Charles Dance Leads Top Honours For Britain’s Film Finest

Britain's film industry was well represented in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Actors Charles Dance and Rudoplh Walker and Aardman founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton and director Gurinder Chadha were all honoured.

An OBE went to Dance, one of Britain's finest actors, whose appearance in the 1984 classic The Jewel In The Crown firmly established him as a major screen performer.

His recent appearance in the acclaimed adaptation of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, in which he played the dastardly lawyer Tulkinghorn, was one of the TV highlights of last year.

There were CBEs for Peter Lord and and David Sproxton, co-founders of Aardman Animations, creators of the famous Wallace And Gromit films.

Actor Rudolph Walker, who gets an OBE, became the first black person to star in a major TV series, when he was cast as the lead role in Love Thy Neighbour in 1972.

He has also worked in repertory theatres across the country and regularly appears on the BBC soap EastEnders.

An OBE goes to Gurinder Chadha, a British film director best known for her films Bhaji On The Beach (1993) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002), which became a worldwide smash hit.

Film director Michael Winner, who rejected the offer of an OBE because he feared he might have to associate with lavatory cleaners at railway stations, need not have worried. There were no such public servants among the OBEs, nor in any other part of the list.