Marius Goring

Goring was born on 23 May 1912 in Newport, Isle of Wight. He was the son of the eminent physician and researcher Charles Buckman Goring (1870–1919), the author of The English Convict, and Kate Winifred (née Macdonald, 1874–1964), a professional pianist of Scottish descent who was also a suffragette. He had an older brother, Donald, who died in Yemen, in 1936, from injuries sustained in a motor vehicle accident.

After attending The Perse School in Cambridge, where he became a friend of an older boy, the future documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings, Goring studied modern languages at the University of Frankfurt am Main, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the University of Vienna, and the University of Paris.

Encouraged by both of his parents to pursue his acting ambitions, he made his professional debut in 1927 playing Harlequin. He studied under Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic dramatic school from 1929 to 1932. In 1931, he toured Germany and France with the English Classical Players performing in Shakespearean and classic English plays. Having become fluent in French and German, he joined La Compagnie des Quinze, under the directorship of Michel Saint-Denis, in 1934. He would later encourage Saint-Denis to come to England and work as a director. His early stage career in England included appearances at the Old Vic, Sadler's Wells and in the West End from 1932 through to 1940. During that period, he played a variety of Shakespearean roles at the Old Vic, including the title role in Macbeth and Romeo in Romeo and Juliet (1933), Feste in Twelfth Night (1937), in addition to Trip in Sheridan's The School for Scandal. He first worked in the West End in a 1934 revival of Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance at the Shaftesbury Theatre.

In 1929, he became a founding member of British Equity, the actors' union, served on its council from 1949 and was three times its vice-president from 1963 to 1965, 1975 to 1977 and again from 1980 to 1982. Goring's relationship with his union was fraught with conflict: he took it to litigation on three occasions. In 1978, regarding the issue of the supremacy of a referendum to decide Equity rules, he took it as far as the House of Lords and won his case. In 1992, he unsuccessfully sought to end the restriction on the sale of radio and television programmes to apartheid South Africa. Stressing that he opposed apartheid and would not perform for segregated audiences, he argued that the ban was depriving actors of work, and stated that he wished to stage a production of the play She Stoops to Conquer with an all-black cast. This particular litigation nearly bankrupted him, due to heavy court costs.

In November 1931, at the age of nineteen, he married twenty-nine year old Mary Westwood Steel (1902-1994) at Gretna Green, Scotland (they had a second marriage ceremony in a London register office in February 1932) and their only child, a daughter Phyllida Mariette Goring, was born in March 1932 and died in 2018. The marriage did not succeed and he became engaged in 1935 to ballet choreographer and designer, Susan 'Susy' Salaman, older sister of Merula Salaman, wife of Alec Guinness. Susy contracted acute encephalitis in late 1935 and was left brain-damaged. Goring wanted to go ahead with the wedding but Susy's father, Michel Salaman, would not allow it.

In 1935, he co-founded the London Theatre Studio with Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine and Glen Byam Shaw. It trained actors, directors and designers and was a precursor of the Old Vic Theatre School; Goring taught Shakespeare there. It had to close in late 1939 due to the outbreak of war.

Goring's film career began with an uncredited role in The Amateur Gentleman (1936) with Douglas Fairbanks Jr and a small speaking role in Rembrandt (also 1936). He shared his one scene in this film with the star Charles Laughton, with whom he had previously worked on stage at the Old Vic. He made two further films released in 1939: Flying Fifty-Five with Derrick de Marney where he showed off his comedic skills playing an amusing drunkard and co-starred with Conrad Veidt in his first Powell and Pressburger film, The Spy in Black, an intriguing spy thriller set during World War One, where he played a German officer for the first of many times in his film career.

When war was declared in September 1939, he was back in the West End as Pip in a production of Great Expectations, adapted for the stage by Alec Guinness. Along with all other plays, it was closed down temporarily by the war but was the first to resume when theatres were reopened in early 1940. He joined the British Army in June 1940, and was seconded in 1941 to the BBC as supervisor of radio productions broadcasting to Germany as part of the BBC German Service (Londoner Rundfunk). He made broadcasts under the name Charles Richardson (using his father's first name and maternal grandmother's maiden name), because of the association of his name with Hermann Göring. In 1944 he became a member of the intelligence staff of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) where he attained the rank of colonel. Because of the broadcasts he had been making to Germany, set up by the Foreign Office as a counter to William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), he was put on a Nazi hit-list.

In 1941, he married his second wife, the German actress Lucie Mannheim (1899-1976). Mannheim, who was Jewish, had been a principal actress in the Berlin Theatre but had to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power. She worked with Goring in many stage productions from the 1930s onwards and in seven episodes of The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, one of which he wrote especially for her, as well as in several films. Mannheim died in 1976, and the next year Goring married television director/producer Prudence Fitzgerald (1930-2018), who had directed him in many episodes of The Expert.

In the film A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Goring played Conductor 71, whose role is to 'conduct' Peter Carter (David Niven) to the afterlife. In The Red Shoes, he played Julian Craster, a young composer who wins the heart of ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) and clashes with the imperious ballet impresario, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). In the film Odette released in the UK in 1950, Goring played the role of Colonel Henri, a German Abwehr (Military Intelligence) officer who deceived and captured Odette. The film is based on the true story of Odette Sansom, the first living woman to be awarded the George Cross. The real Odette Sansom was later a witness at his marriage to Prudence Fitzgerald in 1977. He played Colonel Günther von Hohensee in So Little Time (1952), which also featured Maria Schell, one of his rare romantic leads and frequent roles playing a German officer. He considered the film one of his favourites, alongside the four films he made with Powell and Pressburger.

His TV work included starring as Sir Percy Blakeney in The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (ITV, 1955) (a role which he also performed in a 1952-53 radio show), a series which he also co-wrote and produced; Theodore Maxtible in the Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks (BBC, 1967); Professor John Hardy in The Expert (BBC, 1968–1976); Paul von Hindenburg in Fall of Eagles (BBC, 1974); King George V in Edward & Mrs. Simpson (Thames, 1980) and Emile Englander in The Old Men at the Zoo (BBC, 1983).

Goring's voice provides the narration of the sound and light show performed regularly in the evening at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979 and appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1991.

Goring was married three times, to Mary Westwood Steel, Lucie Mannheim, and Prudence Fitzgerald. He had a daughter, Phyllida, with his first wife.

As an adult, Goring regularly performed French and German roles, and was frequently cast in the latter because of his name, coupled with his red-gold hair and blue eyes, fluency in both languages, and a marriage to German actress Lucie Mannheim. However, he did not possess any known German ancestry. In a 1965 interview, he explained that he was not of German descent, stating that "Goring is a completely English name." As BFI Screenonline noted, "Goring, in nearly 50 films, maintained an urbane image - when, that is, he wasn't being notably sinister. Wholly British as he was, he was remarkably adept at suggesting foreigners."

Death

He died from stomach cancer in 1998 aged 86 at his home in Rushlake Green, East Sussex. He is buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Warbleton, East Sussex near Rushlake Green with his wife, Prudence, who died in 2018.

Goring appears as a character in the 2023 BBC radio play, A Wireless War, in which he is recruited by the Radio Drama Company to voice Adolf Hitler in a serial about the rise of Nazi Germany. He is played by Josh Bryant-Jones.

Film

Television