Retrospective: Francis Wallis

This is one of three articles looking back at the lives and careers of the young co-stars of Granada Television’s iconic adaptation of The Owl Service which first aired in 1969-70. All three – Francis Wallis, Michael Holden and Gillian Hills – had disappeared from the acting profession by the time The Owl Service was repeated in colour in 1978. This is Francis’s story.

Official records show that Francis John Wallis was born on 13 December 1944 in Ilford, Essex. He was named after his father F. J. Wallis, founder of the eponymous supermarket chain. F. J. senior was a colourful character – he flew his own private helicopter to visit his company’s stores, which led to Tonbridge Council banning him from landing it on the town’s Angel Ground (Kent & Sussex Courier, 11 December 1970). The businessman was also a keen tennis player, as the Western Daily Press reported (15 April 1964):

Francis Wallis, owner of a supermarket chain, performed one of his customary conjuring tricks yesterday. The former Essex county player, who has been beating up-and-coming youngsters for years but hesitates to reveal his own age, was too wily for 18-year-old Peter Curtis (Sussex) and beat him 6-1, 4-6, 6-1 in the Connaught hard courts tennis tournament at Chingford yesterday. The ironic part is that Curtis, who won the junior covered courts title last year, and one of Britain’s brightest prospects, was at Millfield School in Somerset with Wallis’s son.

Francis junior took a well-trodden path into acting, performing in repertory theatre. An early appearance was in Edge of Reason by Max Frisch at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (The Stage and Television Today, 24 September 1964).

The Bristol Evening Post (29 December 1966) previewed the Bristol Old Vic company’s first transatlantic tour, with Francis Wallis in the troupe. The Best Plays of 1966-1967 (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1967) lists Francis with a role as Player Murderer in Hamlet as well as various other minor parts. The Stage and Television Today (2 March 1967) gave a laudatory review of the company’s success at the City Center in New York, with critics “rapturous in their praise”. A subsequent tour across the USA and Canada showcased the company’s Shakespeare repertoire of Hamlet, Measure for Measure and Romeo and Juliet (Jane Asher featured as Juliet):

After the New York season… the company goes on to Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto, Ottawa and finally Montreal… When the company re-crosses the Atlantic at the end of May, they are to play five or six weeks in Europe, including dates at Amsterdam and Zurich before they proceed to Israel for the final flourish of this international tour.

The Stage and Television Today (26 October 1967) pictured Francis, below, alongside Arthur Lowe (cast as Captain Mainwaring in the BBC’s Dad's Army the following year) and Ruby Head in Marya by Isaac Babel at the Royal Court Theatre.

Scene from Isaac Babel’s Marya at the Royal Court Theatre in The Stage and Television Today (26 October 1967). Left to right: Francis Wallis as Kuzma, Arthur Lowe (with roles as Andrei and Yevstigneyich in the play), Ruby Head (with roles as Agasha and Madame Dora).

Francis spent the summer of 1968 in Scarborough, in plays presented in the round at the Library Theatre. In several productions he performed opposite Tom Baker, most famous later as the Fourth Doctor in the BBC’s Doctor Who. He appeared variously as Jack Dandy in A Boat in the Backyard by David Bramley; as Simon Bliss in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever; and as Thomas Arden in Arden of Feversham (The Stage and Television Today, respectively 4 July, 8 August and 22 August 1968).

Scenes from theatre in the round productions at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1968. Photographs © Scarborough Theatre Trust/www.sjt.uk.com. Left: Hay Fever by Noël Coward, with Francis Wallis as Simon Bliss. Right: Arden of Feversham with (centre) Tom Baker as Black Will; the actor on the right appears to be Francis Wallis as Thomas Arden.

Francis’s earliest known role on British television was in 1969 in the BBC’s The First Churchills. Set during a turbulent period in British history, the series follows the lives of John and Sarah Churchill, made Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, as they navigate machinations and manoeuvrings in the late-Stuart royal courts of Charles II, James II (VII), William and Mary, and Anne. Francis played the Churchills’ son Johnnie in the episode A Famous Victory first broadcast on 29 November 1969. Johnnie is brusque with a peremptory manner, and demands to join his father on a military campaign. His mother thwarts his ambitions –  “We’ll keep you here in England, safe” – only later to grieve at Johnnie’s bedside as he succumbs to smallpox.

Francis Wallis as Johnnie Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, in The First Churchills episode A Famous Victory. Also pictured (right) is Susan Hampshire as his mother Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.

A few weeks later, starting on 21 December 1969, Francis appeared as Roger in Granada Television’s eight-part adaptation of The Owl Service. This was a substantial role, arguably the biggest of his career. Based on scriptwriter Alan Garner’s novel, the story is set in a remote Welsh valley where Roger is on holiday with his father Clive (Edwin Richfield) and his new stepfamily: a stepmother who is an ominous off-screen presence and stepsister Alison (Gillian Hills). Together with the housekeeper’s Welsh son Gwyn (Michael Holden), Roger and Alison form an uneasy trio, as they become ensnared by the power of an ancient legend that is awakening in the valley.

Hearing scratching from the ceiling, Gwyn and Alison retrieve some old plates from the attic. They are edged with a curious pattern which Alison traces to make paper owls. Roger is intrigued by a stone with a hole in it, down by the river. Huw the groundskeeper (Raymond Llewellyn) recounts a strange tale of a man being killed by a spear going right through the stone, in revenge for taking another man’s wife. The three youngsters, drawn by the legend, seem fated to reenact the rivalries of the tragic story.

Francis’s portrayal of Roger is strikingly unsympathetic – he is surly and petulant, and lurks resentfully as he observes Gwyn and Alison’s growing intimacy. Roger refers to Gwyn with sneering condescension as a “clever yobbo” and ruthlessly humiliates the Welsh boy by mocking his purchase of elocution records to better himself. It is all the more confounding, then, that in the denouement it is Roger who emerges as the saviour who averts disaster, soothing a stricken Alison and delivering her from possession by the power of the legend.

Francis Wallis in scenes from Granada Television’s The Owl Service. Clockwise from top left: as Roger (left) with Michael Holden as Gwyn; with Gillian Hills as Alison, examining one of her paper owls; Roger in the background with Gwyn and Alison; Roger peering through the hole in the Stone of Gronw.

Alan Garner’s children, off school for nine weeks to witness with him the making of the series, kept diaries which are reproduced in Filming the Owl Service (Armada Books, 1970). The children recorded how the actors endured the artificially produced deluge of rain during filming at Poulton Hall on the Wirral, Merseyside (used by Granada as a country house film set). On 13 May 1969:

Adam Garner: Outside was a fire engine to make rain.

Ellen Garner: On the roof of the porch was the camera and a fireman with the hose. It looked as though everybody was going to get very wet.

Adam: Some of the actors did not know it was pond water.

Katharine Garner: Gwyn [Michael Holden] and Roger [Francis Wallis] wanted to be wetted again so the firemen wet them with the hose. [The actors had to be wetted as fast as they dried out because they had to look wet throughout the rainstorm scenes in the film.]

Ellen: After dinner Katharine and I went into the billiard room and Gwyn gave us a box to stand on so that we could see out of the window. They were rehearsing a part where Huw [Raymond Llewellyn] is pulling Roger in the mud.

Katharine: This had to be done lots of times. It was really funny.

Ellen: At the first rehearsal the light exploded because it was getting too wet. After rehearsing the scene a few times Roger was covered in mud.

Adam: He got black all over.

Ellen: I think Roger enjoyed it at first but after a while he got very cold. The firemen who were making the rain were on the billiard room roof, they thought it was great fun.

Ellen: When they had finished with Roger we gave him a bath in Tony’s bathroom because he was so wet and cold. [The Garners had use of tenant Tony Martin’s facilities.]

Katharine: Then Tony and Roger had tea with us. 

In his introduction to Filming the Owl Service Alan Garner recounts the start of filming on location in the Dyfi valley (after five weeks at Poulton Hall) and more torment for Francis:

Although we got there in the middle of May, it felt like the end of Winter, and we were trying to film between rainstorms. In the precious minutes of dry weather, while the camera crew bulked in their padded anoraks, shivering, one poor actor [Francis Wallis] had to swim in the river, and then sunbathe in a presumed heatwave by the Stone of Gronw.

Francis does indeed spend a great deal of time in the serial strutting around in rather short lime green bathing trunks.

Publicity photographs for Granada Television’s The Owl Service, published with a TV Times feature on Alan Garner (“The writer who lives in his own never-never land”, 3-9 January 1970). Left: Francis Wallis as Roger. Right: Gillian Hills as Alison.

Director Peter Plummer recalled casting the actors in Filming the Owl Service.

Perhaps the most difficult job was Roger. In fact I can’t remember how many people we interviewed for the role. Roger bottles everything up inside himself, not wishing to give too much away to other people. His real mother has run off with another man. He was very fond of her, and now cannot bring himself to get involved with the others. ‘Family honeymoon is it?’ says Gwyn and Roger tells him to shut up. He is scarred by Gwyn’s rudeness, finds Alison snobbishly ‘county’, avoids his new mother, Margaret, is disturbed by Huw and, agonisingly, can communicate little of this to his father. But an actor’s job is to show you what he is thinking; with a character like Roger, who is trying to prevent you seeing what he is thinking, the job becomes, as Roger’s father would say, ‘Tricky. Very tricky. You know?’

Have you never been jealous of somebody else’s friendship? Stood, say, in the shadows in the playground and watched from a distance while a former friend went off to play with somebody else? Or even just felt lonely at watching two people, total strangers to you, obviously enjoying each other’s company? In pictures, one of the best ways of showing two people’s ‘closeness’ is to contrast it with a third person standing, lonely, apart from them. That’s why, when Gwyn and Alison tell the legend in the garden, or climb the mountain together, we keep cutting away to shots of the isolated figure of Roger carrying his camera around, with only himself to photograph.

Our search for the third corner of the triangle came when we found Francis Wallis. Francis had trained with Joan Littlewood, a woman who refuses to let any of her actors take anything for granted, and in later episodes particularly, I found the truth of his unexpectedness alarming. In episode one I particularly remember the way he entered Alison’s bedroom – unsure of himself, disturbed by what has just happened at the Stone of Gronw and with Gwyn and Huw, yet making a great effort to overcome his stiffness and uncertainty to make some sort of contact with a rather uncommunicative Alison.

Tricky. Very tricky. You know? Roger (Francis Wallis) and his father Clive (Edwin Richfield) in scenes from Granada Television’s The Owl Service.

Gillian Hills remembered her co-star in the programme notes accompanying The Owl Service Network DVD release (her words dated February 2008):

Francis was an introverted, sensitive and thoughtful person. He very much wanted to be a serious actor. But I think his family had another plan for him. He introduced me to the I Ching.

Francis spoke to the TV Times (10-16 January 1970) for a feature on The Owl Service.

Francis Wallis, 22 [sic], whose favourite pastime is riding and who currently owns a fine four-year-old for which he has high show-jumping hopes, loves the country and was completely immersed in his Owl Service part. Even before going to Wales, he took on the character and admits he worried about it tremendously. “We all did, I think. We took the whole thing very seriously – it was the only way. I am a loner in the story and I found I had to be that way all the time, in my personal life, too.”

This was a period when Francis was in demand as an actor. On 12 January 1970 he played Jeff Senton in Yorkshire Television’s Playhouse: A Man for Loving, starring Richard Greene as a man in his fifties refusing to come to terms with middle age – a “playboy… who indulged in squash with the sons of his contemporaries and had a mistress not much older” (Birmingham Mail, 13 January 1970).

Francis had a minor role as Guardsman Thompson in The Breaking of Bumbo, a 1970 British film comedy starring Joanna Lumley and Richard Warwick. It is a curious film – it contrasts the wild spirits of Swinging Sixties London with deference to military tradition, even as the new decade was ushering in a grittier era of social strife. The distributor’s pressbook describes how an “entire platoon – ex-Guardsmen, extras and actors – was drilled rigorously for three weeks before the parade ground sequence”. Apart from his fleeting appearances in this film, Francis’s screen credits were on television. (Coincidentally, Francis had also shared a scene with Richard Warwick in The First Churchills the year before.)

Francis Wallis (leftmost in each frame) as Gdsm. Thompson in scenes from the 1970 film The Breaking of Bumbo (Associated British Productions).

In two of the three episodes of Granada Television’s Husbands and Lovers, on 29 July and 5 August 1970, Francis played Nicholas Braun. These plays were based on the short stories of Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnar observing Budapest around 1900. The TV Times previewed “three comedies about the sex game and stolen kisses, wanton wives, willing lovers and rather-too-gullible husbands”. Francis appeared opposite Sharon Gurney as Paula Muller in the first episode; according to the Coventry Evening Telegraph (6 August 1970) the second installment featured “the less naughty affair of the young student (Francis Wallis) in love with a married woman (Sarah-Jane Gwillim)”.

Francis Wallis as Nicholas Braun and Sharon Gurney as Paula Muller in Granada Television’s Husbands and Lovers (The Stage and Television Today, 9 July 1970).

Francis featured as Robin in ATV’s Playhouse: Up School on 29 December 1970, as the Liverpool Daily Post on that day described:

Playhouse’s Up School is about an old boy’s reunion at a minor public school, where the newest of the old boys (Francis Wallis) is anxious to continue his former emotional relationship with his old housemaster (John Standing). So you think you know what’s coming? At any rate there seems to be a distinct cooling of the atmosphere. The housemaster has since acquired a fiancee (Sarah-Jane Gwillim) and she starts asking awkward questions.

This was therefore Francis’s second appearance on screen with Sarah-Jane Gwillim in 1970.

On 31 May 1971 Francis appeared in The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder episode Find the Lady. The 1920s-era story sees Mr. Reeder (Hugh Burden) investigate the mysterious disappearances of high society young ladies. Francis gives an extravagantly outrageous performance as Sir Oliver Teezley, a witless aristocrat with a speech impediment who is blithely unconcerned about the missing socialites: “But if one bird flies orf there’s always half a dozen others! There’s a shortage of chaps you know, the trenches and all that.”

Francis Wallis as Sir Oliver Teezley in Find the Lady, an episode of The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder. Francis is pictured (right) with Hugh Burden as Mr. J. G. Reeder.

Francis had a role as Parson in ATV’s comedy You’re Only Young Twice in the episode Home Sweet Homicide on 5 July 1971. This was the first episode of the only series in the original run, set in an old-people’s home where the residents are fond of a practical joke.

Francis continued to tread the boards in regional theatres. He appeared as the adopted son Martin in Someone Waiting at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham (The Birmingham Post, 24 March 1971) before a prolonged stint in 1971-72  at the Belgrade Studio Theatre, Coventry. A notable performance was in Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 18 February 1972):

Perhaps the real catalyst of the production is Francis Wallis as the eccentric and immensely likeable Tom. He never failed to grasp the opportunities for comedy offered to him, and the way he carries out the bizarre interior decoration to his room throughout the play was a highlight.

But disaster struck on 23 April 1972 when Francis’s father was killed in a plane crash.

Daily Mirror front page (24 April 1972) with a report on the disaster that killed Francis Wallis senior and two other men: “Tycoons die in air crash”.

The London Evening Standard (24 April 1972) reported:

Mr Wallis’s 27-year-old-son, Francis, who today flew out to the scene of the crash, is not connected with the family business… A company spokesman said: “We understand the aircraft, which was piloted by Mr Wallis, crashed into a hill in mist and rain.”

A Daily Mail story (1 June 1972) was headlined “Taxman cashes in on the careful millionaire who cleaned his own Rolls”.

Estate duty will swallow up £2,225,287 of £3 million left by supermarket chief Mr Francis Wallis, killed in a plane crash. The former bank employee amassed his huge personal fortune after opening one grocery store with £100 in Ilford, Essex, in 1939. Last night after publication of his will, his widow, Mrs Doris Wallis, 52, gave his recipe for success: ‘Ninety per cent, hard work.’

She said: ‘My husband was not an extravagant man. He was a remarkable example of self-discipline. He even used to clean his Rolls-Royce himself.’ Mrs Wallis was speaking at her Regency home in Loughton, Essex, which has five acres of gardens and 50 acres of parkland…

Mr Wallis, 58, was flying to a veterans’ tennis tournament in France when he died. He was at the controls of his twin-engined Piper Commanche aircraft when it crashed near Lyons. With him were Mr Leslie Cater, 59-year-old head of the Cater Bros. stores group, and Essex county tennis player Mr Reg Caley…

Mr Wallis left the bulk of his fortune on trust to his wife for life and then to his actor son Francis, 27, or other relatives.

Incidentally, it is through his mother Doris that Francis is related to a celebrated music hall performer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Doris’s father was James Thomas Archer (1891-1982), the son of Ann Elizabeth Archer née Wood (1849-1904). Ann’s brother was John James Wood (1847-1940) whose daughter Matilda Alice Victoria Wood (1870-1922) became famous as Marie Lloyd.

Francis continued to make television appearances, playing Gary Masters in the tremendously creepy ITV Thriller episode Someone at the Top of the Stairs on 28 April 1973. The story opens with Gary looking for accommodation and failing to get an answer when he rings at a forbidding old house with a room to let  Mysteriously, friends Chrissie (Donna Mills) and Gillian (Judy Carne) are welcomed inside shortly afterwards and offered a flat for very affordable rent. Chrissie discovers the scratched words “Help me” and is unnerved by sinister happenings and the strange behaviour of the other tenants. Gary befriends the young women and is the smooth suitor of Chrissie – Francis’s portrayal is perhaps a bit too smooth. Gillian disappears, and Chrissie discovers to her horror that the ghoulish Cartney (David de Keyser) at the top of the stairs is preying on his victims one by one. Gary breaks into the house in time to save Chrissie from Cartney’s clutches – but there is a dark twist to come in the final scene.

Francis Wallis as Gary Masters in ATV’s Thriller: Someone at the Top of the Stairs, alongside (right) Donna Mills as Chrissie Morton and David de Keyser as Mr Cartney.

The Newcastle Evening Chronicle (28 April 1973) trailed Thriller:

One person who will not be seeing the play when it is transmitted is 28-year-old Francis Wallis. He has the part of Gary Masters… Francis is now in the Virgin Islands where he is working on a play about Captain Cooke [sic].

The overseas production in question was an episode of the BBC’s ten-part Explorers; these were historical dramatisations of famous voyages of discovery. According to The Guardian (8 May 2026) at the time of broadcast this was the most expensive series the BBC had ever commissioned. The Story of Captain James Cook, an account of Cook’s first voyage on HMS Endeavour, was first broadcast on 2 November 1975. Renowned narrator David Attenborough introduces the ship’s company, including “Alexander Buchan, a Scot, second official artist on board, specialising in topographical work and a rather sickly young man” played by Francis. The ship makes landfall on King George’s Island, now known as Tahiti. Buchan, making sketches “in charcoal and watercolour”, observes the customs of the native Polynesians but suddenly suffers a severe epileptic fit. “He died that night.”

Francis Wallis as Alexander Buchan in the BBC’s Explorers: The Story of Captain James Cook.

On consecutive days on 11, 12 and 13 December 1974 Francis appeared in the Granada Television Crown Court story Forgive-Me-Not as barrister Simon Halliwell. As described in the TV Times:

Frederick Barker, recently released from prison after serving 18 years for double murder, now stands charged in Fulchester Crown Court with assault and killing his neighbour’s racing pigeons. To add to his problems, his counsel [Halliwell] is young and inexperienced and has never before appeared in a jury trial.

Francis Wallis as Simon Halliwell in Granada Television’s Crown Court: Forgive-Me-Not.

By the mid-1970s Francis’s acting career had waned. The Torquay Herald Express (8 July 1974) listed him in the Welsh Drama Company’s Hobson’s Choice. Francis is known to have acted in one more theatre production, the Dolphin Theatre Company’s As You Like It at the Shaw Theatre in London (The Stage and Television Today, 29 May 1975) where he was reunited with two fellow actors: Susan Hampshire (from The First Churchills) and Raymond Llewellyn (from The Owl Service).

The Daily Mirror (24 April 1972) had reported that the Wallis family home was Wallsgrove House, High Beech, Loughton, Essex. We encounter Francis there in The Times Diary (28 April 1975):

Francis Wallis is an unemployed actor who inherited a palatial mansion, part late-Georgian and part neo-Hollywood, in Epping Forest. He keeps in touch with his profession by hiring out the house as a backdrop for glossy fashion photographs and occasional films. “You can use the same set twice with good cameramen and different angles,” he explains.

His circular marble-floored music room, with its bar and French windows leading on to a patio, is currently overrun by the cast of Spy Story, the third Len Deighton thriller to be filmed…

Cheap substitutes seem to be the rule in film-making today. For a party scene, a carved oak table was drunkenly balanced on some tin packing cases so that it would be the right height. Slabs of white polystyrene were tacked to the walls to reflect light, and although white wine did duty for champagne in rehearsals, dry ginger ale was substituted when shooting began. It has more authentic sparkle, they say, than the real thing.

The Evening Standard (7 July 1977) reported that the house was to be sold:

Possibly the finest Georgian house in Epping Forest, owned by the late Mr Francis Wallis… Wallsgrove House at High Beach has its own helicopter hangar, floodlit gardens, four bedroom suites and 68 acres of land.

In 1980 Francis became engaged to Ann Murphy (The Times, 5 April 1980).

Mr F. J. Wallis and Miss A. B. Murphy. The engagement is announced between Francis John, son of Mrs Doris Wallis, of Winchester, Hampshire, and the late Mr Francis J. Wallis, and Ann Barbara, daughter of Dr and Mrs D. St John Murphy, of Loughton, Essex.

Francis’s marriage to Ann established a further show business connection through her father, a relative of the actor Richard Harris who played Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films among many other roles. As previously recorded by The Times (11 February 1957):

The marriage took place on Saturday at the church of Notre Dame de France, Leicester Place, of Mr. Richard Harris, son of Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Harris, of Overdale, Ennis Road, Limerick, Eire, and the Hon. Elizabeth Rees-Williams, only daughter of Lord and Lady Ogmore, of 34, Alexandra Court, Queen’s Gate, S.W.7… Dr. Douglas St. John Murphy, cousin of the bridegroom, was best man.

Irish genealogy records confirm that Francis’s father-in-law was indeed Richard Harris’s first cousin. Douglas St. John Murphy was the son of Bridget Murphy née Harty – Bridget’s sister Mildred married Ivan Harris and actor Richard was one of their eight children.

The Times (2 August 2012) carried a notice of Francis’s mother’s passing.

Deaths– Wallis, Doris, on 19th July 2012, in Winchester; aged 92 years. Beloved wife of the late Francis Wallis, much loved mother of Francis, greatly missed grandmother to Francis and Annabelle and a dear sister to John.

So Francis had two children – Francis and Annabelle – by 2012. General Register Office records show that Francis John Wallis was born in 1983 to Francis’s wife Ann Wallis née Murphy, followed by Annabelle Frances Wallis in 1984. The records also disclose a terrible family tragedy: the Wallises’ firstborn son, also named Francis John, died in 1981 at just three weeks old.

It transpires that Francis’s daughter is the actor Annabelle Wallis, known for roles such as Grace Burgess in the BBC’s Peaky Blinders (2013 onwards) and archaeologist Jenny Halsey in the 2017 film remake of The Mummy. Annabelle has confirmed her parentage, if only indirectly, in interviews, and as reported in the Mirror (15 June 2017):

She took on The Mummy and gave Tom Cruise a run for his money in the stunt department… Annabelle Wallis leads a charmed life, having shot to fame on Peaky Blinders… her great-uncle [was] the legendary Irish actor Richard Harris… Annabelle had an almost fairy tale ­upbringing, growing up on her family’s farm in Cascais, Portugal, after they emigrated from Britain when she was just 18 months old… Through her father’s family, Annabelle is also related to the great 1900s music hall star, Marie Lloyd… She got her breakthrough role in the BBC’s bodice-ripping drama The Tudors, playing Jane Seymour opposite Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Henry VIII.

It has been established above that Francis is related to Marie Lloyd through his mother and that Richard Harris was his father-in-law’s cousin. (Strictly speaking, then, Richard Harris was Annabelle’s grandfather’s cousin, not her great-uncle, though such titles can often be used elastically.) A feature in the Financial Times (29 April 2016) stated that “her father had acted in his youth”.

Left: Annabelle Wallis as Grace Burgess in the BBC’s Peaky Blinders alongside Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby. Right: Annabelle Wallis as Jenny Halsey and Tom Cruise as Nick Morton in the Universal Pictures remake of The Mummy (2017).

Annabelle spoke of her “feral” upbringing in Portugal on the Happy Sad Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz (25 June 2019).

“My mother woke up one day. We have a farm in England. And she looked out the window and she said, ‘If I don't change my life, it will be the same in sixty years from now. Look out this window, it will be exactly the same.’ So I'm very grateful to her. We went to Portugal.”

We might imagine Francis living a relaxed and idyllic life on Portugal’s Atlantic coast — were it not for an astonishing story that appeared in the London Evening Standard (16 January 1997). Mark Honigsbaum’s report investigated an expatriate community living in Areia outside Cascais, Portugal, and alleged that an organisation known as the International Saturday Group (ISG) was essentially a cult. The group’s leader, Nadine Scott, promoted a controversial therapy known as bioenergetics:

Bioenergetics is a dynamic form of therapy… that links physical pain, muscle tension and postural disorders with various states of mind. The idea is that through violent exercise, physical pain can be dissolved and blocking emotions released, leading to a new sense of confidence and well-being…

Francis Wallis, a millionaire farmer who left the group two months ago but whose wife Anne and two children are still members, says that physical violence was commonplace. He also says that Mrs Scott encouraged couples to swap partners frequently as a way of maintaining her control, with her closest disciples organised into a “senior couples’ group”...

Until a few years ago, the ISG held regular annual gatherings [including once at] a hotel in the north of Portugal where members were encouraged to pose en masse for nude photographs…

According to Francis Wallis, who claims to have spent more than £1 million on therapy and various business schemes during his 20-year involvement with the group, Mrs Scott used to joke that the ISG’s name derived from the fact that Saturday was the day she traditionally reserved for her most difficult patients.

The Francis Wallis in the report appears to be the actor of the same name. It would be an extraordinary coincidence for an unrelated Francis Wallis to live in the same expat community where his daughter Annabelle is known to have grown up — and farmer Francis’s wife “Anne” is likely to be a misspelling of the actor’s wife Ann.

An associate of the ISG told the Independent on Sunday (26 January 1997) that members were “induced by Mrs Scott to crawl on all fours, baying and shrieking – a phenomenally disturbing experience”. The Guardian covered the story (23 January 1997) with Francis featuring again:

ISG is [known] simply as “the Family”, which first developed as a community in the late seventies in a small village of Stoke Hammond, Buckinghamshire… Concern about the community’s internal activities began to surface in 1984, when a British judge presiding over a disputed custody case concluded that members “revered”, almost “worshipped”, the charismatic Nadine Scott and urged a full investigation… Despite the judge’s warnings, no official action was taken against the Family, which soon after quietly disappeared from Britain and relocated to Lisbon…

[Graham] Baldwin… was called in to investigate by a wealthy former member of the “cult” called Francis Wallis. It doesn’t take long to realise that the distinguished looking Wallis is in a state of considerable mental distress. His speech seems confused and rambling. “[Nadine Scott] used to say: ‘If it weren’t for me, you’d be in a lunatic asylum; you’d be in a straitjacket.’” he recalls.

Towards the end of last year, Wallis walked out on his wife, children and the Family which had been his entire life for perhaps 20 years…

Baldwin’s new “client”, as he calls Wallis, has the resources to sustain a long and costly inquiry into the ISG. He has asked the Lisbon courts to recover £1 million which he claims to have invested at the behest of Nadine.

More happily, Annabelle spoke warmly of her family’s move to Portugal on the Anna Faris is Unqualified podcast (3 January 2022).

“[I’m] incredibly grateful. I mean, God, I have no words to express the gratitude. I mean, it's perspective. It's a different way of seeing the world… I spoke another language. I became bilingual. I got to just see things so differently… I think [of] that one decision in a kitchen in England that changed my destiny, my brother's and my father's, everyone's.”

Annabelle shared a lighthearted anecdote on The Graham Norton Show on BBC One on 2 June 2017. She recalled watching Peaky Blinders alongside her parents as she appears in a love scene.

“I was just, like, ‘Oh no, this is going to be so awkward,’ and [my dad] was like, ‘Well! We know who you get that from!’”

Ultimately, looking back at his career, it is as Roger in Granada Television’s much-celebrated The Owl Service that we shall surely remember Francis Wallis best. In Episode Two the groundskeeper, Huw, relates a Welsh folk tale from the Mabinogion about how the Stone of Gronw came to have its hole.

Huw: “He [Gronw] is standing on the bank of the river, see, and the husband is up on the Bryn with a spear, and the spear is going right through the stone, and him!”

Roger: “And he stood there and let it happen?”

Huw: “Because he killed the husband the same way, earlier. To take the wife.”

The three youngsters, Alison, Gwyn and Roger, are drawn by ancient forces to reenact the bitter rivalries of the legend: the lethal triangle of Blodeuwedd, created out of flowers as a wife for Lleu but punished and turned into an owl for betraying him in favour of Gronw. Alison disloyally tells Roger about Gwyn’s purchase of elocution records, which Gwyn has divulged in confidence. Roger exploits this knowledge mercilessly: “Ali didn’t say much. I mean, I don’t know whether you’re using the complete Improva-Prole set or the shorter course of Oiks’ Exercises for getting by in the shop.” Alison turns to Roger for comfort and Gwyn feels utterly betrayed.

In the climactic scenes in Episode Eight, Alison, face scratched as if by claws, lies possessed by the power of the legend. Huw beseeches Gwyn to comfort Alison but he is too hurt: “I can’t.” When Roger attempts a reconciliation Gwyn responds viciously with wounding taunts about his absconded mother’s reputation.

Roger: “Ok Gwyn. It’s my fault. It was me, not Ali. She never laughed at you about those records. It wasn’t like I said, I twisted it round. I’m sorry. Don’t let it happen, Gwyn. Gwyn, if you really can stop it don’t let it happen. She’s ill. Alright Gwyn?”

Gwyn: “Get lost. Mummy’s boy. Go and play with her if you can find her.”

“Ok. Ok, Gwyn.”

“And how is the Birmingham Belle. Still ringing?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder who’s swinging on her rope, who’s twisting her tassels, eh?”

“Yes.”

“She’ll need a new clapper by now I shouldn’t wonder.”

“You poor devil.”

Huw: “He is hurt too much. She wants to be flowers and you make her owls, and she is at the hunting.”

Roger: “Is that it? Is that all it is? As easy as that? Hey, Ali, did you hear? You’ve got it back to front you silly gubbins. She’s not owls, she’s flowers. Flowers, Ali. Flowers.”

Roger gently soothes Alison, releasing her from the malevolent power of the legend. Francis’s hard-to-like character finds redemption in the end.

Francis Wallis as Roger in scenes from Granada Television’s The Owl Service, opposite Michael Holden (lower left) as Gwyn, with Raymond Llewellyn (lower right) as Huw, and with Gillian Hills as Alison (top left, lower right).

 

Francis Wallis: career in film and television

29 November 1969 (date of first broadcast)
Johnnie Churchill in The First Churchills, part 10: A Famous Victory (BBC)

21 December 1969 to 8 February 1970
Roger in The Owl Service (Granada Television)

12 January 1970
Jeff Senton in ITV Playhouse: A Man for Loving (Yorkshire Television)

29 July and 5 August 1970
Nicholas Braun in parts 1 and 2 of Husbands and Lovers (Granada Television)

September 1970
Gdsm. Thompson in the film The Breaking of Bumbo (Associated British Productions)

29 December 1970
Robin in ITV Playhouse: Up School (ATV)

31 May 1971
Sir Oliver Teezley in The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder episode Find the Lady (Thames Television)

5 July 1971
Parson in You’re Only Young Twice episode Home Sweet Homicide (ATV)

28 April 1973
Gary Masters in Thriller: Someone at the Top of the Stairs (ATV)

11, 12 and 13 December 1974
Simon Halliwell in Crown Court story Forgive-Me-Not (Granada Television)

2 November 1975
Alexander Buchan in The Explorers: The Story of Captain James Cook (BBC)

 

Francis Wallis: career in theatre

1964

One of the Members of the Foreign Press in Edge of Reason by Max Frisch at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London – The Stage and Television Today, 24 September 1964.

1966 

Molière’s School for Wives at the Grove Theatre, Belfast – The Stage and Television Today, 29 September 1966.

1967 

Player Murderer in Hamlet, minor roles in Measure for Measure and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare on the Bristol Old Vic's first transatlantic tour – Bristol Evening Post (preview), 29 December 1966; The Stage and Television Today, 2 March 1967; The Best Plays of 1966-1967, Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1967.

Kuzma in Marya by Isaac Babel at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London – The Stage and Television Today, 26 and 28 October 1967.

1968 

Heartfree in The Provok’d Wife by John Vanbrugh at Newport Little Theatre and Arts Centre – The Stage and Television Today, 14 March 1968.

Jack Dandy in A Boat in the Backyard by David Bramley at the Library Theatre, Scarborough – The Stage and Television Today, 4 July 1968.

Simon Bliss in Hay Fever by Noël Coward at the Library Theatre, Scarborough – The Stage and Television Today, 8 August 1968.

Thomas Arden in Arden of Feversham at the Library Theatre, Scarborough – The Stage and Television Today, 22 August 1968.

1971 

Martin, the adopted son, in Someone Waiting by Emlyn Williams at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham – The Birmingham Post, 24 March 1971.

Supporting role(s) as the various Trojan and Greek commanders in Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare at the Belgrade Studio Theatre, Coventry – Coventry Evening Telegraph, 7 October 1971.

Ladvenu in St Joan by George Bernard Shaw at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry – Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 12 November 1971.

1972 

Tom in The Knack by Ann Jellicoe at the Belgrade Studio Theatre, Coventry – Coventry Evening Telegraph, 18 February 1972.

Excuses, Excuses by David Edgar at the Belgrade Studio Theatre, Coventry – Coventry Evening Telegraph, 6 May 1972.

The Human Paraphernalia Show in London pubs and at the Belgrade Studio Theatre, Coventry – Coventry Evening Telegraph, 17 May 1972.

David Isaacs’ review of The Human Paraphernalia Show at the Belgrade Studio Theatre in the Coventry Evening Telegraph (2 June 1972). The actors in the accompanying photograph are, left to right, Colin Starkey, Jane Collins, Roger Lancaster and Francis Wallis.

Peemouche in Dig a Bigger Hole (subtitled The 1972 Pollution Show) at the Belgrade Studio Theatre, Coventry – Coventry Evening Telegraph, 30 June 1972.

Photograph in the Coventry Evening Telegraph (30 June 1972) of the cast of Dig a Bigger Hole at the Belgrade Studio Theatre, Coventry.

1974 

Hobson’s Choice by Harold Brighouse at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter – Torquay Herald Express, 8 July 1974.

1975 

As You Like It by William Shakespeare at the Shaw Theatre, London – The Stage and Television Today, 29 May 1975.