Simon Everard, businessman, was born on October 30, 1928. He died on January 17, 2005, aged 76.
SIMON EVERARD turned a small company into a world chemicals giant, then oversaw the demutualisation of Alliance & Leicester. A stalwart of Leicestershire, he served as its deputy lord lieutenant from 1984 to 2004.
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He was born in Werrington and attended Uppingham School in Rutland. After National Service in Palestine, he read history at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1952 he joined the family firm, Ellis and Everard. Established in 1848 as coal merchants, it had by the 1950s branched into agricultural and building supplies. Everard was keen to develop the chemicals arm which was suppling dye to the Leicester hosiery industry. In 1959 the company recorded a £12,000 profit on £139,000 turnover. When it went public in 1963, Everard took the chance to borrow money and diversify, buying a Nottingham chemical distibutor, Charles Forth, and WHB chemicals in Bradford, and cultivating ICI. The risks were high — as was the lending rate of 7.5 per cent — but he knew time was running out for coal and local distribution.
As the chemical empire grew, Everard closed the agricultural arm in 1970, sold the building supplies division in 1978, and resisted a takeover from Unilever by enlisting ICI, which took a 30 per cent stake. By 1980, Ellis and Everard was the largest chemical distributor in Britain, with sales of more than £28 million. Everard became chairman that year and took the company into the US, acquiring AICC in Atlanta and opening a branch in Tennessee. When he retired in 1990, the company was the fifth largest chemical distributor in the world.
In 1994 Everard became chairman of Alliance & Leicester building society and saw it through the complex transformation into a financial services group.
Jerry Orbach, actor, was born on October 20, 1935. He died of prostate cancer on December 28, 2004, aged 69.
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IN THE estimation of one critic, the actor Jerry Orbach “oozed New York from every pore” — the old New York, before Friends, Seinfeld and Sex and the City, of stakeouts, stickups and good men gone bad by doing tough jobs. Orbach was king of this city, and he returned to it in the hugely popular series Law and Order to show that nothing had really changed.
Orbach had the accent, the natural aloofness and the good, but hungry looks of the Bronx, where he was born. His father was a vaudeville actor, his mother a radio singer, and his early years were peripatetic. He studied acting at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, making his first stage appearance as Mack the Knife in Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. His first film, Cop Hater, turned out to be watchable and fairly gripping. Orbach played a gang leader in a hot, claustrophobic New York that dripped with fear and villainy.
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Orbach’s early days were marked by low-budget films and formulaic TV series. He appeared in Mad Dog Coll (1961) and Annie Get Your Gun (1967). He was a popular fill-in on shows such as Kojak, Trapper John MD, Simon and Simon, Hunter and Murder, She Wrote. In 1989 he appeared in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), a definitive New York picture shot entirely on German soil.
When he joined Law and Order in 1992, he played detective Lennie Briscoe. On paper the part was a slavish reincarnation of every detective from Raymond Chandler through McBain to Mike Hammer: a hard-drinking, no-nonsense, twice-divorced cynic. His special quality was the dry wit with which he quietly stole every scene. In one episode he looks at a decapitated victim and says: “Hope his parents weren’t getting him any hats for Christmas.”