by Stephen Vagg
As a spin-off of our series on movie star cold streaks, we thought it was time to profile actors who didn’t quite become movie stars. Let’s start with Tony Wright, who for a few years had the Rank Organisation convinced that he was the next big thing.
(Warning: this article discusses suicide)
In October 1956, John Davis, head of the Rank Organisation, gave an interview where he listed his actors under contract who he thought had the potential to become international movie stars: Peter Finch, Kay Kendall, Jeannie Carson, Virginia McKenna, Belinda Lee, Michael Craig, Maureen Swanson, Kenneth More and Tony Wright.
It was an, ahem, interesting collection of names. The ones who did become big stars were Finch, but only after he freed himself of Rank, and Kenneth More, whose career was eventually wrecked by Davis (as we discussed here). Kendall might have become an international star but for her death from leukaemia in 1959; Belinda Lee became a genuine movie star in Italy and Germany before her untimely death in a car crash in 1961. Maureen Swanson retired from acting in 1961 to marry into the aristocracy. Carson, an experienced stage performer, never quite made it in films, while McKenna had a few genuine hits (Carve Her Name with Pride, Born Free) but her life detoured more into animal conservation. Craig never became a star, although he had a very good career as an actor and writer in England and Australia.
That leaves Tony Wright, perhaps the most obscure name on Davis’ list. We mentioned Wright briefly in our piece on Janet Munro, but thought Wright was worth his own article because his career was so random. So anonymous. So forgotten. Despite the most powerful man in the British film industry having a talent crush on him.
Wright was born in 1925, the son of a French-British actor writer called Hugh E. Wright. Tony tried his hand at a few different careers – the navy, chicken farming, gold mining, sailor – before deciding to try his luck at acting in the early 1950s, originally in South African rep theatre, then in England.
Wright wasn’t much of an actor, but was a good looking guy with a nice build, who didn’t mind taking his shirt off – these were a dime a dozen in Hollywood, but not so common in Britain where male actors tended to be pasty; he was also blonde, which was a little different (male film stars at the time tended not to be, with a few exceptions such as Alan Ladd).
Wright’s first film of note was Bad Blonde aka The Flanagan Boy (1953), a cheap Hammer “B” starring legendary Barbara Payton (one of the all-time great “hot messes” in Hollywood history), where Wright played a manipulated boxer.
It was a splashy part, but only a Hammer B picture, and there seemed to be no further offers. Wright kept busy in theatre, including a long stint in Seagulls over Sorrento. Then he received another lucky break.
British writer Peter Cheyney had written several novels featuring detective Lemmy Caution; these were popular in France and had led to a series of successful French film adaptations starring American actor Eddie Constantine as Caution. An enterprising filmmaker, Willy Rozier, decided there might be a market for some French movies based on another Cheyney creation, private eye Slim Callaghan, featuring an imported actor in the role. He originally hoped to cast Charlie Chaplin Jnr but the latter pulled out and Wright – who could speak French – got the gig instead. The movies were not as successful as Constantine’s Lemmy Caution pictures, but Wright had every right to believe that the Acting Gods were with him: only a few years in the game and he was playing film leads.
The Rank Organisation put Wright in a Frankie Howerd comedy, Jumping for Joy (1956) and were sufficiently impressed to sign him to a long term contract in January 1956. One journalist said Wright “looks like being the most virile discovery for British films since Anthony Steel. And our films need his type very badly – every inch a man without being an Adonis, well built, intelligent, much travelled and with a great deal of the Kenneth More type of humour about him.”
Wright’s nickname at Rank – pushed by publicists – was “Mister Beefcake”. Hollywood studios at the time were having a lot of success with beefcake stars such as Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter – presumably John Davis thought Wright could be Rank’s equivalent. The fact that the actor had enjoyed success in France would also have been appealing at a time when Davis’ thoughts were increasingly turning to overseas markets.
In February 1956, John Davis of Rank announced that the studio would make 20 feature films at a cost of three million pounds, which would showcase Rank’s roster of contact stars. To give some idea of John Davis’ star spotting abilities, Rank’s contract stars included names like Anna Paige, Eunice Grayson, Belinda Lee, June Thorburn, Muriel Pavlow, Beverly Brooks, Susan Beaumont, Virginia McKenna, Josephine Griffin, Jill Adams, Jill Ireland, Maureen Swanson, Norman Wisdom, Peter Finch, Michael Craig, Anthony Steel, John Gregson, Ian Carmichael, Terence London, Dirk Bogarde, David Knight and Tony Wright.
Rank gave Wright a smallish role in Jacqueline (1956), a drama about a plucky brat who helps her dad (John Gregson) – the movie is one of the many examples that Rank didn’t consistently know how to make a commercial film. Still, Davis must’ve liked Wright’s work because he insisted that director Roy Ward Baker use Wright in Tiger in the Smoke (1956). This was a thriller about a woman (Muriel Pavlow) about to re-marry (Donald Sinden) when her heretofore-presumed-dead-and-very-evil husband reappears. Baker had hoped the husband role would be played by someone like Stanley Baker or Jack Hawkins but was forced to take Wright. The movie starts terrifically in a fog-drenched London but gets worse as it goes along, in part because of Wright’s performance.
Baker later reflected: “Sometimes people get picked up for a part, a star part, in a good movie, and they’re just not right for it, and they can’t do it, and it ruins them for the rest of their lives. It blows it completely for them. Tony Wright did do, in fact, a lot of work after that, but he never really caught on as a major personality… It’s too bad, and it wrecked the film, and it wrecked this poor man’s career.”
Wright received a lot of publicity when he married young actor Janet Munro. According to Munro, in a remarkably unguarded 1959 article, Wright asked for her to be given away by Rank’s head of production Earl St John instead of Munro’s actual father, and their honeymoon was spent in France where Wright was making Seven Thunders (1957) with Stephen Boyd.
Thunders is a fascinating misfire, with Wright and Boyd playing escaped POWs in wartime Marseilles, dealing with a serial killing doctor (James Robertson Justice) – either plot of which might’ve made a decent movie, but which mix uneasily.
Munro portrayed Wright as a controlling narcissist driven by insecurity over his acting abilities. She recalled watching him in a movie – presumably Seven Thunders – and thinking “He wasn’t a very good actor, but he did have a magnificent physique and exciting look”.
However, Munro also felt “Looks fade so quickly and I could tell he wasn’t as handsome now as he was in his earlier movie. Nor was his body as supple… There was little talent to back up Tony’s looks.”
Neither Jacqueline, Tiger or Seven Thunders did well at the box office. Wright was loaned out to make a B picture, The Spaniards Cure, then in May 1958 it was reported that he was terminating his seven-year contract with Rank because he “wasn’t getting enough work”. We doubt that was his decision.
By this stage, Wright’s marriage to Munro had imploded, in part because he couldn’t handle her blossoming career (her affair with Gerry O’Hara would not have helped). In June, Wright took an overdose of sleeping tablets at home but called film director Brian Desmond Hurst asking for help, and made it to the hospital in time. A few days later, Wright was recuperating at the house of Rank’s head of production, Earl St John, when he collapsed again and had to be sent to hospital once more. He and Munro never got back together – after their official divorce in 1960 he married the daughter of writer Lesley Storm.
Post-Rank, Tony Wright was considered enough of a “name” to star in British B crime films that were prevalent in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s – titles like In the Wake of a Stranger, The House in Marsh Road, The Rough and the Smooth, Attempt to Kill and Faces in the Dark.
He did some comedies such as Broth of a Boy with Barry Fitzgerald and And the Same to You, and made films abroad including another Slim Callaghan picture in France and Journey Unto Nowhere in South Africa. None of these cut-through and Wright’s career drifted off into bit parts and guest roles on television.
His last years are clouded in mystery – Wright died in 1986 after a fall at his London home, aged only 60 years old. We’ve read that he had a drinking problem but that’s not confirmed.
Of all the odd “shooting comet” stars of the British film industry, Tony Wright is perhaps the oddest. Limited training. Limited ability. Even his blonde hair was unusual. Yet, for a short time there, he had the lead in a franchise, the backing of Britain’s biggest studio and the love of the most talented young actress in the country. Then it went away.
