by Stephen Vagg
A spin off from our series on movie star cold streaks, we examine actors who never quite became movie stars.
The recent piece on the 1957 Robbery Under Arms prompted us to look back on the career of its leading man, Ronald Lewis. Originally, we thought he might be a candidate for a movie star cold streak, but Lewis never really became a star. However, he almost became one – indeed, he played the lead roles in several key films, some quite famous, before his life and career took a disastrous turn. Lewis is mostly unknown today, which makes him catnip for this magazine.
Lewis was Welsh, born in Port Talbot in 1928. Port Talbot isn’t the biggest town in the world, or even Wales. but for some reason it’s fertile soil for movie stars – other actors to hail from the region include Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Rob Brydon, and Michael Sheen.
Lewis attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and didn’t take long to find work after graduation – he was handsome and could act, with a beautiful speaking voice. There was a lot of work around for actors at the time, too, with Britain having a healthy theatre, film and television sector. Lewis went back and forth between all three mediums almost immediately – for instance, he was in the stage and film versions of The Square Ring, written by Australia’s own Ralph Peterson.
Lewis’ early film roles were small but in classy projects – a “native” in The Beachcomber (1954) with Robert Newton, a warden in Alec Guiness’s The Prisoner (1955), Aeneas in the forgotten Robert Wise epic Helen of Troy (1955). What really got his career going, however, was a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra on stage under the direction of none other than Peter Hall – this led to Alex Korda signing Lewis to a long-term contract in 1955.
Korda was probably the shrewdest British film mogul at the time, for all his financial prolificacy, and it was a coup for Lewis to be associated with him. Korda handled the actor skilfully, putting him in (or, at least, letting him appear in) a series of quality projects. Lewis played a “native” again in a Noel Coward stage play, the reactionary comedy South Sea Bubble, appearing alongside Vivien Leigh (Lewis’ role was originally intended for Australia’s Peter Finch); he was one of the friends of hero Anthony Steel in Korda’s entertaining Four Feathers remake, Storm Over the Nile (1956), and among several promising young male actors in a patrol-under-siege film, A Hill in Korea (1956).
Korda also loaned Lewis to the Woolf brothers to play the lead in the unfunny-now-but-not-then comedy Sailor Beware! (1956). These were all strong credits – Storm Over the Nile and Sailor Beware! were big hits, and A Hill in Korea, while a box office disappointment, is definitely worth watching, especially for its an astonishing array of future stars in its cast, including Robert Shaw, Stephen Boyd, Stanley Baker, and a young Michael Caine in his film debut (the film’s actual star was George Baker).
Caine described Lewis in his memoirs as “a goodlooking Welshman… who I thought had the chance to become a star” and a lot of industry observers at the time would have agreed.
Korda died in January 1956 and several months later the Rank Organisation took over Lewis’ contract (along with several other actors who had been signed to the producer, such as Shirley Eaton, James Robertson Justice, Mary Ure, and Australia’s own Keith Michell). Rank would’ve been delighted with Lewis – he fitted right into what that studio thought a film star was: handsome, tall, and muscular with Brylcreamed hair, rather like Anthony Steel. Indeed, not long after Lewis joined Rank, Steel, in a disastrous over-estimation of his own ability, quit the studio to run off to Hollywood with his new wife Anita Ekberg – this meant Lewis could step into a role originally pencilled in for Steel: a small-time crook in the thriller The Secret Place (1957). Lewis co-starred alongside some other Rank contract players including top billed Belinda Lee and David McCallum. The film was only a minor critical and commercial success, but time has been kind, and it was a strong way for Lewis to start with his new employers.
The studio then gave Lewis the plumb role of Dick Marston, the sexy anti-hero brother in Robbery Under Ams, billed after Peter Finch but having a far bigger part, with McCallum playing Lewis’ brother. The movie’s many, many flaws did not include poor work from Lewis, who deserved a better script. Rank put the actor in two other high profile movies: The Wind Cannot Read (1958), a “weepie” where Lewis superbly played the villain to Dirk Bogarde’s sensitive soldier, and Bachelor of Hearts (1958), an unfunny comedy where he was best friend to German Hardy Kruger studying at Cambridge. Lewis continued to appear on television during this time, getting excellent reviews for appearances in adaptations of Ibsen’s Ghost and Emlyn Williams’ Night Must Fall.
Then, in October 1958, Rank dropped Lewis from its list of contract players.
What happened?
To be fair, Rank was shedding several contract stars around this time – Patrick McGoohan and Belinda Lee were among those who also got the chop. And of Lewis’ films with Rank, only The Wind Cannot Read had become a big hit – and that movie’s popularity would have been attributed to Dirk Bogarde, not Lewis.
Still, Rank held on to some other leading men who hadn’t become stars, such as Michael Craig and Keith Michell, so there was likely another reason(s).
Maybe there was a temperament issue and/or personality clash – as we shall see, Lewis liked to drink, which might not have gone down well in an organisation founded by prim J. Arthur Rank. Maybe Lewis disliked being under contract. Maybe the studio felt Lewis’ persona was too limited – he did seem better suited to villains than ordinary leading men parts (it’s hard to imagine Lewis substituting for Dirk Bogarde in, say, a Doctor movie, the way Michael Craig did). Maybe Rank executives simply didn’t like him.
In November 1956, when Lewis was under contract to Rank, studio chairman John Davis announced that he expected the following contracted actors would be big international stars: Peter Finch, Kay Kendall, Jeannie Carson, Virginia McKenna, Belinda Lee, Michael Craig, Maureen Swanson, Kenneth More and Tony Wright. Lewis’ name wasn’t on that list, despite having a more impressive CV at that stage than Craig or Wright. So, Davis might have had some reservations about Lewis from the get-go.
Still, being dropped by a studio wasn’t as fatal to Ronald Lewis as it would have been in, say, Hollywood, because there was so much other work available in London. Lewis continued to receive excellent reviews for his television performances, and was a regular on stage in venues such as the Old Vic.
And if Rank didn’t want Lewis under permanent contract, the studio had no objections to him appearing in its films – Ralph Thomas, who’d directed Lewis in The Wind Cannot Read, cast him as the male lead in the nun drama Conspiracy of Hearts (1960), which was a huge hit. Val Guest then used the actor in The Full Treatment (1960), an entertaining thriller for Hammer; the director called Lewis and co-star Diane Cilento “two neglected stars… and I shall go all out to un-neglect them both.”
Hammer employed Lewis again in Taste of Fear (1961) where he’s excellent as a mysterious chauffeur; the film, stunningly directed by Seth Holt, was successful and kicked off the Hammer “psycho thriller” cycle. Taste of Fear was co-financed by Columbia, who brought Lewis to America to play a lead part in William Castle’s enjoyable Mr Sardonicus (1961). This was also popular, and an American career might’ve beckoned for Lewis – indeed, in hindsight, he probably should’ve stayed in LA, where his occasional Rank co-star David McCallum would have such success on The Man from UNCLE. Still, one can understand Lewis wanting to return to England where the film industry was still thriving.
And for a few years it seemed Ronald Lewis might still, possibly, become a star. Val Guest gave him another star part, in the interesting thriller Jigsaw (1962); the actor was the leading man in a pair of Gerald Thomas comedies, Twice Round the Daffodils (1962), and Nurse on Wheels (1962); and he had a support part in the classy Peter Ustinov drama Billy Budd (1962).
Then Lewis played the lead in two so-so low-budget action films, both made to exploit stock footage from another movie: Columbia’s Siege of the Saxons (1963) (using footage from 1954’s The Black Knight with Alan Ladd, which explains Lewis’ silly blonde wig) and Hammer’s The Brigand and Kandahar (1965) (opposite Oliver Reed, with footage from 1956’s Zarak).
And then, almost overnight, Ronald Lewis was done as a leading man in films.
Not one more lead.
A possible reason for is this is that in 1965 he was accused on two occasions of domestic violence against his wife. The first time involved Lewis also thumping a cop and being charged with drink driving, while the second resulted in Lewis being served with an arrest warrant at the theatre where he was appearing as Captain Hook in Peter Pan. This probably, and rightly, scared off producers.
Still, show business was notoriously apathetic towards domestic violence at the time, and the careers of many a wife-beating actor had survived public exposure (eg. Gig Young, John Ireland, Rod Taylor, Sean Connery, Richard Long, Cary Grant).
Lewis continued to be steadily employed until the late 1970s on stage and television – for instance, in 1967 he had a big stage hit in a comedy about swingers, The Flip Side (opposite then girlfriend Anna Massey) and from 1970 to 1972 he starred in his own sitcom, His and Hers, with Tim Brooke Taylor in support.
A more likely reason for Lewis disappearing from features is that there was a tidal shift in the British film industry during the sixties, and by the middle of the decade, he was likely too strongly associated with the Brylcreamed 1950s (regardless of his stage and television work) to receive any film offers. This is what happened to many of Lewis’ cinematic contemporaries such as John Gregson, Anthony Steel, Ian Carmichael, and Kenneth More – those who survived as film names, like Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Laurence Harvey, Oliver Reed and Peter Finch, had to reinvent themselves through working with top directors. Lewis had the talent to do this, but we are not sure that he had the discipline.
We have no idea when his drinking became problematic, but it clearly became worse through the seventies. He was appearing on stage as Claudius opposite Ian McKellen’s Hamlet in 1971 and McKellen said Lewis “occasionally took an unexplained night off”. Tim Piggot Smith, who understudied Lewis, explained in his memoirs that these were benders. On another occasion, Lewis collapsed in his dressing room minutes before appearing on stage in a revival of Sleuth.
Like many a self-destructive drunk (Tony Hancock, Robert Newton, Judy Garland), Lewis wound up in Australia towards the end of his career, appearing in The John Sullivan Story (1979). This was a telemovie spun off from the hugely popular Crawfords series The Sullivans, set during World War Two. Alan Hardy, associate producer on the project, recalled: “We developed the story in order to come up with a backstory which would justify Grace Sullivan leaving. Lorraine Bayley, who played Grace, wanted out. What if John Sullivan [her son, played by Andrew McFarlane] was alive… and screenwriter Brian Wright came up with the idea that John had been rescued from a shipwreck by the Partisans in Yugoslavia and had information but was injured and only his mother might be able to get him to remember. It was such a good story that we did it as a television movie shown on a Sunday night as the next ep in the series. David Stevens was to direct and one of his favourite ever actors was the dashing Ronald Lewis. He was cast on that basis but arrived, much to everyone’s shock and horror, a broken-down drunk with a drunk wife. No longer the handsome young Welshman. Somehow, he staggered unimpressively through it, went back to the UK and never worked again.”
Hardy was right – Ronald Lewis was unable to find work for the last 18 months of his life. He declared bankruptcy in 1981, and committed suicide in a boarding house in January 1982, taking an overdose of aspirin.
It’s hard to get sort of a fix on what sort of person Ronald Lewis was – even at his peak, he didn’t give that many interviews or pursue much publicity, at least not that we’ve been able to find. He was blessed with many fine attributes and delivered some very good film performances (especially in The Wind Cannot Read and Taste of Fear) – based on contemporary reviews, his work in live drama and theatre might have been even better. But he was an alcoholic, a drink driver and a wife beater. It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for him – that’s probably why no one really discusses him much anymore, despite his presence in some cult classics (Secret Place, Taste of Fear, Sardonicus). Sometimes, life can give you a decent hand of cards, but you still blow it.
The author would like Alan Hardy for his assistance with this article. Unless specified, all opinions are our own.
