Laura Lamson, screenwriter, was born on May 2, 1948. She died on October 13, 2008, aged 60

Laura Lamson wrote the 1991 BBC adaptation of Ann Oakley’s novel The Men’s Room, the tale of an affair that starred Harriet Walter and Bill Nighy. Set in a modern office, it shocked audiences with its sexual explicitness and its mockery of liberal pretensions.

The mini-series, which explored themes that had been largely avoided by British TV, attracted a big audience. Nighy later remarked that it had made his career. Lamson, an American who lived in Britain for 40 years, wrote several other screenplays including Rich Deceiver, a romantic comedy about a woman who wins a secret fortune; The Alchemists, about corruption in the world of genetic engineering; Sparkling Cyanide, a modern adaptation of an Agatha Christie work; and Calling the Shots, starring Lynn Redgrave, about the consequences of intrusive journalism.

Lamson also wrote documentaries about Wren, Michelangelo, the Nuremberg trials and the documentaries Gertrude Jekyll, Asylum Wars and Against All Odds. Coming from the ethical middle ground of America, Lamson was a great admirer of British stoicism and hard work.

Delmar Watson, child star, was born on July 1, 1926. He died of prostate cancer on October 26, 2008, aged 82

Delmar Watson claimed to have made more than 70 films by the time he was 7 and he would go on to appear in more than 1,000 before retiring from films in his mid-teens. He played Peter the Goat General to Shirley Temple’s Heidi in 1937 and he was Governor Guy Kibbee’s son in the Frank Capra classic Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), but most of his appearances were in uncredited, walk-on roles.

His film career actually began before he was capable of a walk-on appearance. David Delmar Watson was born in Los Angeles in 1926, at the end of the silent era, and made his film debut as a baby. His father, Coy, was in the business. He helped to break in horses for the early Hollywood cowboy stars, worked as a stuntman, and developed an expertise in special effects and designed Douglas Fairbanks’s flying carpet for The Thief of Bagdad (1924). He had nine children, and Delmar Watson later recalled that the studios knew they could get “kids of all sizes” there.

During the Second World War, Watson served in the US Coast Guard, working as a cameraman. After the war he and his brothers pursued careers in news photography, continuing in the footsteps of their grandfather James Watson, who photographed Buffalo Bill riding through Los Angeles in 1904.

In 1999 the family was given its own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.

John Gillespie, OBE, chairman of Rowntree Mackintosh in Italy and the Mediterranean area, was born on February 23, 1922. He died on October 16, 2008, aged 86

John Gillespie was the managing director of Rowntree Mackintosh’s Italian subsidiary and was appointed OBE for exceptional service to British business interests in Italy.

Gillespie was born in Glasgow and educated at St Mungo’s Academy. On his 18th birthday he joined the Royal Air Force where he fought with the 8th Army in the Northern Desert and was at Tripoli, El Alamein and the invasion of Sicily. He survived being blown up twice. After the war he enjoyed a successful industrial career with the General Electric Company, which supplied British consumer and defence electronics and communication. In 1973 he was appointed as managing director of Rowntree Mackintosh’s Italian subsidiary and later became the chairman of Rowntree Mackintosh Italy and the Mediterranean. He retired from the chocolate-making company in 1982 and settled on the coast of Riccione, Italy, where he had met his wife.