Ferdy Mayne or Ferdie Mayne (born Ferdinand Philip Mayer-Horckel; 11 March 1916 – 30 January 1998) was a German-British stage and screen actor.[1] Born in Mainz, he emigrated to the United Kingdom in the early 1930s to escape the Nazi regime. He resided in the UK for the majority of his professional career. Working almost continuously throughout a 60-year-long career, Mayne was known as a versatile character actor, often playing suave villains and aristocratic eccentrics in films like The Fearless Vampire Killers, Where Eagles Dare, Barry Lyndon, and Benefit of the Doubt.
Early life
Ferdinand Philip Mayer-Horckel was born in Mainz, Germany, on 11 March 1916. His German father was the judge of Mainz, while his half-English mother was a singing instructor.[2]
Because his family was Jewish, a teenage Mayne was sent to Britain in 1932 to protect him from the Nazis. He stayed with his aunt, Li Osborne (1883–1968), nee Luisa Friedericka Wolf, a well-known German theatre and film portrait photographer. Just a few years previously, she fled Germany for England, married, became Li Hutchinson-Wolf, and, as a noted sculptor, used the name Lee Hutchinson.[2] Mayne obtained British citizenship. His parents were detained briefly in Buchenwald but, due to his mother's British family connections, were able to leave Germany for Britain, where they settled permanently.
At the start of the Second World War, Mayne operated as an informant for MI5. Significant clues to his secret service work were provided by Joan Miller in her posthumously published memoir One Girl's War (1986). Mayne had served as a witness at her marriage in 1945.
In 1977, he appeared in "It Pays to Advertise", an episode of Are You Being Served?,[4] in the role of "The Ten Pound Perfume".[5]
Later, Mayne moved to the United States and played the semi-regular role of Albert Grand in the TV series Cagney and Lacey.[6]
In 1983, he played the role of Ludwig Rosenthal, a wealthy Jewish merchant persecuted and dispossessed by the Nazis, in Winds of War, a television miniseries based on the eponymous novel by Herman Wouk.
Personal life
In 1955, Mayne married actress Deirdre de Payer. Their daughter Belinda Mayne is also an actress. They also adopted a daughter, Fernanda, in 1965. The couple divorced in 1972.
Illness and death
In the 1990s, Mayne developed Parkinson's disease, from which he died on 30 January 1998 in London, aged 81.[2]
