Commemorative Plaque For Chiswick Home Of Actor Donald Pleasence

Actress Vicki Michelle will attend unveiling at Strand on the Green

A Heritage Foundation blue plaque will be unveiled this weekend to the British actor Donald Pleasence, who lived on Strand on the Green for many years.

The unveiling, by the combined forces of Richmond-resident Air Commodore Charles Clarke OBE and Heritage Foundation president actress Vicki Michelle, ('Allo Allo) will take place on Sunday October 22 at 11.45am.

Local residents at Strand on the Green had applied for Listed Building Consent for the Heritage Foundation plaque to honour actor Donald Pleasence OBE who lived in the area through the 1970s.

Donald Pleasence OBE, 1919-1995, was a formidable talent and acclaimed stage, TV and film actor who became world-famous for his roles as the blind prison-of-war forger Colin Blythe in The Great Escape and the scar-faced villain Blofeld in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. In Tony Richardson's film of Look Back in Anger (1959) he plays a vindictive market inspector opposite Richard Burton. He often played the role of villain in movies.

Pleasence was nominated four times for the Tony Award for best performance by a leading actor in a Broadway play: in 1962 for Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, in 1965 for Jean Anouilh's Poor Bitos, in 1969 for Robert Shaw's The Man in the Glass Booth, and in 1972 for Simon Gray's Wise Child.

He was appointed OBE in 1994 for services to the acting profession. He was initially a conscientious objector to WW2 but then joined the RAF as bomber crew and was shot down and became a prisoner of war in Germany.

He was married four times, and died in 1995 in France, at the age of 75.

The Heritage Foundation honours actors and actresses and those in the entertainment industry and its Arts and Entertainment Charitable Trust has strong links with the Bomber Command Association.

October 20, 2017