Stephen Boyd

Stephen Boyd (born William Millar; 4 July 1931 – 2 June 1977) was a Northern Irish actor of Ulster Scottish descent. He appeared in some 60 films, most notably as the villainous Messala in Ben-Hur (1959), a role that earned him the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture.

He received his second Golden Globe Award nomination for Billy Rose's Jumbo (1962). He also appeared, sometimes as a hero and sometimes as a malefactor, in the major big-screen productions The Night Heaven Fell (1958), The Bravados (1958), The Best of Everything (1959), Imperial Venus (1962), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Genghis Khan (1965), Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Shalako (1968).

Spouses

• Mariella di Sarzana, (m. 1958; div. 1959)​​​
• Elizabeth Mills, (m. 1974)​​

Partners 

• Marisa Mell (1970–1972)
• Brigitte Bardot 

Biography

Early life

Stephen Boyd was born on 4 July 1931 in Whitehouse, County Antrim. He was the youngest of nine children born to Scots-Irish Canadian parents, James Alexander Millar and his wife Martha Boyd. At a very early age, William, or Billy as he was known, moved with the family to live in Glengormley. Boyd attended the local Public Elementary School and Ballyclare High School.

At the age of 14, Boyd quit school to work and earn money to help support his family. He eventually joined the Ulster Group Theatre, where he learned the behind-the-scenes tasks of the theatre. He became well known in Belfast for his contributions as a gravel-voiced policeman on the Ulster Radio programme "The McCooeys", the story of a Belfast family written by Joseph Tomelty.

Boyd eventually worked his way up to character parts and then starring roles. By nineteen he had toured Canada with summer stock companies. In 1950, he made a coast-to-coast tour of America with the Clare Tree Major Company, performing A Streetcar Named Desire  in the lead role as Stanley Kowalski. Boyd later recalled this as "the best performance I ever gave in my life".

By the time he was 20, Boyd had a wide range of theatre experience, but he longed for the big stage. In 1952, he moved to London and worked in a cafeteria and busked outside a cinema in Leicester Square to get money as he was literally close to starvation. Boyd caught his first break as a doorman at the Odeon Theatre.

The Leicester Square Cinema across the street recruited him to usher attendees during the British Academy Awards in the early 1950s. During the awards ceremony, he was noticed by actor Sir Michael Redgrave, who used his connections to introduce Boyd to the director of the Windsor Repertory Group. At this point, Boyd's stage career in the U.K. began to flourish with performances in "The Deep Blue Sea" and "Barnett's Folly".

Early roles

Boyd's first role that brought him acclaim was as a pro-Nazi Irish spy in the movie The Man Who Never Was, based on the book by Ewen Montagu. The movie was released in April 1956.

Shortly thereafter, he signed a ten-year contract with 20th Century Fox studios, who began prepping him for Hollywood, but it was a while until Boyd actually set foot on a Hollywood back-lot. Boyd's next stop was Portugal, where he acted in A Hill in Korea, which also featured future stars Michael Caine and Robert Shaw. 

In June 1956, Boyd was cast in the nautical, ship-wreck adventure Abandon Ship! for Columbia Studios starring Tyrone Power. This was filmed in the summer of 1956 in London, where the British Navy built a huge 35,000-gallon water tank for the movie.

In November of 1956, for Twentieth Century Fox, Boyd traveled to the British West Indies as part of a large ensemble cast in Darryl Zanuck's racially provocative film Island in the Sun starring Dorothy Dandridge, based on the Alec Waugh novel. Boyd portrayed a young English aristocrat who becomes the lover of Joan Collins. Boyd was loaned out to the J. Arthur Rank production of Seven Thunders (Beast of Marseilles), a World War II romance set in Nazi-occupied Marseilles. This movie was filmed on location in Marseilles and at Pinewood Studios in London in the spring of 1957 and featured Boyd in his most prominent starring film role yet.

Around the same time, French actress Brigitte Bardot was given the opportunity to cast her own leading man in her next movie after her success in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman, and she chose Boyd. From August to October 1957, Bardot, Boyd, and Alida Valli filmed the lusty romance The Night Heaven Fell, directed by Roger Vadim in Paris and in the region of Málaga, Spain, specifically the small, white-washed town of Mijas. Being in the Bardot spotlight added much to Boyd's film credit, in addition to bringing him notice in Hollywood.

Boyd finally arrived in Hollywood in January 1958 to take on his first true Hollywood role as the leader of a quartet of renegade outlaws in the Twentieth Century Fox western The Bravados, which starred Gregory Peck and Joan Collins. Even though this was a Hollywood production, the actual filming took place in Morelia, Mexico.

Personal life

Silver Screen Magazine in 1960 wrote this about Boyd:

A supreme individualist, like most Irishmen, he has a wonderful actor's face that easily switches from an engaging smile to sinister menace. Far handsomer in person than on the screen ... Stephen Boyd is a lean (180 pounds), well built (six-foot-one) charmer of 31, with a dazzling dimple, light brown curly hair, fair skin and the kind of grey eyes which take on color from what he is wearing. A man of tremendous vitality, a typical Celt, in many roles he veers from humor to anger in the wink of an eye. He dresses conservatively; speaks wittily, and extremely well, though he confesses that he's had almost no formal schooling; is genial and friendly ('I have my brooding hours which wipe that grin off my face').

Journalist Florabel Muir described Boyd's appeal in a feature from 1966. "I would think it has to be his ruggedly masculine good looks. Strong, even craggy features, a wide sympathetic mouth, firm chin, athletic build, wavy dark brown hair, roving 185-lb. frame – all that plus a musical voice and the savoir faire of a much-traveled fellow – his films have taken him to many places in the world, and a rolling stone acquires a high polish."

Boyd was popular with Hollywood columnists, including his friend Hedda Hopper, as well as fellow actors and other members of the entertainment industry because of his charm and sense of humor. "Boyd is the kind of a man who was born to make friends and he has been doing it most of his life...Boyd is a blue-eyed, curly-haired chunk of masculinity, who makes no attempt to hide the fact that he just plain likes people. On the set of Ben-Hur he rarely occupied the fancy portable dressing room set aside for his use. Instead, he spent his time between scenes sitting around and chatting with electricians, carpenters and his fellow actors. He will discuss any subject and enjoys a good argument. He can, like most Irishmen, sprinkle his talk with wit as well as sagacity."

He was first married in 1958 to Italian-born MCA executive Mariella Di Sarzana during the filming of Ben-Hur. They separated after just three weeks. Concerning his short-lived marriage to Sarzana, Boyd explained: "It was my fault. I'm an Irish so-and-so when I'm working. I hadn't been married a week when we both knew we had made a mistake. She is a nice girl but we were just not meant for each other. I suppose I wasn't ready for marriage. Maybe I was still too much of an adolescent." They officially divorced in early 1959. After his divorce Boyd lived as a bachelor for most of his life, dating several prominent Hollywood starlets throughout the 1960s. His secretary Elizabeth Mills was a permanent resident at his Tarzana home during these years, though the two did not marry until 1974.

He had a deep and lasting friendship with actress and French icon Brigitte Bardot with whom he starred in two movies – The Night Heaven Fell in 1958 and Shalako in 1968. During the filming of Shalako in Almería, Spain, Bardot and Boyd's close relationship and open affection for each other sparked numerous rumors of a possible affair. It even caused Brigitte's husband at the time, Gunter Sachs, to ask for a divorce. In Bardot's autobiography, she described the events and states that Boyd "was never her lover, but a tender and attentive friend." In an interview with Photoplay Film in 1968, Boyd said, "Bardot is always Bardot. She's marvelous. She's an enormous star and she's a unique, marvelous woman. I adore her." Even though both actors denied the affair, the press was "convinced there was a romance afoot, that Brigitte and Boyd openly displayed their affection for each other, but that publication of the report on their romance cooled it."

Boyd also had a close relationship with actress Dolores Hart who describes what was her only romance with a co-star in her autobiography The Ear of the Heart. Boyd eventually rejected her advances, but they remained close friends even after she turned to the cloistered life of a nun in 1963. He visited her in 1966 at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut and remained in communication with her until the early 1970s.

Stephen Boyd's most passionate affair seems to have been with Austrian actress Marisa Mell. They met while filming the movie Marta in 1970. Boyd initially dodged Marisa Mell's amorous advances, but during the second film they made together, The Great Swindle, the two became inseparable lovers. They married in a gypsy camp on the outskirts of Madrid in late 1971. The ceremony included a wrist cutting exchange of blood to seal their bond. The marriage was not considered legal, but Marisa Mell said, "Who cares? In our minds it will be real." According to Marisa Mell, their affair was so intense that while living in Rome they made a trip to the Italian town of Sarsina for a ritual exorcism at the Cathedral of St. Vicinius. Boyd abruptly broke off the affair after the intensity apparently became too much to bear. In early 1972, after Boyd's departure, Mell had this to say about the break-up of their relationship: "We both believe in reincarnation, and we realized we've already been lovers in three different lifetimes, and in each one I made him suffer terribly." For her part, Mell fondly remembered Boyd many years later in her autobiography Cover Love from 1990, dedicating a chapter to their affair.

Boyd's last marriage took place in 1974 to Elizabeth Mills, a secretary at the British Arts Council, whom he had known since 1953. Mills followed Boyd to the United States in the late 1950s and was his personal assistant, friend and confidante for many years before marrying him in the mid-1970s.

Death

Boyd died of a massive heart attack on 2 June 1977 at the age of 45 while playing golf with his wife, Elizabeth Mills, at the Porter Valley Country Club in Northridge, California. He was in talks to play the role of the Regimental Sergeant Major in Euan Lloyd's The Wild Geese before his death.

He was cremated and his ashes were interred in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California. His wife Elizabeth Mills Boyd was interred with him at the time of her death in 2007. He is also remembered on his parents' grave in the Clandeboye Cemetery, Bangor, Northern Ireland.

Legacy

On 4 July 2018, the Ulster History Circle, a voluntary organisation which erects plaques across the province of Ulster to celebrate people of achievement, commemorated Stephen Boyd with a blue plaque close to his birthplace  at 'Moygara', Shore Road, Whitehouse (Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland).

Filmography

• Black 13 (1953) as Policeman (uncredited)
• Lilacs in the Spring (1954) as Beaumont's Poolside Companion (uncredited)
• An Alligator Named Daisy (1955) as Albert O'Shannon
• Born for Trouble (1955)
• The Man Who Never Was (1956) as Patrick O'Reilly
• A Hill in Korea (1956) as Pvt. Sims
• The Adventures of Aggie (1956-57)
• Seven Waves Away (1957) as Will McKinley
• Island in the Sun (1957) as Euan Templeton
• Seven Thunders (1957) as Dave
• Les bijoutiers du clair de lune (1958) as Lambert
• The Bravados (1958) as Bill Zachary
• Woman Obsessed (1959) as Fred Carter
• The Best of Everything (1959) as Mike Rice
• Ben-Hur (1959) as Messala
• The Big Gamble (1961) as Vic Brennan
• Lisa (1962) as Peter Jongman
• Jumbo (1962) as Sam Rawlins
• Imperial Venus (1962) as Jules de Canouville
• The Third Secret (1964) as Alex Stedman
• The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) as Livius
• Genghis Khan (1965) as Jamuga
• The Oscar (1966) as Frank Fane
• The Poppy Is Also a Flower (1966) as Benson
• Fantastic Voyage (1966) as Grant
• The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966) as Nimrod
• The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967) as Peter Churchman
• Assignment K (1968) as Philip Scott
• Shalako (1968) as Bosky Fulton
• Slaves (1969) as MacKay
• Carter's Army (1970, TV Movie) as Capt. Beau Carter
• Historia de una traición (1971) as Arturo
• Marta (1971) as Don Miguel
• African Story (1971) as Arnold Tiller
• Hannie Caulder (1971) as The Preacher (uncredited)
• The Great Swindle (1971) as Dave Barton
• Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! (1971) as Brad Killian
• The Devil Has Seven Faces (1972) as León Urrutía, joyero
• The Hands of Cormac Joyce (1972, TV Movie) as Cormac Joyce
• Those Dirty Dogs (1973) as Cpt. Chadwood Willer
• The Big Game (1973) as Leyton van Dyk
• The Man Called Noon (1973) as Rimes
• The Treasure of Jamaica Reef (1974) as Hugo Graham
• The Left Hand of the Law (1975) as Lanza
• L'uomo che sfidò l'organizzazione (1975) as Inspector Stephen McCormick
• Montana Trap [de] (1976) as Bill Ardisson
• Lady Dracula (1977) as Count Dracula (Posthumously)
• The Squeeze (1977) as Vic (Posthumously)
• Women in Hospital (1977) as Dr. Oberhoff (Posthumously)
• Impossible Love (1977) as Alvaro (Posthumously)
• Hawaii Five-O (1977, TV Series) as Daniel Costigan (Posthumously)