Michael Denison

John Michael Terence Wellesley Denison (1 November 191522 July 1998) was an English actor. He often appeared with his wife, Dulcie Gray, with whom he featured in several films and more than 100 West End theatre productions.

After a conventional public school and university education he studied at a drama school and made his professional début in 1938. His career was interrupted by military service during the Second World War but by the end of the 1940s he re-established himself among leading actors of his generation, and remained so until his death in 1998.

He was primarily a stage actor, and appeared in a wide range of roles from Shakespeare to farce, modern drama, musicals, drawing-room comedy, and thrillers. He made some cinema films, particularly in the late 1940s and the 1950s, including My Brother Jonathan, The Glass Mountain, Angels One Five and the 1952 adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest. He became known for his appearance in the title role of the long-running courtroom series Boyd QC which ran on British television from 1956 to 1964.

Life and career Early years Denison was born in Doncaster, West Riding of Yorkshire, 1 November 1915, the only child of Gilbert Dixon Denison (1888–1959) − a paint manufacturer − and his wife, Marie Louise, née Bain (1888–1915). His mother died when Denison was three weeks old; he was brought up by his mother's sister and her husband, who had no children of their own. He also appeared in As You Like It; in a history of the OUDS, Humphrey Carpenter writes:

He later played Macduff in Macbeth, but according to Punch, he was "resolute but hampered by an unfortunate wig". After graduating with a second-class degree in French and German in 1937 Denison went to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, where he met Dulcie Gray, a fellow student, who became his wife and his frequent acting partner.

Denison made his professional stage début in 1938 as Lord Fancourt Babberly in a Frinton-on-Sea production of Charley's Aunt and in the same year, he made his first West End appearance with the London Mask company co-directed by J. B. Priestley, at the Westminster Theatre, playing Paris in Troilus and Cressida. He made his television début in January 1939, when the BBC relayed the company's production of Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions.

Denison and Gray married in London in April 1939; they had no children. The Stage, in an obituary of Denison, observed that the couple appeared in more than 100 West End shows "and their marriage, which lasted very nearly 60 years, was regarded as one of the happiest in showbusiness". The couple appeared there together in plays including Coward's Hay Fever and The Young Idea, Shaw's Arms and the Man, Priestley's Dangerous Corner and Gerald Savory's George and Margaret. Denison and Gray returned to London in October 1939; he appeared again at the Westminster as Peter Horlett in Priestley's Music at Night and Stephen Undershaft in Shaw's Major Barbara. and had supporting roles in two films: Hungry Hill (1947) and The Blind Goddess (1948). His career gained momentum after Gray helped to secure for him the leading role of the doctor starring opposite her in the film My Brother Jonathan (1948). This was a considerable success and saw Denison voted the sixth most popular British star of the year.

Denison returned to the West End in August 1948, playing Sir Nicholas Corbel in Rain on the Just at the Aldwych Theatre, and then, from November 1949, Michael Fuller in Queen Elizabeth Slept Here at the Strand Theatre, alongside Gray in both productions. Denison appeared in a war film, Landfall (1949), and a romantic drama film with Gray, The Glass Mountain (1949).

1950s After a seven-week pre-London tour, beginning in August 1950, Denison and Gray opened at the Ambassadors Theatre as Michael and Agnes in The Fourposter, a two-hander, charting the married life of a couple. For the cinema they starred in The Franchise Affair (1951), and after a cameo as a reporter in The Magic Box (1951), Denison had a major role in a war film, Angels One Five. In December 1951 he and Gray starred in a BBC television adaptation of Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock's play Milestones.

In 1950 Associated British Productions (ABP) had acquired the film rights to The Importance of Being Earnest, and chose Denison and Gray to play Algernon Moncrieff and Gwendolen Fairfax. The head of production wanted Gielgud to direct, and asked Denison to approach him with the suggestion. Gielgud declined: "Oh, no, I don't think so. I've been doing the play for years and years. I don't see it as a film, do you?" ABP released the filming rights to the Rank Organisation in 1951; the director, Anthony Asquith, retained Denison but cast Joan Greenwood instead of Gray as Gwendolen. In a survey of productions of Wilde Robert Tanitch describes Denison's performance in Asquith's 1952 film as "a conceited and debonair Algernon, tossing off the epigrams in a bumptious manner".

At the St James's Theatre in December 1952 Denison played Clive Jevons in Sweet Peril, with Gray as Robina Jevons; Denison began appearing regularly on television. He was a panellist in the 1953 series of the BBC's What's My Line? and from 1956 to 1964 he starred in the title role of the ITV series Boyd QC, which ran for 78 episodes. He played what one critic called a "suave and elegant barrister ... Britain's answer to Perry Mason" (although the Boyd series came first). The first 40 episodes were transmitted live.

At the Prince's Theatre in February 1954 Denison appeared as the White Knight, Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass; Gray played the White Queen. They reprised these roles the following year. Denison appeared as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well, Dr Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Lucius in Titus Andronicus.

At the Aldwych Theatre in August 1957 Denison played Charles Cuttinghame in Meet Me By Moonlight, an only moderately successful mock-Victorian musical. In 1958 he toured with Gray in a two-hander thriller, Double Cross, but his schedule for Boyd QC prevented him from appearing in the piece when it opened in the West End, and his role was taken by Terence Morgan. Denison's last stage role of the 1950s was the Duke of Hampshire, with Gray as the Duchess, in a revival of Frederick Lonsdale's Let Them Eat Cake at the Cambridge Theatre in May, 1959. After the London run the production toured. The couple appeared together in a revival of Heartbreak House at the Oxford Playhouse and then Wyndham's. They went to Hong Kong, appearing at the opening of the City Centre Theatre in August 1962 in a double bill of A Village Wooing and A Marriage Has Been Arranged, and then to Berlin, where the two gave a Shakespeare recital at the Berlin Drama Festival. In the West End they headed the cast in a 1963 adaptation of E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, which ran for 262 performances. From April to July 1964 the couple toured England and Continental Europe in a Shakespeare programme called Merely Players. In London Denison appeared in Hostile Witness at the Haymarket Theatre (November 1964) and in An Ideal Husband at the Strand (December 1965), as Sir Robert Chiltern to Gray's Lady Chiltern.

1970s During the 1970s Denison toured in six productions: the 18th-century comedy of manners The Clandestine Marriage (1971); a comedy-thriller, The Dragon Variation (1973); a revival of a 1930s comedy, The First Mrs Fraser (1976); a new comedy, The Earl and the Pussycat (1976), a musical, Robert and Elizabeth (1976); and Pinero's comedy The Cabinet Minister (1977).

In London, Denison played a wide range of roles during the 1970s. In 1970 he and Gray appeared in Three – a trio of one-act plays by Shaw, and then in Ibsen's The Wild Duck. The Stage commented:

He appeared in The Tempest (1972 − as "a somewhat declamatory Prospero", according to one critic), and as Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1972 and 1978). Gray and Denison appeared in a comedy, The Sack Race, in 1974,

In 1975 Denison was the only white member of the cast of The Black Mikado; he played Pooh-Bah in an adaptation of the original transplanted from Japan to the Caribbean. At the Old Vic in 1978 he played what The Stage called "an amusingly mouth-pursing, bewildered Mayor" in a revival of The Lady's Not for Burning, and appeared in the same season in Twelfth Night, as Malvolio, and in Ivanov as Lebedev. Later in 1991 Denison and Grey toured in The Importance of Being Earnest; she played Miss Prism and he doubled the roles of Lane and Dr Chasuble. They again appeared together in a tour of Bedroom Farce in 1992, and in the same year began a long association with Peter Hall's production of An Ideal Husband, this time in the roles of Lord Caversham and Lady Markby. It opened at the Globe in 1992, toured in 1993, returned to the West End at the Haymarket and played on Broadway in 1996 (their New York débuts), and once back in London played at the Haymarket and finally the Gielgud Theatre in 1997. |

Denison's final stage tour was with Gray and Eric Sykes in Two of a Kind, a comedy by Hugh Janes, set in a retirement home. His last appearances on stage were with his wife in March and April 1998 in Curtain Up – An Evening with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Writings Together with Gray, Denison wrote The Actor and His World (1964). He published two volumes of memoirs, covering both his own and his wife's life and career: Overture and Beginners (1973) and Double Act (1985). For the Dictionary of National Biography he contributed biographies of Sir Noël Coward and Sir Peter Daubeny (1983), Peter Bridge (1987) and Glen Byam Shaw (1994).

Offices and honours For many years Denison was a leading figure in the actors' trade union, Equity. He was a member of its council from 1949 to 1976, and was its vice-president in 1952, 1961–1963 and 1973. From 1975 to 1978 he was a member of the drama panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Angels One Five (1952) The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) There Was a Young Lady (1953) Contraband Spain (1955) The Truth About Women (1957) Faces in the Dark (1960) Village Wooing (1962) Shadowlands (1993)