Coffee-Table Notes

Eva Marie Saint – Actress Born July 4, 1924; died October 6, 2026     Eva Marie Saint, who has died aged 102, was an actress who won an Oscar for her very first film role in On the Waterfront (1954). As Edie Doyle, the quietly determined sister of a murdered New York dockworker, Saint provided understated but steely ballast to the machismo of Marlon Brando’s punch drunk Terry Malloy in director Elia Kazan’s blue-collar epic. Brando may have ripped up the screen as Terry took on the mob-run union he’d become a patsy for, but it was Saint’s portrayal of Edie that gave the film its moral centre, as she became a translucent force for good in a brutalised world.   It was a startling big screen debut that gave a wider audience for Saint, who had already made her mark on stage and television, where she was spotted by Kazan in Horton Foote’s play, The Trip to Bountiful. Kazan cast Saint in favour of Elizabeth Montgomery. As well deserved as her Best Supporting Actress Oscar undou...

Frank Dunlop – Theatre and opera director   Born February 15, 1927; died January 4, 2026     Frank Dunlop, who has died aged 98, was a maverick theatre director, whose seven-year stint as director of Edinburgh International Festival between 1984 and 1991 brought major world theatre to the festival. Work by international heavyweights such as the Berliner Ensemble, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda and Yukio Ninagawa was programmed alongside major revivals of Scottish classics. The latter included Tom Fleming’s epic staging of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, Sydney Goodsir Smith’s version of The Wallace, and James Bridie’s Holy Isle. Dunlop brought both strands together in his own 1987 production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, which featured a large Scottish cast led by Hannah Gordon as Mary.     Dunlop’s first year as director also featured a ten-day Samuel Beckett season at the Churchill Theatre, Morningside. The latter included works by New York’s Harold Clurman...

Tom Stoppard – Playwright Born July 3, 1937; died November 29, 2025   Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was a playwright of linguistic verve, wild theatricality and an inherent sense of intellectual playfulness that blew the mainstream British stage wide open following the success of his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard’s work continued to dazzle right up to what turned out to be his final and infinitely more personal work, the 41-actor epic, Leopoldstadt.   Inbetween came a vast catalogue of work. This ranged from the intellectual riot of Travesties (1974), which looked at the possibilities that might have ensued from the fact that Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara had all spent time in Zurich during World War One. With Joyce in the midst of writing Ulysses, Tzara in the thick of Dada’s rise, and Lenin at the vanguard of the Russian Revolution, Stoppard depicted a world about to explode on every level. More overtly politically, perhaps, Rock’n’Roll (...

  Ian McKenzie Smith – 1935-2025   Ian McKenzie Smith, who has died aged 90, was a visionary curator, whose leadership in Aberdeen’s artistic and civic society saw the city’s art collection transformed. As director of Aberdeen Art Gallery from 1968 to 1989, then as Aberdeen’s City Arts Officer and Director of the Arts until 1996, McKenzie Smith married his historical artistic knowledge and forward thinking sensibilities to focus on constantly reinventing the institution with contemporary work by living artists.    McKenzie Smith gave quietly determined support to young artists across all disciplines, doing so with an understated Zen-like calm that betrayed his own influences as an artist. This made for a bold programme that was rooted in the North East of Scotland, but which looked outwards in a way that made for the basis of a world-class collection in a transformed artistic landscape.   Ian McKenzie Smith was born in Montrose, the younger of two brothers to Ma...

Terry Lane – Theatre director, writer   Born September 7, 1937; died August 7, 2025     Terry Lane, who has died aged 87, was a theatre director who inadvertently changed the theatrical lexicon forever. As one of the co-founders of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1962 in its original home in a former brothel off the High Street, it was Lane whose misreading of what was actually ‘transverse’ theatre – an auditorium with seating either side of the performing area – gave this new home of the radical and avant-garde its name. By the time anyone realised, the name had stuck, and a theatre legend was born.   The first night of Lane’s opening Traverse production in January 1963 of Jean Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clois provided another legend, when actress Colette O’Neil was accidentally stabbed on stage by fellow performer Rosamund Dickson – also Lane’s fiancé and future wife. While O’Neil thankfully survived, the headlines the incident made attracted audiences, and the Trave...

Ella Wildridge – Translator, dramaturg   Born  December 27 1945: died August 26, 2025   Ella Wildridge, who has died aged 79, was one of Scottish theatre’s great unsung heroines. As a translator and dramaturg fluent in German and French, and who read in Russian, Italian, Spanish, and later Farsi, Wildridge brought a sense of internationalism to the Scottish stage that included translations of writers from Germany, Quebec and France. Working alongside her partner, playwright Tom McGrath, and then at the Traverse Theatre, Wildridge also helped foster a new generation of Scottish playwrights throughout the 1990s and beyond.   Ella Muriel Wildridge was born  at Clover Hill Farm in Broughton, Peeblesshire,  the youngest of four sisters to  Gilbert Johnson Wildridge and Constance Lila Wildridge (née Hooper). Her father was a Cambridge graduate and farmer who encouraged his daughters’ intellectual pursuits. Her mother studied at the Central School of Speech a...

Giles Havergal – Theatre director, Actor, writer   Born June 9, 1938; died August 23, 2025     Giles Havergal, who has died aged 87, was a towering figure in Scottish theatre. As co-artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre for thirty-three years, Havergal helped redraw the theatrical map of Glasgow, Scotland and the world. Working alongside writer/director Robert David MacDonald and designer/director Philip Prowse, from his arrival in the Gorbals in 1969 to his departure in 2003, Havergal blazed a trail of radicalism that reinvigorated the Citz as an international powerhouse.   The tone was set from the start with Havergal’s 1970 all male production of Hamlet that featured nudity, sex and swearing. With the press as outraged as some of the city high hid yins,  some schools cancelled their planned visit. The attention this brought to the production made it box office gold, with many school pupils going to see the show of their own volition.  ...

Paddy Higson – Film producer   Born June 2nd1941; died April 13th 2025     Paddy Higson, who has died aged 83, was a trailblazing film producer who was long regarded as the mother of the Scottish film industry. Over more than forty years she worked closely with several generations of directors, writers and fellow producers in Scotland. She helped foster a series of films that set the tone for a way of contemporary Scottish filmmaking that was witty, urbane and quietly aspirational.   Higson worked with director Bill Forsyth as associate producer on his debut feature, That Sinking Feeling (1979), was production supervisor on Gregory’s Girl (1980) and associate producer on Comfort and Joy (1984). She also worked as line producer on director Michael Hoffman and Ninian Dunnett’s Edinburgh set comedy, Restless Natives (1985).   While she played a crucial role in nurturing all those films, Higson’s first credit as a producer in her own right was Living Apart Together ...