Okay, so Tumblr has its uses...
I will explain later (with much waffling no doubt) but an anon on Tumblr directed me to a bunch of James Maxwell stuff from his college days - including his yearbook entry from 1949. Do you want to see a very young James Maxwell? Because you're going to if you look under the cut...
( wee James Maxwell complete with bow tie )
( wee James Maxwell complete with bow tie )
And I'm sorry! I just got lost in old UK TV as a desperate means of keeping myself from exploding while being ill and even though I can usually at least watch some modern TV these days again (well, ish), I can't quite give up the ancient cardboard theatrical stuff. And of course, I got all invested in certain characters and actors, as you do when you're ill and bored and alone and not having much of a life. James Maxwell is because I liked him in Shadow of the Tower and I was sure I'd seen him before, so I Googled him to find out. And then he sounded really nice and interested... and the internet reckoned he was a ghost. There seemed to be no reason for him to be a ghost, so naturally I had to investigate. I don't see what else a person can do when you look at actor up out of general interest and apparently they're supposed to be hanging about haunting somewhere despite being nice, fairly recently dead and not particularly tragic. (And I had seen him before: in Doctor Who, like everyone else ever, except I'd forgotten because he was in the almost entirely unloved Underworld. At least I did think even at the time that he was one of the few good things about it.) So, the short answer is that he was an American, who came over here to drama school in 1950 and stayed for the rest of his life. He also helped to found a theatre, translated plays from German into English, adapted various 19th C lit for the stage, and also directed as well as being one said theatre's artistic directors, until he sadly died in 1995, aged 66. He was actually a fairly major 1960s TV star here, but from the mid-70s on, the theatre just took up more and more of his time and the moment he resigned to go back to just acting, he died, so he's just not as well known even here, compared to other actors of similar standing. I suspect, the reverse is true in properly theatrical circles, though.
My other favourites are for similar reasons, except they're not ghosts (one or two of them are even still alive, it's amazing) and nobody else founded a theatre, but I seem to have been in a James Maxwell mood for quite a while lately, or I've just been having more luck finding him than the others. But, yes. Sorry??
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And, yes, the theatre is Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre. The group believed strongly that theatre should be taken out of London where it could be part of a community and they also wanted to change the physical shape of it, in order to remove the barriers between the actors and the audience - so it is (or certainly was) the largest round theatre in the country & happily seems to still be going strong and living up to all the original ideals. :-)
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I should watch the rest of that pilot, really. The casting was good and it seemed reasonably well done.
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