Wilfred Lawson

Just seen a good programme about George Frederick Handel on BBC2; made me think of a film made back in the fifties or sixties on Handel's life which starred Wilfred Lawson as the great composer. He played it well, though I thought, before seeing it, that it would be a most unlikely role for Lawson.
I don't think Wilfred Lawson was ever box-office popular, certainly with his rugged, pock-marked face and gritty, ringing voice, not a matinee idol, but he was a very fine actor: he was often referred to as "an actor's actor". I recall Albert Finney on "call my Bluff" many years ago doing a superb impersonation of Lawson's voice while the panel, blindfolded, tried to guess who it was doing the impersonation. They did not get Albert Finney - he was too good at the impersonation.
Apart from the Handel film I can only recall Wilfred Lawson in two other films one of which was "Pygmalion" where he brilliantly played the dustman Doolittle and a horror film which I cannot recall a thing about except that he was in it.
He was much praised as a stage actor and achieved great critical and popular success with his West End performance in Strinberg's "The Father". When I say he had critical success this was what most critics averred. But not Kenneth Tynan. After he gave it a drubbing a woman I knew, Miriam Pleasence, Donald Pleasence's wife, told me she approached Tynan in a bar one evening and proceeded to give him a dressing down for his criticism of Wilfred Lawson; Tynan gave her some excuse about his having to leave the theatre early or some such thing.
I must try to get hold of a copy of the Handel film and see if it is as good as I thought when I saw it as a young man.