The Avengers Dossier, Page Eighteen

Here's another mini-profile of a supporting player from "The Avengers".


PATRICK ALLEN

In "The Thirteenth Hole", Patrick Allen is a golf pro who is keeping a dark secret.

Patrick Allen was born in 1927 to tobacco farmers in what is now Malawi, but spent his teenaged years and early 20s in Canada, having been evacuated to there because of World War 2. After briefly studying medicine, he turned to acting. His earliest professional roles were in radio plays and doing voice overs for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, but in 1952, he moved to Hollywood and subsequently appeared in bit parts in movies and television series of various genres, including Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder".

Allen moved to England in the late 1950s where he joined the Shakespear Memorial Company in Stradford-on-Avon while also steadily working as a voice actor on radio, doing voice-overs for television series, and appearing on-screen as policemen, military officers, and other authority figures or villains of every stripe.

Over the course of his busy career, Allen acted in some 150 television series or made-for-television movies, including playing two different characters on "The Avengers", one in Season One and one in Season Four. He also appeared in dozens of stage productions and countless radio plays. No matter how big or small the role, Allen could always be relied upon to give the part everything he could. His distinguished voice  led him to serve as the Master of Ceremonies for 14 years at the annual West London Christmas concert, Advent in Knightbridge. During the 1970s, he was also the narrator heard in a series of disaster- and nuclear war-preparedness films produced by the British government, and his voice was later sampled from these by Frankie Goes to Hollywood on a mix of their hit song "Two Tribes".

Allen worked up until shortly before his death at the age of 79 in 2006.