by Stephen Vagg
We’ve never done a married couple before in this series, but it seems appropriate for the team of Susan Shaw and Bonar Colleano, as both were going to become film stars before and during their marriage, but neither made it. Neither are that famous today, which is surprising when you consider that they had an exciting private life, full of drama, sex, violence and intrigue, plus the odd cult-y movie. Possibly the British film industry doesn’t celebrate its hot messes the way Hollywood does.
We’ll start with Susan Shaw. She was born in 1929 under the fantastic real name of Patsy Sloots. Patsy didn’t have an easy upbringing – working class family, dad ran off with another woman; she was very pretty but that led to plenty of unwanted attention – people nicknamed her “gaol bait” and lots of married men tried to play tickle games with her. Patsy left home early to get a job, perhaps unwisely in hindsight, and was working as a typist at the Ministry of Information when her beauty caught the eye of a photographer, Jack Emerald, who recommended her to an agent. The agent changed her name to Pat Fanshawe and got her a small part in London Town (1946) when she was just fifteen. She met Sydney Box, producer at Rank, who was taken by Sloots/Fanshawe, signed her up to the Rank Organisation, changed her name to Susan Shaw, and sent her to the legendary Rank Charm School (aka Company of Youth), where pretty male and female actors would learn how to walk with books on their head and speak nicely. Other grads of this school would include Claire Bloom, Diana Dors and Christopher Lee, so while it’s easy to make fun of it, and we should make fun of it, the legacy isn’t bad.
Anyway, the British film industry was booming at the time and Rank put Shaw in a series of small parts for pretty girls: Walking on Air (1946), The Upturned Glass (1947), Jassy (1947), Holiday Camp (1948), It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and My Brother’s Keeper (1948). Then she received a big break when Pat Roc – an attractive starlet whose off-screen amorous activities led to her being nicknamed “bed rock” – quit (or was fired from) London Belongs to Me (1948), so Shaw stepped in instead.
Rank promoted Shaw to the lead in To the Public Danger (1948), based on a famous radio play by Patrick Hamilton, and gave her a key role in Quartet (1948), where she’s very good, though far too attractive to be believably married on-screen to George Cole.
By this stage, Shaw’s speciality was probably best described as “hot daughter of a working class family”, which is what she played in a series of movies about the Huggett family: Here Come the Huggetts (1948), A Vote for Huggett (1948) and The Huggetts Abroad (1949). These were all directed by Ken Annakin, who despite being married, had a hot fling/sexually harassed Shaw during filming (he would deliberately organise complicated tracking shots to give him time to hook up with Shaw while it was being lit). Annakin told his wife that he was in love with Shaw and the wife just laughed at him; the director-star relationship didn’t last much longer but neither did Annakin’s marriage. Incidentally, the Huggett films started strongly – Here Come the Huggetts is terrific because of the cast, notably Diana Dors – but get worse as they go along, a tribute to the commercial ineptitude of Sydney Box’s Gainsborough Pictures (the last one has the Huggetts emigrating to South Africa by… driving across the desert).
Shaw was in It’s Just Not Cricket (1949) – again outshone by Diana Dors who had a smaller part (director Alfred Roome later said he wished he’d been able to cut out Shaw’s part altogether). She was also in Marry Me (1949) and Train of Events (1949). Around this time, she married actor Albert Lieven, who was 23 years older than her. In fairness, the marriage was accelerated by the fact that she was pregnant to him; they had a daughter, Anna, who later did some acting.
Shaw was in Waterfront (1950) with Richard Burton. Rank forced Anthony Asquith to use her in The Woman in Question (1950) with Jean Kent. Shaw was in There is Another Sun (1951), with Laurence Harvey with whom she had an affair. By this stage, it was clear that Shaw was an immensely attractive, competent actor, but she lacked X factor – she didn’t have, say, Diana Dors’ vivacity, Margaret Lockwood’s empathy, or Anna Neagle’s all-round talent. She wasn’t going to be a star, at least not in the British industry of the 1950s which was very male focused. But she was solid, gorgeous, and there was no reason that she couldn’t have had a long career.
Then Shaw played the female lead in Pool of London (1951), which starred Bonar Colleano. They had a steamy affair, the Rank Organisation suggested she break it off, she didn’t, so they dropped her.
Who was this irresistible man?
Colleano was born in 1924, under the name Bonar Sullivan – he took the surname of his uncle, Australian circus performer Con Colleano; Bonar’s dad was a high wire artist and his mother was an acrobat – there was even a recent Australian documentary about the family called The Colleano Heart.
Bonar was born in New York and started acting when he was five; he moved to England when he was 12, where he performed with his family on various stages, mostly circuses and revues. He hung on to his American accent for the rest of his life, which proved useful for his career, as it gave him a niche. Colleano starred in the revue Sweet and Lowdown in London and then was cast on stage as an American soldier in While the Sun Shines. Colleano would play variations of this part for the rest of his career – wisecracking, energetic, gun-chewing, jitterbugging, lecherous.
He made his film debut in just such a role, as an American airman in The Way to the Stars (1945), a huge hit at the local box-office. He followed it with Wanted for Murder (1946), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and the film version of While the Sun Shines (1947). He married actor Tamara Lees; did Burlesque and A Bell for Adano on stage, and had his own radio show.
Like Shaw, Colleano benefited from the post-war boom in British filmmaking, appearing in One Night with You (1948); this was a musical vehicle for Nino Martini, with Pat Roc as the female lead. He followed it with: Good Time Girl (1948), as a deserter; Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), as a comic relief American (starring Mr Susan Shaw, Albert Lieven); Broken Journey (1948); Once a Jolly Swagman (1949), second-billed to Dirk Bogarde; Give Us This Day (1949), shot in Britain but entirely set in America directed by blacklisted Edward Dmytryk.
Colleano’s career received a further boost when cast as Stanley Kowalski in the English stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Laurence Olivier and starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche. Leigh stole the reviews (not to mention the role in the film version) but Colleano did not disgrace himself, and his stocks rose within the industry.
He replaced Dermot Walsh in Dance Hall (1950) during filming, then was top-billed in Pool of London (1951) with Susan Shaw, although the film is best remembered for co-star Earl Cameron; the movie was a hit, incidentally. As mentioned, Shaw and Colleano began an affair, which resulted in both leaving their spouses and getting married in 1954. They would have one child, a son.
After Shaw met Colleano, her career went into decline – or, rather, she never kicked on the way people thought, in part because she took a back seat to her husband, but also because there were so few decent movie roles for British actresses in the 1950s. She mostly wound up in crime films: Wide Boy (1952), top-billed, and very good (based on a story by Australian Rex Rienits); A Killer Walks (1952); The Large Rope (1954) and Small Town Story (1953) both with Donald Houston. She would be in the occasional “A” but in small roles – The Intruder (1953), The Good Die Young (1954) (with ex Laurence Harvey), Time is My Enemy (1954), Davy (1958). She continued to play the leads in cheap “B”s: Stolen Time (1955); Stock Car (1955); Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956), as a woman literally from Venus; The Diplomatic Corpse (1958), a last-minute replacement for Ursula Howell; and Chain of Events (1958). She also did lots of television and theatre including a 1952 stage version of the film The Blue Lamp with Colleano.
Colleano’s career went much better than his wife’s, though it never hit the heights that at one stage it seemed he might. He had plenty of energy and talent, but he was not a conventional handsome leading man, and better suited for comedic/villainous turns rather than romance. This isn’t in itself fatal (eg Humphrey Bogart) but it did make things harder – and while the American accent was useful for getting roles in Britain as “the American”, it would limit him from receiving the opportunities of, say, Kenneth More or Dirk Bogarde. He never found the dream part that, say, Eddie Constantine (an American) did in France. However, this meant he had a great deal of versatility.
After A Tale of Five Cities (1951), where Colleano was top-billed, he went to the US and starred in Stanley Kramer’s Eight Iron Men (1952), directed again by Edward Dmytryk; this might have launched him in Hollywood, but the film flopped and he went home.
Colleano was Diana Dors’ leading man in Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (1953), then was the lead in a crime thriller, Escape by Night (1953). He supported Lana Turner in MGM’s European-shot dud Flame and the Flesh (1954), then started drifting down the cast list: Time is My Enemy (1954) with his wife; The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1955), as a Canadian cunningly named “Canada”; the wonderful gangster flick based on the Scottish play, Joe MacBeth (1955), in the Macduff part; and Stars in Your Eyes (1956), a musical. He regularly appeared in cabarets and on television, and was in a string of movies for Warwick Productions, who made British films focused on the international market: Zarak (1956), as a bandit chief; Interpol (1957); Fire Down Below (1957), as another American sailor; No Time to Die (1958), excellent as “the Pole”, clearly suffering PTSD and keen to kill Germans; and The Man Inside (1958). He was the lead in some second-tier features: Them Nice Americans (1958) and Death Over My Shoulder (1958). There is every reason to expect he would have worked constantly as a character actor for the rest of his career.
The private lives of Shaw and Colleano were hectic. Both liked to drink and the relationship was combustible; she later wrote that he boozed and regularly cheated on her. He was cited as co-respondent in two divorce cases. Colleano was also bad with money. In 1950, he had a court judgement entered against him to repay a loan to some moneylenders. In May 1958, a court heard that Colleano owed an estimated £8,087 to the Inland Revenue for income tax and had assets of only £367. He revealed that he earned around £9,900 a year but would spend it on things like £875 for a Mediterranean cruise and £700 bringing Shaw to Trinidad when making Fire Down Below.
Colleano continued to appear as Americans in American plays, though the shows were dogged by bad luck. On the opening night of A Hatful of Rain – in which Colleano played a drug addict – his father collapsed during the show in the stalls and died on the way to hospital. Then while driving home from a stage production of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? in Liverpool, Colleano crashed his sports car; he drove through a corrugated iron fence and smashed into an embankment behind it, the steering wheel punctured his chest and Colleano died. A fellow actor, Michael Balfour, who was riding in the car, survived with injuries. (The year before, Colleano had crashed his car into the back of a bus and been fined £50; it came out that he had five previous convictions for motoring offences. In 1954, he had lost his driving licence for 12 months.)
Susan Shaw had to identify her husband’s corpse. The family requested a Requiem Mass, but it was denied because he had been divorced. At his funeral, Bonar’s mother Ruby fainted while the coffin was being lowered into the grave. Actors Bebe Daniel and Ben Lyon had to carry her out. A charity football match was held to raise money for Shaw and her two children (one to Lieven, one to Colleano) at Hayes Stadium in Middlesex with Tommy Yeardye, Stanley Baker, Alma Cogan, and Alfie Bass. Paddy Chayefsky sent Shaw $500 to help.
Shaw struggled badly in the aftermath of Colleano’s death. Her film roles got smaller and smaller: Carry on Nurse (1959), The Big Day (1960), Stranglehold (1963), The Switch (1964). She had an affair with a married producer, Ronald Rowson, who left his wife for Shaw; they got married then split up 35 days later when she left him for another boyfriend, writer Stanley Mann. Shaw gave up custody of her son to Colleano’s mother and focused on her drinking. She died of cirrhosis of the liver in November 1978, having outlived Colleano’s son to another woman, Robbie McIntosh, a founding member of the Average White Band, who died of a heroin overdose when only 24.
When Shaw died, her old drinking friends were going to cover the cost of her funeral. Charlie Stevenson, landlord of the Swiss Tavern in Old Compton Street, said, “She came in here every day. This is Soho. We loved her and we weren’t going to see her buried in a pauper’s grave.” However, the Rank Organisation stepped in to pay the costs.
Susan Shaw and Bonar Colleano were both talented, attractive performers who weren’t quite stars but had entirely decent CVs. Both had plenty of leads in low-budget crime thrillers that dominated British output in the 1950s, and found their way into the occasional “A”. Neither should have touched alcohol, both were bad with money, and he shouldn’t have driven cars. The sex was probably really good. A lot of their movies are worth seeing.
