Catacombs Reference LibraryTV Times
Catacombs Reference LibraryThese are articles about Space: 1999 cast in the UK TV listings magazine TV Times, mostly before their role in the show.
TV Times 29 January - 4 February 1972 p46; Catherine Schell appearing in A Family At War
Catherine Schell, daughter of an Hungarian baron, is married to William Marlowe, Son of a London docker. She is a self-confessed stubborn individual. Born a Catholic, she chose a divorcee for a husband, and became an actress initially to shock her parents. This week, Catherine appears with her husband in A Family At War. She is a singer who helps solve an Ashton mystery... by PATRICK MCCORMICK
CATHERINE SCHELL is tall, slender, fine-skulled, swan-necked and altogether aristocratic; her beautifully spoken English, faintly etched with Continen- tal vowels, is becomingly patrician. In a word: she has class. Which is not surprising when you consider that had not Hitler and then Communism prevailed in her native Hungary she would be the Baroness Catherine Schell von Bauschlott of Nagyida.
Does she regret her loss of title?
Catherine our cover star says that as she was born at the end of the war she knows nothing of the kind of life which a title sustains. Now she is an American citizen. Press the point and ask does she see any irony in the daughter of Baron Schell von Bauschlott and the former Countess Teleky (whose uncle was Minister President of Hungary) being married to the son of a London docker - actor William Marlowe - and she replies: acting and love are quite classless. And is it a good idea to mention her background?
The furniture in her London flat is antique; carved wood and velvet and brocade, a tapestry and prints on the walls. The feeling in the room, the ceiling high and pale within a blue stucco border, is old. One can imagine a servant in the opulent, almost make- believe Austro-Hungarian Empire into which her parents, both still alive, were born, rustling discreetly in to light the lamps.
But the family estate, a military headquarters under the Germans, a hospital under the Communists, is no more (indeed Nagyida is now in Czechoslovakia).
Catherine has not been interviewed a great deal, she says. What would be relevant? Her answers are concise, candid and anticipatory. She was born in Budapest, a third child and only daughter of strict Roman Catholic parents. For years her father was secretary to the Hungarian Ambassador in Washington, returned home in the mid-Thirties (against all advice) to see his dying father; met and married her mother; and was trapped by the outbreak of war.
Because of his connections the Germans had tried to woo him. "They made him manager of a factory. Money was so worthless that my mother remembers him bringing his wages stacked in a wheelbarrow. Later they made him a captain in the army, and ordered him to take a platoon of Jews and undesirables to the Russian Front and see that none of them came back. He was supposed to treat them badly, keep them on half rations and make them sleep in the open. But he didn't. He broke all the rules. When he got to the Front he said: "This is bloody ridiculous, I'm going back to Budapest, anyone who wants to come with me can."
"Half crossed over to the Russians and gave themselves up and were never heard of again. The rest went back with my father. My family was living in a cellar at the time and he got dressed up as an old crone with a wig and bonnet and stayed like that until the end of the war."
Catherine Schell thinks her father, who is in his 70's, a remarkable man. "He has great will-power. After the Communists took over at the end of 1948, and we escaped into Austria, he got a job as a librarian in Salzburg. Two years later we managed to get to America where he worked in drug stores. What can an ex-diplomat do? God knows how he managed. But then he got a nice job as a concert tour manager for visiting foreign orchestras. And later he became a programme analyser with Radio Free Europe and we went to Munich. That was seven years after arriving in America."
Catherine's mother is no less remarkable. During the period her husband and children were in Salzburg she ran a bar in Vienna. In New York she worked for another remarkable woman, Jolie Gabor, the matriarch of the Gabor family - Zsa-Zsa, Eva and Magda - in a jewellery shop on Madison Avenue, and then opened her own dress and millinery shop. "She is still very active - and beautiful," says Catherine. "She has my bone structure, but her face is broader. And her eyes! You really have to see her eyes." She tries to visit her parents in Germany twice a year. "They are very old. One never knows when a visit will be the last."
What is Catherine Schell like? Stubborn, she promptly says. "I always fought against my parents- well, not fought, but I was stubborn. I could never be made to like the people I should like. My parents are intensely religious and were heartbroken when I told them that Bill had been married before (to Linda Marlowe, seen in Oh, Calcutta!). But they took it well. They talked to their priest in Munich, who said benignly: 'It is a theatrical marriage; they should be happy!' I think that's sweet, don't you?"
In fact, Catherine and her husband, whom she met on location on a film in Amsterdam, talked about trying to get his first marriage annulled by the Church, but nothing came of it. She would still like to be married in a Catholic church. "When you are brought up strictly you can't shrug it off; there is a little twinge of unease. But I feel married; and I can't believe I'm going to Hell because I didn't get married in church."
She has a terrible fear of the dark, a legacy of her convent boarding school days in Staten Island. "The nuns were sweet. but they told us that Satan roamed in the dark, and that if you looked too long in a mirror at yourself you'd see the Devil. I will never look in a mirror I'm just passing. Never. I know it's silly, but I can't help it."
She is a very private person, she thinks. She is ambitious without being obsessive. No, she couldn't think of anything that she and Bill had quarrelled about - just silly little things. They watched football together on TV, but he would never dream of going to a match. Neither of them liked Edward Heath, but they didn't like Harold Wilson either. She was still very much in love with him after three and a half years of marriage and couldn't imagine being unfaithful to him.
She'd like two or three children, which was one reason they were negotiating for a house in an out-of-the-way village in Oxfordshire. ("There's a hole in the roof and damp and it'll cost £5,000 to put it right, but it's all inglenook fireplaces and exposed beams.")
What else is there to tell? Catherine Schell wrinkles her nose and returns to the word stubborn. That is the word to describe her, she again insists. When Bill flew with her to Munich to meet her parents her father solemnly warned him about her stubbornness. And it was stubbornness which made her become an actress: she hadn't always harboured a burning desire.
"When I finished high school in Munich I made an agreement with my father to stay at home for a year and do nothing, at the end of which he promised I could do anything I wanted - get married, anything. At the end of the year I wanted to go to university, but having already put my brothers through he couldn't afford it. I was furious. You promised,' I said. I was so annoyed I thought I'd shock him. 'In that case I'm going to become an actress,' I said."
Her first paid role (half a day's pay) was in a film as a radio announcer speaking Hungarian, and Catherine, her Hungarian forgotten, had to phone her mother to find out what to say. Her first starring role, while still in her teens, was in a German production in Brazil - and reduced her to tears.
"It was called Lana, Queen of the Amazons. Before I went I was fitted out with little leather skirts and garlands of flowers, gold, rubies and stuff. When I got there the director started tearing everything off me. I had to bathe nude. They promised to shoot from very far away, and I agreed. But I had no idea about camera lenses and zooms, and when I saw myself on screen I cried and cried. I sent hysterical letters to my parents, they sent letters to the director begging him to take me off the film, and that I was under age. Finally when the unit got back to Germany my father saw the director. "What happened?" I asked him. 'Nothing,' my father said. 'He was such a nice man I didn't want to upset him!""
Her career, Catherine admits, then settled into flickering anonymity. She made some bad films. "I always played the ingenue nothing-type parts"; and, even at that, by the time she met Bill and came to England (she'd been here in 1964 on an Anglo-German production) she was playing less and less. "The German film industry had gone over almost entirely to sex, and I refused."
She agonised before agreeing to appear naked from the waist up in the television series The Search For The Nile. "I didn't find out until three days before I was supposed to go to Africa; and I found out at a wardrobe fitting of all things. I had already fallen in love with the part (Florence von Sass, the Hungarian second wife of Sir Samuel White Baker, whom she accompanied in his discovery of Lake Albert in 1864) and I recognised that it was going to be a classical series. I talked to Bill and he decided it would be all right. But I made sure there were no publicity stills. Mrs. Baker did wash her hair to dispel an ugly mood which was building up among the natives, but there is no evidence as to how she was dressed. I would have thought she would have worn her shift. Wouldn't you?"
9-15th September 1972, p11-12,14
It wasn't exactly love at first sight, but something certainly went click when William Marlowe, who stars in Saturday's Villains episode, met the lovely Catherine Schell in the beautiful city of Amsterdam. That was five years ago. Recently, Catherine was back there working on a new television series called The Adventurer, so we flew Marlowe over to join her to see what memories they had of those romantic days
Caption: They met in the city they call "the Venice of the North": William Marlowe and Catherine Schell (above) return to the scene of their courtship and the memories just come flooding back
Downstairs in the Doelen Hotel, Amsterdam, you can sip cocktails at £1 a time in what was Rembrandt's bedroom, and is now the Rembrandt Bar, and ponder humbly: "To think Rembrandt slept here!"
Alternatively, you can walk up the hotel's main staircase and, entirely free, stand on the exact step where five years ago the beautiful Catherine Schell passed Bill Marlowe and thought: "I bet that man is staring at my legs." Marlowe remembers it more precisely as her thighs. Obviously, this wasn't going to be just one of those spiritual things. Love at first sight is straight out of the chemistry set.
He recalls: "I came out of my room. I saw this bird. I clocked it. A little bell rang. I thought 'fair cop', I wonder if it's got anything in tow."
For the next four weeks, in his pursuit of Catherine, Marlowe littered Amsterdam with what are called fond memories, but which at the time were incredibly wincing experiences. I particularly liked his account of the grand seduction dinner which was supposed to end at the liqueurs with her falling tipsily into his wicked arms. In fact, it ended at the soup when one of his upper teeth fell out.
It even beat the moment when the only thing for it was to say: "Catherine, I would like you to meet a very dear friend of mine. My wife." But the situation is considerably tidier now. His routine male stance ("What, me marry again?") at the outset of his courtship has come naturally to the monthly mortgage re- payments on the little cottage they have "done up" in Twickenham, Middlesex. They've been married four years and clean the Mini on Sundays.
Looking back, the only thing that rankles were the headlines after their wedding, like: "Docker's son marries Baroness." Which labels their love affair in terms of a Victorian novelette.
"She doesn't walk about in a tiara and I don't have a hook in my belt," says Marlowe.
Even so, her origins in the European elite dispossessed by the the war, were small pre- paration for the onslaught of Bill Marlowe, ex- engineer's apprentice who ran away to sea.
Catherine was unmarried, a firm church- goer; she lived at home with her father in Munich, and went to Amsterdam in 1967 to co-star with Marlowe in a film called, fatefully, Amsterdam Affair. It was the first visit for both to the city called "the Venice of the North" because of its canals (into which, so I understand, an average of eight Amsterdamers accidentally back their cars every week).
We took Marlowe to the city for a memory trip. Catherine was already there; working on location for a new ATV series, The Adventurer, with Gene Barry. All the old memories came flooding back..
"I remember we went up to the director's script of Amsterdam Affair. Catherine was room for a preliminary read-through of the behaving in her usual cool, impeccable manner. I thought I was going to have to break the ice somehow.
"Then we got to a part in the script where we were supposed to be having some fairly close-to-the-heart dialogue. 'In for a penny, in for a pound,' I thought, so I switched my chair around until we were literally touching knees, and went into a sort of eye-to-eye moodie.
"The incredible thing was the producer was knocked out by this. He thought it was amazing this instant rapport between the actors. He got a bit weedy-legged about it later when he discovered we were having a 'thing'.
"It was very, very romantic. But it didn't help the performance."
His explanation for the film's lack of success was mainly a weak script based on an awkward plot. But he admits: "If the atmosphere gets very relaxed and people begin to like each other too much, that certain elastic tension sags. If it gets too real, oddly enough it doesn't work. In a brittle atmosphere you can often make even a lousy part work. It's horrendous how audiences see any kind of self indulgence."
2-8 December 1972, p70-71 "Star Knitting" - a knitting pattern
30 December 1972-5 January 1973, p254-255
Fashion for the girl who doesn't like fashion: It's hard to imagine a beauty like Catherine Schell having clothes problems. This husky-voiced Hungarian actress (starring in ITV's series The Adventurers) seems to have everything going for her - five foot eight inches... a wonderful face... the most beautiful mane of hair (Sunsilk certainly think so). But she says that most designers don't cater for her kind of woman. "All I ask is for clothes that do something for a woman's figure. Fashion at the moment is for morons and nine-year-olds (you'd better not print that!) Shops are full of little high-waisted dresses, smocks or styles that are utterly ridiculous and totally unwearable.
10-16 February 1973, p54-55
CATHERINE SCHELL, Hungarian- born beauty, is a superb cook: she learnt from her mother in her native Hungary. She adores the foods and dishes of her country, "but," she says, "my husband (actor William Marlowe) is English and prefers English cooking - the plain and simple kind so I can really only go to town when we have guests for dinner." Catherine's favourite dish is Szegediner Goulash; she says: "This is typically Hungarian, and it uses lots and lots of paprika." With it, she serves thin cucumber slices topped with sour cream, which make a delicious and cool contrast. Paprika Chicken is also a Hungarian dish. "Perhaps the most famous of all," Catherine tells me. "Fortunately this is something William loves, so I cook it quite often: followed by Hungarian Pancakes, which I make thin, and roll tightly around jam before shaking icing sugar on top." Catherine is a truly inter- national cook, since she spent some years in Germany and the United States before coming to live in England five years ago. "I like England best of all," she says. "I've always liked the people, and my typically English husband suits me very well." Here is Catherine's recipe for main course, Szegediner Goulash, and my own recipes for the accompaniments: Cucumber and Soured Cream and Buttered Noodles and, to follow, sugared Hungarian Pancakes.
8-14 March 1975, p53 (schedule for Thursday 13 March 1975)
CATHERINE SCHELL has a lot to be pleased about. She is currently considering a role for a forthcoming Thriller story, is working on a new series for the BBC, and has been filming with Peter Sellers for the Return of the Pink Panther, due to be re- leased soon. Tonight, in The Sweeney, she plays a villain's girlfriend. Warren Mitchell plays the crook. Catherine brims with enthusiasm, yet behind the bright front and busy schedules there is a private sadness.
Last year her marriage to British actor William Marlowe they met when co-starring in the film Amsterdam Affair in 1967- broke down, and at least part of the reason was the amount of work they both had. Now they are separated and Catherine is living the life of a bachelor girl. "But we are still friends, good friends. A divorce? Perhaps. We haven't discussed it recently."
29 January-4 February 1977, p64-65, interview with Schell's ex-husband William Marlow, by Dermod Hill, includes quotes from her
AT 45, William Marlowe has had two failed marriages- some kind of qualification you could say for portraying the plight of the divorced husband adrift in bedsitter- land in the afternoon serial Rooms this week.
Marlowe was arranged as comfortably as a cat in front of a large, warm, open fire, sipping iced drinks from a crystal tumbler, in the elegant surroundings he shares. with the attractive lady he hopes will eventually become his third wife.
Periodically over the last few years, the newspapers have produced a brief but avid curiosity in the loves of Bill Marlowe, and it always makes him uneasy.
In 1968, the headlines. were: "Docker's son marries Baroness". "I don't see why everyone who comes out of East London has to be some. kind of toad," said Marlowe. "It doesn't necessarily mean you have to blow your nose on the napkin." His second bride, Catherine Schell, one of the most elegant and beautiful of European actresses (who starred in Space 1999) was in fact born the Baroness von Schell in Hungary, and lived in Munich. They met in Amsterdam while on location for a film. The romance was whirlwind. But as Marlowe said: "She didn't wall around in a tiara, And I didn't walk around with a hook in my belt."
Recently a whole new spate of headlines has followed their decision to separate. For, having parted from Marlowe, Catherine's new choice of flatmate has been Mrs. Marlowe the first, actress Linda Marlowe. And the notion of the two ex-wives getting on famously, and dividing between them a house in Fulham, London, continues to fascinate the gossip writers.
Catherine told me: "People think it's very strange. They just gape with amazement when I tell them. But the answer is simple enough. I knew Linda when her marriage to Bill was breaking up, and we became friends then. After Bill and I separated, it just happened that Linda and I were flat hunting at the same time. I found this place, and it seemed logical that we take it jointly. We have separate flats, and are totally separate units. It's terrific set-up. And if ever we are lonely, we can pop upstairs -or downstairs-for a natter."
William Marlowe says: "Nowadays, almost everyone seems to be turning around after their divorce and saying 'we are still great friends'.
"Linda and I had become great friends before we divorced. We never went through that bit of learning to hate each other. Two people can split up for the best reasons in the world, as well as for the worst, I have very good relationships with both my former wives, And the fact that they live together shows how well we all got on. And it just means they recognise I am not a monster. That there was no real animosity between us.
"Unless of course they spend their nights talking about me which, of course, they do. But in the most lovely way."
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Space: 1999 copyright ITV