AncientFaces Your browser does not support JavaScript!
Please enable JavaScript to view the entire contents of this page.

Frith Banbury 1912 - 2005

Frith Banbury was born on May 4, 1912 in Devon County, England United Kingdom, and died at age 93 years old on May 14, 2005 in London, Greater London County.

Frith Banbury

Frederick Frith Banbury

May 4, 1912

Devon County, England, United Kingdom

May 14, 2005

London, Greater London County, England, United Kingdom

Male

Looking for someone else

Frith Banbury Frith Banbury (1912 - 2005)

ADVERTISEMENT BY ANCESTRY.COM

This page exists for YOU
and everyone who remembers Frith.

Share what you know,
even ask what you wish you knew.

Invite others to do the same,
but don't worry if you can't...

Someone, somewhere will find this page,
and we'll notify you when they do.

Frith Banbury's History: 1912 - 2005

Uncover new discoveries and connections today by sharing about people & moments from yesterday.

- Discover how AncientFaces works.

Introduction

Frith Banbury - Famous british Actor and Director Born May 4, 1912 in Plymouth, Devon, England, UK Died May 14, 2008 in London, England, UK (cancer) Birth Name Frederick Harold Frith Banbury Mini Bio (1) Frith Banbury was born on May 4, 1912 in Plymouth, Devon, England as Frederick Harold Frith Banbury. He was an actor and director, known for Theatre Night (1957), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and ITV Television Playhouse (1955). He died on May 14, 2008 in London, England. He was awarded the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2000 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to theatre. Associate Member of RADA.
05/4

1912

Birthday

May 4, 1912

Birthdate

Devon County, England United Kingdom

Birthplace

ADVERTISEMENT BY
Professional Career

Frith Banbury Born Frederick Harold Frith Banbury 4 May 1912 Plymouth, Devon, England Died 14 May 2008 (aged 96) London, England Occupation Actor and Stage Director Years active 1933–2000 Frederick Harold Frith Banbury MBE (4 May 1912 – 14 May 2008) was a British theatre actor and director. Frith Banbury was born in Plymouth, Devon, on 4 May 1912, the son of Rear Admiral Frederick Arthur Frith Banbury and his wife Winifred (née Fink). While attending Stowe School, Banbury rejected his father's naval background by refusing to join the Officer Training Corps, later being registered as a conscientious objector, enabling him to continue acting throughout the Second World War. He went on to attend Hertford College, Oxford, though he left after one year without obtaining an academic degree. He trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art alongside Joan Littlewood, Rachel Kempson, Robert Morley, and Peter Bull. Banbury died on 14 May 2008, at the age of 96. Theatrical career Banbury made his first stage appearance on 15 June 1933, playing a walk-on part in If I Were You at the Shaftesbury Theatre. He continued to act through the 1930s and 40s, appearing at such venues as the Ambassadors Theatre, the Little Theatre, the Gate Theatre, the Apollo Theatre, and the Q Theatre. After World War II, Banbury was invited back to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to direct. He made his professional directing breakthrough by directing Dark Summer, a play written by fellow pacifist Wynyard Browne. Other early successes for Banbury included The Holly and the Ivy, Waters of the Moon, and The Deep Blue Sea. The latter was one of three plays which Banbury directed on Broadway, with the other two being Flowering Cherry and The Right Honourable Gentleman. Other locations at which Banbury directed plays include the Old Vic theatre, the Edinburgh Festival, the Chichester Festival Theatre, Paris, Dublin, South Africa, Kenya, and Australia. Archive The papers of Frith Banbury were purchased by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1990s as part of their extensive holdings of contemporary British theatre. The collection opened to the public in 1996. The archive consists of over sixty boxes of scripts, correspondence, posters, programs, photographs, publicity clippings and scrapbooks, reviews, and financial records pertaining to his career from 1926-1995. The Ransom Center also holds a collection of material relating to the 1952 American production of Terrence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, which was directed by Banbury. Selected Filmography The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) The Huggetts Abroad (1949)
05/14

2005

Death

May 14, 2005

Death date

Unknown
Cause of death

London, Greater London County, England United Kingdom
Death location

ADVERTISEMENT BY
Obituary

Frith Banbury Eclectic stalwart of London's West End as director, producer and actor Michael Billington 15 May 2008 19.32 EDT Frith Banbury, who has died aged 96, was a director, producer and actor who seemed to epitomise the glamour and style of the West End theatre in its 1940s and 50s heyday. Yet, although he worked with just about every leading actor and actress and staged many plays by Rodney Ackland, NC Hunter, Wynyard Browne, Terence Rattigan and Robert Bolt, he was never a fully paid-up member of the theatrical establishment: he was much more eclectic in his tastes and adventurous in his outlook - apart from being more durable - than almost all of his contemporaries in the commercial theatre. Born in Plymouth, the son of a rear-admiral and his wealthy Russian-Jewish wife, the young Banbury rebelled from the start against authority. He rejected his father's naval background. At Stowe school, Buckinghamshire, he refused to join the Officer Training Corps, later becoming a conscientious objector. And, although going up to Oxford to read modern languages in 1930, he spent most of his time acting and partying and left after a year without taking a degree. Theatre had become his passion from the age of six, when he was taken to the London Hippodrome to see his first play. So, after leaving Oxford, he enrolled at Rada, where his fellow students included Joan Littlewood and Rachel Kempson. From there he went more or less straight into mainstream theatre understudying - and eventually playing the lead in - Gordon Daviot's Richard of Bordeaux, and walking on in Gielgud's 1934 New Theatre Hamlet. ("Banbury, don't be so prissy," said Gielgud, stripping him of the few lines he had). He also did three summer seasons in rep in Perranporth in Cornwall, which led to a lifelong friendship with its rumbustious directors, Robert Morley and Peter Bull. With the outbreak of war, Banbury - already a card-carrying member of the Rev Dick Sheppard's Peace Pledge Union - registered as a conscientious objector. Asked if he was prepared to do farm work, he replied: "Prepared, but not capable." So he found himself continuing to work as an actor: he appeared in a wide variety of intimate revues, played a season in rep at Cambridge, took the lead in The Government Inspector at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre and did an Ensa tour of the newly liberated Europe in 1945 with While the Sun Shines by his Oxford contemporary, Terence Rattigan. But, although he was an accomplished comic actor, it was after the war that Banbury found his true metier as a director of plays. He was invited back to Rada, where he directed Pinero's farce, The Times. According to Charles Duff's The Lost Summer, which uses Banbury's career as an epitome of postwar commercial theatre, this was the moment of revelation. Confronted by a cast of 22 students, Banbury suddenly found himself spontaneously and naturally directing them. He made his professional break-through by taking a six-month option on a work called Dark Summer written by a friend and fellow pacifist, Wynyard Browne. He took it to Binkie Beaumont at HM Tennent Ltd, the management that monopolised West End theatre and had a subsidiary non-profit company that did much of its work at the Lyric Hammersmith. It was there that Browne's play opened in 1947 and was enough of a success to come into the West End. It also established Banbury as a skilled director of traditional English middle-class plays and led, in the next few years, to work on such huge successes as Browne's The Holly and the Ivy, Hunter's Waters of the Moon and Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. Banbury was excellent at getting fine performances out of actors. But, looking back over his years in commercial theatre, he was both perceptive and funny. He once told me that Peggy Ashcroft's success as the outwardly conventional but sexually passionate Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea was due to the fact that it touched something deep in her: an observation which I quoted in my biography and which led to my one serious argument with my subject. In 1996, a group of British theatre folk were also invited to a conference at the University of Texas at Austin, to which Banbury had donated his papers. He stole the show with his memories of the Beaumont years and, in particular, with his stories about NC Hunter. Apparently, after Hunter's death, his widow - an ardent spiritualist and shrewd executor - was approached by Duncan Weldon about the prospect of reviving Waters of the Moon, but on a reduced royalty. To Weldon's astonishment, Mrs Hunter's initial reaction was: "I'll have to ask Norman." Having made suitable contact with her husband on the other side, Mrs Hunter came back to Weldon a week or so later and decisively announced: "Norman says no." That story showed Banbury's innate impishness. But he was also a passionate advocate of work he believed in. In the 1950s, he waged a fierce campaign on behalf of Rodney Ackland, long before he was fashionable, directing The Pink Room (later retitled Absolute Hell), which was critically reviled, and A Dead Secret which, with Paul Scofield in the lead, enjoyed a respectable run. Banbury also gave Robert Bolt a kick-start directing (and co-presenting) Flowering Cherry as well as The Tiger and the Horse. He also, surprisingly, directed in 1958 the first play by a black author to be seen at the Royal Court: Errol John's Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, which won an Observer new play competition. With the slow decline of commercial theatre, Banbury's influence gradually waned, though he directed notable revivals of Dear Octopus in the 1960s and On Approval in the 70s. He also carried on working to the end of his life: only illness forced him to withdraw, in his mid-80s, from a Chichester revival of Ackland's After October. He was awarded the MBE in 2000 for his services to theatre. From my acquaintanceship with him, he was a man of fascinating contradictions: a rebel against authority who yet believed strongly in theatrical discipline; an instinctive European who made his name directing quintessentially English middle-class plays; an embodiment of West End values who had a ravenous appetite for new writing. He will be remembered best as a first-rate naturalistic director who gave the commercial theatre a dignity and style that now seems a distant memory. He is survived by a niece and nephew. · Frith (Frederick Harold) Banbury, theatrical director, producer and actor, born May 4 1912; died May 14 2008 America is at a crossroads ...

ADVERTISEMENT BY
Looking for more information?
share

Memories

below

Join 2 others
who remember Frith

Select options below to share special moments.

Ethnicity & Family History Nationality & Locations Early Life & Education Baptism Religious Beliefs Military Service Personal Life & Family Gravesite & Burial Add Memory Add Photo

Share what you remember.
Ask what you wish to know.
Connect to discover more.
Advertisement
Did you know?

Frith Banbury lived 19 years longer than the average family member when died at the age of 93.

ADVERTISEMENT BY
Looking for more information?
share

Memories

below