Paul Vaughan (1925-2014)

Birthplace:
Brixton, London, England, U.K.

Born:
October 24, 1925

Died:
November 14, 2014

Paul Vaughan was an English actor, author and voiceover virtuoso, known to millions as the “Horizon voice” on BBC2, as well as for Waking Ned Devine (1998), Threads (1984) and The Escapist (2008). His voice was his prize accomplishment, in professional use into his 80s, but it was not the only one. He matriculated at Oxford in 1943, reading English and French at Wadham College in two spells wrapped around national service in the Royal Engineers, finally emerging with a wartime degree. A lifelong clarinettist (self-taught from the recordings of Frank Teschemacher), he most enjoyed sitting in the midst of an orchestra and contributing to its sublime sound. His first books were spin-offs from his career as a medical journalist, including a history of the British Medical Association, and a study of the contraceptive pill (The Pill on Trial, 1972).

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Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

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  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.