Tobey explained, For some reason Cary and Ann laughed at something I did, and it interested Hawks He kept writing in things for me to do. Then at the end of the film he said, “I’m going to star you in a picture some day.” And he did, in The Thing.Credited as director on the film is Christian Nyby, who had been the editor of many Hawks films. Tobey said, “Hawks was having union trouble at the time so he didn’t want his name on the film.” One of Hawks’ trademarks evident in The Thing is the use of overlapping dialogue. When asked if that made timing difficult, Tobey replied, I come from the stage originally Stage actors pick up cues very quickly. If, at the end of a sentence, it’s not too meaningful, you just start talking over the other person. It makes the pace very quick.The actor Robert Cornthwaite, who played the head scientist in The Thing, recalled that Hawks wanted complete unknowns for the film. “He felt it gave the audience a sense of greater reality,” he told the New York Times.

“Tobey had a wonderful, understated kind of style as an actor.”The film resulted in better parts for Tobey in general, but it was in sci-fi and monster films that he had his best parts. He was an army colonel in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and received top billing in It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) as the captain of a naval submarine who first spots a mutant killer octopus (with five tentacles) in the Pacific Ocean. Weaver said, Most of the other sci-fi heroes of the Fifties were scientists or eggheads, but Tobey always represented the military, and in such a hard-nosed, no-nonsense style that you knew as soon as he came on and started barking orders that the monsters had probably bitten off more than they could chew.The actor’s role in The Thing paid another dividend when he ran into Sammy Davis Jr in a Los Angeles jazz club in the early Sixties. A great fan of the film, Davis asked him to play the key role of his fight manager in the Strouse-Adams musical Golden Boy, which opened on Broadway in 1964.In the spoof disaster movie Airplane! (1980), Tobey was one of the air traffic controllers, and his many other films included Seven Ways from Sundown (1960), Marlowe (1969), Strange Invaders (1983), and Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992). One of his last roles was in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1995).Tom Vallance.

John Malcolm Brealey, art conservator: born London 25 January 1925; married 1951 Hella von Kupfer (died 1991; one son and one son deceased); died New York 19 December 2002. John Brealey was the leading conservator of paintings of his generation and one of the most important teachers and practitioners of the 20th century. Conservators in many of the world’s foremost art museums worked with him or were trained by him and his influence on the profession was profound. He was head of the paintings conservation department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a post to which he was invited in 1975 after an extraordinarily distinguished career as a private restorer in London. He remained at the Metropolitan Museum until 1989 when a stroke cruelly cut short his working life. His parents were both artists: his father William Brealey was a well-known portrait painter in London, and his mother trained as a designer of textiles. Speaking in 1976 (to the American Institute for Conservation oral history project), John Brealey said of his early life, Later.

I realised that I had a very strongly developed inherent response to works of art which seemed to be stronger than other people’s I felt completely at home with an artwork. probably the only time in life that I was at ease.He went to Mill Hill School and was evacuated to Cambridge during the Second World War. After a brief flirtation with journalism, he worked in an aircraft factory and found it was possible to work at night and have the days free to spend in museums and libraries in Cambridge. At this time he met Picasso’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and his brother Gustav, whose collection of photographs and paintings he studied.Brealey went into the RAF and was posted to India for three years, where a medical examination revealed a condition that barred him from active service.