Murray Melvin has died. I had thought he might be immortal. I was well aware he had been born in London in 1932, but I would not have been slightly surprised if he had turned out to have just stepped out of a tree one summer in 1630.
He would have deserved immortality for his first serious screen appearance, reprising for film and posterity the role he had originated in Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958/61): the art student Geof, kicked out of his lodgings for being queer, forming a socially unconventional, nonetheless real family with the pregnant protagonist in post-industrial Salford until the rest of the world gets back in. That he continued to turn up for more than half a century afterward in everything from key supporting parts to four-second indelible walk-ons was just lagniappe. He was adorable as a literal sea-lawyer in Lewis Gilbert's H.M.S. Defiant (1962), very funny as the posher, dweebier of two suitors in Joan Littlewood's Sparrows Can't Sing (1963), forlorn and faintly numinous as the dancing-master of the Marshalsea in Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit (1987), where he looked like a constellation by Greer Gilman. He worked regularly with Ken Russell, whom he used to accompany to festivals; it bewilders me that unless you count The Devils (1971), he never worked with Derek Jarman. He made such an enigmatic hit as Bilis Manger in two episodes of Torchwood (2007) that he returned to the character for a sequence of audio dramas for Big Finish, the most recent recorded and released last year. I can't decide if I would use my time machine credit to catch his dancing in Littlewood's Oh, What a Lovely War! in 1963 or his direction of Peter Maxwell Davies' The Martyrdom of St Magnus in 1977. I loved that later in life he became the archivist of the Theatre Royal. It seemed to suit his relationship to time.
He was extraordinarily beautiful when he was younger, one of the people you weren't sure how they were allowed out in public without causing traffic accidents on all sides, and then he weathered into what![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme once excellently described as "ethereal and hawkish at once." He had trained as a mime and dancer and always moved like it. I don't know what to watch for his memory, there was so much of it. I was always glad to check on him and find he was still in the world and I kind of refuse to believe he isn't. Ninety years isn't so long for a theatre, or a tree.
He would have deserved immortality for his first serious screen appearance, reprising for film and posterity the role he had originated in Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958/61): the art student Geof, kicked out of his lodgings for being queer, forming a socially unconventional, nonetheless real family with the pregnant protagonist in post-industrial Salford until the rest of the world gets back in. That he continued to turn up for more than half a century afterward in everything from key supporting parts to four-second indelible walk-ons was just lagniappe. He was adorable as a literal sea-lawyer in Lewis Gilbert's H.M.S. Defiant (1962), very funny as the posher, dweebier of two suitors in Joan Littlewood's Sparrows Can't Sing (1963), forlorn and faintly numinous as the dancing-master of the Marshalsea in Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit (1987), where he looked like a constellation by Greer Gilman. He worked regularly with Ken Russell, whom he used to accompany to festivals; it bewilders me that unless you count The Devils (1971), he never worked with Derek Jarman. He made such an enigmatic hit as Bilis Manger in two episodes of Torchwood (2007) that he returned to the character for a sequence of audio dramas for Big Finish, the most recent recorded and released last year. I can't decide if I would use my time machine credit to catch his dancing in Littlewood's Oh, What a Lovely War! in 1963 or his direction of Peter Maxwell Davies' The Martyrdom of St Magnus in 1977. I loved that later in life he became the archivist of the Theatre Royal. It seemed to suit his relationship to time.
He was extraordinarily beautiful when he was younger, one of the people you weren't sure how they were allowed out in public without causing traffic accidents on all sides, and then he weathered into what
ashlyme once excellently described as "ethereal and hawkish at once." He had trained as a mime and dancer and always moved like it. I don't know what to watch for his memory, there was so much of it. I was always glad to check on him and find he was still in the world and I kind of refuse to believe he isn't. Ninety years isn't so long for a theatre, or a tree.
