady.

David Graham (Charlie) Jul 11 1925 to Sep 20 2024 Click here for David Graham's entry on The Daleks

Martyn Huntley (Warren Earp)
Doctor Who credits
Played:
 First human in The Sensorites (1964)
Played: Roboman in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964)
Played: Warren Earp in The Gunfighters (1966)
Career highlights
Martyn subsequently appeared in United! (1965), A Farewell to Arms (1966), The Spanish Farm (1968) and Z Cars (1969).

William Hurndell (Ike Clanton) Jul 31 1933 to Jul 4 2019
Career highlights
William's other appearances include Taxi! (1963), Bold as Brass (1964), Danger Man (1965), Adam Adamant Lives! (1966), Carry On Follow That Camel (1967) and The Borderers (1970).
Facts
In 2010, William was involved in a High Court case where he claimed more than 33 million shares in a company called Stanelco were "stolen" from him by Barrie and David Hozier. William's case was dismissed.
In 2014 Toby Hadoke released his Who's Round interview with William here.

Anthony Jacobs (Doc Holliday) Mar 23 1918 to Aug 3 1993
Career highlights
Anthony's other credits include The March of the Peasants (1952), Mother Michel and Her Cat (1955), The Rebel Heiress (1958), Danger Man (1960), International Detective (1959-61), Ghost Squad (1963), The Mill on the Floss (1965), Roads to Freedom (1970), War and Peace (1972) and Survivors (1977).
Facts
Anthony is the father of Matthew Jacobs, who wrote the script for the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, and who visited his dad on the set of The Gunfighters when he was a 10-year-old boy! Anthony's first wife (and Matthew's mother) was actress Katharine Blake, best known for playing prison governess Helen Forrester in Within These Walls (1976).

Sheena Marshe (Kate Fisher) 1935 to Feb 17 2019
Career highlights
Sheena's CV also includes Action Stations (1956), Boy Meets Girl (1957), Charlesworth at Large (1958), Educating Archie (1959), Our House (1960), Dentist on the Job (1961), Benny Hill (1962), The Rag Trade (1963), Best of Friends (1963), Act of Murder (1964), The Prisoner (1968) and The Dickie Henderson Show (1961-68).
Facts
Sheena can be seen attending the 1957 premiere of Woman in a Dressing Gown at the Warner Theatre in London in this British Pathe report (which also includes Doctor Who luminaries Leonard Sachs, Jon Pertwee and John Fraser). Sheena was married for a time to film stuntman Doug Robinson.

Laurence Payne (Johnny Ringo) Jun 5 1919 to Feb 23 2009 (vascular dementia)
Doctor Who credits
Played: Johnny Ringo in The Gunfighters (1966)
Played: Morix in The Leisure Hive (1980)
Played: Dastari in The Two Doctors (1985)
Career highlights
Laurence's further credits include Till Tomorrow (1948), Train of Events (1949), The Face of Love (1954), The Three Musketeers (1954), Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), The Trollenberg Terror (1958), Moonstrike (1963), The Midnight Men (1964), The Saint (1966), Vampire Circus (1972), The Hanged Man (1975), The Sandbaggers (1978), Airline (1982) and Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992). He became well known for playing the title character in Sexton Blake (1967-71).
Facts
Between 1962-93, Laurence wrote 11 detective novels, the first of which (The Nose on My Face) was adapted into the film Girl in the Headlines aka The Model Murder Case (1963). A sword-fighting accident while filming Sexton Blake in 1968 cost him the sight in his left eye. Laurence's first wife (of three) was actress Sheila Burrell, cousin to Sir Laurence Olivier. In a 1998 interview with Edinburgh's Evening News, Laurence said: "Dr Who was great fun. I was one of the villains in the second series with that strange elderly man as Dr Who. We did about ten weeks filming at a time, and then had a break. I got on very well with the boy playing Dr Who's grandson. I wasn't in any of the ones with those robots [Daleks] in, thank God! I think I would have laughed!" In the 1990s Laurence contracted septicaemia, causing some brain damage, and the last three years of his life were spent in a nursing home suffering from vascular dementia.

Shane Rimmer (Seth Harper) May 29 1929 to Mar 28 2019
Career highlights
Canadian born Shane's CV stretches back as 1957 in Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans; subsequent appearances include After Hours (1959), Compact (1963-64), Dr Strangelove (1964), Orlando (1966), Coronation Street (1970), Quiller (1975), Star Wars (1977), Warlords of Atlantis (1978), Reds (1981), Gandhi (1982), Smith and Jones (1984), Dreamchild (1985), Out of Africa (1985), Roman Holiday (1987), A Kiss Before Dying (1991), Lipstick on Your Collar (1993), Space Truckers (1996), Spy Game (2001), Batman Begins (2005), Dark Shadows (2012), Dick Spanner PI (2014), Darkwave: Edge of the Storm (2016) and The Amazing World of Gumball (2014-17). Shane will be best known for his long association with the works of Gerry Anderson, notably voicing Scott Tracy in Thunderbirds (1965-66), and various roles in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68), Joe 90 (1968-69), UFO (1970-71), Space: 1999 (1975-76) and Dick Spanner PI (1986). He also wrote episodes of Captain Scarlet, Joe 90, The Secret Service (1969) and The Protectors (1973-74).

CREW

Donald Cotton (writer) Apr 26 1928 to Dec 28 1999 Click here for Donald Cotton's entry on The Myth Makers

Rex Tucker (director) Feb 20 1913 to Aug 10 1996
Career highlights
Rex's other directing work included The Silver Swan (1952), The Three Musketeers (1954), Triton (1961), Jane Eyre (1963), The Mill on the Floss (1965), A Farewell to Arms (1966), The £1,000,000 Bank Note (1968), Sinister Street (1969), Paul Temple (1970) and Z Cars (1972), while he produced for The Cruise of the Toytown Belle (1950), The Man in Armour (1951), The Three Musketeers, Parbottle Speaking (1962) and A Pin to See the Peepshow (1973). He also wrote scripts for some of these series, as well as St Ives (1955 and 1967), Dr Finlay's Casebook (1962), The Massingham Affair (1964), Vanity Fair (1967) and Pegasus (1969).
Facts
Rex joined the BBC as a writer and producer for radio in 1937, and was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Doctor Who in 1963, acting as an uncredited caretaker producer alongside Verity Lambert and Mervyn Pinfield. He initially suggested casting Hugh David in the lead role, and was originally to have directed the first serial. Rex is credited as co-writing the lyrics to Tristram Cary's composition The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon for The Gunfighters, along with Donald Cotton. Rex's daughter is Jane Tucker, best known to many as part of the children's song and dance outfit Rod, Jane and Freddy (from Rainbow).

Innes Lloyd (producer) Dec 24 1925 to Aug 23 1991 Click here for Innes Lloyd's entry on The Celestial Toymaker

Gerry Davis (script editor) Feb 23 1930 to Aug 31 1991 Click here for Gerry Davis's entry on The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve

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