This weekend the death was announced of Murray Melvin, activist, actor and archivist. Those of you familiar with our books describing the history of Kilburn and its residents, will know he lived on the Kilburn Gate Estate in the 1960s. But his links with Camden go back to 1932, when he was born in what was then the Borough of St Pancras. His parents, Hugh Victor and Maisie Winifred Melvin, were living at 2 Marquis Road, off Camden Road. Next, they rented in Mornington Crescent and then Delancey Street in Camden Town.
Murray left school at the age of fourteen, unable to master fractions but as head prefect, a qualification he said he gained by always having clean fingernails and well-combed hair. He started work as an office boy for a firm of travel agents off Oxford Street. A short-lived job followed as an import and export clerk in a shipping office, during which he inadvertently exported quantities of goods to destinations that had not ordered them.
After WWII, Hugh and Maisie moved to Hampstead, living for over ten years at 66 Hampstead High Street, in a flat over what today is a branch of Tara Jarmon, a women’s clothing retailer. The Melvins founded a Hampstead youth club where Murray enjoyed acting in a drama group, until he became eligible for National Service, a form of peacetime conscription. Introduced in 1949, all males aged between 17 and 21 had to serve in one of the armed forces for 18 months, later increased to two years (1950). Murray chose the RAF; his father had served in the RAF during the war.
The Melvin family had moved to 92 Kilburn Gate by 1959, and Murray left for 3 Wilton Mews SW1 in the 1960s. The phone books for 1975 and 1976 show M. Melvin at 84 Brondesbury Road Kilburn, and this is probably Murray.
Murray had no interest in his clerical civilian jobs either before or after National Service. He enrolled in drama, mime, and classical dance classes at the City Literary Institute close to where he was working at the time. At an audition for the Theatre Workshop he was asked to portray someone he knew. Murray chose his pompous boss, and his performance attracted the interest of Joan Littlewood, one of the founders of the Workshop based at the Theatre Royal Stratford. This marked the start of Murray’s professional career, best known for his close working relationships with Joan Littlewood, Ken Russell and Stanley Kubrick.
Murray liked to claim that ‘Gay Pride’ started in 1958 when he appeared on stage in Littlewood’s production of Shelagh Delaney’s ‘A Taste of Honey’, playing a gay art student. At the time homosexuality was illegal in the UK and punishable by a prison sentence. Murray’s performance was met by a standing ovation. ‘Looking back’, he said, ‘I think how daring I was to go out and perform that, it broke barriers’. It was later made into a film.
The following are among the many other plays, films, and TV productions in Murray’s long and successful career.
Joan Littlewood’s production: ‘Oh, What a Lovely War!’
Stanley Kubrick: ‘Barry Lyndon’. Kubrick was a perfectionist, and one scene took 77 takes before the director was satisfied with Murray’s performance.
Ken Russell: ‘Isadora Duncan’, ‘The Devils’, ‘The Boy Friend’, and ‘Lisztomania’.
Co-incidentally, Isadora Duncan danced for the American sculptor Gutzon Borglum in the garden of his Kilburn home, across the road from what later became the Kilburn Gate estate.
Murray was the official archivist of the Theatre Royal Stratford and led a campaign to get a statue by Philip Jackson of Joan Littlewood, erected in front of the Theatre in 2015.
He died aged 90, at St Thomas’ Hospital on 14 April 2023, following a fall the previous December.
There is an informative and amusing interview of Murray talking to Michael Billington on YouTube, (2014).
Comments
Post a Comment