Web Page 3063 28th September 2023 First Picture: Young Bill Owen

Second Picture with Norah Batty

Third Picture: This is your life

Fourth Picture: Compos grave

Bill Owen. The career of Bill Owen was an extreme example of how vast television fame in one role - in his case the incorrigibly scruffy Compo, in Last Of The Summer Wine - can wipe out in the public mind a whole lifetime of quite different achievement. As a Christmas show, Last of The Summer Wine once enjoyed higher ratings than Gone With the Wind. Compo had to reply to old ladies who fancied him, and to open fetes. As a stunt, a tabloid newspaper took the disreputable character for lunch at the Savoy. The series ran for more than two decades, and the real Bill Owen virtually disappeared. Yet as a stalwart player for the radical Unity theatre, he was at ease in Bernard Shaw and was cast by Lindsay Anderson in the first production of David Storey's In Celebration, The Contractor and The March On Russia, the latter being revived at the National in the 1990s. He was George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, finding inspiration for the necessary domestic venom just before opening night after a row with his wife. In the 1950s, and later, he directed a number of plays. Though a contract film actor for Rank for several years, Bill Owen failed to find a niche in that over-full stable, where height and looks were the tools of preferment. He composed the lyrics for 75 songs, recorded by Cliff Richard and other popular singers, wrote one-act plays for boys’ clubs and was arts adviser to the National Association of Boys Clubs, for which he was made an MBE in 1976. Once called by Gene Kelly a born dancer, he wrote musical plays and appeared in others, including The Threepenny Opera, as Mack the Knife. Radical causes were always close to his heart: he had been born to working-class parents in Acton Green, west London, and fashioned by family history into a firm mistrust of fat cats - especially American fat cats - and any form of pretension. This mind-set stood him in good stead in playing the foul-mouthed, dirty, smelly and nihilistic Compo - once, with his woolly hat, dirty wellies and holed trousers tied up with string, voted the scruffiest character on television. Bill Owen was an intelligence and energy at odds with a working-class rut and he remained all his life a somewhat isolated figure, never fitting anywhere except in performance, and in causes. He made few childhood friends, and his view of actors - usually middle-class - was such that only two of them became friends. He rose socially, once owning an old Rolls Royce, which he would leave outside the Unity theatre near King's Cross. But sentimentality did not spread easily outside the boundaries of people of his origins, a fact that ultimately helped end his marriage to a wife from a well-off family. It was a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, that classic story of capitalist chicanery and abuse of the working class, given him on his 14th birthday by his father, that first articulated his radical leanings. With another boy as The It Kids: A Song In Harmony, he won a talent competition at a local cinema. Falling in love with an actress in Acton Co-operative Players - amateurs, but specialists in Shaw and Galsworthy - involved him in serious theatre. As a 20-year-old, he appeared in Cambridge repertory. It was going to a Warner holiday camp in Devon in 1936, when he was drawn into entertaining the campers, that led to Dovercourt Warner's offering him a job the following year. The fact that his parents' lodger was associated with Unity theatre, with a pipeline to all the progressive writers of the period, drew him there. He got a part in Colony, a play dealing with the oppression of trade unionism on West Indian plantations, but the outbreak of war intervened, and he found himself an officer in the Pioneer Corps, forming concert parties. His spell as an officer was predictably short. One of his NCOs lost a foot after a grenade exploded, which caused Bill a breakdown that led to his discharge. After going back to Unity, he took over from Alfie Bass as Gunner Cohen in Mr Balfry. When the war ended, his unhappy military experience came in useful when he appeared as Nobby Clarke in The Way To The Stars, his first feature film, which was to lead to a contract with Rank studios but no great parts: he complained that they didn't know what to do with him. He was in the first Soviet play to be performed abroad after the war, The Russian Question, about the way British and American journalists had put hostile questions to the Russians after west and east forces invading Germany had met at the Elbe. He appeared as a cockney plumber in the Victorian social comedy Caste, later rewriting it as a musical premiered at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. Often his line in scatological, devilish comedy offended the rose-tinted spectacles of the time. When he played Touchstone in As You Like It on a US tour, it was not without shouting at the director that he intended to do it his way - which included squeezing a female member of the cast on the inner thigh. The Boston Record commented that he played Touchstone "like the manly wiseacre he is, rather than the uppity-voiced daffodil you usually see". In Britain, he did not have to fight so hard. He appeared in the grim play about the exploitation of boxers, The Square Ring, and then in the film version with Basil Dearden directing. Peter Rogers recruited him as a corporal in the first of the Carry On films, Carry On Sergeant. In the early 1970s, Bill Owen received from the BBC a copy of the script of Last of The Summer Wine - as a single slot for Comedy Playhouse. It had helped that he had played a Yorkshireman in Storey's In Celebration. Realising it was unique, he accepted at once. He had also played Thelma’s father in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. The three out-of-work Yorkshiremen, now whiling away their retirement as best they could in a Yorkshire village, became more real than reality. The location village, Holmfirth, became a tourist shrine. More than 11 million people watched each episode. For Bill it led to a gap of 21 years in other television work, but the public loved it. His domestic life was not untroubled. The fact that his first wife, Edith Stevenson, offered him £1,000 so that for a year they could be seen in places where he might make fashionable professional contacts, and he indignantly refused, was a pointer to the difficulties that would end the marriage in 1964. They had one son. His second marriage was to Kathleen O' Donoghue, who survives him, with his son and stepdaughter. William John Owen Rowbotham (Bill Owen), actor, director and writer, born March 14, 1914; died July 12, 1999. Stay in touch Peter gsseditor@gmail.com

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