Biography

Alfred Burke

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Burke was born in Peckham, South London after his family arrived from Cork, in Ireland. He was educated in Leo Street School, Peckham, then Walworth Central. At 15, he left school and became an office boy with a railway wagon repair firm. A year later, he became a steward in a businessmen's club in Bishopsgate. His job ended abruptly when he quarrelled with a barmaid and she squirted soda in his face. Too frightened to tell his parents, he ran away to Brighton, but post-Winter there was no work and he was forced to return home to a job in a silk warehouse in Cheapside. At 17, he left home and went into lodgings in New Cross. For the first time, he started going to the cinema and the theatre. Finding it exciting, he took up amateur dramatics with a local group and went to Morley College where he won a scholarship to RADA in 1937. Burke eventually met and married Barbara, an actress, who was originally training to be a singer. They had two sets of twins, Jacob and Harriet and Kelly and Louisa, all musically inclined. Alfred became well known when he played private eye Frank Marker in the TV series Public Eye.
- IMDb mini biography by: Tonyman 5

He and Barbara Bonelle had two sets of twins: Jacob and Harriet, born 1956; and Kelly and Louisa, born 1960.
During the Second World War, he registered as a conscientious objector and was put to work as a rural labourer.
Appeared at the National Theatre in London in Jonathan Kent's production of Oedipus. Burke, aged 90, played The Shepherd.
Joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in his late 60s and continued on for nearly two decades.
He spent 3 years with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

I think nowadays you're more responsible for yourself as an actor. You are expected to take more responsibility for yourself and you do. And your own opinions for instance, nowadays would be much more important than they were in my time when your own opinion didn't count for much. You did what you were told or what was suggested to you. The sort of thing you did was imitate older actors actually.
What makes people a good director, it's a mystery. I mean, I did a lot of directing in my day, at Farnham, I've no idea what sort of director I was but these were people, they were good organizers, they were well read, cultured used to be the word, they knew what they were doing, they knew their history of the theatre.
In weekly rep of course you had to learn a new act every day, every night, after the show. You'd go home and you'd go to bed and start learning your lines for the following day so you'd rehearse an act a day and you had to learn all the lines for one act in one fell swoop. That really was hard work but somehow you know everybody did it. I don't think people would do it now.

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