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Last Update : 09/06/16

It’s the merest of ice cold sneers, a near contemptuous air of superiority as the assassin looks down briefly at his silencer and then back at his impending victim.

“The first one won’t kill you; not the second, not even the third… not till you crawl over here and you KISS MY FOOT!”

The dialogue is chillingly delivered by the steely blued eyed actor and the agent on his knees (played by Sean Connery), looks desperate, his options disappearing by the second. This scene from the second 007 epic, a moment anticipated by cinemagoers throughout the preceding ninety minutes, turned the enigmatic Robert Shaw into a genuine bona fide star.

Shaw, who died in 1978, three years after he won international acclaim for his starring role in “Jaws,” the movie credited as the first blockbuster, grew up on Orkney and is well remembered in his former home town. At the time of his death, he had expressed no desire to vegetate in his declining years, preferring instead to exploit his box office popularity for a few more years and then to retire to his Irish sanctuary. Tending the land, writing and playing out his role as the honoured patriarch amongst his loving and possibly still expanding family featured heavily in his plans.

The hardman star, also famous for giving Sean Connery his toughest fist-fight as evil agent Red Grant in the Bond movie ‘From Russia With Love,’ spent most of his career playing villains or anti-heroes in Hollywood hits such as ‘The Sting,’ and ‘Battle of the Bulge.’ The accomplished stage actor was also a successful writer, with several published works to his credit, and wrote the standout USS Indianapolis monologue scene in ‘Jaws’ that explained his character’s frenzied hatred of sharks. Yet off screen, he was renowned for his fast living and hard drinking, earning a reputation as one of the noisiest hellraisers in the business. He was also one of the most prolific actors around, a work ethic which some might attribute to his three marriages and ten children. Nevertheless, whatever his motivation, there was never any doubting his acting talent and enormous screen charisma, even if many of his appearances were representative of an uneven career.

At fifty, he claimed to be mellowing after long years of struggle for commercial success. Talking to a reporter, he was quoted as saying that – “It’s been a strange movie career, not a slow steady progression, but good years followed by bad in a disheartening sequence. I’m enjoying my seventh resurgence now,” he mused, an edge of sarcasm creeping into his deep voice. “It was luck that they kept on discovering me.”

Though long acknowledged as a fine actor, Shaw had rarely won the starring role in films. “I was never really a character actor — I was a leading man who was always cast as a character,” he explained. “I wanted to be Jack Nicholson or Jean Gabin.” The closest Shaw had come to winning an Oscar was a 1967 nomination for his supporting role as Henry VIII in ‘A Man for All Seasons.’ The award that year went to Walter Matthau for “The Fortune Cookie,” the first of many pairings with Jack Lemmon.

Shaw was living in Ireland at the time of his death, for both the country life and its less punitive tax regime. Elucidating further, the actor went on to add that : “I still don’t think of myself as a star. Success lasts only three seconds. After that you’re the same as you were before you had it. I’m not a true artist anyway because I refuse to shrug off my family. To support them I must work in commercial films. My taxes alone keep eight lawyers busy, and when I finally get my money, it’s only one-third of what I earn. With the kids in school and my other responsibilities, I get no change back from the first million dollars. The money flows out like water.” He did concede that his family would survive if he never appeared in another movie yet still wanted the best for his kids. That didn’t mean he was mercenary but “having been brought up in a capitalist competitive world, I retain its traditions. There’s no future in being poor.”

Robert Shaw was born in Lancashire and raised in Cornwall, where his father, a doctor, committed suicide. Shaw, too, was a manic depressive and competitive to the point of lunacy, literally with any activity, running, gambling, table tennis, anything. Fresh from filming “Jaws,” Shaw travelled to Spain for location work on “Robin and Marian” with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. The English writer and comic actor, Ronnie Barker, had a small part as one of Robin’s merry men and his recollections of Shaw appear in Bob McCabe’s authorised biography of the comedian (BBC Books 2004). He found Shaw, cast as the Sheriff of Nottingham, a mercurial character. “I remember we were having a half day and it was lunchtime. Everyone had had a few I think, and Robert Shaw was saying how he loved playing boules.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boules\

“Now I’ve played it a bit. He was always challenging people to things to show them he was the best. He said “I’ll bet you a hundred pounds, I’ll give you eight points and I’ll beat you to thirteen points. I said OK. And everyone came out to watch us, the other actors. It was like a tournament. He started to catch me up. We got to the point where he had a ball right next to the jack and – they were all rooting for me – I had one ball left and I thought “I’ve got to bomb him out of here. I have to do this”. I took aim and it flew right out and a great cheer went up. He was very angry, very upset about it. _“Bastard” he said and threw his money down. I felt so elated. It was like David and Goliath. He was a nice man but he was aggressive.”_ Barker’s approach to the game was the correct one but where interraction with characters like Shaw is more regular, perhaps amongst (say) family members, work colleagues or friends, I’ve tended by default, to let them have their day, whatever my ability to compete. Their competitive instinct makes for boorish behaviour when results do not go in their favour and frankly I’m not concerned enough either way. In any event, it’s impossible to truly change one’s personality – even some form of moderation is extremely difficult and Shaw was clearly disinterested in changing his outward demeanour. Reflecting on an encounter with the mercurial star, actor Christopher Plummer recalls in his autobiography “In spite of myself”:

‘One evening, soon after _‘The Battle of B(ritain’) had wrapped, enjoying yet another delectable supper there (L’Etoile on Charlotte Street, London), I was just coming out of the boys’ room when I felt a stabbing pain in my right foot. Robert Shaw had stamped firmly on my shoe, pinioning me to the floor. “We’re doing ‘The Royal Hunt’ in Spain one month from now as a film”, he announced between his teeth. “You’re going to play Atahuallpa and I’m going to play your old part Pizarro! Say yes now and I’ll take my foot off ya!” – I had no choice but to say yes. “Right!” the Cornish rooster crowed. “You’re free to go.”

Shaw’s second wife was the stage actress Mary Ure, perhaps unjustly best known nowadays for her supporting role in the World War II blockbuster “Where Eagles Dare.” She became involved with the actor whilst still married to the playwright John Osbourne. There are parallels in Ure’s life with her husbands; an inability to stand her ground, to persue her professional goals and the spiralling descent into recreational drinking and then alcoholism.

The marriage between Mary and John would only last five years; his extremely complicated love life, womanising, abusive behaviour and their differences of opinion on starting a family contributing greatly to the breakdown. It was also noted at this time that Osborne was beginning to resent Mary’s growing dependence on alcohol.

Osbornе’s cruelty was observed by the writer Doris Lessing, who watched as Mary was reduced to tears in a bistro by one of John’s verbal attacks: ‘I was there with somebody else and we attempted to defuse the situation, but he never let up for a second. He flayed her, quite like Jimmy Porter.’

The impending breakdown in her marriage in the late 50’s led Mary into an affair with Shaw, then a fast rising star as a result of his starring role in the ITC series “The Bucaneers.” Discretion was not a word in the actress’s vocabulary for whilst Osbourne was at least making some attempt to keep his affairs hidden, Mary was positively indiscreet with hers, going out of her way to leave correspondence from Shaw lying round the marital home for Osborne to discover.

I first became aware of Mary Ure for her performance in the 1959 film ‘Look back in Anger,’ starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom. It was later suggested by Burton in his autobiography, that he and Mary had had a brief affair during filming which is pure inconsequential trivia but more than likely in view of Burton’s predatory habits.

In 1960, Mary Ure starred as Clara Dawes in the screen adaptation of DH Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’ and was nominated for both a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Unfortunately, despite her rapidly rising star, her personal life was still an extraordinarily tangled web, as evidenced by the fact that whilst Osbourne was on holiday in the South of France with his mistress Jocelyn Rickard in 1961, Mary was giving birth to a son. In his book “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” (Arrow Books 2011), Robert Sellers confirms that, by this stage, Shaw’s life had descended into utter farce. Having made Mary pregnant, he discovered a few weeks later that his wife Jennifer was also expecting. Not only was he shuffling between a home life and his mistress, but now he had to juggle two impending fatherhoods. Urged by friends to stay with Jennifer, a woman who had been content to forgo a promising acting career to be a wife and mother to Shaw’s children, the actor ignored their advice, laying the foundation for one of the most famous celebrity marriages of the 60’s.

Mary’s son Colin Murray Osborne, named after her Scottish Father, was born on the 31st August 1961. Even though Osborne was named as the Father on the birth certificate, it was widely believed that the child was Shaw’s, and tellingly, the actor formally adopted the young child two years later. Shaw was delighted at having a son. All his children with Jennifer were girls and, though he loved them deeply, like Henry VIII, it was a son he truly longed for. During the time both women were pregnant, Shaw was reportedly telling friends how he was going to solve the problem, choosing between wife and mistress. ‘I’ll go to the one who gives me the boy’. Perhaps many interpreted his remarks as pure flippancy but, with my experience of people and life, he was deadly serious. In any event, with his estranged wife giving birth to another daughter, the dilemma was soon resolved. Heaven only knows what the actor would have done though, had the results been different. As it was, he was holed up in New York so cutting ties with his wife and children in England was conveniently left in the hands of solicitors.

The Osbornes finally divorced in 1962 and she wedded Shaw on April 13th 1963 in secret in Buckinghamshire. Their honeymoon was spent in Istanbul where Robert was playing the vicious assassin Red Grant in the 1963 Bond film ‘From Russia with Love.’

At the time, and away from a pretty volatile, and at times violent, home life, Mary’s professional career had also started to settle down. Mary continued to star in a few plays in London during the 1960’s, including Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’ and ‘Duel of Angels’ with Vivien Leigh.

Mary and Shaw would have four children together (eight in total including four from Robert’s previous marriage to Jennifer Bourke) and everything appeared well, with Mary quoted as saying, “they enjoyed a gloriously loving, combative, thoroughly agreeable relationship.”

As a young boy, and without any conscious forethought I saw them both on the big screen throughout the 60’s. For my ninth birthday my parents took me to see “Custer of the West” in which Shaw and Ure recreated their real life position as husband and wife on the big screen. I had seen Shaw earlier in “From Russia with love” and as Henry VIII in “A Man for all Seasons.” More recently, I acquainted myself with her role in the 1962 Sci-Fi drama ‘The Mind Benders’ in which she starred with Dirk Bogarde.

In 1968, Mary played a beautiful and gutsy allied agent in the block buster adaptation of Alastair MacLean’s ‘Where Eagles Dare,’ opposite Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. TCM has periodically run a small “making of” featurette about the movie, and Elizabeth Taylor appears as a dutiful, ever present wife on the location shoot, either bereft of suitable film projects herself or merely there to ensure her husband’s feelings for Ure were not re-ignited. It was a box office smash but it was also to be Mary’s last big screen role for five years.

Robert Shaw was fiercely protective, and some say jealous, of Mary, and he insisted that she take a step back, and concentrate on being a full time mother and wife. Mary didn’t give up her career entirely, but the demands of motherhood, she bore three children during this period, and her growing dependence on alcohol meant her career lapsed. Shaw’s motives may well have been predictably sexist but perhaps also pragmatic and indicative of his desire for a stable homelife. Looking back on Ure’s life after her appaulingly early death at forty two, Shaw’s agent John French, was moved to say – he had taken all her cash, demolished her job and made her into a housekeeper.’

As her alcohol dependence increased, Mary tried to resurrect her career in 1973 appearing in what was eventually her final film ‘A Reflection of Fear’ with Shaw. Mary appeared dissipated and it was evident that she was unwell.

Nevertheless, the couple would continue working on joint projects, a one off drama “The Break” premiering on the ITV network in January 1974. The following link contains a scan of the original article that accompanied the broadcast.

http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/actors-actresses/111819-robert-shaw.html

She attempted a return to Broadway in 1974 in The Phoenix Theatre’s production of Congrieve’s “Love for Love” but she was unceremoniously released after a disastrous Saturday matinee performance, being replaced by her understudy the then unknown Glenn Close.

It is reported that whilst residing in New York, Mary was found naked in Central Park. According to Shaw’s agent John French, Mary’s reaction to liquor was very different to that of her husband’s. It launched her into turbulent rages, and she became very abusive, feeling compelled to rid herself of her clothing. The couple had by now moved to Ireland for tax reasons, but the cracks in their marriage continued, with Shaw having an affair with his secretary and Mary continuing to seek solace in alcohol.

In 1975 Mary took a leading role with Honor Blackman and Brian Blessed in the Don Taylor stage-play production ‘The Exorcism,’ adapted from the 1972 BBC TV film production of the same name – a sinister tale of a group of friends trapped in a cottage at Christmas, it was to be Mary’s last role in life. A few hours after it had opened on the London stage Mary Ure was dead on 3rd April 1975. The circumstances of Mary’s death led the sensational press to talk of a ‘curse’ on the production in which she was appearing.

It was her husband Robert Shaw, returning home from a break in filming, who discovered his wife dead in their Curzon Street home. At the time, there was much speculation that Mary had committed suicide. I recall an interview with the actress Honor Blackman in the weeks following her death, in which she appeared troubled by the manner of her friend’s passing. Later, at the inquest the actual cause of her death was revealed as accidental death; a tragic combination of prescription drugs and alcohol.

Since the birth of her daughter, Hannah, six years earlier, and at the start of her break from the limelight, Mary had been on prescription medication for depression and often became careless with the dosage. On the night of her death, she had indulged in a few drinks at the play’s opening night party and had arrived home to take some her prescription drugs, a combination that proved fatal.

Shaw, by his own admission, went on a bender after her death. It happened only hours after she opened in a new play. “Her stage comeback had been a huge success,” the actor recalled, “I didn’t go partying with her because I had to get up early the next morning for a film. She came home, took two pills and slept on the sofa so as not to disturb me. She never woke up to read her marvelous notices in the papers. Technically, the pills after the champagne killed her. It was a nightmare, though I don’t feel guilty about Mary’s death, and I can’t take the blame for it.” Revealingly he further added that “it was a happy release for her because she was suffering from the early stages of a cancer tumor — unknown to anybody.”

In the summer of ’76, and little more than a year after Mary’s death, Shaw married his longtime secretary, Virginia “Jay” Jansen, and their first baby was born in New York that December. In addition, Shaw’s third wife had an older son whom Shaw had adopted years ago. There had always been some mystery surrounding Jay’s older son, Charles, but the Shaws talked quite openly about the circumstances. “Everyone always thought Robert was the father,” she admitted at the time – the truth is I became pregnant during a mad affair with a French musician. I paid for an abortion in Denmark but I was tricked. Nothing was done, and I decided to have the baby.” Backpedaling at this stage of the interview, Shaw added that “Never once while I was married to Mary did we play around.”

Jay also admitted that, at first, she had resisted the idea of marrying Robert. “I didn’t want to be a film star’s wife; I’d seen enough of what it meant traveling exhausted around the world living from suitcases. But I’m happy he finally wore me down, and I changed my mind. It was only after I agreed to his final proposal that I stopped calling him Mr. Shaw.” Her new husband added ominously that “Virginia was pregnant when we got married, but then all my wives have been. She loves me more than the other two did. She’s a better wife than secretary. And she’s got another thing coming if she believes our new baby will be the only one — having kids keeps you young.”

Unsurprisingly, Shaw was lying about the extent of his involvement with Virginia whilst he was married to Ure. Whether it was the effects of her medication or the crumbling state of her marriage, Shaw’s biographer John French writes in chapter thirteen of his book that: “Though she knew full well that he had no interest in philandering with other woman, she still suspected, she ‘knew’, he was having an affair with Miss Jay, which was a great deal worse since it was carried out, presumably, in her own home.” In the following chapter, French confirms – via a recollection from the Nobel prize-winning playwright – that when Shaw visited his friend Harold Pinter in London in 1975, he told him that he was having an affair with Virginia, and what was more, that she was pregnant.

Sadly, for Shaw, there was precious little time left. He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 51 on August 28, 1978.

The events of that day are recalled in the following link:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001727/bio\

I was in Gibraltar at the time with family when I heard the news about Shaw, and thereafter recall watching my father incessantly at the beach for three days as he swam those huge distances he was more than capable of negotiating. He was five months younger than Shaw and appeared indestructible to me. Now I saw him in a different light. It was a stressful time in his life workwise, and he exercised rigorously in order to endure the 45,000 miles he would drive every year. We had been to see “Jaws” a couple of years earlier and he had been shocked by Shaw’s appearance in the film. He was right, for in little over a decade since “From Russia with love,” the drink had definitely taken its toll.

Ultimately, the feeling persists that Shaw was a man who over-complicated his life, placing untold financial pressure upon himself. Utilising ‘remittance basis’ taxation rules, he would be compelled to meander around the world, working no more than ninety days in whichever country he was filming, flying aimlessly to somewhere – anywhere – at weekends, to avoid breaching the appropriate rules. When the UK Inland Revenue came after him, he was faced with either a mountainous tax back payment, or the realisation that he could never set foot in England again. Ultimately, both parties would agree on a full and final settlement payment of £120,000. From a planning perspective, his use of ‘shell’ companies had worked well – his marginal tax rate on earnings since 1965 little more than 15%. But was it all worth it? The stress involved with any tax investigation, his untold financial commitment to such a large family, the never ending cost of restoring his Irish residence, and the relentless guilt he felt over Mary’s death, all exacerbated his drinking problem. Yet Shaw was a compelling actor – given the right material – and an intuitive writer whose work deserves wider recognition.