Norman Clifford Bowler (born 1 August 1932) is an English actor, best known for his role as Frank Tate in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale.
Queer Places:
54 Mill Lane, West Hampstead, London
Norman Clifford Bowler (born 1 August 1932) is an English actor, best known for his role as Frank Tate in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale.
Norman Clifford Bowler was born on 1 August 1932 in London, England. His father, Clifford Norman Bowler (1899–1993), a watchmaker and jeweller, had a shop at 54 Mill Lane, West Hampstead, London, where he is commemorated by a plaque.
Amidst the hubbub of the swinging 1960s, David Archer ran his small, apparently unremarkable, bookshop, since the 1930s, which according to the poet Christopher Logue, who discusses Archer in his autobiography, was (unusually for the area) ‘clean, sleek and uncluttered’. No 4 Parton Street became a regular haunt for writers, many casually leaving their books with Archer in the hope of shifting a few copies. The ceiling of the shop was covered in portraits of poets – the work of Italian graphic designer Germano Facetti. This was the same ceiling that caught Allen Lane’s eye and eventually took Facetti to Penguin books as designer. Even the girl serving the endless free coffees was the famously beautiful Soho siren Henrietta Moraes, muse to Francis Bacon. She left her first husband, Michael Law, and married John Minton's lover, actor Norman Bowler, with whom she had two children, Joshua and Caroline, although many years later it transpired that Joshua's father was actually Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner. She later married the Indian writer Dom Moraes.
Berjourhi Bowler, his second wife, mother of Tamara, and Bowler were divorced in 1969, after 10 years of marriage. Bowler's third wife Dianne died in December 2012.
Bowler was a regular star of the ATV soap series Harpers West One, playing the character of Roger Pike, and played a variety of bit parts and single episode roles on television throughout the 1960s, including an episode of Gideon's Way. He featured in an episode of The Avengers in 1967 entitled "Dead Man's Treasure" and starred alongside James Caan in the 1968 war film Submarine X-1, about World War II British midget submarines. From 1966 to 1976, Bowler played Det. Chief Inspector Harry Hawkins for the entire run of the BBC TV police drama Softly, Softly (later Softly, Softly: Taskforce). He also appeared as Titinius in Julius Caesar (1970), as Saturninus in Jesus of Nazareth (1977), as Bill Smugs in The Island of Adventure (1982), and as Moose in the Terence Hill film They Call Me Renegade (1987). After a continuing role in Crossroads from 1986 to 1987, he later played the part of Frank Tate in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale from November 1989 to May 1997. Frank's death was one of the most iconic episodes of Emmerdale, when he was left to die of a heart attack on the floor of his beloved Home Farm.
Bowler has been active in charity work and adult education. With his third wife, Dianne, he spent several years at Auroville International Township in Tamil Nadu, India. There he engaged in development work with people in the surrounding Tamil villages and often entertained the village children. He also worked with and directed, the amateur actors of the township. In August 2012, Bowler released a recorded reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner to raise money for The Auroville Trust.[1]
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