Sunday 16 June 2019

Norman Florence's Acting Career

I was watching another episode of The Saint, The Set Up - it's 1965 and involves an unusually brutal mail van robbery. There are fist fights in The Saint every week, and Simon does get knocked out rather a lot, but one of the bad guys in this episode was shooting people all over the place.
And another member of the gang of robbers was a certain Norman Florence.
In Hay, Norman Florence (or Flo, as he was usually known), was best known for having the original idea that became Hay Festival, now an international concern run by his son Peter. I knew he had been an actor, but I hadn't noticed him appearing in anything until last night.
When I looked up his acting career, I saw that he had also appeared (well down the cast list) in one of my favourite episodes of The Champions, The Iron Man, in which Craig, Richard and Sharon are sent to protect a South American dictator in exile from being murdered.
He did quite a lot of TV work in the 1960s, including two other episodes of The Saint and one other episode of The Champions. Several of his characters seem to have been called Carlo, or some other vaguely Mediterranean name - he also seemed to play quite a few policemen, and he was Tony Marchesi in the series Compact, which was a soap opera set in the offices of a glossy women's magazine. He was also in Redcap, with a young John Thaw. The last acting credit in his IMDb entry is for Doomwatch in 1971.
In the 1970s he went into theatre management, working with Sam Wanamaker on the Globe project, and coming to Wales with Theatr Ym Ymylon, a bilingual theatre group - and he happened to settle just outside Hay....

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