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Dateline: 24th March, 2005
David Kossoff (1919 - 2005) Actor David Kossoff died yesterday of cancer of the liver. He had been ill for some months. The son of Russian East End rag trade worker, he went to London's Northern Polytechnic where he trained as a draughtsman. He worked in that field when he left the college in 1937 and then moved into furniture design. Then he decided he wanted to be an actor but that ambuition was put on hold due to the outbreak of the Second World War. He later joked that his parents, who worried about him giving up a secure job for acting, were the only parents of a son of call-up age in Britain who were relieved by the outbreak of war. He began his acting career in 1943 and in 1945 joined the BBC Repertory Company. He did a considerable amount of radio work, but is probably best known for his performance as Alf Larkin in The Larkins on TV, although he had a fairly high profile film career which included Wolf Mankowitz' A Kid for Two Farthings (1956) for which he won an award from the Society of Film and Televsion Arts, the predecessor BAFTA. His almost archetypal role was as Morry in Mankowitz' shor film The Bespoke Overcoat (also 1956), a part which he originated on stage in 1953 at the Arts Theatre. However he also appeared in unexpected places - in Summer Holiday starring Cliff Richard, for example, and in the Hammer Horro movie The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll. Apart from Overcoat, his most well known stage performance was as Colonel Alexander Ikonenko in Peter Ustinov's The Love Of Four Colonels in the West End. Other films included I Am A Camera (1955), The Mouse That Roared (1959), The Mouse On The Moon (1963) and Freud (1962). Science fiction fans remember him with great affection as Lemmy in the radio serial Journey into Space. He was also known for his re-tellings of Bible stories. Told with his own special kind of humour - he ended the story of Samson, for example, with "God helped Samson, the main attraction of the evening, to bring the house down." His son Paul, a member of the rock band Free, died in 1976 at the age of 25 of a heart attack brought on by drug abuse and he devoted a year of his life to touring Late Great Paul around schools. "Late Great Paul was very honest about his addiction and the waste of his life," he once said. "For an immensely talented young man to die at 25, it was not a loss to the musical world - it was simply a waste of great potential. The show used Paul’s music, the voices of people who knew him, and mime. It was designed to leave a bruise. It was not comfortable. It didn’t look for applause. It looked for a shocked silence at the end." He leaves two children and three grandchildren. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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