THE AMOROUS MILKMAN

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JOHN: You must, at some time, have wanted to be more than an actor because there was The Amorous Milkman in 1975, which you wrote, produced and directed. Derren was trained at RADA where he won the prestigious Forbes-Robertson Shakespearian Acting award.

Eskimo Nell (1975) This is the story of bold Benny U. Murdoch (Roy Kinnear) - owner of B.U.M Studios and producer of naughty… It’s a lesser example of the fine 70s British sex comedies (there’s actually very little sex *or* comedy) with small cameos from comedy stalwarts including Diana Dors, Bill Fraser, Arnold Ridley and Roy Kinnear. Finally, he ends up in court on a rape charge when an irate husband comes home unexpectedly and discovers Terry and his wife in a compromising situation. Ups and Downs of a Handyman, The (1975) Bob (Barry Stokes) and Maggie (Penny Meredith) inherit a country cottage in a sleepy English village from her late aunt,… Funnily enough, years and years ago, Richard Harris– an old friend of mine who was a great drunk – was asked by someone to do an autobiography and he took an advert in The Times saying: :”If anybody could remind me what I was doing between…” (LAUGHS)

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Randy Milkman Davey (Brendan Price) bites off more than he can chew when he starts to deliver more than pints of milk to some of the bored housewives on his route.

Randy milkman Davey ends up delivering more than pints of milk to some of the bored housewives on his round. In a short space of time he finds himself engaged to two different women, Janice and Margo, on the receiving end of a bad beating from John, the local gangster, whose girlfriend Diana has been two-timing him with Davey, and finally ending up in court on a rape charge when Gerald, an irate husband, comes home unexpectedly and discovers Davey and his wife Rita in a compromising situation. DERREN: Well, you can never be anybody else. So what you have got is me as a drag queen in those circumstances. What would I be in those circumstances? And that’s what you try and do. Comedian Steve Oram turns up as a drug dealer and comedian Brendon Burns wrote some of the on-stage gags and appears briefly as a club MC. Apology (1986) An above-average made-for-cable chiller that makes some telling points about the nature of voyeurism. Lesley Ann Warren plays an avant-garde…Years and years later, I went to the South of France where my mother used to live – she had by then married someone richer than my father – and she asked me: ”How is Lew?”

DERREN: Yes, I did and, afterwards, I thought: Well, I’ve done it and that’s good enough. I wrote the novel, then wrote the screenplay from the novel. But then, afterwards, I felt: I’ve done it. So why do it again? JOHN: For your role as a nasty Nazi in the Clint Eastwood movie Where Eagles Dare, you reportedly talked to an ex-Gestapo man to get the feel for your screen character. He finds himself engaged to two different women and on the receiving end of a bad beating from the local gangster (Alan Lake) whose girlfriend has been two-timing him with Davey. DERREN: Well no, not really. Everybody seems to thing you’ve gotta do an awful lot of research. But not in this particular case, because my family were very famous music hall stars. I was in theatres from the age of 5 and, later on, was seeing drag queens and all the rest. So it didn’t take very much for me to ‘become’ a drag queen.DERREN: He did everything. He was involved in so many different things. Including the Grade Organisation. Lew Grade was a great, great friend of his. In fact, Lew Grade had a huge affair with my mother and told her: “If he doesn’t marry you, I will marry you and adopt him (Derren).” (LAUGHS) Maybe the biggest tragedy of my life! Well, in fact, the first thing I ever really remember was my mother throwing me in a bush as a German Messerschmitt came over. (LAUGHS) I never quite trusted her after that! I was in the War in London. I was in the Blitz, right in the middle of it. My first memory is seeing a baby’s head in the gutter. I saw the dead bodies and god knows what else. So I start from then. action films. Before the end of that decade, however, demand for his talents began to wane heavily (following a series of newspaper stories suggesting he could be as unpleasant in real life as some of the characters he played on-screen) and in the 80s and 90s, he made appearances in only a handful of films.

In the UK, the Guardian calls it a “touching, unexpectedly funny end-of-life drama with a terrific performance by 83-year-old Derren Nesbitt.” Dingy, sleazy and dispiriting beyond belief: this is what the last days of the traditional post-Carry On film comedy in Britain came to, a film which is, however, indisputably the work of an auteur: writer-producer-director Derren Nesbitt, whose hopes of ever embarking on a long-term film-making career vanished when his wife filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty. The allegations of wife-beating hit the tabloids just as The Amorous Milkman was released, making the film an even more unpalatable proposition than it would have been anyway and pole-axing Nesbitt's acting career in the bargain.Bizarrely, the film was based on the first novel by tv star Derren Nesbitt (of Special Branch fame) who also directed. DERREN: Yes. He chose me to go to the Oxford Playhouse. But he only did one play there and moved on and then I was very fortunate. I think the movie Victim was the turning point. And I have never done an audition. DERREN: I did. I finished it about two months ago. I thought: Who would want to read it? But I wrote it more as a cathartic thing. Whether or not anyone wants to publish it, I have no idea. She said: “Well, your father wouldn’t take Lew seriously. If Leslie Grade had asked him, he would have put money in.” DERREN: Well, he’s a human being. The hardest thing in the world is to present true reality on the screen, but that’s the name of the game.