Basil Hoskins

Basil Hoskins was an English stage and screen actor, born in Edmonton, London, in 1929, who trained at RADA before joining the Nottingham Playhouse company in 1951. He spent five seasons with the Shakespeare Memorial Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, playing Lucius opposite Laurence Olivier's Titus Andronicus, and had a long London stage career opposite Vivien Leigh in Duel of Angels (1958), Alec Guinness in Ross (1960), and Lauren Bacall in the musical Applause (1971); in the 1950s he also toured Australia with the Old Vic Company alongside Katharine Hepburn. On screen he is best remembered for the films Ice Cold in Alex (1958) and North West Frontier (1959), and on British television he played Dr. Rex Lane Russell in Emergency-Ward 10 (1957) and appeared in The Prisoner, Clayhanger, The New Avengers, and Cold Comfort Farm (1995). Hoskins was gay and, from the late 1950s until Harry Andrews's death in 1989, was Andrews's partner of more than thirty years, having met him while filming Ice Cold in Alex; the two lived together quietly in the East Sussex countryside during an era when homosexuality remained a criminal offense in Britain. Hoskins died in 2005 and is buried beside Andrews at St Mary the Virgin, Salehurst.