Peter Wilton Cushing OBE (May 26, 1913 - August 11, 1994) is a British actor best known for his role in the horror film Hammer Productions of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and his appearance as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (1977). For more than six decades, his acting career includes appearances in over 100 films, as well as many television, stage and radio roles. Born in Kenley, Surrey, Cushing performed his stage debut in 1935 and spent three years in a theater repertoire before moving to Hollywood to pursue a film career.
After making his film debut in the 1939 film The Man in the Iron Mask, Cushing began to find a modest success in American films before returning to England at the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite appearing in a series of roles, including one as Osric in the film adaptation of Laurence Olivier of Hamlet (1948), Cushing struggled to find work during this period and began to consider himself a failure. His career was revitalized after he started working in live television dramas, and he soon became one of the most recognizable faces on British television. He received special praise for the lead performance in the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four . Cushing gained worldwide fame for his performance in twenty-two horror films by independent Hammer Productions, especially for his role as Baron Frankenstein in six of their seven Frankenstein movies, and Doctor Van Helsing in five Dracula movies. Cushing often appears with actor Christopher Lee, who became one of his closest friends, and occasionally with American horror star Vincent Price.
Cushing appeared in several other Hammer films, including The Abominable Snowman, The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles, the latter being marked as the first many times he played Sherlock Holmes's famous detective throughout his career. Cushing continues to perform various roles, though he is often typecast as a horror movie actor. She plays Dr. Who in Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150 AD (1966) and earned the highest number of visibility of his career in 1977, when he appeared as Grand Moff Tarkin in the movie < i> Star Wars first. Cushing continued to act in his final years, and wrote two autobiographies. He lovingly served his wife for twenty-eight years, Helen Cushing, who died in 1971. Cushing himself died in 1994 of prostate cancer.
By 2016, the similarities are digitally altered to allow Tarkin characters to appear in Rogue One .
Video Peter Cushing
Biography
Early life
Peter Wilton Cushing was born in Kenley, a district in the English county of Surrey, on May 26, 1913 to George Edward Cushing (1881-1956) and Nellie Marie (nÃÆ' Â © e King) Cushing (1882-1961). The youngest of the two sons - his brother George is three years older - his mother is desperate for a princess who for the first few years of his life will wear Peter's skirt to a girl, let her hair grow in long curls and tie it with ribbon pink, so others often mistakenly think of it as a girl. His father, a quantity surveyor of an upper class family, was a quiet and non-communicative man that Peter said he never knew very well. Her mother is the daughter of a carpet trader and is considered a lesser class than her husband. The Cushing family consists of several stage actors, including his paternal grandfather Henry William Cushing (who toured with Henry Irving), the aunt of his father Maude Ashton and his stepmate Wilton Herriot, after whom Peter Cushing received his middle name.
The Cushing family lived in Dulwich during the First World War but moved to Purley after the war ended in 1918. Though resurrected during wartime, Cushing was too young to understand or be so influenced by him, and protected from the horrors of war by his mother, which prompted him to play game under the kitchen table every time a bombing threat might pop up. In its infancy, Cushing twice developed pneumonia and once what became known as "double pneumonia." Although he survived, the latter was often fatal during that period. During one Christmas in his youth, Cushing saw the production of Peter Pan's stage, which served as a source of initial inspiration and interest in acting. Cushing likes to dress up and play pretense from an early age, and then claims he always wants to be an actor, "probably without knowing at first." As a fan of comics and toy collections in his teenage years, Cushing earns money by holding puppet shows for family members with dolls of his gloves and toys.
He began his early education in Dulwich, a prosperous area in South London, before attending Shoreham Grammar School at Shoreham-by-Sea, on the Sussex coast between Brighton and Worthing. Tending to homesick, he was miserable at boarding school and spent only one semester there before returning home. He attends Purley County Middle School, where he swims and plays cricket and rugby. With the exception of art, Cushing is a poor student who proclaims himself in most subjects and has little attention span for things that are not of interest to him. She gets a fair value only through the help of her brother, a strong student who does her homework for her. Cushing kept his aspirations for art throughout his youth, especially acting. Her childhood inspiration is Tom Mix, an American film actor and star of many Western movies. D.J. Davies, a physics teacher at Purley County Secondary School who produced all the school dramas, recognized some of the potential acting within him and encouraged him to participate in the theater, allowing Cushing to skip classes to paint sets. He played a major role in almost every school production during his teenage years, including the role of Sir Anthony Absolute in the performance of comedy drama Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1929, The Rivals.
Cushing wanted to enter the acting profession after school, but his father opposed the idea, despite the theater background of some of his family members. Instead, utilizing Cushing's interest in art and drawing, he earned his son a job as a surveyor assistant in the drawing department of the Couldsdon surveyor office and the Purley Urban District Council during the summer of 1933. Cushing hated the job, where he stayed for three years without promotion or progress because of the lack of ambition in the profession. His only pleasure was to draw the prospect of the proposed building, which was almost always rejected because it was too imaginative and expensive and lacked a strong foundation, which Cushing ignored as "only details." Thanks to his former teacher, Davies, Cushing continues to appear in school production during this time, as well as amateur dramas like W.S. Gilbert's Pygmalion and Galatea , George Kelly's The Torch-Bearers , and The Red Umbrella , by Brenda Girvin and Monica Cosens. Cushing often learns and practices his lines in the attic at work, under the guise that he puts ordnance survey maps into sequences. She will regularly apply for auditions and openings for a role she finds in the Stage-oriented newspaper, but is rejected repeatedly due to lack of professional experience in the theater.
Initial career
Cushing finally applied for a scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. His first audition was before actor Allan Aynesworth, who was so unimpressed with Cushing's way of speaking that he rejected it directly and insisted that he did not return until he corrected his words. Cushing persistently pursued a scholarship, writing exactly twenty-one letters to school, until actor and producer Bill Fraser finally agreed to meet Cushing in 1935 just so he could ask him to stop writing immediately. During the meeting, Cushing was given a walk-on section as a courier in the production of the evening from J. B. Priestley Cornelius . It marked his professional stage debut, although he lacked a line and did little more than stand on stage behind other actors. After that, he was awarded a scholarship and was given odd jobs around the theater, such as selling drinks and working as an assistant stage manager. One of his earliest professional stage performances was in 1935 as Captain Randall at Ian Hay's The Middle Watch at Connaught Theater in Worthing. At the end of the summer of 1936, Cushing accepted a job with the repertory theater company of Southampton Rep., Working as an assistant stage manager and performing in a small role at the Grand Theater in Hampshire. He spent the next three years on an internship at Southampton Rep., Auditioning for the role of both the characters there and in the other surrounding theaters, eventually collecting nearly 100 individual parts.
Soon, he felt the urge to pursue a film career in the United States. In 1939, his father bought him a one-way ticket to Hollywood, where he moved only for £ 50 for his name. Cushing met Columbia Pictures employee Larry Goodkind, who wrote him a letter of recommendation and directed him to a acquaintance that Goodkind knew in Edward Small Productions. Cushing visited the company, just days from the 1939 film The Man in the Iron Mask, the adaptation of James Whale-directed from the Alexandre Dumas story based on the French legend of a prisoner during the reign of Louis XIV of France. Cushing was hired as a stand-in for a scene featuring both characters played by Louis Hayward, who had the dual lead role of King Louis XIV and Philippe of Gascony. Cushing will play one part against Hayward in one scene, then the other on the other, and eventually the scenes will be united in a separate screen process that features Hayward in both halves and leaves Cushing's work cut out of the movie altogether. Although the job meant Cushing would not accept the actual screen time, he eventually served as the king's messenger, who made The Man in the Iron Mask his official film debut. The small role involved in the battle of the sword and, although Cushing has no experience with the fence, he told the Pope he is an excellent fencer to make sure he gets the role. Cushing then says his screenless scene with Hayward is a terrible show, but his experience in the film provides an excellent opportunity to learn and observe how studio shooting works.
Just days after filming at The Man in the Iron Mask, Cushing was at Schwab's Drug Store, a famous Sunset Boulevard hangout for actors, when he found out that producer Hal Roach was looking for an English actor for a comedy film starring Laurel and Hardy. Cushing sought and played a role in that role. Cushing appeared briefly in Oxford's A Chump (1940) and the scene only took a week to shoot, but he proudly worked with whom he called "the two biggest comedians ever produced cinema." Around this time the actor Robert Coote, who met Cushing during a cricket match, recommended to director George Stevens that Cushing might be good for part in the upcoming film Stevens Vigil in the Night (1940). Adapted from a serial novel of the same name, it is a drama about a nurse played by Carole Lombard who works in a poorly equipped rural hospital. Stevens threw Cushing in the lead role of second male Joe Shand, the husband of Lombard's sister character. The shooting lasted from September to November 1939, and the film was released in 1940, attracting Cushing's first attention and critical acclaim.
Cushing continues to work in several Hollywood engagements, including unrecognized roles in the war movie They Do Not Love (1941), which reunites him with director James Whale. In 1941, Cushing was cast in one of a series of short films in the MGM series The Passing Parade, which focused on strange-but-true historical events. She appeared on the episode of Your Hidden Master as a young Clive of India, long before the soldiers established the military and political supremacy of the East India Company. In the film, Clive tries to shoot himself twice but the gun is shot wrong, then he shoots the third time in the water jug ​​and the gun works perfectly. Clive took this as a sign that he should live, and he went on to make great achievements in his life. The studio executives are happy with Cushing's appearance, and there is talk amongst the people in Hollywood who make it a star. Despite the success he began to enjoy, however, Cushing grew home long and decided he wanted to return to England. He moved to New York City in anticipation of his return, during which time he voiced several radio ads and joined the summer theater company to raise money for his trip back to England. She appeared in dramas such as Robert E. Sherwood The Petrified Forest, Arnold Ridley's The Ghost Train, SN Behrman's Biography and the modern clothing version of William Shakespeare Macbeth . He was finally noticed by Broadway theater talent scouts, and in 1941 he made his Broadway debut in the Seventh Trumpet wartime war drama. It received a bad review, however, and ran only eleven days.
Return to UK
Cushing returned to England during the Second World War. Although some injuries in childhood prevented him from performing active duty, a friend suggested he entertain the troops by performing as part of the National Association of Entertainment Services. In 1942, Noel Coward played Private Lives on a tour of military stations and hospitals in the British Isles, and the actor who played the lead role of Elyot Chase was called to serve. Cushing agrees to take the place with little notice or time to prepare, and earns ten pounds a week for the job. During this tour he meets Helen Beck, a former dancer who starred in the main female role of Amanda Prynne. They fell in love and married on April 10, 1943. Cushing finally had to leave ENSA because of lung congestion, the illness he suffered helped him recover. Both have little money around this time, and Cushing must gather help from the National Assistance and Actors Benevolent Fund. Cushing struggled to find work during this period, with several dramas that he released for failing to even get through the practice to the cinema. Others were closed after several shows, such as an ambitious five-hour adaptation of the Leo Tolstoy War and Peace novel that opened and closed in 1943 at the Phoenix Theater in London.
During the Second World War he served alongside the National Association of Entertainment Services (ENSA). Cushing records radio spots occasionally and shows up in week-long duties as a top performer at the Q Theater in London, but otherwise work is hard to come by. Cushing found a modest success in Sheridan's 1945 production of The Rivals at Westminster's Criterion Theater, which earned enough money to pay off growing debts. However, the war years continued to be difficult for him, and at one point he was forced to work to design a female head scarf at the Macclesfield-based silk factory to meet the needs. In the fall of 1946, after the war ended, Cushing failed to audition for part of Paul Verrall in the production of Born Yesterday drama staged by famous actor and director Laurence Olivier. He was not cast because he insisted he could not perform with an American accent. After Cushing tried to accent and failed, Olivier replied, "Well, I appreciate you not wasting my time, I'll remember you." Towards the middle age and finding it increasingly difficult to earn a living in acting, Cushing began to consider himself a failure.
In 1947, when Laurence Olivier searched for him to adapt William Shakespeare to play Hamlet into a movie, Cushing's wife Helen encouraged her to pursue a role. Far from being blocked by Cushing's failed audition the previous year, Olivier remembered the actor well and was happy to throw it away, but the only remaining unfilled character was a relatively small part of the false false Osric. Cushing accepted the role, and Hamlet (1948) marked his film debut in the UK. One of Cushing's main scenes involves Osric talking to Hamlet and Horatio while walking on a wide stone spiral staircase. This set provides technical difficulties, and all Cushing rows must be re-recorded later as part of the post-sync process. Cushing recently had dental surgery and he tried not to open his mouth for fear of spitting. When this hampered the post-sync process, Olivier leaned against Cushing's face and said, "Now drown me, it will be a glorious death, as long as I can hear what you say."
Hamlet went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and earned Cushing's praise for her performance. Also featured in the film is Christopher Lee, who will eventually become a close friend and often a star with Cushing. Cushing designed a special hand-held scarf in honor of Hamlet's film, and when it was showcased throughout England, the scarves were finally received as gifts by Queen Elizabeth-Bowes-Lyon and Queen Elizabeth II. After Hamlet, both Peter and Helen Cushing received a personal invitation from Olivier to join Old Vic, the treasury theater company Olivier, who started the Australasia tour for a year. The tour, which lasted until February 1949, took them to Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart, Tasmania, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, and included performances by Richard Brinsley Sheridan School for Scandal, Shakespeare Richard III , Thornton Wilder Our Teeth , Jean Anouilh Antigone and Anton Chekhov The Proposal .
Success on television
Cushing struggled to find work for the next few years, and became so depressed that he felt suffering from a long mental disorder. Nevertheless, he continues to perform in several small roles on radio, theater and film. Among them was the 1952 John Huston movie Moulin Rouge , where he played racing audiences named Marcel de la Voisier who appeared in front of the star Josà ©  © Ferrer, who portrayed the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. During a time of desperation for Cushing, his wife encouraged him to seek a role on television, which was just beginning to grow in England. He suggested that he write to all producers listed in the Radio Times magazine looking for work in the media. The move proved to be a wise move, as Cushing was hired to fill the cast of a series of major theater successes adapted for live television. The first was JB Priestley's Eden End, which was televised in December 1951. Over the next three years, he became one of the most active and preferred names on British television, and was considered a pioneer in British television drama.
He was credited with playing the lead male role of Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1952 television television production of BBC Austen Pride and Prejudice . Other successful television ventures during this time include Epitaph for a Spy, The Noble Spaniard, Beau Brummell, Portrait by Peko i>>, and Anastasia , the latter winning Cushing the National Mail's Daily Mail for Best Actor 1953-54. His greatest television success from this period was Winston Smith's main role in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the adaptation of British television 1954 Rudolph Cartier from George Orwell's classic novel of the same name as the totalitarian socialist regime. Production will prove controversial, resulting in death threats for Cartier and causing Cushing to be vilified for appearing in "dirt." Parliament even considered a motion soon after the first screening to ban repetition of the drama. However, the second television production was filmed and aired, and Cushing finally drew both critical acclaim and acting awards, further solidifying his reputation as one of Britain's biggest television stars. Cushing felt his first appearance was much stronger than the second, but the second production was the only version known to be alive.
Within two years after Nineteen Eighty-Four, Cushing appeared in thirty-one television dramas and two series, and won the Best Television Actor of the Year from the Evening Chronicle . He also won the best actor award from Guild of Television Producers in 1955, and from the British Academy of Fine Arts and Film in 1956. Among the dramas he performed at this time was Terence Rattigan The Browning Version , Gordon Daviot's Richard from Bordeaux , and the 1955 production of Nigel Kneale's The Creature , the latter of which Cushing will star in the film adaptation two years later. Despite this continued success on live television, Cushing finds the media too stressed and hopes to return to the film. The cinematic role proved somewhat difficult to find, however, as film producers often resent the television star to attract audiences away from the cinema.
Nevertheless, he continued to work in several film roles during this period, including the movie The Black Knight (1954) in front of Alan Ladd. For the film, he traveled to Spain and filmed scenes in locations at Manzanares el Real and El Escorial palaces. He also starred in the 1955 film adaptation of Graham Greene's End of the Affair as Henry Miles, an important civil servant and a timid husband of Sarah Miles, played by Deborah Kerr. Also that year she appeared in Magic Fire, an autobiographical film about German composer Richard Wagner. Filmed in a location in Munich, Cushing plays Otto Wesendonck, the husband of poet Mathilde Wesendonck, who in the film is described as having an affair with Wagner.
Hammer Frankenstein's Movies
During the short period of quiet after the success of Cushing television, he read in a trade publication about Hammer, a low-budget independent production company that attempted to adapt the novel horror of Mary Shelley to Frankenstein into a new film. Cushing, who enjoyed the story as a child, asked his agent John Redway to inform the company of Cushing's interest in portraying the protagonist, Baron Victor Frankenstein. The studio executives are eager to have Cushing; In fact, the founder of Hammer, James Carreras, did not succeed in approaching Cushing for a film role in another project even before his great success with Nineteen Eighty-Four. Cushing was about twenty years older than Baron Frankenstein when he appeared in his original novel, but that did not deter the filmmakers. Cushing was instrumental in the main role of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), marking the first of the twenty-two films he made for Hammer. He later said that his career decision requires choosing a role in which he knows that he will be accepted by the audience. "Who wants to see me as Hamlet? Very few, but millions want to see me as Frankenstein, so that's what I do." Film critic Roger Ebert describes Cushing's work in the movie Hammer: "[Cushing is] that is in all English horror films, standing between Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.The dialog usually runs along the lines, 'But the good sky, man! You see been dead for over two centuries! '"
Unlike the famous Frankenstein film from 1931 by Universal Studios, the Hammer movie revolves around Victor Frankenstein, rather than the monster. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster writes the protagonist as an ambitious, selfish, and cold intellectual scientist who hates his contemporaries. Unlike the characters of the novel and previous film versions, Frankenstein Cushing committed an evil crime to achieve his goal, including the murder of a colleague to get a brain for his creature. Frankenstein Curse also features a star alongside Cushing Hamlet Christopher Lee, who plays Frankenstein's monster. Cushing and Lee became very close friends, and will remain so for the rest of Cushing's life. They first met at the filming location, where Lee still wore makeup monsters prepared by Phil Leakey. Hammer Studio's publicity department issued a story that when Cushing first met Lee without make-up, she screamed in terror.
Cushing greatly appreciates the preparation for his role so he insists on being trained by a surgeon to learn how to use an authentic scalpel. Shot in vibrant colors with a small budget Ã, £ 65,000, the film is best known for its heavy use of gore and its sexual content. As a result, while the film went well at the box office with its target audience, the film received negative reviews from professional critics. Most, however, are free of Cushing's performance, claiming it adds a layer of difference and credibility to the movie. Many feel that Cushing's performance helped create a character of a typical mad scientist. Picturegoer writer Margaret Hinxman, who does not praise Lee's performance, praises Cushing and writes about the movie: "Although this disgust may not create many monsters, it may have created something more lasting: a star!" Donald F. Glut, a writer and filmmaker who wrote a book about Frankenstein's depiction, said the deep warmth of Cushing's outer screen personality was clearly visible on the screen even though the terrifying elements of Frankenstein, which helped add layers attraction to character.
The Frankenstein Curse was an overnight success, bringing the fame of Cushing and Lee around the world. The two men will continue to work together in many movies for Hammer, and their names become synonymous with the company. Cushing repeated the role of Baron Victor Frankenstein in five sequels. At first, The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), his protagonist was sentenced to death by the guillotine, but he escaped and hid under the alias of Doctor Victor Stein. He returned to The Evil of Frankenstein (1963), where the Baron possessed a carnival hypnotist evoking his inactive monsters, and Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), in which Frankenstein was a monster is the woman who played by Playboy magazine centrefold model Susan Denberg. Cushing played the lead two more times in Frankenstein's Must Be Destroyed (1969) and Frankenstein and the Monster of Hell (1974). The former film depicts Frankenstein as a much cruel character than he has ever seen before, and features scenes in which Frankenstein Cushing plays the character played by Veronica Carlson. Neither Carlson nor Cushing wanted to do the scene, was filmed despite objections directed by Terence Fisher, and his controversial sequence was edited out of the film for his release in America. In Frankenstein and the Monster of Hell, Cushing describes Frankenstein as completely insane, in the right coda for previous films.
Movie Hammer Dracula
When Hammer attempts to adapt the classic vampire novel Bram Stoker Dracula, they cast Cushing to play a vampire vampire, Doctor Van Helsing. Cushing envisioned the character as an idealist fighter for the greater good, and studied the original book carefully and adjusted some of Van Helsing's characteristics from the books into his appearance, including repetitive motions lifting his index finger to emphasize important points. Cushing says one of the biggest challenges during filming does not go away every time he hits the stake with a hammer and pushes it into the heart of a vampire. Dracula was released in 1958, with Cushing once again starring in Lee's opponent, who plays the title character, even though Cushing is given top bills. During the filming, Cushing himself suggested staging for the final confrontation scene, in which Van Helsing jumped onto the large dining table, opened the window curtain to weaken Dracula with the sun, then used two candlesticks as an emergency cross to propel the vampire into the sunlight. Like the Frankenstein movie, critics hate Dracula for their violence and sexual content, thinking it is lower than the Universal Studios 1931 version.
In 1959, Cushing agreed to re-enact Van Helsing's role in the sequel, The Brides of Dracula (1960). Before the filming began, however, Cushing said he objected to the script written by Jimmy Sangster and Peter Bryan. As a result, playwright Edward Percy was brought in to make modifications to the script, although the rewriting prompted filming until early 1960 and brought additional costs to production. For the sequel to 1966, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, which marked Lee's return to the title role for the first time since 1958, Cushing gave permission for a recording featuring him for use in the opening scene, retaliation from the climax of the movie < i> Dracula first. Instead, James Carreras of Hammer thanked Cushing by paying for the extensive rooftop repair work recently undertaken at Whitstable's recently acquired Cushing house. In 1972 Cushing appeared in Dracula A.D. 1972 , a Hammer modernization of the Dracula story set in the past. Lee once again starred as Dracula. In the opening scene, Cushing portrays Van Helsing in the nineteenth century as he did in previous films, and the character was killed after battling Dracula. After that the action leaps forward until 1972, and Cushing plays the real man's grandchild for most of the film. Cushing does a lot of his own stunts in Dracula A.D. 1972 , which included falling from a straw carriage during a fight with Dracula. Christopher Neame, who also starred in the movie, said he was very impressed with Cushing's agility and fitness, given his age. Cushing and Lee both took their respective roles in the 1974 sequel The Satanic Rites of Dracula, known in the United States as Count Dracula and its Vampire Bride. Also in that year Cushing played the original nineteenth-century Van Helsing in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires , a joint production between Hammer Studio and Shaw Brothers Studio, which brought Chinese martial arts into Dracula's story. In the film, Van Helsing of Cushing traveled to the Chinese city of Chungking, where Count Dracula headed to a vampire cult.
Other Hammer Roles
Though best known for his role in the film Frankenstein and Dracula, Cushing appeared in various other Hammer productions during this time. Both he and his wife fear Cushing will become a typecast of being a horror role, but he continues to take it as they are guaranteed a routine job. She appeared in the 1957 horror film Abiginable Snowman, a Hammer adaptation of the BBC television drama Sunday Night Theater from 1955 which also starred Cushing. He plays a British botanist looking for the Himalayas for the legendary Yeti.. Director Val Guest said he was very impressed with Cushing's preparation and ability to plan which props were best used to improve his performance, so much so that Cushing became known as "Peter's Props". In 1959, Cushing and Lee appeared together in the horror of Hammer The Mummy , with Cushing as archaeologist John Banning and Lee as Kharis antagonist. Cushing sees a promotional poster for The Mummy that shows Lee's character with a large hole in his chest, allowing a beam of light to pass through his body. There is no reference to such injuries in the film, and when he asks the publicity department why it's on the poster, they say it's just meant to be a shocking image to promote the movie. During the filming he asked director Terence Fisher to permit riding a harpoon through the body of a mummy during a fight scene, to explain a poster image. Fisher agrees, and the scene is used in the movie.
Also in 1959, he described the famous detective Sherlock Holmes in the production of Hammer The Hound of the Baskervilles, an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel of the same name. He once again becomes opposed to Lee, who plays the aristocracy of Sir Henry Baskerville. A keen fan of Sherlock Holmes, Cushing is keen to play the characters, and reread the novels in anticipation of the role. Hammer decides to raise the horror element of the source novel, which disrupts Conan Doyle's real estate, but Cushing himself does not voice objections over creative licenses because he feels Holmes's own character remains intact. However, when producer Anthony Hinds proposed to remove deerstalker characters, Cushing insisted they remained because the audience was associated with Holmes with headgear and pipe. Cushing prepared extensively for the role, studied the novel and recorded it in his script. He studied the costume and manuscript writer Peter Bryan, often changing words or phrases. Lee later admitted to being fascinated by Cushing's ability to incorporate various props and different actions into his performance simultaneously, whether reading, smoking pipes, drinking whiskey, filing through paper or other things while portraying Holmes. In the following years, Cushing considers his Holmes performance one of the best achievements of his career. Cushing draws mixed-usual reviews: Movies Daily calling it "tempting performance" and Time Out David Pirie calls it "one of the very best shows", while The Monthly Film Bulletin calls him "very polite and too light" and Barry Norman BBC TV says he "does not quite catch the air of arrogance know-all that is a great detective sign". The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally conceived as the first in a series of Sherlock Holmes movies, but eventually no sequel was made.
Soon after the completion of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Cushing was offered the lead role in the Hammer The Man Who Could Cheat Death, a remake of The Man in Half Moon Street . Cushing refused, partly because he did not like the script by Jimmy Sangster, and the lead role was taken over by Anton Diffring. Cushing next appeared for Hammer when he played Sheriff of Nottingham in the adventure film Sherwood Forest Sword, starring Richard Greene as a legendary Robin Hood. It was filmed in a location in County Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland. The following year, Cushing starred as Ebenezer Scrooge-like the bank manager who was robbed in the Hammer thriller Cash on Demand (1961). Cushing considers this a favorite of his films, and some critics believe him to be one of his best performances, though it is one of the most rarely seen films of his career. In 1962, he appeared in the movie Hammer Captain Clegg , known in the United States as Night Creatures . Cushing starred as Parson Blyss, the local priest of the 18th-century English seaside town believed to hide smuggling activities with ghost reports. The film is roughly based on Doctor Syn's novel by Russell Thorndike. Cushing read Thorndike to prepare for his role, and made suggestions for makeup artist Roy Ashton about Blyss costumes and hairstyles. Cushing and director Peter Graham Scott did not get along during the shoot and at one point, when both of them disapproved on the set, Cushing turned to cameraman Len Harris and said, "Do not pay attention to Len.We have done enough of this now to know what we are doing. "
Cushing and Lee appeared together in the 1964 horror movie The Gorgon, about the female character of a snake-haired woman from Greek mythology. The following year, Cushing and Lee again appear together in the movie Hammer He , about the lost nature ruled by the eternal queen of Ayesha, played by Ursula Andress. Cushing later appeared in The Vampire Lovers (1970), an erotic Hammer horror movie about a lesbian vampire, adapted in part from the Sheridan Le Fanu Carmilla novel. The following year he is set to star in the sequel, Lust for a Vampire, but has to stop because his wife is sick. His role was filled not by actor Ralph Bates. Later that year, however, Cushing starred in Twins of Evil , prequel of kind to The Vampire Lovers , such as Gustav Weil, leader of a group of religious thinkers who tried to stamp out magic and satanism. Among his last Hammer roles is Fear in the Night (1972), where he plays a one-armed schoolmaster who seems to terrorize the protagonist, played by Judy Geeson.
Non-Hammer film work
Although widely known for his Hammer appearance from the 1950s to the 1970s, Cushing worked in various other roles during this time, and actively sought out roles outside the horror genre to diversify his work. In an interview published in the ABC Film Review in November 1964, Cushing stated, "People look at me as if I were some kind of monster, but I can not think why." In my dreadful picture, I'm either a monster maker or a monster destroyer, but never a monster, actually, I'm a gentle person, never hurt a fly, I love animals, and when I'm in this country I'm a sharp bird-a spy. " In an interview published in 1966, he added, "I'm so tired of the neighbors telling me 'My mom says she does not want to see you in the dark alley.'" He continued performing at the occasional production stage, such as Robert E. MacEnroe
He appeared in the epic biography of John Paul Jones (1959), in which Robert Stack played the title role of American naval fighter in the American Revolutionary War. Cushing becomes very ill with dysentery during filming and loses a lot of weight as a result. In 1959, Cushing played Robert Knox on The Flesh and the Iblends, based on a true story of a doctor who bought a human corpse for research from a serial killer of Burke and Hare duo. Cushing earlier stated Knox was one of his role models in developing his role as Baron Frankenstein. The film is called Mania in its American release. Cushing appeared in several films in 1961, including Fury in Smugglers' Bay , an adventure movie about pirates scavenging ships off the coast of England; The Hellfire Club , where he plays lawyers helping a youth expose a cult; and The Naked Edge , an English-American thriller about a woman who suspects her husband of framing another man for murder. The last film starred Deborah Kerr, Cushing's co-star from The End of the Affair, and Gary Cooper, one of Cushing's favorite actors.
In 1965, Cushing appeared in a joke of Ben Travers playing Thark at Westminster's Garrick Theater. It will be his last stage performance for a decade, but he continues to stay active in movies and television during this period. In 1965, he starred in two science fiction films by AARU Productions based on the British television series, Doctor Who. Although the Cushing protagonist is based on the Doctor of the series, his portrayal of characters is very different, especially in the fact that Dr. Cushing is a human being, while the original doctor depicted on TV by William Hartnell is an extraterrestrial. Cushing plays a role in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Dalde 'Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966).
Cushing later starred in the fifteen-episode television series Sherlock Holmes, again repeating his role as a title character with Nigel Stock as Watson, although only six episodes have survived to this day. Episodes aired in 1968. Douglas Wilmer had previously played Holmes for the BBC, but he refused part of the series due to a very heavy filming schedule. Fourteen training days are initially scheduled for each episode, but they are reduced to ten days for economic reasons. Many actors dismissed the role as a result, but Cushing accepted, and the BBC believes that his Hammer Studios personality will bring what they call the sense of "stalking horror and heartless cruelty" into the series. Production runs from May to December, and Cushing adopts a rigorous training, preparation, and training regimen. He tries to keep his performance synonymous with his role as Holmes of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Although the series proved popular, Cushing felt he could not deliver his best performance under a busy schedule, and he was not happy with the final result.
Cushing appeared in several horror films by independent Amicus Productions, including Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), as a person who can look to the future using Tarot cards; The Skull (1965), as a professor possessed by the spiritual power embodied in the skull; and Torture Garden (1967), as a collector of Edgar Allan Poe relics who were robbed and killed by rivals. Cushing also appeared in non-Amicus horror films such as Island of Terror (1966) and The Blood Beast Terror (1968), both of which investigated a series of mysterious deaths.. In 1968, he appeared in Corruption , a movie that was billed as so horrible that "no woman would be accepted alone" to the cinema to see it. Cushing plays a surgeon who tries to restore the beauty of his wife (played by Sue Lloyd), whose face is horribly wounded in an accident.
In July 1969, Cushing appeared as a straight man in a sketch comedy show hosted by comedians Morecambe and Wise. In the comedy drama, Cushing plays King Arthur, while the other two provide comedy characters such as Merlin and Round Table knights. Cushing continued to make occasional brilliant acting on the show over the next decade, describing himself desperately trying to collect payments for his previous acting performance on the show. Cushing and Lee made acting as their old roles Frankenstein and Dracula in the 1970 comedy One More Time , starring Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr. The single scene took only one morning of filming, which Cushing agreed after Davis asked him to do it as a favor. The following year, Cushing appeared in I, Monster (1971), adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson
In 1971, he contacted the Royal National Institute for the Blind and offered to provide voice acting for some of their audiobooks. They were immediately accepted, and among the papers Cushing noted was The return of Sherlock Holmes , a collection of thirteen stories an hour. In 1972, Cushing appeared with Vincent Price at Dr. Phibes Rising Again! , a sequel from the previous year The Dr Phibes the Jorok , and later became a star along with Price again in the 1974 movie Madhouse . Cushing continued to appear in several Amicus Productions films during this period, including Tales from the Crypt (1972),
For Tales from the Crypt , an anthology film consisting of several horror segments, Cushing was offered the part of a cruel businessman but did not like that part and rejected it. Instead, Cushing asks to portray Arthur Grymsdyke, a kindhearted widower and worker who is familiar with local children, but is subject to a dirty campaign by his arrogant neighbors. Eventually the character was encouraged to commit suicide, but returned from the grave to get revenge on his torturers. After Cushing played a role in the role, some changes were made to the script at his suggestion. Initially, all the character lines were spoken aloud to himself, but Cushing advised him to speak to a framed photograph of his late wife instead, and director Freddie Francis agreed. Cushing uses the emotion of losing his wife recently to add to the authenticity of the widower of the widower of the widower. Make-up artist Roy Ashton designed the costumes and makeup that Cushing wore when he rose from the dead, but the actor helped Ashton develop the costume, and wore a pair of dentures that he had previously used in disguise during Sherlock Holmes television series. Her performance at Tales from the Crypt won her the Best Male Actor award at the 1971 French Fantasy Cinema Convention in France.
In 1975 Cushing was keen to return to the stage, where he did not perform in ten years. Around this time he learned that Helen Ryan, an actress who impressed her in a television drama about King Edward VII, plans to run the Horseshoe Theater in Basingstoke with her husband, Guy Slater. Cushing wrote to the couple and suggested they perform the Heiress, a drama by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, with Cushing himself in the lead role. Ryan and Slater agree, and Cushing then says doing the part is his most exciting experience since his wife died four years earlier. Cushing also starred in several horror films in 1975. Among them was the Land of Minotaur, where he played Baron Corofax, the evil leader of a demonic sect opposed by a priest who was played by Donald Pleasence. Another is The Ghoul , where he plays a former priest who hid a cannibal son in an attic. The film marks Cushing's first work for producer Kevin Francis, who works in a small job at Hammer and has long wanted to work with Cushing, whom he greatly admired. They went on to make two other films together, Legend of the Werewolf (1975), and The Masks of Death (1984) with Cushing as Sherlock Holmes once more. In 1976 Cushing appeared on the television movie The Great Houdini as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Cushing wrote the preface to two books on detectives: Peter Haining Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook (1974) and Holmes of the Movies: The Screen Career of Sherlock Holmes (1976), by David Stuart Davies. Cushing also appeared in the 1977 horror film The Uncanny .
Star Wars
Film director George Lucas approached Cushing in hopes of playing the actor in an upcoming space fantasy movie, Star Wars . Because the main antagonist of the movie Darth Vader wore a mask throughout the film and his face was never seen, Lucas felt a strong human trait character was needed. This led to Lucas writing the character of Grand Moff Tarkin, a high-level Imperial governor and commander of the destructive battlestation of the planet, Death Star. Lucas feels a talented actor is needed to play a role and says Peter Cushing is his first choice for that part. However, Cushing has claimed that Lucas originally approached him to play the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, and just decided to throw it away as Tarkin after the two met. Cushing says he prefers to play Kenobi rather than Tarkin, but can not do it because he's going to be filming another movie role when Star Wars is filming, and Tarkin's scenes take less time to film than those of the Kenobi role the greater one. Though not a fan of science-specific fiction, Cushing accepts that part because he believes his listeners will love Star Wars and are happy to see it in the role.
Cushing joined the cast in May 1976, and the scene was filmed at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood. Along with Alec Guinness, who eventually acted as Kenobi, Cushing was one of the most famous actors at the time appearing in Star Wars as the rest of the cast is still relatively unknown. As a result, Cushing is paid a larger daily salary than most of his fellow players, earning £ 2,000 per day compared to a $ 1,000 weekly salary for Mark Hamill, $ 850 for Carrie Fisher and $ 750 for Harrison Ford, who plays protagonist Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia Organa and Han Solo, respectively. When Cushing smokes between shots, he wears a white glove so that the make-up artists do not have to deal with the nicotine stains on his fingers. Like Guinness, Cushing had trouble with some technical jargon in his dialogue, and stated that he did not understand all the words he was saying. Nevertheless, he works hard to master his lines so that he sounds natural and his character will appear intelligent and confident.
Cushing gets along well with the rest of the cast, especially his old co-star David Prowse (who plays Darth Vader) and Fisher, who appeared in his first lead role as Princess Leia Organa. The scene in which Tarkin and Organa appeared together in the Death Star, just before the destruction of the Alderaan planet, was the first scene with the main dialogue Fisher filming for Star Wars. Cushing consciously tries to define their character as an opposite representation of good and evil, and the actor purposely stands in the shadows so that the light will shine on Fisher's face. Fisher says he really likes Cushing so it's hard to act as if he hates Tarkin, and he has to replace others in his mind to gather feelings. Although one of his phrases refers to Tarkin's "stench", he says the actual actor smells like "linen and lavender," something Cushing is associated with his tendency to wash and brush his teeth thoroughly before filming because of his awareness of bad breath..
During the filming of Star Wars , Cushing was given a pair of boots too small to accommodate the size of a twelve-foot actor. This caused a lot of pain for her during the photo shoot, but the costume designer did not have enough time to buy her another pair. As a result, he asks Lucas to film more close-range photos from the waist up and, after the director agrees, Cushing wore sandals during a scene where his legs were invisible. During practice, Lucas initially planned for Tarkin and Vader to use a giant screen filled with representations of computer architecture from the alleys to monitor the existence of Skywalker, Solo and Organa. Although the idea was eventually abandoned before the filming began, Cushing and Prowse coached the scenes in a set built by computer animation artist Larry Cuba. The Cushing close-up shot above the Death Star, shown just before the battlestation is destroyed, is actually an extra recording taken from scenes that were previously shot with Cushing that did not make the last movie. During production, Lucas decided to add the photos, along with a second unit record of the Death Star shooters preparing to shoot, to add to the tension on the movie's space fighting scenes.
When Star Wars was first released in 1977, most of the early ads called Tarkin Cushing the main antagonist of the film, not Vader; Cushing was very pleased with the last movie, and he claimed his only disappointment was that Tarkin was killed and could not appear in the next sequel. The film gave Cushing the highest amount of visibility throughout his career, and helped inspire young audiences to watch his older movies.
For 2016 Rogue One movies, CGI and digital-repurposed-archive recordings are used to insert Cushing images from the original film on the face of actor Guy Henry. Henry provides retrieval and voice work set with added reference material and charts his performance like a digital body mask. The owner of the Cushing plantation is deeply involved with the creation that occurred more than twenty years after his death. The extensive use of CGI to "revive" an actor who died several decades ago created a lot of controversy about ethics in the form of dead actor. Joyce Broughton, former Cushing's secretary, has agreed to create Cushing in the film. After attending the London premiere, he was reportedly "shocked" and "fascinated" by the effect of seeing Cushing on the screen again.
Next career and death
Toward the end of his career, Cushing appeared in the film and the role of critics is widely considered under his talent. Director John Carpenter approached him to appear in the horror film Halloween (1978) as Samuel Loomis, psychiatrist killer Michael Myers, but Cushing rejected the role. It was also rejected by Christopher Lee, and eventually went to Donald Pleasence, one of Cushing's former co-stars. Cushing made a cameo appearance as himself in a special Christmas 1980 organized by comedians Morecambe and Wise. In the comedy drama, Cushing complains that he has not been paid for the comedy drama he appeared in during the Morecambe and Wise performances in 1969. In 1983, Cushing appeared alongside co-stars Christopher Lee and Vincent Price at the House of the Long Shadows , a horror-parody film featuring Desi Arnaz, Jr. as a writer trying to write a gothic novel in a quiet Welsh house.
In 1984, Cushing appeared on the movie The Masks of Death, marking both of them the last time he would play Sherlock Holmes detective and the last show he'd gained as a primary collector. He appeared with actor John Mills as Watson, and both were recognized by critics for their strong chemistry and friendship. When both actors were in their seventies, screenwriter N.J. Crisp and executive producer Kevin Francis both try to portray them as two ancient men in a rapidly changing world. Cushing biographer Tony Earnshaw says Cushing's performance in The Masks of Death is arguably the best interpretation of the actor of the role, calling it "the peak time of life as a Holmes fan, and more than a quarter of a century of preparation for playing the character. most complex ". The last important role of Cushing's career was the 1984 comedy Top Secret! , 1984's fantasy film Sword of the Valiant and adventure movie 1986 Biggles: Adventure in Time In 1986, she appeared on the British television show Jim Fix It , where host Jimmy Savile will arrange guests' wishes for granted. Cushing hopes for a rose strain named after his wife, and Savile arranges "Helen Cushing Rose" to be planted at Wheatcroft Rose Garden in Edwalton, Nottinghamshire.
During this period, Cushing was honored by the British Film Institute, who invited him in 1986 to give a lecture at the National Film Theater. He also held An Evening with Peter Cushing at St. Edmund's Public School in Canterbury to raise money for the local Cancer Care Unit. In 1987, Cushing painted watercolors were received by Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex and auctioned at a charity event held to raise funds for the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. Also that year, the Cushing sketch taken from Sherlock Holmes was accepted as the official logo of the Northern Musgraves Sherlock Holmes Society.
Cushing wrote two autobiographies, Peter Cushing: An Autobiography (1986) and Past Forgetting: Memoirs of the Hammer Years (1988). Cushing wrote the books as what he called "a form of therapy to stop me from going mad, crazy babbling" following the loss of his wife. His old friend and fellow star, John Mills, encouraged him to publish his memoirs as a way of overcoming the closed state that Cushing had inserted into his death. In 1989, he was made a British Royal Order Official for his contribution to the British film industry. Cushing also wrote a children's book titled The Bois Saga , a story based on British history. Published in 1994, originally written specifically for Cushing's old secretary daughter and friend Joyce Broughton, to help her overcome the problem of reading due to dyslexia. It was Broughton who encouraged Cushing for the book to be published. Her final acting work recounts, along with Christopher Lee, the documentary Hammer Film Meat and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1994), which was recorded just weeks before Cushing's death. Produced by American writer and director Ted Newsom, his contribution was recorded in Canterbury, near his home. Lee admitted Cushing's health faded and did his best to keep his friend's spirit, but Lee later claimed he had a hunch that it would be the last time he saw Cushing live, which proved true.
In May 1982, Cushing was diagnosed with prostate cancer. She was rushed to Kent and Canterbury Hospital when her left eye swelled to nearly three times her normal size, a side effect of cancer. The doctor decides he has the age of twelve to eighteen months to live, and that his left eye may be missing. However, to their surprise, Cushing recovered well enough to be released from the hospital, and although his health continued to decline gradually, Cushing lived another thirteen years without surgery or chemotherapy treatment. During this period, he lived with Joyce Broughton and his family at their home in Hartley, Kent. In August 1994 Cushing entered Pilgrim Hospital in Canterbury, where he died on August 11 at the age of eighty-one. In accordance with his wishes, Cushing held a low-key cemetery with family and friends, although hundreds of fans and sympathizers came to Canterbury to pay their respects. In January 1995, a memorial service was held at The Actor's Church in Covent Garden, with addresses given by Christopher Lee, Kevin Francis, Ron Moody and James Bree. In total, Cushing appeared in over 100 movies throughout his career.
In an interview included in the DVD release of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), Lee said of his friend's death: "I do not want to sound grim, but at some point in your life, everyone of you will notice that in your life there is one person, one friend you love and dear, that person is so close to you that you can share some things with him only For example, you can call that friend, and from the first crazy laughs or other jokes, you will know who is at the other end of the line.We often do that with him, and then when that person leaves, there will be nothing like that in your life again. "Some filmmakers and actors claim to be influenced by Peter Cushing, including actor Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead in the horror movie Hellraiser, and John Carpenter, who directed films like Halloween > (1978), ri New York (1981) and The Thing (1982). Director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp both said the depiction of Ichabod Crane at Sleepy Hollow was meant to resemble the old Cushing horror movie show. In 2008, fourteen years after his death, Cushing's image was used in a set of stamps issued by the Royal Mail in honor of Hammer Studios' movie on the fiftieth anniversary of the Dracula release.
Maps Peter Cushing
Personal life
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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