Upstairs, Downstairs
Out of Costume
Before Upstairs, Downstairs 1

Who said solicitors are all blood-suckers? Raymond Huntley, who played the Bellamy's legal advisor Sir Geoffrey Dillon, had a long career behind him before Upstairs, Downstairs. One of his early roles was playing Dracula on the London stage in the late Twenties - a role for which he had to provide his own costume!

Raymond "Sir Geoffrey" Huntley in the 1944 morale-boosting war film The Way Ahead. The movie is packed with stalwarts of British cinema of the time including David Niven, Jack Watling, Peter Ustinov and Trevor Howard. In the pictures above you can also see Jimmy Hanley, John "Dad's Army" Laurie, William "Doctor Who" Hartnell, Leslie "Hi-De-Hi" Dwyer, and Stanley Holloway. Click on the picture for a larger version.

A young Nicola Pagett. Her early years were spent in the Middle and Far East so she had some idea of what it was like to be surrounded by servants when it came to her Upstairs, Downstairs role.

Nicola Pagett in Granada's 1968 serial The Caesars. She featured in the last episode as Messalina alongside Freddie Jones as her husband Claudius. The show covers almost identical territory to the BBC's later (and more famous) I, Claudius in 1976 and it's worth noting just how much Derek Jacobi's celebrated later performance as Claudius owes to Freddie Jones. Despite having rather slow opening episodes (a trait shared by its BBC counterpart) the serial doesn't quite deserve its modern-day obscurity. Part of the problem may be that The Caesars was shot in black and white - one of the last period dramas to be made this way - and the surviving copies appear to be rather grotty. Click picture for a larger version.

Can you spot the future UpDown star in this group shot from the early BBC soap The Grove Family? A young Christopher Beeny played Lennie Grove, the trouble-attracting youngster of the family, and is pictured in the back row. The show is credited as "the first continuous television narrative drama [i.e. soap] in Britain" and ran for nearly 150 episodes between April 1954 and June 1957, all (somewhat hair-raisingly) transmitted live. Sadly only two episodes (including the last) still survive, but the series did spin off a cinema film, It's A Great Day, in 1955.

Simon Williams pictured with his sister Polly during their childhood and, below, in 1995. Recognise her face? She played in the UpDown episode Tug of War as Lady Viola Courtney, a nurse training alongside Georgina. She married actor Nigel Havers in 1989 but sadly died in 2004 after a four-year battle with cancer.

Here is Pauline Collins in the 1965 drama/documentary Secrets Of A Windmill Girl. It follows the adventures of two young girls (played by Collins and April Wilding) who decide to go into burlesque at London's legendary Windmill Theatre. Ironically, the theatre had closed (and been converted into a cinema) just a year before the movie went into production. Click for a bigger version.