1. Val Guest enjoyed a long career in the film industry from the early 1930s until the early 1980s.
29 Facts About Val Guest
1. 2.
Val Guest's father was a jute broker, and the family spent some of Guest's childhood in India before returning to England.
3.
Val Guest's parents divorced when he was young, but this information was kept from him.
4.
Val Guest was educated at Seaford College in Sussex, but left in 1927 and worked for a time as a bookkeeper.
5.
Val Guest appeared in a few early sound film roles, before he left acting and began a writing career.
6.
Val Guest was placed under contract as a staff writer at Gainsborough's Islington Studios in Poole Street.
7.
Val Guest's credits included All In for Varnel; Public Nuisance No 1 ; A Star Fell from Heaven ; O-Kay for Sound for Varnel with The Crazy Gang; Alf's Button Afloat with Flanagan and Allen.
8.
Val Guest became a fully-fledged director in the early 1940s.
9.
Val Guest's first film was an Arthur Askey short, The Nose Has It, warning of the dangers of spreading infection.
10.
Val Guest followed this with two films starring Vic Oliver and Margaret Lockwood, Give Us the Moon and I'll Be Your Sweetheart ; the latter was the first and only musical from Gainsborough Studios.
11.
Val Guest directed two films based on the Just William stories, Just William's Luck and William Comes to Town.
12.
Val Guest wrote and directed a thriller, Murder at the Windmill.
13.
Val Guest then made the comedy Miss Pilgrim's Progress with Yolande Donlan, who became his wife in 1954.
14.
Val Guest began an association with Hammer films when he directed The Men of Sherwood Forest.
15.
Val Guest did a thriller Break in the Circle and Dance, Little Lady.
16.
Val Guest shot The Quatermass Xperiment as though it was a television documentary.
17.
Val Guest followed it with a drama They Can't Hang Me and musical It's a Wonderful World.
18.
Val Guest made a comedy Up the Creek which led to a sequel Further Up the Creek.
19.
Val Guest returned to comedy with Life Is a Circus starring Bud Flanagan.
20.
Val Guest made another for Hammer with Stanley Baker, a tough crime film, Hell Is a City.
21.
Val Guest followed this with a thriller for Hammer, The Full Treatment.
22.
Val Guest was one of five credited directors to work on the spoof James Bond film Casino Royale, a critically mauled picture in its day.
23.
Val Guest opted for an 'Additional Sequences' credit after he saw the completed film.
24.
Val Guest made a thriller Assignment K then a musical Toomorrow which, according to Christopher Hawtree, it is "a staggeringly dreadful movie".
25.
Val Guest issued an injunction against Harry Saltzman, the producer, because he had not been paid for his work, and the film was quickly pulled from screenings.
26.
Around the same time, Val Guest wrote and directed When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth for Hammer.
27.
Val Guest continued to direct films, including Killer Force.
28.
Originally married to Pat Watson, the couple divorced after Val Guest fell in love with American actress Yolande Donlan who eventually became his wife in 1954; Donlan appeared in eight of his films during the 1950s.
29.
Val Guest died in a hospice in Palm Desert, California from prostate cancer at the age of 94.