Feature: Exhibition - Sam Beazley's paintings is at the Millinery Works Gallery until August 28

Published: 19 August, 2010
by GARALD ISAAMAN

AFTER success in the worlds of acting and antiques, Sam Beazley is now hanging out with the big names in British art at the Millinery Works Gallery. 

His watercolours hang alongside some of the illustrious names of modern British art – Graham Sutherland, Elisabeth Frink, Edward Wolfe and Karen Jonzen – in the current summer exhibition at Islington’s Millinery Works Gallery.

Yet few of those looking at the eight submissions of Sam Beazley know that he is 94 and, moreover, that he took to painting just three years ago when he broke his leg falling off a ladder while pruning his roses.

Neither would they know that he has already had two highly success­ful careers – one as an actor, appearing at the National Theatre and in major films, and a second spent running an immaculate antiques business for 30 years, with royalty among his clients.

Now he is having similar success with his art, selling a record three of his paintings on the opening day of the Millinery Works exhibition for £600 each.

“People say I’ve had a very extraordinary life and I suppose I have,” he confesses. “I don’t have any unfulfilled ambitions, though I have just started taking singing lessons.

“I have a very strong baritone voice. It’s about the only part of me that isn’t crumbling, though I have had a very healthy life and people are amazed that I still don’t take any medication.

“I would like to drop dead in comfort. I am 94 after all and it must happen sometime. 

“But meanwhile I’m taking singing lessons because I love the music of Noel Coward and Gershwin.”

Sam is surprised at his success in selling five of  his paintings and intro­ducing eight new ones. One of his sales was of a land­scape of Pembroke­shire, the others two fantasy pictures of well-known buildings in unusual settings, the most popular one being of the Tower of London in the Gulf of Aden.

“I’m told that is considered terrific, but I feel very honoured – and lucky – at being in the exhibition in the first place with so many distinguished artists.”

Born in 1916, Sam was encouraged by his artistic mother to leave school at 13 and go on the stage. He did – and appeared with many of the foremost stars of the pre-war theatre, among them John Gielgud.

It was while serving in the army in Italy during the Second World War that Sam experimented to see if he had any talent for drawing, and discovered he had inherited some of the talents of his mother and his Victorian great aunts, not to mention the imaginative ideas of another relative, his cousin Clough William Ellis, the architect who designed the famed fantasy village of Portmeirion in North Wales. The result was an illustrated book of wartime memories called Chiaroscuro.

Back in London after the war, and backed by his cousin, he opened the Portmeirion Shop in Pont Street, Chelsea, which specialised in rare antiques such as Beidermeier furniture, which attracted the attention of famed clients including Queen Mary and Jackie Onassis. 

Then, at the age of 75, Sam sold the business and, having kept his Equity card, returned to the stage, appearing in productions at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill. 

It was there that he was spotted by director Richard Eyre, who offered him a part in the National Theatre production of Richard III with Ian McKellen.

“That was equally astonishing and terrifying,” he recalls. “That was followed by the Almeida production of Ivanov with Ralph Fiennes and both plays had world tours.”

Television and film productions also beckoned and Sam appeared in Pride and Prejudice, Casualty, Foyle’s War and Little Britain, and also Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

It was the pruning accident in the garden of his home in Clapham that brought Sam back to his easel, the more so because he took tap-dancing lessons while his broken right leg was mending.

“It was a totally rotten idea, and didn’t help,” he admits. “But I am still pretty mobile now and find painting highly enjoyable. I paint mainly in the afternoon and find it relaxing. It takes my mind off doing other things…”

• Sam Beazley’s paint­ings are part of the Modern and Contem­porary British Art exhib­ition at The Millinery Works Gallery, 87 Southgate Road, Islington, until August 28, 0207 359 2019, www.millineryworks.co.uk