Blue plaque commemorates Chichester’s Alan Badel
actor Alan Badel has now been remembered with a blue plaque on the house where he lived in Chichester.
The plaque has been placed at 1 a st martin’ s square–much to the delight of his daughter Sarah bad el who followed him into the profession: “It means that I can walk past and have the privilege of looking up and seeing his name and knowing that even all these years later he is still remembered. I feel tremendous gratitude and pride that this is happening.”
Alan, who died on March 19 1982, would have celebrated his 100th birthday on September 11 this year. He moved to Chichester after Sarah moved to the city when she was invited to work at the Festival Theatre by artistic director sir John Clements after he took over from Laurence Olivier.
Alan–knownasbladefrom the nickname he was given, Lord Blade of Grass – was always Alan or Blade to Sarah: “And he was just such a wonderful actor. He absolutely inhabited whoever it was he was playing. Living at home with him you never knew who was going to come out of the bathroom, whether it was going to be Macbeth or King Kong or Ratty from The Wind In The Willows. He would totally be that person. One day I saw his mouth twitching an dire al is ed he was practising Ratty!
“He had always wanted to be an actor. He was born in Manchester and he just loved the theatre. He wrote to Robert Donat as a very young man and Robert Donat very kindly encouraged him. He encouraged him to go to RADA and he did. Alan was 16 and it was the outbreak of the war and he got a scholarship through Robert Donat coaching him – though Don at said‘ you' ve got to get rid of that mancunian accent !’ he was 16 and he was two years at RADA where he met my mother who was also 16. his parents let him go alone to London at the outbreak of war at that young age but he left RADA having won the Bancroft gold medal and my mother won the silver medal. He would have been jolly cross if it had been the other way round!”
Then the war intervened. Alan served as a paratrooper and saw action on D-day. He was blown up at Pegasus Bridge: “It profoundly damaged his hearing. After that he was totally stone deaf for a while, couldn’ t hear a thing but his hearing did come back to a degree. One-on-one in quiet surroundings he was alright but with any background noise he could not cope. But he was absolutely brilliant at disguising it. There were so many women who so admired him. He would be very gallant and charming and a lot of them would think that he was going to kiss them but he was actually looking at their mouths because he was lip reading! That intensity of gaze that he was so remembered for was actually partly for that reason!”
Alan was demobbed in 1947 and came back to a very different world where there was a new realism in the theatre: “He was a complete chameleon and could have done anycelebrated thing but the realism was not really his thing.”
The really crucial role for him was The Count of Monte Cristo on television in 1964: “He was suddenly launched and everybody fell for him.”
Sarah remembers that his years in Chichester relaxed him: “He loved it here. He was here for about eight years. The people were so nice and he was always very supportive of the theatre though he was never asked to play at the Festival Theatre. He couldn't have managed that stage with his hearing problem but he saw everything there and he supportedme and encouraged me in everything that I did.”
There was sadness though in his final years. One day he was summoned from London because there was a fire back in Chichester, tragically a fire that killed his next door neighbours :“1 A was not damaged but the cellars were interconnected and the smoke went through the whole house and blackened everything and of course it was an awful tragedy for the people next door. That really shocked Alan, and he died just months later.”
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