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A dancer, choreographer and director who made her stage debut aged three, Toye was a creative powerhouse who left an estimable legacy as a film director. Now two of her films are being released for a new audience

There are few figures in British film history as fascinating as Wendy Toye. Born in east London in 1917, she was a showbiz prodigy who first appeared on stage aged three at the Royal Albert Hall. Later, she was a dancer, choreographer and director working across stage and film, and responsible for some of British cinema’s most beguiling and chilling flights of fantasy – as well as some beloved comedies. All that a time when women were rarely entrusted with the director’s chair. “Then, I liked it to be forgotten that my films were made by a woman,” she said in 1990. “I think nowadays I’d feel quite differently.”

For a remarkably long stretch,...

Konga

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1961/ 1:85 / 90 min.

Starring Michael Gough, Margo Johns

Directed by John Lemont

Like any actor worth their salt, Michael Gough contained multitudes. And so did his fans – from the West End to 42nd Street they gathered as one to sing his praises. Born in Kuala Lumpur and educated in England, Gough bolted Wye College for the Old Vic, eventually graduating to roles in films like Richard III and The Horse’s Mouth. Haunting the studio by day, he tread the boards at night showing a special talent for light comedy and, in the words of critic Caryl Brahms, an “extraordinary capacity for pent-up emotion.”

In 1959 Gough’s day job took a turn for the weird – producer Herman Cohen offered him the lead in Horrors of the Black Museum, the grisly tale of a crime enthusiast with a fetish for eccentric torture devices. And absolutely no capacity for pent-up emotion.

Director of British comedy films in the tradition of saucy seaside postcards

During the 1970s, British cinema produced dozens of sex comedies, of which the director Bob Kellett, who has died aged 84, was something of a master. Kellett's films superseded the Carry On series, whose innuendo had become smuttier and less funny, and predated the more vulgar Confessions movies. They were in the tradition of Donald McGill's saucy seaside postcards, which George Orwell had extolled as being "symptomatically important as a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue".

Kellett, who was born in Lancaster, went to Bedford school, where he was captain of the rowing team. After school, he had various jobs, including growing and selling orchids, selling encyclopedias, and writing for an advertising agency, before entering the film industry in the early 50s. After working on several features as script editor for the producer Ian Dalrymple at Pinewood Studios,...

Actor with poise and presence, best known as Alfred the butler in Tim Burton's Batman

The actor Michael Gough, who has died aged 94, was an arresting presence on stage, television and film for the entire postwar period, notably as the butler Alfred Pennyworth in Tim Burton's Batman movies. Eventually he just voiced roles, as with the Dodo Bird in the same director's Alice in Wonderland film last year, but always to striking effect.

Gough started in the Old Vic company in London before the second world war, but it took till 1946 for his career proper to get off to a flying start in the West End, in Frederick Lonsdale's But for the Grace of God. The fistfight-to-the-death scene was done with such startling verisimilitude that nearly all the stage furniture was demolished nightly, and Gough broke three ribs and injured the base of his spine. So copiously...