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Barbara Leigh-Hunt trained for the theatre at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, then joined the Old Vic Company in London. After working in provincial repertory theatres she returned to the Bristol Old Vic to play Rosemary in 'A Severed Head', and transferred with the play to the West End. She returned again to Bristol to appear in 'Love's Labour's Lost' and 'Henry V', then toured Europe and Israel with them. She returned again to Bristol for further productions, then went on an American tour in 'Measure For Measure' and as Ophelia, opposite her husband Richard Pasco who was in the title role of 'Hamlet'. After her return to England she had a big success in the 1968 West End production of 'Mrs Mouse Are You Within'. Following this she made many appearances at the Old Vic, with the RSC at the Aldwych Theatre, and at the National Theatre.

She made her television debut in 1956 in a episode of The Recording Angells (1956), followed over the years by appearances in episodes of series such as Callan (1967), Special Branch (1969), Inspector Morse (1987), Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1987) and Kavanagh QC (1995), along with mini-series including The Brontës of Haworth (1973), A Perfect Hero (1991) and Wives and Daughters (1999). Her film debut was in 1972 in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), which was quickly followed by Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), in which she played Catherine Parr, and The Nelson Affair (1973). Subsequently her film appearances have been few, though they have included Billy Elliot (2000).

William Shakespeare's birthdate is assumed from his baptism on April 25. His father John was the son of a farmer who became a successful tradesman; his mother Mary Arden was gentry. He studied Latin works at Stratford Grammar School, leaving at about age 15. About this time his father suffered an unknown financial setback, though the family home remained in his possession. An affair with Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and a nearby farmer's daughter, led to pregnancy and a hasty marriage late in 1582. Susanna was born in May of 1583, twins Hamnet and Judith in January of 1585. By 1592 he was an established actor and playwright in London though his "career path" afterward (fugitive? butcher? soldier? actor?) is highly debated. When plague closed the London theatres for two years he apparently toured; he also wrote two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". He may have spent this time at the estate of the Earl of Southampton. By December 1594 he was back in London as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company he stayed with the rest of his life. In 1596 he seems to have purchased a coat of arms for his father; the same year Hamnet died at age 11. The following year he purchased the grand Stratford mansion New Place. A 1598 edition of "Love's Labors" was the first to bear his name, though he was already regarded as England's greatest playwright. He is believed to have written his "Sonnets" during the 1590s. In 1599 he became a partner in the new Globe Theatre, the company of which joined the royal household on the accession of James in 1603. That is the last year in which he appeared in a cast list. He seems to have retired to Stratford in 1612, where he continued to be active in real estate investment. The cause of his death is unknown.

The son of a struggling businessman, Cy Endfield--born Cyril Raker Endfield--worked hard to be admitted to Yale University in 1933. While completing his education he became enamored with progressive theatre and appeared in a New Haven production of a minor Russian play in 1934. He was also profoundly influenced by such friends as writer Paul Jarrico, who was in Hollywood and who advocated liberal and leftist views. For several years Endfield worked as a director and choreographer with avant-garde theatre companies in and around New York and Montreal. He led his own repertory company of amateur players in performances of musicals and satirical revue at resorts in the Catskills.

Endfield had another string to his bow, having established a not inconsiderable reputation as master of the art of micro magic, particularly card tricks. In a circuitous way this brought him to Hollywood in 1940. There have been conflicting stories as to how he came to the attention of Orson Welles, who was known to have a long-standing fascination with magic. Endfield first met Welles in a magic shop, but it was his producer and business manager Jack Moss, himself a magician, who hired Endfield for the Mercury Theatre as a "general factotum". Moss wanted to enhance his own skills in order to confound Welles, who had engaged him in the first place as a tutor for performing magic on stage. In return for his expertise, Endfield was permitted to sit in on the making of Journey Into Fear (1943) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), learning valuable lessons in the process. By 1942 he was ready with his first film, a 15-minute-long documentary about the danger of rampant capitalism, entitled Inflation (1943). The witty little piece was a subtle attack on corporate greed and corruption and featured well-known actor Edward Arnold as a devil in businessman garb. An outspoken social critic, who had flirted briefly with the Young Communist League back in his days at Yale, Endfield was from the outset on a collision course with the establishment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce banned his film as "excessively anti-capitalist" and kept it from public view for half a century.

Following wartime service, Endfield wrote several scripts for radio and television. He directed a number of short documentaries for MGM in 1946, and followed this with his motion picture debut, Gentleman Joe Palooka (1946), based on a popular comic strip character, shot in eight days at "Poverty Row" studio Monogram Pictures. He also directed a B-mystery, The Argyle Secrets (1948), from his own earlier radio play, followed by one of the better entries in the "Tarzan" series, Tarzan's Savage Fury (1952). Unfortunately, the picture did poorly at the box office. The reason for this, producer, Sol Lesser suggested later, was because Lex Barker (as "Tarzan") had been given too many lines to speak and "nearly talked himself to death". It was not until Endfield's harrowing indictment of mob rule, The Sound of Fury (1950), that he "arrived" as a director of note. That same year he helmed another independently produced minor masterpiece (on a budget of $500,000), the stylish and moody film noir The Underworld Story (1950). In this scathing attack on unscrupulous journalism, with the lead character being inherently unsympathetic, Endfield elicited one of the finest performances of his career from Dan Duryea.

The ideas and sentiments expressed in these films were ill-timed, in that they drew the attention of HUAC--The House Un-American Activities Committee, which was tasked with rooting out Communists and other "subversives" in the entertainment industry--which particularly denounced "Sound of Fury" as being un-American. Though never a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, Endfield found himself "named" as a sympathizer. Preferring to leave the country rather than inform on others to the FBI, he settled his affairs and left for a new career in Britain in December 1951. To avoid problems with distribution in the US, for the first few years he worked under pseudonyms (such as "Hugh Raker") and on two occasions allowed a friend of his, director Charles de la Tour, to act as a 'front'. He used his own name again for the offbeat action film Hell Drivers (1957). This uncompromisingly tough working-class melodrama featured Stanley Baker, with whom Endfield formed a production company in the 1960s. Baker eventually starred in six of Endfield's films, including the routinely scripted drama Sea Fury (1958) about tugboat sailors and the rather over-the-top Sands of the Kalahari (1965). From the late 1950's, Endfield became also increasingly involved in turning out television commercials. He also worked in the theatre again, directing Neil Simon's play "Come Blow Your Horn" at the West End.

Certainly the most visually impressive and successful of Endfield's films is Zulu (1964), the epic story of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879 between a small contingent of British troops and a vastly superior force of Zulu tribesmen. The original story was penned by military writer John Prebble and Endfield had written the screenplay as early as 1959. After several abortive attempts, he was able to parlay his way into the offices of producer Joseph E. Levine in Rome and was finally given the go-ahead. Enhanced by John Barry's rousing score, "Zulu" is a supremely well-choreographed "battle ballet"--the battle scenes constitute well over half the screen time), with numerous lateral tracking shots of the main protagonists, which effectively draw the audience into the heart of the action. The social element is concerned with British imperialism and class structure, as two officers from different backgrounds are forced to pull together in order to stay alive. As the supercilious upper-crust Lt. Bromhead, Michael Caine, then relatively unknown, began on his path to fame with an excellent performance, alongside Stanley Baker. Historical incongruities apart, "Zulu" succeeded as pure spectacle, much in the same way as the big-budget Hollywood epics of the same period.

Endfield lost interest in filmmaking after shooting the anti-war movie Universal Soldier (1971). This was in part due to the fact that most of his films had failed to make much money. After the death of his friend Stanley Baker in 1976, Endfield devoted himself to his "technical period". He manufactured a gold-and-silver chess set as commemoration for a famous match between grand masters Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972 (only 100 were ever produced). In 1980 he invented the first pocket word processing system, the "MicroWriter", which had re-chargeable batteries and a 14-character LCD display.

In 1955 Endfield had co-authored a very successful book, "Cy Endfield's Entertaining Card Magic" (with Lewis Ganson), which had been well-received by amateur and professional magicians alike. In fact, one of his admirers, and occasional collaborators, was the famous micro magician Dai Vernon. Many of the sleight-of-hand routines in the book were developed by Endfield himself and related to the reader in a manner befitting a consummate storyteller. Endfield's passion for performing magic remained with him to the end. The multi-talented polymath resided in Britain until his death in April 1995.

Immensely talented and instantly recognizable, Peter Jeffrey was one of a great generation of British actors who were comfortable in everything from classical theatre to television comedy. He was born in Bristol, England in 1929 and went on to be educated at Harrow school. He studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge and embarked on a career as an actor. During his distinguished and diverse stage career, he worked with all of the great British theatre companies and performed with the likes of Peggy Ashcroft, Marius Goring, Paul Scofield, Eric Porter and Peter O'Toole.

His opportunities in television and film always seemed to come in the form of supporting roles but his rare talent always brightened the screen. Peter Jeffrey was still acting in the final years of his life, including a wonderful BBC adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper (1996). He was greatly respected in the industry for his quiet professionalism and the empathy he had for other actors and the support he gave to less experienced colleagues. His death from cancer at the age of 70 in 1999 robbed British acting of one of its finest and most reliable performers.

Don Henderson was born on 10 November 1931 in Leytonstone, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), Brazil (1985) and No Escape (1994). He was married to Shirley Stelfox and Hilary. He died on 22 June 1997 in Warwick, Warwickshire, England, UK.

Born in 1949, Antony Sher was raised in South Africa before going to London to study at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art between 1969 and 1971. After performing for the Gay Sweatshop theatrical group in "Thinking Straight" (1975), "The Fork" (1976), and "Stone" (1976), he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982. Three years later, his performance in the title role of "Richard III" won him a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor and, in 1997, he won another Laurence Olivier Award for "Stanley".

Although he spent more time onstage, Sher appeared in a number of films and TV series, including The History Man (1981), Shadey (1985), The Young Poisoner's Handbook (1995) and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride (1996). He gave a charming performance as Benjamin Disraeli in Mrs. Brown (1997), and played "Dr. Moth" in Shakespeare in Love (1998).

Sher was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000.

Peter Butterworth's promising career in the British Navy Fleet Air Arm ended when the plane which he was flying was shot down by the Germans in WW II and he was placed in a POW camp. There he became close friends with Talbot Rothwell (later a writer on the "Carry On" series, on which Butterworth often worked) and the two began writing and performing sketches for camp shows to entertain the prisoners (and to cover up the noise of other prisoners digging escape tunnels). Never having performed in public he was petrified but gamely sang a duet with Talbot. This sparked his enthusiasm to enter show business after the war and Talbot helped and encouraged him and he soon became a familiar character actor in both films and television. He specialized in playing gentle, well-meaning but somewhat eccentric characters (which, by most accounts, is what he was in real life). He was married to impressionist Janet Brown, who he met while doing a Summer show at Scarborough and their son, Tyler Butterworth, also became an actor. Butterworth died suddenly in 1979, as he was waiting in the wings to go onstage in a pantomime show.

Earl Cameron did not set out to be an actor. Bermudian by birth, Cameron joined the British Merchant Navy in the 1930s for the travel opportunities that it afforded. By the early 1940s, with World War II in full swing, Cameron found himself in London working menial jobs to survive. After seeing a West End revival of the musical comedy Chu Chin Chow, he got the acting bug. When an actor didn't show up for a performance, Cameron replaced the actor in the production. This was followed by a series of roles on the London stage.

In 1951, he received a big break when he was cast in Pool of London (1951). The film directed by Basil Dearden in which Cameron played a dockworker who falls in love with a local woman, was significant in that it was one of the first British films to feature a Black man in a non-stereotypical role. He was essentially the UK counterpart to Sidney Poitier, who made his film debut around the same time, although equally talented, he never became a star. Toward the end of the decade, he would work with Dearden again in Sapphire (1959), where he would play a physician who is the brother of the title character, who was murdered while passing for White.

Other significant film film roles in Cameron's career include Thunderball (1965) where he played opposite Sean Connery as Pinder, Bond's Bahamian assistant. Cameron played an ambassador in A Warm December (1973), a film starring and directed by Poitier. In The Interpreter (2005), a film directed by Sydney Pollack , in which he played Edmond Zuwanie, a dictator loosely based on Robert Mugabe.

Cameron continued to work steadily in film and television into his nineties. One of his last appearances was in They've Gotta Have Us (2018), a documentary on Black actors in Hollywood produced by BBC Two.

He died in 2020 at the age of 102.

Rosalind Elliot was born on 28 August 1943 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971), Softly Softly (1966) and Bartleby (1970). She was married to William Edmiston. She died on 10 April 2020 in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, UK.

His father, a wine importer loved the theatre and encouraged his acting ambitions and got him his first job at 16 touring with a Shakespearean company painting scenery and doing walk on parts. His mother disapproved thinking it wasn't a job for a respectable middle class young man. By 1939 he'd graduated to leading roles but then the war came. He joined the army and rose through the ranks to become a major. Within four days of leaving the service he was back in the theatre in a play 'Fifty Fifty' and the 'Seagulls Over Sorento' which ran five years.

Wendy Williams was born on 7 November 1934 in Cheam, Surrey, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Doctor Who (1963), Jack the Ripper (1973) and Wuthering Heights (1978). She was married to Michael Winser and Hugh David. She died on 17 October 2019 in Warwickshire, England, UK.

Richard Pasco was born on 18 July 1926 in Barnes, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Mrs. Brown (1997), The Watcher in the Woods (1980) and The Three Musketeers (1966). He was married to Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Greta Watson. He died on 12 November 2014 in Warwickshire, England, UK.

Diana Coupland was born on 5 March 1928 in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Dr. No (1962), Bless This House (1972) and The Twelve Chairs (1970). She was married to Marc Miller and Monty Norman. She died on 10 November 2006 in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, UK.

Faulds was born in Africa into a missionary family. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1948, but it was as a radio actor that he first became widely known, playing Jet Morgan in Charles Chilton's "Journey into Space" on the BBC. In 1959, he and his wife were among those providing hospitality for the black-listed Paul Robeson during the latter's season at Stratford. It was Robeson who, recognising his friend's deep anti-racist convictions, persuaded him to go into politics, thus starting Faulds' second career. Labour MP for Smethwick from 1966-1974, and for Warley East from 1974-1997, he would no doubt have attained ministerial office if his outspoken support for the Palestinian cause had not been mis-construed as anti-Jewishness.

Nat Jackley (16 July 1909 - 17 September 1988) was an English comic actor starring in variety, film and pantomime from the 1920s to the mid-1980s whose trademark rubber-neck dance, skeletal frame and peculiar speech impediment made him a formidable and funny comedian and pantomime dame. His later years were spent as a character actor in films and television.

A native of Sunderland, Nathaniel Tristram Jackley Hirsch was born into a theatrical family. His father George Jackley (1885-1950) was a comic actor who was the leading comedian for the Melville Brothers at the Lyceum Theatre during the interwar years.

George, himself, was the son of Nathan Jackley who, with his own troupe, The Jackley Wonders, performed in circuses throughout Europe and the United States. His brother David was an actor and his wife, Marianne Lincoln, was scriptwriter and Nat's comedy foil. Nat Jackley was also a member of the Freemasons.

E.M. Forster was born on 1 January 1879 in London, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Howards End (1992), A Room with a View (1985) and The Machine Stops (2009). He died on 7 June 1970 in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, UK.

John Boynton Priestley is one of England's greatest writers--he was a member of the last generation of freethinking British "sages" who contemplated both science and philosophy in their literary output. His books have never been out of print and his name is known to every educated Englishman, rightly so for one of the deepest thinkers and most influential essayists and playwrights of the 20th century. In his long life he became world famous as an essayist, playwright, novelist, social critic and historian, but he also made contributions in the form of an opera libretto ("The Olympians"), a teleplay, a volume of poetry, many amateur paintings, several short stories and even went as far as to take the lead in one of his own plays (without rehearsal) when the one of the actors took sick suddenly.

John Boynton Priestley was born at 34 Mannheim Road, off Toller Lane in the town of Bradford in Yorkshire, England, in September of 1894. His father was a successful schoolmaster and his mother died when he was still an infant. Priestley studied at Belle Vue Grammar School, but left his studies at the age of 16 and worked for four years (1910-1914) as a junior clerk at Helm & Co., a wool firm in Swan Arcade. During these years he started writing at night and began to publish articles in local and London papers. He was a regular unpaid contributor to the Bradford Pioneer, a Labour Party paper. Priestley served in World War I in Flanders, Belgium, with the Duke of Wellington's and Devon regiments and survived front-line combat, although he was seriously injured once. He became one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century and was made a Freeman of Bradford. The J.B. Priestley Library at the University of Bradford was named after his as a token of his hometown's affection.

Priestley's first book was actually a volume of poetry called "The Chapman of Rhymes", written during his teens; he finally published (at his own expense)in 1918 while serving in World War I, thinking that he should "leave something behind" in the event that he, like so many of his comrades, should not survive. In the 1920s he set himself up as an essayist after taking his degree at Trinity Hall in Cambridge University. He studied literature, history and political science, receiving his B.A. after two years there in 1921. From 1922 he worked as a journalist in London, starting his career as an essayist and critic at various newspapers and periodicals, including the New Statesman. His first book published by a professional publisher, "Brief Diversions", was a collection of essays that appeared in 1922, and was the result of his nightly writing efforts. He turned out approximately one essay per week during this period until turning to novels in the latter part of the decade. When he began to write fiction, he would often produce as many as three books in a year. One of the reasons for his early productivity was that, unlike many other writers of the 20th century, Priestley always depended on writing for his livelihood. Much of this work, as might be expected, was of somewhat inferior quality, but it also gave him the opportunity of trying out differing approaches and helped to hone his writing skills.

Priestley's early essays were in the Georgian style, which has since gone out of favor, but it was important to remember that to be able to get his work published, Priestley had to conform some of his writing to meet popular tastes of his day. The chief faults of these "familiar" essays is that they really weren't usually about anything in particular--they tended to be filled with rambling overgeneralisations and personal opinion and lacked direction. There was seldom any subtlety in this manner of writing and the whole style seemed a bit overblown and artificial. The results were that, at a certain point, he began to sense that he had exhausted the medium that he had chosen, which ultimately prompted his turn to fiction. The theory behind the writing of such essays was also very nearly the opposite of what we typically consider good essay writing today. Priestley held that essays were primarily to be used as vehicles for the author's personality to show through, and do not necessarily have to be about any particular subject; fortunately, he didn't always follow this paradigm. Later in his life Priestley would return to the essay, but these always seemed to have a sense of purpose and had greater depth than these early inconsequential essays. Nevertheless, the time that he spent writing these essays to please the public in his youth left its mark upon him, and he was to struggle for the rest of his life to throw off the "bad influence" of this early writing style, in much the same way that H.P. Lovecraft had to battle with hack writing infiltrating his style.

Since it was so difficult for a young playwright to get any plays produced, Priestley decided to create his own opportunity by founding his own production company, English Plays, Ltd., for his plays, and in 1938-39 he was director of the Mask Theatre in London. Priestley was married three times, the first time in 1919 with Emily Tempest, who died young in 1925, then Mary ('Jane') Wyndham Lewis, the former wife of the biographer and satirist 'D.B. Wyndham Lewis'. In 1953 he married archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, with whom he lived in Warwickshire in Kissing Tree House, situated near Stratford-upon-Avon, near William Shakespeare's house.

During his long and productive career Priestley published over 120 books, usually light and optimistic in their tone. His prolific output continued over 60 years. From the age of 70 to 84 Priestley published 21 books. As an essayist he wrote for the "middle brow" audience, always making a special effort to ensure that his work was accessible to the common people and had relevance to them and their lives, many of the professional academics--he scornfully referred to them as "professors"--who delighted in abstract arguments that most people either could not understand or did not care to know, while being thoughtful enough to always be considered "real" literature. The topics and themes are numerous. In his pamphlet 'Letter To A Returning Serviceman" (1945) Priestley shared the common sentiment that Britain was obliged to rebuild after the war along socialist lines, and in "The Nuclear Bombs" (1957) he argued for the moral superiority that unilateral nuclear disarmament would bring. In "Disturbing" (1967) he criticized contemporary playwrights for creating works that sought to "disturb" a reading public already disturbed by their own problems, and in "Particular Pleasures" (1975) he stated that works of art should meet some need, and not be evaluated on programmatic grounds. Priestley was a publisher's dream come true and it can be truly said that William Heinemann, his primary British publisher, really struck a gold mine when he took a chance on Priestley, as no one could match him in his diversity and willingness to take on any sort of job--film scripts, essays, plays, opera librettos, verse, editing, introductions, commentaries, radio broadcasts, pamphlets, etc.; Priestley willingly (and successfully) did it all.

There were several subjects that the pipe-smoking Priestley felt drawn to repeatedly throughout his long career. Among these were the nature of the British character, the theatre and the nature of time. The metaphysical nature of time crops up in nearly all of Priestley's work, from the light-hearted No School Report to his magnum opus, Man and Time, and nearly all of his plays involve various hypothetical situations that involve unusual perspectives on time. In "Man and Time" and "Over the Long, High Wall", Priestley builds upon the theories of the engineer (not to be confused with 17th-century poet) John W. Dunne, the author of "An Experiment With Time", "The Serial Universe" and "Nothing Dies", among others. Priestley hypothesizes that time is somewhat more complicated than we have previously thought and that there is more than one dimension of time--just as there is more than a single dimension of space--which results in humans experiencing a different quality of time, and that we can experience each type of time at different parts in our lives. This led him to an investigation of Dunne's theories of precognitive dreams ("memories of the future"), which Priestley had began experiencing some years back. In "The Magicians", Priestley uses the time-recurrence theory of Ouspensky to hypothesize that although our time is all we have, we have it for an eternity and that we are capable of altering the outcome of our lives by learning and improving on our choices throughout each gyre (the cycle-of-time idea seems to suggest William Butler Yeats' influence as well as Ouspensky's).

The paradoxical nature of the British character also intrigued Priestley. The British people have unarguably the strongest literary tradition in the world--in the mass of the output as well as the quality of the material produced. Throughout the world, however, the British people have a tendency to be looked upon as dull, stuffy, unimaginative, unromantic and, in general, incredibly boring and uninteresting people. If this is a true estimation of the British, though, where did such wonderful literature and poetry come from? Priestley studied this inconsistency and eventually came up with a theory that he thought would explain this discrepancy. By the time the World War II came around, Priestly had become acutely aware of the way in which Britain was changing. He was saddened to realize that the world that he knew and cherished was rapidly vanishing. It was something more than an aging man's nostalgia for the "good old days", however. He noticed that the British were losing their essential "Englishness" slowly but surely, and they were losing their creativity as well--no one can deny that the centuries-old fount of poetic and literary creativity has been drying up since World War II. Priestley gained considerable fame as "the voice of the common people", as he was often called, a patriotic radio broadcaster, second in popularity only to Winston Churchill. It must be said that Priestley's patriotism was never at any time mere nationalism, but sprung from a genuine love of his homeland and not political power brokerage, like so many social commentators do today.

At the early stage of the Cold War he become known during for his support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and in 1946-47 he was a UK delegate to UNESCO conferences. In the late 1930s he turned his attention to the theatre; his fascination with the theatre in his professional life paralleled his personal interest in dreams. He seems to have regarded the atmosphere of the theatre as very similar in nature to that of dreams; he was to use this similarity to great effect in most of his plays. The most famous of his plays took advantage of the dream-like atmosphere to present his theories about time. The most famous of these was "Johnson Over Jordan", a play that used Ouspensky's idea about temporal recurrence with variations. In "A Dangerous Corner"--a play that he referred to as "a box of tricks"--Priestley uses the idea of a "split" in time; the action of the play occurs once but at a critical moment in the plays development, the play begins again without the random comment that causes the conflict of the drama to take place, allowing us to consider the alternatives to every present state that depend on random choices. "Time and the Conways" uses the idea that time is not merely a series of "nows", but that the it is actually an illusion in the way that we perceive reality--that there are other types of time rather than the sequential time with which we are more familiar, which he refers to as "Consensus-Time", which seems to parallel mathematician Rudy Rucker's views as described in his "Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension". This interest in the metaphysics of time would last for the rest of Priestley's life. As he got older he became more seriously interested in social and political problems in England, and he turned his attention to these. At this stage his writing had fully matured, and whenever he penned anything, everyone could easily recognize him as a man with something to say and who said it well enough to command the attention of even a notoriously complacent populous. As a consequence, when Priestley wrote anything in his later years, it seemed as though he had the ability to see much deeper than most of his contemporaries and by this time, he had developed into a "sage", a man who seemed to possess a wisdom and clarity of insight which has made his work timeless, although currently out of fashion among the sensation-seeking consumers and producers of modern "literature". He was offered a knighthood and a peerage as a token of his homeland's esteem for his work, both of which he refused, but he did accept the Order of Merit in 1977.

He died in August 14, 1984, at the age of 89 and is buried at Hubberholme.

Born William White in 1923 to unmarried parents, Grayson was adopted into a coal mining family in Nuneaton.

By the age of 14, he was working under the name of Billy Breen as a supporting drag act on the comedy club circuit, and over the next thirty years he toured the UK not only in male revues and drag shows, but also in variety shows.

After touring and presenting further variety shows in the 70s, including his own TV series 'Shut That Door', his catchphrase, he took over presenting 'The Generation Game' from Bruce Forsyth.

He retired from television in 1981, but continued to perform in the theatre, particularly in pantomime. He died in 1995, aged 71.

While in the army he appeared in camp shows then when demobbed got a flat in London's West End and worked in morning jobs as a Covent Garden porter, in a bakery and on a railway, slept during the afternoon then in the evening with no actual training he more or less conned his way into doing bits in cabaret clubs. He was in a revue when he was spotted by Mario Zampi who cast him in the film Too Many Crooks. His big break came in 1959 in the 'One to Another ' revue with Beryl Reid.

Peggy Thorpe-Bates was born on 11 August 1914 in London, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Rumpole of the Bailey (1978), The Franchise Affair (1962) and BBC Sunday-Night Theatre (1950). She was married to Brian Oulton. She died on 26 December 1989 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK.

Brian Coburn was born on 15 December 1936 in Scotland, UK. He was an actor, known for Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Octopussy (1983) and Lassiter (1984). He was married to Julia Breck. He died on 28 December 1989 in Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, England, UK.

David Auker was born in March 1949 in Wood Green, Middlesex, England, UK. He was an actor, known for A Bridge Too Far (1977), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971). He died in August 2022 in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, UK.

Arthur Whybrow was born on 20 August 1923 in Islington, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Spider (2002), King David (1985) and Bellman and True (1987). He died on 23 April 2009 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK.

Ivor Salter was born on 22 August 1925 in Taunton, Somerset, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Einer frisst den anderen (1964), The Black Arrow (1958) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1960). He died on 21 June 1991 in Warwickshire, England, UK.

Terence Brook was born on 10 February 1924 in Wokingham, Berkshire, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Doctor Who (1963), Secret Venture (1955) and The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (1981). He was married to Pamela Craig. He died on 4 October 1990 in Warwick, Warwickshire, England, UK.