Jack Hawkins never gave up… even when silenced by cancer

Jack Hawkins’ career had been erratic from the start. As Britain’s most famous stiff upper lip – and today, famous as star of The Cruel Sea, The League of Gentlemen, Bridge On The River Kwai and Ben-Hur – he’d spent nearly 25 years in the shadows before hitting the big time.

Born in London in 1910, Jack’s father, Thomas George Hawkins, was the well-regarded local master builder. His mother, Phoebe, was a housewife. By all accounts, he was an indifferent student and got his professional start as a child actor, honing his craft playing a variety of roles on stage.

When war came in 1939, his career was waylaid. Serving with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, he briefly led a Bren gun platoon deep inside the Indian jungle, before being seconded to a softer job with the Entertainments National Service Association in India. With peace, his subtle, seemingly-effortless style led to a string of small roles, playing solid, responsible naval sorts, policemen, pilots and army officers.

However, convinced that he would never progress further than character parts, he was astonished to be catapulted into fame playing Lieutenant-Commander George Ericson, the stoical captain protecting Allied convoys against U-boat attacks in 1953 epic, The Cruel Sea, based on the bestselling novel by Nicholas Monsarrat.

After entering the hallowed gates of Ealing Studios, Hawkins had the feeling the film would either be a flop or a great success. “But either way it would never be mediocre.” In fact, it turned out to be one of the great international hits of the 1950s, providing a strong dose of bulldog British and pathos. On set, he offered support to 21-year-old actress Virginia McKenna, making her film debut as WREN Julie Hallam.

“The subtle way in which he expressed emotions had such understatement,” McKenna, now 93, told me during an interview for my new biography, Jack Hawkins: A Biography. Her casting in The Cruel Sea came almost by chance. “I met Jack in the studio. He was the nicest, kindest, and most unstarry of people, and as courageous in real life as in the characters he played.”

In one highly charged scene, Hawkins’ Lt-Col Ericson orders depth charges to be dropped, although it meant slaughtering British survivors of another ship swimming towards him. It made dramatic cinema – there were gasps in movie theatres when the camera framed Jack against a backdrop of the dark ocean, shedding a tear at the carnage. Remarkably, this wonder was nearly thrown out by studio boss Michael Balcon, who, reckoning men did not cry, wanted it cut. Thankfully, the head of Paramount production insisted: “The shot with Jack Hawkins crying stays in the picture… it has balls!” Grudgingly, Balcon agreed.

When filmgoers chose him as the leading actor of 1953, the Daily Mirror thought his success broke “all the rules” of a celebrity.

“He is 43, portly, and has hardly had a screen kiss in 20 years of films,” the paper opined rather unkindly. However, from here on, prestigious war dramas emerged as his forte.

“The Cruel Sea was tremendously important to Jack,” says Barry MacGregor, who featured in a radio adaptation of the story. “There are some actors who work with you who are total s***s – they just work on their own and you happen to be there in the scene with them.

“And then you get the actor that listens to you. I would put Jack on the same level as Paul Schofield. When we were working together in rehearsals, Jack was listening to you. He was part of it, and it was a joy to work with someone like that.”

By the mid-1950s, Hawkins was exuberantly the toast of British cinema and he loved every moment of it. But not all of his projects were as popular as The Cruel Sea.

At the height of his fame, he accepted £30,000 to play Pharaoh Khufu in the monumentally ill-advised Land Of The Pharaohs, a Cinemascope epic shot on location in Egypt about the building of the Great Pyramid.

While his memoirs describe a “perfectly ridiculous” plot littered with “frightful lines”, there are many other theories as to why it morphed into outright disaster. One of them points the finger at the American model Ivy Nicholson, who was cast as his love interest, Princess Nellifer.

Alarm bells should have rung during her screen test with Jack, where instructions read: “You’re quarrelling, and he slaps you. Just react naturally, as you would if you really got slapped.” But when the cameras rolled and Jack faked a slap, Ivy let out a terrifying yell and bit deeply into his hand, leaving him reeling in pain. After a few more prissy fits, she was finally sacked.

“The ex-Nellifer was very difficult,” recalled Dame Joan Collins, who stepped into the princess’s sandals. “Apparently stardom had gone instantly to her head, and she started going round telling director Howard Hawks and Jack Hawkins what to do.”

When the film flopped, Hawks disowned it and took a two-year break from work to recover from the ordeal. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Egypt banned the movie on the grounds of “distortion of historical facts”.

The Bridge On The River Kwai, starring Alec Guinness and American heartthrob William Holden, was another production plagued by problems. In it, Jack played the leader of the commando unit sent to blow up a bridge painstakingly constructed by half-starved Allied prisoners of the Japanese.

It was a tense, unhappy experience. Everything during production was difficult: relationships, living conditions, script – all made worse by the humid climes of Ceylon.

The first little melodrama came when Guinness’s nose was conked out of joint after discovering director David Lean “didn’t particularly” want him for the lead role. From that moment, legends grew about the filming. When the weather turned foul, Hawkins and Holden found relief from the unbearable humidity by wading into a waterfall in the jungle deep in the interior.

One morning, they both emerged from the water covered with bloodsucking leeches, sausage-sized parasitic worms. “But not the kind you can get off with matches,” Holden recounted. “These were big enough to require flamethrowers.”

Typically, Hawkins took all the drama in his stride and savoured the lighter moments. Apparently, Guinness never forgot arriving at the make-up tent to discover Holden shaving his chest because American ladies were supposed to be averse to seeing body hair, while Jack was busily gumming on quantities of crepe hair to satisfy the English ladies.

When Kwai became an instant hit, euphoria took over. Guinness even sent a note to his bête noire David Lean claiming he was enormously impressed by Jack Hawkins.

For two years, Hawkins parried offers from Hollywood, but relished the prospect of playing the mastermind behind a gang of elegant but shady Army veterans turning to robbery in the low-budget British heist caper The League Of Gentlemen. Nobody could have predicted, however, it would be his last starring role after he grappled a cancerous growth on his throat. For years, Hawkins had been a militant smoker, puffing through at least 60 cigarettes a day.

Thankfully, Cobalt treatment restored his speech in 1960, but doctors warned the removal of his vocal cords would be the only option if the cancer returned. Over time, he eased himself back into work with a string of superb performances in Guns Of Batasi, Lord Jim, and Judith, with Italian starlet Sophia Loren.

Nevertheless, a trend was developing in the film business away from jut-jawed epics toward grimmer, socially conscious “kitchen sink” cinema – a genre neither admired by Hawkins nor in keeping with his style.

Certainly, the tide had turned. And, as his fanbase waned, younger actors such as Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Laurence Harvey began to dominate the spotlight.

Hawkins was in strange territory. And unlike this modern wave of marquee names – all oozing charisma and political opinions – he refused to air his views on civil rights, religion, Apartheid, nuclear armaments, or politics. “To remain a star,” he asserted with bemused diplomacy, “you have to be an actor and not a personality.” Though some considered him old hat, he did, thankfully, land a few plum parts, including playing the crotchety General Edmund Allenby in Lawrence Of Arabia, and Otto Witt, a drunken renegade missionary, in Zulu.

However, as Zulu’s continuity assistant Muirne Mathieson told me: “Jack had a problem with his throat which couldn’t have made his life easy.” In fact, it was not so much a problem as a preview of disaster to come – by 1965, the cancer had returned.

Tragically, his deep husky voice known to millions of cinemagoers was lost forever when doctors removed his larynx – the voice box. Though Hawkins first thought his acting career was over, he overcame the handicap by learning to speak by using his diaphragm and stomach muscles, which served him adequately for delivering brief lines.

However, when longer speaking parts were called for, another actor’s voice – usually Charles Grey’s – was used.

Over the next few years, he appeared in half a dozen more films, largely in unmemorable roles. In The Adventures of Gerard, the picture’s star, Peter McEnery, was left agog when Hawkins turned up with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “I watched him smoking. He couldn’t draw on the cigarette because he was breathing through the hole in his throat and yet he still smoked,” McEnery recalled. “It was about the whole motion of putting the cigarette to his lips.”

Over time, Hawkins came to despise his lack of inflection and having to swallow air – or gulp – which ruined his timing. So, when he heard about a new artificial voice-box being developed in America, he wasted no time in finding out more. It turned out that with just ten operations having been conducted, it was still considered an experimental procedure.

The little instrument, invented by one Dr Stanley Taub, promised the immediate restoration of “effortless speech” for a person whose larynx, or voice box, had been removed. To install the device – known as a VoiceBak – Taub would cut a second opening through the side of Hawkins’ neck into the oesophagus, leading to the stomach.

“Despite any fears, Jack was admitted to the hospital and proceeded to get prepared for surgical procedure,” Taub told me.

Nevertheless, things did not go smoothly.

He suffered an infection in the flap that was put into the neck area, and a carotid leak. The neck wound never healed.

Not long after, Hawkins was rushed to St Stephens after blood began spurting from his throat. The “long tale of horror”, as his wife Doreen later described it, ended on July 18, 1973. The cause of death was “a secondary haemorrhage, which occurred after an operation to fit an appliance to improve his speaking voice”.

Hawkins, this one-time giant of British movies, was just 62 years old. Most actors, given a long life and perfect fitness, would have been delighted to achieve what Jack Hawkins achieved. And even today, via the endless re-runs of his films on TV, he still occupies a special niche of his own: one of sincerity, integrity and courage.

In fact, someone once said, if he had made a serious attempt to play a criminal or Nazi, he would have been booed offstage.

Jack Hawkins: A Biography, by Nathan Morley (Fonthill Media, £30) is out now. For free UK P&P, visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832