Tony Earnshaw: Tastes change, but integrity will never go out of fashion
MY friend Richard Todd, who died last week at the grand old age of 90, once told me how hard it had been to be a film star out of fashion with modern tastes.
He was referring to the mid-'60s when the advent of a new method of acting – and a new breed of actor – made his style redundant.
And it seemingly happened overnight. One minute he was the star of a string of blockbusters, the next he couldn't get arrested. Such are the vagaries of fame and the fickleness of audience tastes.
Richard said something else that was very telling for a man who had been a star – one of the country's biggest – by his mid-thirties. He remarked that he might have peaked too soon.
I suspect he was right. He was nominated for an Academy Award for playing a dying serviceman in The Hasty Heart, released in 1949. His co-star was Ronald Reagan.
Over the next few years, Richard mixed with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Marlene Dietrich (on Stage Fright), with Bette Davis (on The Virgin Queen) and in the mid-'50s hit his stride in a pair of films for Disney, playing Robin Hood and Rob Roy.
Of course he became best-known for playing sundry military figures in stiff-upper lip classics like The Dam Busters, Yangtze Incident, D-Day the Sixth of June, Danger Within and The Longest Day, in which he played his own commanding officer parachuting into occupied France in the early hours of June 6, 1944.
He enjoyed 15 years as a star, and it was a happy, productive time. Yet by 1966 his film career had all but flatlined and he turned increasingly to theatre.
It was a harsh, even brutal, epiphany for a still handsome man who was not yet 50, but the writing was on the wall. As Richard himself said to me: "The Sixties changed everything, but I didn't change. I couldn't. I didn't like the films I was being offered or the parts. So I didn't do them."
Over dinner following an event at the National Media Museum a few years ago, I asked Richard if he was bitter at never being knighted. He gave me a funny look. "Not bitter, no. A little sad, perhaps. I saw other chaps getting it and wondered 'Why not me?' But I don't dwell on it. Life's too short for regrets."
In later life he became the spokesman and mascot for the RAF's 617 Squadron – the men who destroyed the Ruhr dams and who were immortalised in The Dam Busters. Richard played Wing Commander Guy Gibson opposite Michael Redgrave as bouncing bomb inventor Barnes Wallis.
He was a proud man – proud of his work in the film, proud of what it represented and proud, if reticent, of his own wartime exploits. When I asked him about his experiences he laughed and said the films were better. Later, in private, he told me things that made my hair stand on end.
Richard Todd was not a tall man but he was a big man nonetheless. He was an actor of honesty and integrity. He was a war hero. He was a gentleman. And he was my friend.
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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