Submitted by
Roger Mellor
Anthony Steel
(21 May 1920 - 21 March 2001)
The Independent, 29 March 2001
By Tom Vallance
Anthony Maitland Steel, actor:
born London 21 May 1919; married 1949 Juanita
Forbes (marriage dissolved 1954), 1956 Anita Ekberg (marriage dissolved
1959), 1964 Johanna Melcher (marriage dissolved); died Northwood, Middlesex
21 March 2001.
Tall and dashing, Anthony Steel was one of Britain's most popular film
actors in the early Fifties and was considered the country's top "beefcake"
star to rival the more muscular of Hollywood's leading men.
A former guardsman and the epitome of good breeding, he excelled in officer
roles in stiff-upper-lip war stories like The Wooden Horse and The Sea Shall
Not Have Them, but his own story illustrates the vagaries of fame. In 1951
he starred in the Royal Command Performance film Where No Vultures Fly and
was presented to the Queen, and five years later he wed one of the most
glamorous stars in the world, Anita Ekberg. Forty years after that he was
living in sheltered accommodation.
Born in Chelsea, London, in 1919, Anthony Maitland Steel was the son of
an
Indian army officer. Educated in Ireland, then at Cambridge University,
he
joined the Grenadier Guards at the outbreak of the Second World War, but
at
the end of the war decided to take up acting and appeared in small parts
on
the stage. When his girlfriend, a niece of J. Arthur Rank, introduced him
to
the film mogul at a party, Rank recognised that Steel could be an asset
to
British films and signed him to a contract.
For several years the Rank Organisation, noted for its "charm school" in
which young actresses were groomed, carefully prepared Steel for stardom
by
giving him small roles in over a dozen films in three years, including
Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), Quartet (1948), The Blue Lamp (1949),
Trotti True (1949), Christopher Columbus (1949), and The Chiltern Hundreds
(1949), in which, foreshadowing many of his later assignments, he played
an
army adjutant.
His first major opportunity came when he was cast as one of the officers
who
devise a novel method of escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in The Wooden
Horse (1950), based on Eric Williams's autobiographical book. The film's
director Jack Lee said, "Tony Steel was fine to work with just a physical
type, a young chap who could do certain things, though he didn't have much
acting to do in this." The film was a great success, and established Steel
as a star personality.
His next film, Another Man's Poison (1951), was dominated by the extrovert
performance of Bette Davis, and Steel seemed pallid in comparison as the
engineer engaged to her secretary but seduced by Davis's wiles. He was
happier starring in Where No Vultures Fly (1951) as an upright game warden
who campaigns for a national safari park after he witnesses the slaughter
of
wildlife in East Africa. Not only was the film chosen for the Royal
Performance, but it was the top British moneymaker of 1952.
Steel co-starred with Patricia Roc in the patchy comedy Something Money
Can't Buy (1952), as an army officer who finds it hard to adjust to civilian
life after the war, and he was an officer helping a plantation owner (Jack
Hawkins) fight off terrorists in Malaya in The Planter's Wife (1952), a
popular film co-starring the Hollywood star Claudette Colbert. The following
year Steel starred in two hit war movies, The Malta Story, with Alec
Guinness, and Albert RN, in which he was once again a resourceful officer
who makes a lifelike dummy to cover the escape of prisoners from a camp
in
Germany. At the start of 1954 he was voted second to Jack Hawkins in
popularity with British filmgoers, and it was announced that he and Dirk
Bogarde were the highest-paid actors in the Rank Organisation.
He reproduced his role as a game warden in West of Zanzibar (1954), a sequel
to Where No Vultures Fly in which this time he was tracking ivory poachers,
and he made a recording of the theme song by Jack Fishman, "Jambo", which
sold well.
His career reached its peak in 1955. In another Second World War story,
The
Sea Shall Not Have Them, co-starring Bogarde and Michael Redgrave, Steel
was
an Air Sea Rescue officer who rescues four downed fliers who are adrift
in a
dinghy in the North Sea, and the year also saw the release of the
merchant-navy drama Passage Home and Storm Over the Nile, a remake of The
Four Feathers, in which he had the central role of Harry Faversham, branded
a coward by his fellow officers after he resigns his commission in 1895
rather than go to the Sudan.
It was in December 1955 that Steel met the blonde Swedish actress Anita
Ekberg, a former Miss Universe, at a film premiere. "Anita is the most
beautiful woman I have ever met," he declared, and they were married the
following year in Florence. It was Steel's second marriage, but Ekberg's
first. When Steel announced that he was moving to Hollywood at the request
of his wife, the Rank Organisation (in particular its head of production
John Davis) considered it an act of ingratitude after the grooming and
promotion they had given him, and there is little doubt that the decision
damaged his career considerably.
His behaviour, though, had been giving cause for concern. His background
and
demeanour were in total contrast to that of the extrovert Ekberg, and soon
there were stories of the couple's arguments and heavy drinking. Twice Steel
was arrested for drunken driving, and he acquired a reputation as a
hell-raiser who would physically attack paparazzi who tried to photograph
his wife. His stay in Hollywood yielded just one film, a little-seen
thriller with a post-Civil-War western setting, Valerie (1957), co-starring
Sterling Hayden and Ekberg.
When he returned to Europe, Steel played in Hugo Fregonese's superior drama
Harry Black (1958), though his role was secondary to that of Stewart
Granger, then took the leading role of a sterile husband in Raymond Stross's
production A Question of Adultery (1958), a sensationalist treatment of
artificial insemination which anticipated the sort of exploitation movies
in
which Steel ultimately found himself.
His last prestigious leading role was in Michael Powell's unsuccessful
attempt to recapture the flavour of The Red Shoes with a bland blend of
romance and ballet, Honeymoon (1959). Ironically, Steel and Ekberg were
divorced in the year Honeymoon was released, with Steel stating, "It was
no
fun being married to a glamour girl." (When in 1964 he married for a third
time, it was to a former Miss Austria.)
In 1960 he took up residence in Rome and made Revenge of the Barbarians,
the
first of several films he made on the continent, including Vacanze alla
baia
d'argento (1961), Tiger of the Seven Seas (1962), Last of the Renegades
(1965, one of the German series of westerns featuring the hero "Winnetou"),
and Le Fate (1966), called Sex Quartet in the UK. He had small roles in
the
war epics Anzio (1967) and Massacre in Rome (1973), but as his appearances
became fewer he took roles in exploitation features such as Run Rabbit Run
(1975), in which he played a music conductor who falls in love with his
mistress's teenage daughter, The Story of O (1976), Hardcore (1977) and
Let's Get Laid (also 1977).
Mainstream audiences saw him for the first time in several years when he
turned up, looking much older but still distinguished, in the film version
of Jackie Collins's book The World is Full of Married Men (1979). He had
returned to Britain, where he found work touring in stage productions,
together with guest spots in such television series as The Professionals,
Bergerac and Robin of Sherwood, and played in the BBC's epic three-hour
science-fantasy production Artemis 81 (1981), which featured Sting as an
alien.
But work was scarce and before the end of the decade he had moved from his
room in a modest Earls Court hotel to sheltered accommodation in a council
flat in Northolt, west London, cutting himself off from his agent and his
old friends. In the mid-Nineties his agent David Daly discovered where he
was living, found him work in the television series The Broker's Man (1999),
and arranged to have him admitted to Denville Hall, a London home for
retired theatrical folk.
Daly said, "He was a very private man. If he decided that things weren't
right, he would withdraw into himself and not contact anybody."
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