Early Life
Frank Thornton Ball (he would later drop his surname professionally) was born in Dulwich, London, the son of Rosina Mary (née Thornton) and William Ernest Ball. His father was organist at Stephen's church Dulwich (ref: St Stephen Parish Magazine) and Frank learned to play for a short while. Music proved too difficult for Frank. However he wanted to act from an early age, but his father, who worked in a bank, wanted him to get a 'proper' job and so he got a job working in insurance after leaving Alleyn's School. He soon enrolled at a small acting school, the London School of Dramatic Art, and did evening classes. After two years working at the insurance company, Frank Thornton was invited to become a day student at the acting school and persuaded his father to finance his studies.
During the Second World War Thornton was evacuated along with the drama school and his first job was touring with four plays in Ireland. On 5 June 1945, he married actress Beryl Jane Margaret Evans in West Wickham, London and they had a daughter, Jane. He served during World War II as an officer in the Royal Air Force and was demobilised in 1947. Almost immediately after, Thornton joined a rep company. His first credited role was in the 1954 film Radio Cab Murder.
Read more about this topic: Frank Thornton
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)