A look at the eclectic career of Una Brandon Jones
A native of St Albans, Hertfordshire Una Brandon Jones was born on 24th
April 1916. She was primarily a stage actress featuring in film and TV in a
variety of small supporting or guest roles in a career that spanned over fifty
years playing landladies, aunts or other similar older female figures. Her
stage work has a more notable political slant due to her lifelong socialist
views.
From the
late 1930s onwards she was an active member of the Unity Theatre based in Camden,
London. The theatre club was formed in 1936, an off shoot of the Worker’s Theatre
Movement, and attempted to bring contemporary political and social issues to a
working class audience. It would produce plays by the workers, for the workers,
about the workers and cover topics such as the plight of the unemployed during
the hardships of the depression, the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the
British Union of Fascists in the UK. The company also utilised new forms of
drama including documentary performances and satirical pantomimes. It was one
of these satirical pantomimes which would see the debut performance of Una
Brandon Jones when she appeared opposite Alfie Bass and Bill Owen (of Last of the Summer Wine fame) in a
production of Babes in the Woods in
1938.
In 1942,
with many of the creative males involved in staging productions away waging war,
Una stepped up to the challenge to fill the void. She became a lyricist and
helped to pen the popular wartime song Women
in Industry about females working in factories during wartime. She was
still active in Unity Theatre productions with roles such as The Queen in Alice in Thunderland (1945), a
politicised satire of Alice in Wonderland.
After a dispute with the actor Bill Owen over the lack of females in Unity’s
touring group[1]
she formed an all-female revue group called The Amazons for which she wrote
material from an early feminist perspective.
In 1953 writer
and journalist John Gold and Lionel Bart joined the theatre group and they
wrote numerous songs for revues and productions. Bart was soon talent spotted
by Joan Littlewood and left to begin a career which would see him become a
famous song writer with credits including the film Oliver (1968). Gold meanwhile married Una and they would remain in
wedlock until his death in 1998. Following her marriage Una would sometimes be
credited as Una Gold, especially in her theatre roles. The marriage would
produce two children with a daughter, Louise Gold, being born first in 1956.
Louise is best known for her work as a puppeteer / voice actor for The Muppet Show as well as Spitting Image (as Nancy Reagan, Joan
Collins and The Queen amongst others) and Roland
Rat the TV Series as Iris Rat and Roxanne. A son, Maxim J Gold, was born in
1958. He now acts under the name of Max Gold and is a respected theatre actor,
writer and director. He is probably best known for his role as Frank in The Buddha of Suburbia (1993) and
appearances in episodes of Eastenders, The
Bill and The Tunnel (2016).
Una Brandon
Jones made appearance on TV from 1968 onwards. Amongst her first credits was an
appearance as Sister Packer in ‘Purposes of Love’ (22nd November
1968), an episode of the second season of the BBC drama anthology Boy Meets Girl. She had previously had a
small role credited as ‘British Woman’ in the children’s educational series Merry Go Round when she appeared in the
episode ‘The Broken Sword Part 1: Death of the Eagle’ (13th May
1968). Her next TV role was also for Merry
Go Round when she appeared as Aunt Mina in the episode ‘When Uncle Klaas
Fell Over Part 1: The Empty Stable’ (10th March 1969).
Wicked Women was a London Weekend Television
drama anthology based around the theme of Victorian woman who had made the
headlines in the newspapers due to the crimes they had committed. Una appeared
in the episode ‘Christiana Edmund’ (21st February 1970) as Bertha.
Anna Massey portrayed the title character, a murderess who poisoned a child. Una’s
most notable stage role for the year was in Terence Rattigan’s A Bequest to the Nation, a play about
Lord Nelson, staged at Haymarket Theatre during winter 1970. The following year
she had a small role as a landlady in the sublime detective series Public Eye in the episode ‘Transatlantic
Cousins’ (15th September
1971). In cinemas she could be seen as a supervisor in Mike Leigh’s first film Bleak Moments (1971) which began as an alternative
theatre play and was then financed by the actors Albert Finney and Michael
Medwin for a cinema adaptation through their Memorial Films production company.
She next
popped up in the ATV series Spyders Webb
– ‘Rev Counter’ (14th April 1972) as a ‘socialist woman’ –
typecasting at its finest / worse depending on your point of view. She was cast
as a female police superintendent in the fourth and final episode of the BBC
drama A Pin To See The Peepshow (16th
August 1973) which starred Francesca Annis and John Duttine as young lovers
accused of murder. She was also in the Derek Nimmo-as-a-comedy-vicar vehicle Oh, Father! In the episode ‘Angels and
Ministers’ (3rd October 1973) as Miss Noonan. Vienna 1900 was a BBC anthology of stories dramatized by Robert
Muller[2]
from the writings of Arthur Schnitzler and Una featured in a small role as a
postmistress in the episode ‘Man of Honour’ (9th March 1975). Mrs
Clemson in ‘Murrain’ was her next
role.
Una made a
rare film appearance playing Martha Willoughby in A Dirty Knight’s Work (1976) AKA Trial by Combat / A Choice of Weapons. I’ve never seen this film
but it sounds tremendous fun and has a great cast – John Mills, Donald
Pleasance, Peter Cushing, Brian Glover and Barbara Hershey to name a few. Director
Kevin Connor would also make the lost worlds movies At the Earth’s Core (1976), The
Land That Time Forgot (1975) and Warlords
of Atlantis (1978). On television viewers saw her in Supernatural, a BBC horror anthology where membership of a secret
society is granted if an applicant can tell a chilling enough horror story. Una
featured in the episode ‘Lady Sybil’ (9th July 1977) as Miranda.
Una continued her career into a new decade as she made her first appearance in the popular children’s drama series Grange Hill when she was cast as a hospital visitor in an episode of the third series transmitted 25th January 1980. It was back to comedy next with a small role as a shop customer in an episode of the third season of the Wendy Craig starring sitcom Butterflies – ‘Problems, Problems’ (30th September 1980). This was followed by a return to the horror genre with the classic ‘The House That Bled to Death’ (11th October 1980), a well-remembered episode of the horror anthology programme Hammer House of Horror.
She memorably played an old woman who dies of a heart attack whilst he husband looks on and refuses to help or call a doctor. Another typecast role as an elderly woman followed in the third episode of the four-part BBC drama series Love Is Old, Love Is New (8th April 1982) which also starred James Fox and Jane Asher. She was then seen as a nurse in two episodes of the Central Television historical biographical drama I Remember Nelson – ‘Love’ (21st February 1982) and ‘Passion’ (21st April 1982) -which starred Kenneth Colley as Nelson.
Her final
credit of the year was in an episode of the documentary series Arena – ‘A Genius Like Us: A Portrait of
Joe Orton’ (9th November 1982) which mixed interviews and
dramatizations to tell the rise of and the events that led to the murder of Joe
Orton. Brandon Jones could be seen as one of the cast members in a section of
Orton’s play Loot. She also appeared
in The Year of the Bodyguard, a short
drama-documentary film made for Channel 4 in 1982. She is credited as Wardress.
The film used archive material and reconstructions to portray the feminist
struggle to form the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1913. Women’s rights
was an issue that Brandon Jones felt passionately about and this role reflects a
lifetime committed to social issues such as this one.
Una had close links with The Fall Out Theatre Group during the 1980s. The group was a combination of amateurs and “resting” actors usually under the direction of Una. The group mounted three major productions mostly all directed and written by Una which included major tours for Time Is Running Out (1989) and Gulf War (1991). The Setbacks was a Thames Television comedy in which Una had a recurring role as Gran in the fourth season transmitted in 1985. Then there was more cinema work as a Weeping Woman in the 1986 Derek Jarman fim Caravaggio. She was one of the models for the famous artist’s paintings. The following year she made perhaps her best known appearance[3] as Mrs Parkin in the film Withnail And I (1987), wife of the farmer with his leg wrapped up in a bin bag! Theatre work for the year included the experimental piece Dungeness, described as a “small opera about landscape[4]”, and staged at the ICA in London during October 1987
She returned
to horror once more with a rather unexpected credit in the anthology horror
film Pulse Pounders (1988) which has earned something of a
cult following due to being uncompleted and unreleased[5].
As well as featuring sequel segments to the films Trancers and The Dungeonmaster the production also
contained a brand new H P Lovecraft adaptation – ‘The Evil Clergyman’. Una
played a landlady opposite David Warner as the evil clergyman of the title. A
workprint of the Trancers and ‘Evil Clergyman’ segments was
shown in at a film festival in Chicago in 2012 and has since surfaced on the
internet as an illegal download. The film itself has never been completed.
Her first television
role of 1989 was in the American financed, but shot in Europe, drama series A Fine Romance[6].
Brandon Jones plays a cleaner in the tenth episode, ‘School Daze’. Transmitted
on the America TV channel ABC opposite the ratings winners The Cosby Show and A
Different World it quickly died a death with only seven episodes
transmitted before the programme was pulled. Five episodes remain unseen of
which ‘School Daze’ is one. Una featured as the recurring character Annie
Murdoch in three episodes of the BBC drama Chelworth,
which featured Peter Jeffries as a down on his luck Earl who is trying to
restore his estate to its former glory. Una was in the first three episodes (9th
– 23rd July 1989.
She made far fewer film and TV appearances in the 1990s though she was cast as a grandmother in the British Film Institute short film Meat (1990) opposite Roger Lloyd Pack and Ewen Bremner. In 1991 she appeared as Nadine Stacey in the Inspector Morse episode ‘Fat Chance’ (27th February 1991), her only TV or film credit for the year. She was still popular in theatre works including R(age) at Battersea Arts Centre during March and April 1990, Macbeth in Birmingham during January 1991 and Blood Wedding at the Haymarket in Leicester over October 1992 followed by a production of Under Milk Wood during December 1992 . After over a year’s absence she made a return to TV, and to the children’s drama Grange Hill, playing yet another old lady in the fourth episode of the eighteenth series transmitted 13th January 1995. She also played an old lady mourning at a funeral in the BBC TV movie The Great Kandinsky (14th April 1995) which starred Richard Harris as a geriatric escapologist wanting to perform one final escape. Theatre wise Brandon Jones appeared in a version of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry during April and May 1995
Una was one
of the main cast in the short film The
Chocolate Acrobat (1995) playing Etta, an elderly acrobat in a care home.
The film was directed by Tessa Sheridan, who had worked as an animator on When the Wind Blows (1986), and she would
cast Una in her next short film. Is It the
Design on the Wrapper (1996) was
an eight minute short which won a Palm d’Or at Cannes film festival. Una was
one of the members of the public in the market scenes. She was also in Tire a part (1996), a French drama film
that starred Terence Stamp. Una was seen as the character Maggie Brown. She
appeared in seven episodes of The Bill,
all as different characters; ‘Runaround’ (13th September 1988) as
Daisy Allison, ‘A Blind Eye’ (15th September 1992) as Frances Webb, ‘Fall
Guy’ (22nd December 1994) as Mrs Challen, ‘A Policeman’s Lot’ (17th
January 1997) as Helen Macey, ‘Vacant
Possession’ (16th July 1998) as Mrs Fowler, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’
(17th November 2000) as the obligatory old lady and the episode ‘011’ (25th April 2002) as Edith Summers.
Her final TV appearance was in an episode of Dalziel and Pascoe – ‘Mens Sana’ (7th October 2002) when
she played the character Harriet Vanstone.
Una died,
aged 94, on 22nd December 2010.
[1]
This was a group of entertainers who toured the factories and performed in air
raid shelters to boost the public’s morale.
[2]
Muller had written for anthology series Mystery and Imagination and would go on
to create the BBC horror anthology Supernatural (1977)
[3]
Her first scene in Withnail and I is
exactly the same as her introduction in ‘Murrain’ as she opens the door to the
vet Critch with a matching air of suspicion to that she displayed to Richard E
Grant and Paul McGann
[4] A
Place in Time by Gerard Werson, The Stage, Thursday 15th October
1987, page 14
[5]
“Band’s horror / fantasy anthology has been held up in litigation for over
twenty years since the collapse of his primo studio” – Empire of the ‘B’s : The
Mad Movie World of Charles Band by Dave Jay, Torsten Dewi and Nathan Shumate,
page 371, Hemlock Books 2013
[6]
Not the sitcom with Judi Dench which this acting credit is often mistaken for.
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