(Hugh in The Dambusters 1954)

I adored Hugh Manning. 

He was suave, amusing, intelligent, had a wonderful voice . . . and played a pretty good game of contract bridge. 

In fact it was in cutting for partners at the bridge table that I first met him.  As, indeed, I met so many of my friends during the 1950s and the 1960s.

Funny how it's the little things that often remain in memory when some of the more significant happenings are consigned to our unconscious minds.  In the case of Hugh Manning, the first thing that springs to recall is that he introduced me to the wonderful world of Tom Lehrer, whose name was practically unknown in the UK at that time.  We were playing bridge at his Hampstead home and the game was considerably delayed by the LP performance and our vast guffaws.

This would have been a few years after his film appearance in The Dambusters, illustrated above.  He went on to appear in several other movies, his final big screen performance being in The Elephant Man in 1980, illustrated below.  But he was never far from sight and memory with some very well known appearances on TV, such as the soap opera Emmerdale from 1977 to 1989.  His role as a butler to Kathleen Harrison's Mrs Thursday preceded this in 1966 and this was a role that he reprised famously and for a long time in televised commercials advertising the soft drink Robinson's lemon barley water - a favoured thirst-quencher on the tennis courts of Wimbledon.

I only saw him in one live performance, but it is one I have never forgotten, although I no longer recall the venue.  He did a wonderful one-man show, reciting some of the works of Charles Dickens.  This was recalled vividly, with nostalgia and sadness, last year when I went to the theatre with my daughter to see Simon Callow perform similarly and - for me - disappointingly.  I have little doubt that it was the memory of Hugh Manning in that role which detracted massively from any pleasure I might have derived from Simon Callow.

(Hugh had a minor role in The Elephant Man in 1980)