Quatermass and The Pit - Cast and Crew

Cast and Crew

For the third time in as many serials the title role was played by a different actor, with André Morell being cast. The part had initially been offered to Alec Clunes, who declined the role. Morell had a reputation for playing authority figures, such as Colonel Green in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and had previously worked with Kneale and Cartier when he appeared as O'Brien in their BBC television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954). He had also been the first actor ever offered the part of Quatermass, for the original serial The Quatermass Experiment in 1953, but on that occasion he had turned the part down. Morell's portrayal of Quatermass has been described as the definitive interpretation of the character. The actor found that it became the role for which he was best remembered by the public in later years.

Colonel Breen was played by Anthony Bushell, who was known for various similar military roles — including, another bomb disposal officer in The Small Back Room (1949) — and preferred to be addressed as "Major Bushell", the rank he held during World War II. He had also worked as Laurence Olivier's manager and as a television producer. Before Quatermass and the Pit he had most recently been seen as Arthur Rostron in the film version of A Night to Remember (1958).

Roney was played by Canadian actor Cec Linder. Linder had appeared in various American television series, such as Studio One, and later appeared in Lolita (1962) and the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964). John Stratton played Captain Potter; later he become a regular guest actor in a number of British television series. Christine Finn played the other main character, Barbara Judd; she later voiced various characters in the popular 1960s children's television series Thunderbirds.

For the first time, Kneale used a character from a previous serial other than Quatermass himself. He brought back the journalist James Fullalove from The Quatermass Experiment, and the production team had hoped that actor Paul Whitsun-Jones would be able to reprise the part. Whitsun-Jones was unavailable to appear, so Brian Worth was cast instead. Appearing as an army sergeant was Michael Ripper; Ripper had been in Hammer Film Productions' adaptation of the second Quatermass serial, Quatermass 2, the previous year. He had the distinction of appearing in more Hammer films than any other actor.

Nigel Kneale continued his successful career writing for film and television after Quatermass and the Pit. He wrote feature film screenplays for The Entertainer (1960), H.M.S. Defiant (1962) and The First Men in the Moon (1964). He returned to the Quatermass character for a final time with Quatermass (1979), a serial for the ITV network. He continued writing for television until the 1990s, and Quatermass and the Pit was often cited as the most successful work of his long career.

Quatermass and the Pit was the last original production upon which Kneale collaborated with Rudolph Cartier, although Cartier did direct a new version of Kneale's 1953 adaptation of Wuthering Heights for the BBC in 1962. Other later successes for Cartier were Anna Karenina (1961) and Lee Oswald: Assassin (1966).