John Rodney Buckmaster (18 July 1915 – 1 April 1983) was an English actor on the stage, in films and on television, and a cabaret singer-songwriter. He was the son of actress Dame Gladys Cooper (1888–1971) and Captain Herbert Buckmaster (1881–1966). Educated at Eton College, he followed his mother into the acting profession and worked on both sides of the Atlantic.
During World War II, he served for a time as a private in the United States Army Air Forces before resuming his acting career until the mid-1950s. He suffered increasingly from mental illness, which led to his confinement at the Priory Hospital, where he committed suicide on 1 April 1983.
Early life
John Buckmaster was born on 18 July 1915 in Frinton-on-Sea where his mother, actress Gladys Cooper, had bought a cottage. Most people had fled from Frinton at the start of World War I, but Cooper kept her daughter, Joan (b. 1910), and baby John there in the care of a nanny, Sarah Aves, while she herself stayed in London to be near the theatre and going down to be with them at weekends.
His father was Herbert John Buckmaster, a veteran of the Boer War, known as "Buck", who founded Buck's Club and would later put the 'Buck' into Buck's Fizz. Herbert Buckmaster enlisted as soon as the war started and was given a commission in the 12th Reserve Regiment of Cavalry. After an initial posting in Aldershot, he went to France with the Royal Horse Guards in early 1915, where he remained for three-and-a-half years. During the war, Cooper wrote daily to her husband, giving him regular updates on their two children, including their son's stages of development from infant to toddler and little boy.
Cooper continued to be widely photographed on picture-postcards in which her children also featured. At the end of the war, the couple found that they had drifted apart; they divorced amicably on 12 December 1921 and remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
Throughout his childhood, John Buckmaster was regularly reported in the Press as an interesting and decorative news item. At the age of seven, a picture shows him dressed as a naval cadet and carrying a telescope under one arm. At nine he stands, racket in hand, beside his mother at the Frinton Juvenile Lawn Tennis Tournament, in which he was the youngest boy competitor. A year later, with boxing gloves on, he is facing the ex-welterweight champion of Europe, Johnny Summers, who had taught him for two years, and with whom he sparred at the Brighton Hospital Tournament in July 1925.
On 14 June 1927, Cooper married Sir Neville Pearson, and gave birth to their daughter, Sally, 1929. Buckmaster, now at Eton College, found the second marriage difficult to accept and became a difficult teenager. Although handsome, witty and talented, he was sensitive and highly strung. Of Cooper's three children, he was emotionally closest to his mother and proved deeply affected by her remarriage, as he and Pearson disliked each other intensely.
In early 1934, when his mother left England to expand her stage career into North America, Buckmaster moved to a flat in Chelsea with his nanny, Sarah Aves, to keep home for him. While in the USA, Cooper met and eventually married Philip Merivale on 30 April 1937, after obtaining a divorce from Pearson on 16 October 1936. They lived mainly in California and worked extensively in both Hollywood and Broadway, also supporting the Red Cross British Relief Fund and running a small theatre for servicemen during World War II.
John Buckmaster was very fond of his stepfather Merivale, upon whose death, on 12 March 1946, he wrote a tribute poem and left it on his mother's desk one morning.
Career
One of Buckmaster's earliest appearances on stage was in J. M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton at the age of eight. After its dress rehearsal, Sybil Thorndike had declared he was "the best actor I have seen."
At twenty, Buckmaster had already been performing professionally for a year when, in 1935, he played Georges Dupont in Robert E. Sherwood's English adaptation of Jacques Deval's 1933 play Tovarich at the Lyric Theatre, where it ran for 414 performances and where the wardrobe mistress was Mrs Mott ("Motty")his mother's dresser for over twenty years. The same year, he played Mike Doyle in George Pearson's film Checkmate, based on the novel by Amy Kennedy Gould.