Marius Goring

Marius Goring
Marius Goring as Julian Craster in The Red Shoes (1948)
Born	23 May 1912(1912-05-23) Newport, Isle of Wight, England
Died	30 September 1998 (aged 86) Rushlake Green, Heathfield, East Sussex, England, UK
Occupation	actor
Years active	1936–1990
Spouse(s)	Prudence Fitzgerald (1977-1998) (his death) Lucie Mannheim (1941-1976) (her death) Mary Westwood Steel (1931-1941) (divorced) 1 child

Marius Goring CBE (23 May 1912 – 30 September 1998) was an English stage and cinema actor. He is most often remembered for the four films he did with Powell & Pressburger, particularly as Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death and as Julian Craster in The Red Shoes. He regularly performed French and German roles.

Goring was born in Newport, Isle of Wight, England, the son of Doctor Charles Goring and Kate Macdonald. After attending The Perse School in Cambridge, where he became a friend of an older boy, the future documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings, he studied at the universities of Cambridge, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Paris.^[1] He first performed professionally in 1927.^[1] His early stage career included appearances at the Old Vic, Sadler's Wells, Stratford and several European tours; he was fluent in French and German. He first worked in the West End in a 1934 revival of Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance at the Shaftesbury Theatre. During the 1930s, he played a variety of Shakespearean roles, including Feste in Twelfth Night (1937), Macbeth and Romeo, in addition to Trip in Sheridan's The School for Scandal. In 1929, he became a founding member of British Equity, the actor's union, and became its president from 1963-1965, and again from 1975-1982. Goring's relationship with his union was fraught: he took it to litigation on three occasions. In 1992 he unsuccessfully sought to end the block on the sale of radio and television programmes to (the still) apartheid South Africa.^[1]

Conductor 71 (Marius Goring, holding book)
and Peter Carter (David Niven).

During the war he joined the army, becoming supervisor of BBC radio productions broadcasting to Germany and continued to act under the name Charles Richardson, because of the association of his name with Hermann Göring. In 1941, he married his second wife, the actress Lucie Mannheim. She died in 1976, and the next year Goring married television producer Prudence Fitzgerald, who survived him.

His TV work included starring as Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (ITV, 1955), a series which he also co-wrote/produced; Theodore Maxtible in the Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks (BBC, 1967); Title role in The Expert (BBC, 1968 - 1976), George V in Edward and Mrs Simpson (Thames, 1980); and The Old Men at the Zoo (BBC, 1983).

Goring's voice provides the narration of the sound and light show performed regularly in the evening at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979 and awarded a CBE in 1991. He died from cancer in 1998 aged 86.

References

Selected filmography

• The Spy in Black* (1939)
• A Matter of Life and Death* (1946)
• Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1948)
• The Red Shoes* (1948)
• Odette (1950)
• Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)
• Circle of Danger (1951)
• So Little Time (1952)
• The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1952)
• The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
• The Adventures of Quentin Durward (1955)
• Ill Met by Moonlight * (1957)
• I Was Monty's Double (1958)
• The Unstoppable Man (1960)
• Exodus (1960)
• The Devil's Daffodil (1961)
• Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)
• First Love (1970)

* Powell and Pressburger productions

External links

• The British Film Institute profile
• Marius Goring at the Internet Movie Database