Bernard Chastey Braden (16 May 1916 – 2 February 1993) was a Canadian-born British actor and comedian, who is best known for his appearances in UK television and radio shows.
Life
Braden was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and educated at Magee Secondary School, Kerrisdale, Vancouver. He produced plays on CJOR Vancouver in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He married Barbara Kelly in 1942, and they moved to Toronto the same year. They had two children, Christopher and Kelly Braden. Seven years later, he, his wife and two children moved to England.
Braden hosted a quiz show for London Weekend Television in 1976, The Sweepstakes Game. Two contestants decided which of six star guests were most likely to help them to win cash and prizes.
He later (1987-1989) presented episodes of the show All Our Yesterdays.
Braden independently produced and shot in 1967-68 an extended series of interviews of public figures, conducted by himself (and sometimes by his wife), for a series called Now and Then but the series was never completed or sold to a broadcaster. The series was re-edited in 2008 as Sex Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: The 60s Revealed, in which the original interviewees saw their 1968 interviews for the first time.
Film and stage
His few film appearances included Love in Pawn (1953), Jet Storm (1959), The Full Treatment (1960), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) (as the news editor of the Daily Express), and the 1962 films Two and Two Make Six and All Night Long. In the same year he played Flight Surgeon Randall in the British film The War Lover, alongside Steve McQueen, Robert Wagner and a young Michael Crawford.
He also narrated the 20-minute British Transport Films short The Coasts of Clyde, in which he announces himself as a Canadian traveller arriving in Scotland in pursuit of an ancestor in the land of his parents.
On the stage he appeared in two Tennessee Williams plays, as Mitch in the London premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire alongside Vivien Leigh, and later as the lead in Period of Adjustment.
Book
Braden published an autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers; the title is an allusion to A Streetcar Named Desire.
Discography
- Bernard Braden Reads Stephen Leacock (1969), Capitol ST-6335