Was rugby star’s grandfather a Soviet agent?
Former England fly-half Toby Flood is the grandson of a famous actor who was tailed by MI5 amid fears he was part of a communist cell at the BBC
AS TOBY FLOOD takes the rugby pitch for his French club Toulouse at the weekend he could be forgiven if his mind was not entirely on the game but rather on the much-married grandfather he never knew. Albert Lieven, a German-born actor who died in London in 1971 at 65, was already known to have had an interesting life: four wives and a role in the film The Guns Of Navarone, among much else. But according to newly released papers, he could have had yet another string to his bow: Soviet spy.
If it all sounds too strange to be true, more worthy of the plots of the films in which he appeared, what is undeniably true is that Albert left Germany to escape Nazi persecution (and ironically ended up portraying Nazis in more than one of his films).
Born Albert Fritz Liévin to a father who was a lung specialist in Hohenstein, East Prussia, on June 22, 1906, he first appeared on stage at the Hottheater in Gera in 1928. He then joined the Preussische Staatstheater as part of the ensemble cast and made his first German film in 1932. Another 16 were to follow, including the German version of Charley’s Aunt.
Around this time, he married the first of his wives Tatiana Silbermann. Born into a White Russian Jewish family from St Petersburg in 1909, she fled Germany in 1936 to escape the Nazis. Once in London, the couple came under suspicion because Tatiana was known to have communist sympathies and the newly released documents refer to her as a “dangerous woman”.
As her husband’s career began to flourish in their new home, with Albert appearing in seven films in 1940 alone, the authorities began to worry that Albert, too, might be a spy.
The couple were thought to have tried to get a communist sympathiser to infiltrate the BBC, while Albert was suspected of running a communist cell “operating in the German sections of the BBC Foreign Propaganda Service” according to MI5. He could “no longer be regarded as trustworthy,” it said, adding there was “little hope he could be saved from communism”. But MI5’s suspicions didn’t hurt his career, as one film followed another including, The Life And Times Of Colonel Blimp.
THE marriage, however, did not last, divorcing in 1944 and Tatiana, at least, remained very much under suspicion. She married another actor, Miles Malleson, best known for comedies and Hammer horrors, and was seen in the company of Klaus Fuchs, a scientist and spy who in 1950 was convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
His mistress Erna Turner, herself married to Fuch’s boss at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Hartwell, Oxfordshire, later told Tatiana, “Klaus was a bloody fool.” For their part MI5 observed that Tatiana was a “most unsuitable acquaintance for the wife of the deputy head of the AERE”.
After his marriage broke up, official interest in Albert waned. He had a succession of wives, all actresses: Valerie White, Petra Peters and finally Susan Shaw, who he married in 1949 and had his only child, Anna. But the couple separated after four years and Susan, who trained at J Arthur Rank’s “charm school” and appeared in Carry On Nurse, went on to marry the actor Bonar Colleano in 1954. A year later they had a son, Mark. But their happiness was shortlived. In 1958 Bonar was killed in a car crash and Susan never recovered. She became an alcoholic, was no longer able to work and died in 1978 of cirrhosis of the liver, aged just 49. The Rank Organisation paid for her funeral. Anna, like her parents, went on the stage and when she appeared in a production in Guildford, one of her co-stars was a well-established actor called Gerald Flood, who had appeared in various TV programmes including Doctor Who, The Ratcatchers and Tom Brown’s Schooldays and more to the point had a son called Tim.
Tim wanted to be a theatre manager and went on to work in the management team at The Customs House theatre and arts centre in South Shields, South Tyneside. But more significantly for our purposes he and Anna married and had a son, one Tobias Gerald Albert Lieven Flood. His one known acting role was as a pig in a school nativity play at Warkworth First School.
Instead, his stage was to be on the rugby union field with Toby playing for Newcastle Falcons and Leicester Tigers, before moving to Toulouse. He has also played for England no fewer than 60 times.
Toby was born in 1985, well after his maternal grandfather’s death, but has taken this week’s news about his mysterious past with some amusement. “He had a great journey through life,” Toby said, adding he “might now vote for the communist guy” in France’s upcoming presidential election. “My real genes might come out. I will have to get a hammer and sickle.”
It would be a fitting end to an intriguing tale.