by Ken Windsor

Created on: February 02, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

The scene - St. Johns Wood, only a stones throw from Lords Cricket Ground. The kind of day when sad faces echoed the rusty bark of the tree lined streets. Harry H. Corbett stood there, imposing, but with a smile on his face which was lighting up the immediate neighborhood. "Come on in," he said,"I wish we could have laid on better weather for you, but let's get inside to the warmth of the lounge."

Instant Television fame has a downside, and too often the public expect the persona of an actor to mirror that of the character which they portray on the screen. This misconception can make the interviewers' job a little difficult, as although the reader or listener wants to know about the screen character, it is our job to try to dispel some of the myths, and to get inside the real person.

Talking to Harry was easy - he started just where I wanted him to - at the beginning.

"I was born in Rangoon," he said, as his wife handed me a very large mug of steaming tea. "My dad was an Officer in the Army out there. I actually came to England when I was just 2 years old, although the event is not one which I remember much about. I have been told that I sulked all the way over, because my orange rolled overboard."

"At 17 I joined the Marines, and I do remember one vivid moment from those days. I had gone back home on leave to Manchester, and when the time came to leave again, Manchester decided to oblige with its' usual dose of fog."

"I was stuck on the station for about 3 hours, cold and miserable, so I said to myself 'to hell with this' - I am going home. Unfortunately when I did eventually decide to go back to Plymouth I found that my ship had been given urgent sailing orders and had shoved off without me. This got me locked up in the strongbox as we called it - absent without leave, and banged to rights."

Harry had in fact been raised in Manchester by his aunt as his mother had died when he was only 3. This was a City which proved to be the base for his acting career.

"I joined the 'Theatre Workshop. This is a name which implies that it was a place to try out new ideas and beliefs, and around this time in the fifties I found that they still wrote plays where working men had big red spotted handkerchiefs and all the maids had adenoids."

"We were playing to an audience who actually believed all this, and I got fed up with it. What I wanted to do was to go out and build not necessarily a working class theatre, but a theatre which would show a little more truthfully the differences

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