Lifestyle screens by don massie series#

He is survived by his three sisters, Frances, Jacqueline and Dorothy.Don Massie, LLC.

He lived his last days in a modest house on the south shore of Nova Scotia. After his retirement in 1996, he was named professor emeritus. Massie then gave up acting and taught at the University of South Florida for nearly 30 years, hardly ever referring to his past career.

Lifestyle screens by don massie series#

Massie's last feature was as a wide-eyed new inmate of a prison in the Porridge-like The Pot Carriers (1962).Īt the same time, Massie appeared in many television dramas and series such as Armchair Theatre (1959), No Hiding Place (1961), The Avengers (1965) and in the title role in all five episodes of Hawkeye, The Pathfinder (1973), based on James Fenimore Cooper's novel. Massie was straight man again as a penniless music student surrounded by the likes of Leslie Phillips, Kenneth Williams and Sid James in Gerald 'Carry On' Thomas's Raising the Wind (1961). I don't just paint a chair, I become the chair.' Hancock, the leader of the school of the New Infantilism, tells him, 'Your colours are the wrong shape.' I'm seeking the volcanic turbulence of light and colour. Every brush-stroke is torn out of my body. While Massie delivers such lines as 'Art to me is more than inspiration, it's life itself. In a lighter vein, Massie, playing perfectly straight as a genuine artist, was phoney artist Tony Hancock's roommate in a Paris attic in The Rebel (1961). This time, the bearded, middle-aged Jekyll is transformed into a dashing and virile young playboy. He then took the title roles in The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960), a Hammer Horror version of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic. In 1959, Massie appeared in two films in which he was equally ambivalent: in Basil Deardon's Sapphire, as the possibly racist fiance of a murdered girl, known as a 'lily skin', having 'passed herself off as white', and in Asquith's Libel, as an ex-PoW who accuses a baronet (Dirk Bogarde), claiming to have been in the same camp, of being an impostor. Massie is brilliant at conveying the dilemma in which he finds himself and in moments of panic, such as not being able to get out of a telephone booth. After getting to know his intended victim, he begins to have doubts about his mission. Massie played a young American bomber pilot sent to Nazi-occupied Paris to kill a man believed to be betraying his colleagues in the French resistance.

Though Kenneth Tynan thought Massie was not up to his female partner, the actor gathered huge praise for his performance in Anthony Asquith's Orders to Kill (1958), for which he won a Bafta as most promising newcomer to film.Ĭertainly it was his best role, one that suited his sensitive, rather self-effacing persona. Thus, by paying a five-shilling subscription, audiences were able to see Peter Hall's production at the Comedy theatre, London. Since it was forbidden to portray homosexuality (or even the suggestion of it) on the stage in Britain, the only way the play could be presented was under club conditions. Despite having only spent a year in theatre school in Montreal, and having done little acting, Massie was thrust into the limelight in 1958 when he was chosen to play Brick opposite Kim Stanley as Maggie the Cat in a stage production of Tennessee Williams's Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.