Colin Tapley - Post World War II Film Career

Post World War II Film Career

After demobilisation in 1945 Colin married, Patricia Hambro Lyon, whom he had met during the war, and returned to his native New Zealand for the first time since 1933. He soon tired of life in New Zealand and returned to Hollywood to re-establish his film career. Legendary American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer Cecil B. DeMille personally gave him a role in his new film, Samson and Delilah, which Colin accepted, playing the part of a prince. Shortly after finishing Samson and Delilah Colin and Patsy, finding that Hollywood had changed for the worse, returned to England. Due to Colin's upper class accent he found no trouble finding work in the film industry; it was also the boom period of British war films in the '50s and '60s and he landed the role of a lifetime, the revered war epic The Dam Busters film of 1955 where along side Michael Redgrave he played William Glanville who helped to develop the famous bouncing bomb. From 1954 to 1958, he appeared as a police inspector named Parker, working with his good friend Donald Gray, in the detective television series The Vise (later known as Saber of London). He was subsequently typecast and would play a police officer in many of his later films. His acting career ended in 1983, at the age of 74, and he retired to Coates, Gloucestershire with his wife Patsie.

Read more about this topic:  Colin Tapley

Famous quotes containing the words post, world, war, film and/or career:

    My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes discuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel—not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.
    Clara Barton (1821–1912)

    All things change, nothing is extinguished.... There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.
    Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)

    Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man, that is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.
    Frieda Lawrence (1879–1956)

    Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man’s ken now are but poor- mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and cliché-shouting publicity agents.
    Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance,
    Ignorance bringing them nearer to death,
    But nearness to death no nearer to God.
    Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)

    Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.
    Ann Oakley (b. 1944)