Skip Martin was an actor at the dwarf -like who built a successful horror film career in the sixties and seventies, starring in addition to genre legends, writes David Turnbull
Long before actors such as Warwick Davis, David RappaPort and Peter Dinklage Roem found actors with dwarf gram, there was Skip Martin – a South London artist who won a distinguishing career in British horror films in the sixties and 70s in the main role in the main role in the lead role.
Warwick Davis (Star Wars, Willow and Harry Potter) received the Bafta Lifetime Achievement Award this year. Davis, who has been on three centimeters long, founded the charity institution Little People UK in 2012 with his wife Samantha. The organization promotes the positive representation of people with dwarf -like in the media.
Among other things, actors with dwarf group who, like Davis and Martin, had a remarkable career, are David Rappaport (Time Bandits, The Bride) and Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones, X-Men: Days of Future Fits).
Who was Martin Skip?
Born Derek George Horowitz on March 28, 1928 in Sydenham, in Lewisham, Zuid -London, he earned the children’s name ‘Skip’ because of his tendency to skip lessons at school. His early walk on roles include parts in Corridors of Blood (1958), starring Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee and the Hellfire Club (1961) with Peter Cushing in the lead.
His breakthrough in the talk came in Roger Corman’s much -praised 1964 Big Screen -adjustment by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. Martin plays Hop-Toad, at the Hof van Prince Prospero, played by Vincent Price.
The Hop-Toad character was lifted from another story by Edgar Allan Poe, Hop Frog and split into the plot of the film. Martin’s climatic scene lets him seek revenge against Alfredo who previously met the reducing lover of the Nar, Esmeralda.
Hop-Toad lets him dress like a monkey for the masked ball of Prince Prospero before he demands his revenge by hoisting him on a chandelier, set him on fire and seeing him burning. He and Esmeralda then escape from the castle before the arrival of the red death.
Circus of Fear, AKA Psycho Circus (1966), based on a novel by Edgar Wallace, followed, in which he again played alongside Christopher Lee and also Klaus Kinski. An early example of what might be called a slasher film later, but probably much closer to a WHO-Dun-IT, Martin plays a dwarf named Mr Big Working for Barberini’s circus that is working on a blackmail plot against Christopher Lee’s facial treatment and black-masked Drago.
Another role with the circus theme was the dwarf in Hammer’s Cult -Film Vampire Circus from 1972 as Michael, which also played the leading role in Future Doctor WHO -Mean -Meetel Lalla Ward in her first film role.
Horror Hospital followed in 1973. Written and directed by Anthony Balch, the plot concentrates on a health farm where an annoying songwriter, played by confessions of a window cleaner, Robin Asquith, discovered secret experiments by a crazy surgeon to lobotomize hippies.
Martin plays Frederick, the sadistic assistant of Michael Gough’s disturbed doctor, Christian Storm. In the opening scenes, Frederick can be seen in the company of the doctor who hunts and a patient removes who desperately tries an escape from the field of the health farm. He relieves himself later at the end of the film by actually helping the character of Asquith.
1974 Martin saw a role countries in son of Dracula, a tongue in the musical horror of the cheek, produced by Beatle Ringo Starr and with Harry Neilson in the lead role of Count Downe, the son of the recently deceased Dracula.
Martin plays Igor, assistant of Baron Frankenstein of Freddie Jones, who is secretly on his way to prevent the son of Dracula from taking on the mantle of king of the Netherworld.
Martin also had roles in the Italian Giallo film Col Cuoro in Gola (1966), directed by Tinto Brass and released in English as ‘Deadly Sweet’ and the German historical fantasy Die Nibelungen, Teil 2 – Kreimhilds Rache (1967) (who wanted the God).
His television roles include performances in episodes of the Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives and the Goodies. He also played an alien in an advertisement for Birds Eye Beef-Burgers.
Despite his film and television career, he spends his entire life in Lewisham, occasionally working in a local tobacco concrete between roles. He died for only 56 years on November 4, 1984 in the here green area of Lewisham and was buried in the here green cemetery.
What is your favorite Skip Martin film? Tell us in the commentary section below!
