NEW DATA!!

Ian Holm, for many years one of our finest actors. recently wrote his autobiography. He was a member of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company in the mid-1950s and toured Europe with Laurence Olivier in Titus Andronicus. Subsequent Shakespeare roles have included the title roles in Richard III (1963 -64), Henry V (1964) and Romeo and Juliet (1967). He has also acted in plays by modern playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Edward Bond, although a severe bout of stage-fright kept him away from the theatre for many years.

His film appearances include Chariots of Fire (1981), Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989) and as Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). (This wasn't his first role as a hobbit, by the way; he took the part of Frodo Baggins in a 1995 BBC Radio adaptation.) He has also appeared in many TV dramas and was knighted in 1998.

IAN HOLM (real name Ian Holm Cuthbert): 12 September 1931; Ilford, Essex (51N33 00E05); 2.00 am BST (1.00 am GMT). Autobiography Acting My Life (Bantam Press, 2004). Two other references give Goodmayes, which is quite near Ilford.

They say it's a small world, and this was brought home to me twenty years ago when I took responsibility for the AA's Data Section. An AA member - and I have to admit that I've forgotten her name - asked me if I could obtain a birth-time for senior civil servant Anne Mueller, a woman about whom I knew nothing. I think I must have obtained her home address from Who's Who, so I wrote off to her. Imagine my surprise when she replied that, as a schoolgirl during the Second World War, she was evacuated to an aunt's house in the village of Notton, where I have lived for most of my life. She wanted to know if the village green was still there - yes, it is - and all about the post office which overlooked the green - that's still standing although it recently underwent drastic refurbishment.

Although Anne Mueller was a successful career woman, it appears that her private life was not exactly happy. She obtained a degree in philosophy, polotics and economics at Somerville College, Oxford in 1952, and the following year she joined the Civil Service, working in the Misistry of Labour. In 1956, she was in a near-fatal car accident in Paris, resulting in two years of operations and rehabilitation. Her marriage to a fellow civil servant lasted from 1958 to 1978. In 1984 she was posted to the Cabinet Office as second permanent secretary. Born to a German engineer and an English mother who was a schoolteacher, Anne Mueller was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1988 and died on 8 July 2000.

ANNE MUELLER: 15 October 1930; Bombay, India (18N58 72E50); 02.00AM IST (20.30 GMT 14 October 1930). Letter from her to David Fisher, 20 June 1984.

There are few sitcoms in the history of British TV which are more revered, or groundbreaking, than Steptoe and Son which ran from 1962 to 1965 and then again from 1970 to 1974. Scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson had already tasted success with Hancock's Half-Hour on both the radio and TV, but with this saga of father and son forever trapped in a love-hate relationship and a not very profitable rag-and-bone business, they reached the heights of true comedy. Where it differed in previous sitcoms was in the use of straight actors instead of established comedians. The BBC chose Wilfred Brambell to play the dirty old father who is constantly "holding back" the son, played by Harry H. Corbett, who had more upwardly-mobile pretensions. This same theme runs through the entire saga. In time Corbett came to resent the series; he became so identified with the character of Harold Steptoe that the public would not accept him in anything else. This was a shame because he was regarded by many as one of the finest British actors of his time. Happily, Galton and Simpson are still with us, but Corbett died after a heart attack on 21st March 1982 and Brambell died of cancer on 18th January 1985. They are both still sorely missed.

ALAN SIMPSON: 27 November 1929; Brixton, London (51N27 00W12); 00.40 am GMT. Letter from his agent to David Fisher, information from Simpson himself.

The rest of the data appears in Steptoe and Son by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson with Robert Ross (BBC Worldwide 2002):

RAY GALTON: 17 July 1930; Paddington, London; time not known.

WIFRED BRAMBELL: 22 March 1912; Dublin; time not known.

HARRY H. CORBETT: 28 February 1925; Rangoon, Burma; time not known. (The 'H' didn't stand for anything; it was merely to distinguish him from Harry Corbett, the creator of Sooty.)

PILOT SHOW, ONE OF A SERIES OF COMEDY PLAYHOUSE, FIRST TRANSMISSION: 5 January 1962; London; 8.45 pm (20.45) GMT. The first episode of the first series went out at 8.45 pm BST (19.45 GMT) om 14 June 1962.

We say a sad farewell to two movie stars who died recently, Janet Leigh and Christopher Reeve. Although Janet Leigh (d. 3 october 2004) appeared in several notable films, she will always be remembered for one particular scene - the shower scen in Hitchcock's Psycho, in which she was stabbed to death to the sound of screeching violins. Married to actor Tony Curtis 1951-62, her third husband, she was the mother of Jamie Lee Curtis. Her fourth marriage lasted some forty years until her death.

Christopher Reeve died on 10 October 2004 and will always be remembered as Superman (look at his chart and you'll see why), a part he filled with a degree of tongue-in-cheek humour. A self-confessed Anglophile, he had been paralysed since a riding accident in May 1995.

JANET LEIGH (born Jeanette Morrison): 6 July 1927; Merced, California (37N18 120W29); 2.15 pm PST (22.15 GMT). The Gauquelin Book of American Charts from birth Certificate.

CHRISTOPHER REEVE: 25 September 1952; New York NY (4045 73W57); 3.12 am EDT (07.12 GMT). Linda Clark quotes his letter.

Finally, I am reminded that next year sees the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot and, although he wasn't a leading figure in the plot, Guy Fawkes is the one we remember most because he was the one who was caught in the act. Although he was part of a Catholic conspiracy, his parents were Protestant. He was born in York and I have a date of birth for him - 16 April 1570 O.S. (26 April 1570 N.S.) - but i cannot recall where I obtained it. Maybe it was from a dcumentary; Antonia Fraser's book The Gunpowder Plot merely gives the year 1570. Fawkes was executed on 31 January 1606 O.S. (10 February 1606 N.S.).