Ian Hendry, who died in the Royal Free Hospital, London, on December 24 at the age of 53, was an actor who specialized in virile, aggresiveroles, in films of which he had made a substantial number, and more predominantly from the mid 1950s onwards on television. On the small screen he is especially remembered for his starring roles in popular series like “Police Surgeon” and “The Lotus Eaters.” Ian Hendry was born in Ipswich on January 13, 1931. His first experience of the world of theatre was when as a part-time drama student he worked in cabaret as a stooge to Coco the Clown. Later, after National Service in the Royal Artillery he trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
From here he began a life in rep at Hornchurch and Worthing and was seen in Goldoni’s “Servant of Two Masters” at the Edinburgh Festival. He also had film parts in “Simon and Laura” and “The Secret Place” at this period, but it was a successful season at the Oxford Playhouse which brought him to London and to wider notice. He secured himself a television following in the role of a polio patient in “Emergency Ward 10” and parts in films such as “Sink the Bismarck” and “In the Nick” further established him.
He became a sought after television actor, appearing in such series as “Probation Officer” and “The Avengers” of which he was one of the original trio, and “Police Surgeon”. But perhaps one of his most characteristic roles was as Erik Shepherd the tortured alcoholic trying to pull the threads of life together in “The Lotus Eaters” in the 1970s.
Hendry’s own tempestuous and hard drinking personal life often seemed to echo his screen one, and the breakdown of his second marriage to the actress Janet Munro who was to have played his wife in the series, as it was about to go into production, threatened the entire venture when she withdrew from the role. She died from drink related problems in 1972 aged only 38.
In spite of more leading television roles and a series of films which included “Casino Royale”, “Get Carter”, “Theatre of Blood” and “The Bitch” Hendry’s life continued to have its ups and downs and in 1980 he was declared a bankrupt, later on being discharged on payment of his debts, thanks to his securing a major role in the television series “Maddie for Love” in which he starred with Nyree Dawn Porter.
Hendry’s first marriage to Joanna, a makeup artist, had been dissolved in 1962. His third marriage was to Sandy Jones, a former children’s nanny, who survives him.
The only unexpected thing about the wonderful actor Tim Pigott-Smith, who has died aged 70, was that he never played Iago or, indeed, Richard III. Having marked out a special line in sadistic villainy as Ronald Merrick in his career-defining, Bafta award-winning performance in The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Granada TV’s adaptation for ITV of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels, he built a portfolio of characters both good and bad who were invariably presented with layers of technical accomplishment and emotional complexity.
He emerged as a genuine leading actor in Shakespeare, contemporary plays by Michael Frayn – in Frayn’s Benefactors (1984) he was a malicious, Iago-like journalist undermining a neighbouring college chum’s ambitions as an architect – and Stephen Poliakoff, American classics by Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee, and as a go-to screen embodiment of high-ranking police officers and politicians, usually served with a twist of lemon and a side order of menace and sarcasm.
He played a highly respectable King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2011, but that performance was eclipsed, three years later, by his subtle, affecting and principled turn in the title role of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III (soon to be seen in a television version) at the Almeida, in the West End and on Broadway, for which he received nominations in both the Olivier and Tony awards. The play, written in Shakespearean iambics, was set in a futuristic limbo, before the coronation, when Charles refuses to grant his royal assent to a Labour prime minister’s press regulation bill.
The interregnum cliffhanger quality to the show was ideal for Pigott-Smith’s ability to simultaneously project the spine and the jelly of a character, and he brilliantly suggested an accurate portrait of the future king without cheapening his portrayal of him. Although not primarily a physical actor, like Laurence Olivier, he was aware of his attributes, once saying that the camera “does something to my eyes, particularly on my left side in profile”, something to do with the eye being quite low and “being able to see some white underneath the pupil”. It was this physical accident, not necessarily any skill, he modestly maintained, which gave him a menacing look on film and television, “as if I am thinking more than one thing”.
Born in Rugby, Tim was the only child of Harry Pigott-Smith, a journalist, and his wife Margaret (nee Goodman), a keen amateur actor, and was educated at Wyggeston boys’ school in Leicester and – when his father was appointed to the editorship of the Herald in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962 – King Edward VI grammar school, where Shakespeare was a pupil. Attending the Royal Shakespeare theatre, he was transfixed by John Barton and Peter Hall’s Wars of the Roses production, and the actors: Peggy Ashcroft, with whom he would one day appear in The Jewel in the Crown, Ian Holm and David Warner. He took a part‑time job in the RSC’s paint shop.
At Bristol University he gained a degree in English, French and drama (1967), and at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school he graduated from the training course (1969) alongside Jeremy Irons and Christopher Biggins as acting stage managers in the Bristol Old Vic company. He joined the Prospect touring company as Balthazar in Much Ado with John Neville and Sylvia Syms and then as the Player King and, later, Laertes to Ian McKellen’s febrile Hamlet. Back with the RSC he played Posthumus in Barton’s fine 1974 production of Cymbeline and Dr Watson in William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes, opposite John Wood’s definitive detective, at the Aldwych and on Broadway. He further established himself in repertory at Birmingham, Cambridge and Nottingham.
He was busy in television from 1970, appearing in two Doctor Who sagas, The Claws of Axos (1971) and The Masque of Mandragora (1976), as well as in the first of the BBC’s adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1975, as Frederick Hale; in the second, in 2004, he played Hale’s father, Richard). His first films were Jack Gold’s Aces High (1976), adapted by Howard Barker from RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End, and Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews (1977). His first Shakespeare leads were in the BBC’s Shakespeare series – Angelo in Measure for Measure and Hotspur in Henry IV Part One (both 1979).
A long association with Hall began at the National Theatre in 1987, when he played a coruscating half-hour interrogation scene with Maggie Smith in Hall’s production of Coming in to Land by Poliakoff; he was a Dostoeyvskyan immigration officer, Smith a desperate, and despairing, Polish immigrant. In Hall’s farewell season of Shakespeare’s late romances in 1988, he led the company alongside Michael Bryant and Eileen Atkins, playing a clenched and possessed Leontes in The Winter’s Tale; an Italianate, jesting Iachimo in Cymbeline; and a gloriously drunken Trinculo in The Tempest (he played Prospero for Adrian Nobleat the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2012).
The Falstaff on television when he played Hotspur was Anthony Quayle, and he succeeded this great actor, whom he much admired as director of the touring Compass Theatre in 1989, playing Brutus in Julius Caesar and Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. When the Arts Council cut funding to Compass, he extended his rogue’s gallery with a sulphurous Rochester in Fay Weldon’s adaptation of Jane Eyre, on tour and at the Playhouse, in a phantasmagorical production by Helena Kaut-Howson, with Alexandra Mathie as Jane (1993); and, back at the NT, as a magnificent, treacherous Leicester in Howard Davies’ remarkable revival of Schiller’s Mary Stuart (1996) with Isabelle Huppert as a sensual Mary and Anna Massey a bitterly prim Elizabeth.
In that same National season, he teamed with Simon Callow (as Face) and Josie Lawrence (as Doll Common) in a co-production by Bill Alexander for the Birmingham Rep of Ben Jonson’s trickstering, two-faced masterpiece The Alchemist; he was a comically pious Subtle in sackcloth and sandals. He pulled himself together as a wryly observant Larry Slade in one of the landmark productions of the past 20 years: O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida in 1998, transferring to the Old Vic, and to Broadway, with Kevin Spacey as the salesman Hickey revisiting the last chance saloon where Pigott-Smith propped up the bar with Rupert Graves, Mark Strong and Clarke Peters in Davies’ great production.
He and Davies combined again, with Helen Mirren and Eve Best, in a monumental NT revival (designed by Bob Crowley) of O’Neill’s epic Mourning Becomes Electrain 2003. Pigott-Smith recycled his ersatz “Agamemnon” role of the returning civil war hero, Ezra Mannon, as the real Agamemnon, fiercely sarcastic while measuring a dollop of decency against weasel expediency, in Euripides’ Hecuba at the Donmar Warehouse in 2004. In complete contrast, his controlled but hilarious Bishop of Lax in Douglas Hodge’s 2006 revival of Philip King’s See How They Runat the Duchess suggested he had done far too little outright comedy in his career.
Television roles after The Jewel in the Crown included the titular chief constable, John Stafford, in The Chief (1990-93) and the much sleazier chief inspector Frank Vickers in The Vice (2001-03). On film, he showed up in The Remains of the Day (1993); Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002), a harrowing documentary reconstruction of the protest and massacre in Derry in 1972; as Pegasus, head of MI7, in Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English (2003) and the foreign secretary in the Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008).
At the start of this year he was appointed OBE. His last television appearance came as Mr Sniggs, the junior dean of Scone College, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, starring Jack Whitehall. He had been due to open as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in Northampton prior to a long tour.
Pigott-Smith was a keen sportsman, loved the countryside and wrote four short books, three of them for children.
In 1972 he married the actor Pamela Miles. She survives him, along with their son, Tom, a violinist, and two grandchildren, Imogen and Gabriel.
•Timothy Peter Pigott-Smith, actor, born 13 May 1946; died 7 April 2017
Denise Gough is an Irish actress. She has received a number of accolades for her work in theatre, including two Laurence Olivier Awards as well as a nomination for a Tony Award.
Born in Wexford and grew up in Ennis, Co. Clare, daughter of an electrician, Gough is the seventh of eleven siblings. One of her younger sisters is the actress Kelly Gough. She trained as a soprano before leaving Ireland for London at 15. She was awarded a grant to study at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA) in Wandsworth aged 18, and graduated from ALRA in 2003.
Christopher Lee obituary in “The Guardian” in 2015
Sir Christopher Lee, who has died aged 93, achieved his international following through playing monsters and villains. In his 30s, he was Dracula, the Mummy and Frankenstein’s creature; in his 80s, Count Dooku in Star Wars and the evil wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. Along the way he was Rasputin, Fu Manchu several times and Scaramanga – the man with the golden gun – opposite Roger Moore as a weak 007, whom Lee did something to offset. For the last of these he was paid £40,000 – his highest fee, among hundreds of screen appearances, until the blockbusters of his later years. “The Bonds get the big money, and they save on the heavies,” he said.
Lee became an actor almost by accident. Through birth and education he seemed a more likely candidate for the diplomatic ladder, but he never reached the first rung. His father, Geoffrey, a colonel much decorated in the first world war, wrecked through gambling his marriage to Estelle, the daughter of the Italian Marquis de Sarzano, and a society beauty of the 1920s. Christopher was born in Belgravia, London. His education at Wellington college, Berkshire, ended abruptly at 17, and he had to get along on the pittance of a City clerk.
But the second world war might be said to have rescued him, making him an intelligence officer with an RAF squadron through north Africa and Italy. At the end, he was seconded for a period with a unit investigating war crimes. Though demobbed with the rank of lieutenant, he had suffered a psychological trauma in training and was never a pilot. In his later civilian life he was endlessly required to fly as a passenger, and it was barely a consolation to him having his film contracts stipulate that he travel first class.
Without previous aspirations or natural talent for acting, except a pleasing dark baritone voice that he exercised in song at home and abroad every day of his life, he was pushed towards film by one of his influential Italian relatives, Nicolò Carandini, then president of the Alitalia airline, who backed the suggestion with a chat to the Italian head of Two Cities Films, Filippo del Giudice. Lee was put on a seven-year contract by the Rank entertainment group, with the executive who signed it saying: “Why is Filippo wasting my time with a man who is too tall to be an actor?”
His height – 6ft 4in, kept upright by his lofty temperament and fondness for playing off scratch in pro-am golf tournaments – actually proved helpful in securing him the parts for which he had the most affinity: authority figures. He lent a severe and commanding presence to James I of Aragon in The Disputation (1986), the Comte de Rochefort in The Three Musketeers (1973), Ramses II in Moses (1995), the cardinal in L’Avaro (1990), a high priest in She (1965), the Grand Master of the Knights Templar in Ivanhoe (1958) and the Duc in The Devil Rides Out (1968).
He shared his aptness for sinister material with two friends who lived near his London home in a Chelsea square: the writer of occult thrillers Dennis Wheatley and the actor Boris Karloff. The latter once cheered him up when Lee was overloaded with horror roles, remarking, “Types are continually in work.”
Lee initially studied method acting at Rank’s “charm school”, where he was supposed to spend six months of the year in rep. But floundering at the Connaught in Worthing, and humiliated by audience laughter when he put his hand through a window supposedly made of glass, he recognised that the theatre was not his metier and never went near the stage again. Perhaps the most useful coaching Rank gave him was in swordplay: across his career he fought in more screen duels than opponents such as Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks put together.Play VideoPlayCurrent Time 0:00/Duration Time0:00Loaded: 0%Progress: 0%FullscreenMuteEmbedFacebookTwitterPinterest Sir Christopher Lee, veteran horror film actor, has died at the age of 93 after being hospitalised for respiratory problems and heart failure
Terence Young gave Christopher his first – and minimal – chance before the film cameras in Corridor of Mirrors (1948). Over the next 10 years, he played secondary and anonymous characters in a miscellany of mostly low-budget British films. This had a lasting effect into his later years: he would accept virtually any role. The film that lifted him out of obscurity, and showed him to Times Square as a 50ft-tall vampire, was the Hammer production of Dracula in 1958. It cost £82,000 and earned £26m, of which Christopher’s take was £750. It was the first time he and Peter Cushing worked together, in a pairing that lasted through 22 films.
It was often said in the film business that it was not easy to make friends with Lee. But he always knew his part, and he was always in the right place, so that he was at any rate approved of by the cameramen. Furthermore, three other actors who also enjoyed sinister roles in exploitation movies kept a quartet of friendship with him: Cushing, Karloff and Vincent Price.Advertisement
Lee’s particular difference as Dracula lay in his height and powerful showing, and his terrifying presence even when no words had been written for him. But while admitting that Dracula had been his cornerstone, he eventually left the role to others, and later regretted letting himself in for so many of the vampire’s increasingly absurd adventures.
He took work wherever he could find it, including five times as Fu Manchu. When he could not find roles in Britain, he cast about in France, Italy, Spain and Germany. His ability to say his lines in their languages was a great advantage when it came to dubbing. He became the first actor to play both Sherlock Holmes and, for the director Billy Wilder in 1970, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft. While shooting by Loch Ness in Scotland, Wilder remarked to him, as they walked in the twilight by the spooky stretch of dark water with bats wheeling about: “You must feel quite at home here.”
Supporting roles in action pictures – as a Nazi officer, a western gunman and a pirate – extended not only his portfolio but also the range of lead actors who were his idols. Among them was Burt Lancaster, whose example as his own stunt man Lee strove to emulate. Lancaster once warned him against journalists: “Never let them get too close.” Lee liked to give interviews, but resented the results, since they invariably harped on about Dracula despite his protestations that he had left the “prince of darkness” behind.
Given this attitude, he rather surprisingly gave me, a journalist, the job of ghostwriting his autobiography, which was published in 1977 as Tall, Dark and Gruesome. In 2003, after he had played several roles a year for 25 more years, we updated the story as Lord of Misrule.
Lee had come nearest to producing something lasting for the cinema in 1973, playing the pagan Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. With a marvellous script by Anthony Shaffer, and despite almost no money for production, it was a rare horror film that proved to have a long life. Lee was prevented by injury from taking the role of Sir Lachlan Morrison in a sequel, The Wicker Tree (2011), though he made a cameo appearance as “Old Gentleman”.
After the high-profile part in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), Lee – at the urging of Wilder – left Britain for Hollywood. America delivered some of his hopes. On the downside was the disaster film Airport 77; on the upside, a completely unexpected comic success hosting Saturday Night Live on TV, with such stars as John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. In among the 40 jobs he undertook in the 1970s, Lee’s sword and sorcery, murder and spook movies made way for his roles as a U-boat captain in Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), a Hell’s Angel biker in Serial (1980) and, back in Europe, the studied interpretation of the executioner Charles-Henri Sanson as a dandy, for a 1989 French TV history of the Revolution. Lee was fascinated by public executions. His move to the US allowed him the opportunity to see the electric chair firsthand, in a similarly detached mood of inquiry with which he had previously invited England’s last hangman to come to his house and talk about his own career. One of his favourite pastimes was visiting Scotland Yard’s Black Museum.
He worked on tirelessly, becoming a familiar figure in the studios of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Balkans, the Baltic and Russia; he also made films in Pakistan and New Zealand, and in 2000 he struck a touching figure as the butler Flay in the BBC TV production of Gormenghast.
The 21st century saw a major reinvigoration of his reputation – first in the Star Wars prequels, and then even more significantly as Saruman in Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film sequence of The Lord of the Rings. He was upset when Jackson cut his scenes in the theatrical edition of the trilogy’s final instalment, The Return of the King (2003), but their rift was healed when the scenes were restored in the extended editions on DVD. At last, in his 80s, Lee was earning six figures. He reprised the role in The Hobbit films.
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Nonetheless, one of the roles for which he was most proud was a low-budget assignment: the arduous – and politically precarious – challenge of playing the title role in Jinnah (1998). Though Lee worked with all due seriousness and admiration for the founder of Pakistan (and looked remarkably like him), he had to be constantly under armed guard because of an abusive press campaign against the producers for associating the father of the nation with Dracula; the Pakistan government eventually caved in to the pressure and withdrew its funding for the film. The end product was well reviewed; Lee himself thought it his best achievement, though not everybody would agree.
Still, at home he was becoming the nation’s darling. Tim Burton fitted him into small parts in five films and was on stage to introduce him when Lee won a Bafta fellowship award for lifetime achievement in 2011. A BFI fellowship in 2013 was presented to him by Johnny Depp. In France, he was made a commander of arts and letters; he was likewise honoured in Berlin. He was made CBE in 2001 and knighted in 2009. A prolific schedule of film appearances continued and most recently he had taken the lead role in the comedy Angels in Notting Hill.
He is survived by his wife, Gitte (nee Kroencke), whom he married in 1961, and their daughter, Christina.
• Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, actor, born 27 May 1922; died 7 June 2015Topics
Norman Wooland (16 March 1910 – 3 April 1989) was a British character actor who appeared in many major films, including several Shakespearean adaptations.
A classical stage actor who enjoyed modest film stardom in the late 1940s and 1950s, the good-looking, somewhat unassuming British actor Norman Wooland also worked extensively on radio and television in a career that spanned six decades. Born to British parents in Dusseldorf, Germany on March 16, 1910, he was educated in England and started out in local theatre during his teen years. He went on to earn strong notice in repertory as a regular performer in Stratford-on-Avon Shakespearean productions. Appearing in “The Merchant of Venice” by the age of 16, he graced a number of pre-WWII plays including “When We Are Married” (1937), “Time and the Conways” (1938) and “What They Say” (1939). He joined the BBC in 1939 and spent six years as a radio commentator.
Mary Lydia Thornton (Christine Norden), actress, born Sunderland 28 December 1924, married 1944 Norman Cole (one son), 1947 Jack Clayton, 1953 Mitchell Dodge, 1956 Herbert Hecht, 1980 George Heselden, died London 21 September 1988.
ChristineNorden occupies a small, but secure, niche in British film history as Alexander Korda’s first post-war star. British film-stars of the pre-war period, Gracie Fields and George Formby always excepted, were there courtesy of the stage (Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh) or Hollywood, allowing them to work here (Leslie Howard, Robert Donat). But during the war the British cinema discovered a flock of artists who were genuine box-office attractions, starting with Margaret Lockwood and James Mason. Korda, returning to production in Britain in 1945, had either to filch or borrow these (in this respect he was far more successful with behind-the-camera personnel) or create his own. The first he created was Christine Norden. She was also the last.
The publicity lie was that he spotted her in a cinema queue. Well, they got a lot of press mileage out of it. Picturegoer, Picture Show and the popular press featured her prominently: British moviegoers panted for their first glimpse of her. Since she was blonde and sexy, and since Miss Lockwood had made this an era of wicked ladies, it was not surprising that Korda chose for her first role that of a devious night-club singer, in Night Beat, but the film itself went out without his London Films logo because he did not think it of a standard to re-introduce his work. Its hero (Ronald Howard) was a cop going bent because of Norden, who is more interested in a ‘you’re my sort’ affair with a slimy night-club owner (Maxwell Reed): at the climax she sings his favourite song, has a big drunk scene and falls to her death. She and the film were ludicrous, but she, at least, could claim inexperience.
Korda and MGM (since she was technically under contract to both, as he had signed her during his brief association with that company) loaned her the following year to Premier, the company started by the Ostrer brothers after their break from Rank. With Rank, the Ostrers had mined gold with a series of pseudo-Gothic melodramas: but Isle of Paris proved the beginning and end for Premier. Norden played the Second Empire courtesan Cora Pearl, engaged in a duel of whips with the heroine – Beryl Baxter, obviously chosen for her resemblance to Miss Lockwood. The critic CA Lejeune felt that she would be failing in her duty if she discouraged anyone ‘from sharing this unique experience .. . Such stupendous imbecility in a film, delivered with such portentous gravity in such excruciating dialogue, demands a sort of recognition.’
Miss Norden’s hysterical performance could not now be explained by inexperience; Korda gave up on her fifth film for him, Saints and Sinners, a load of blarney co-starring her male equivalent, Kieron Moore, which literally emptied cinemas. She carried on vamping four more times, twice in unabashed B movies, then left to discuss Hollywood offers’. It was true that she had married an American – her second husband had been Jack Clayton, later to direct Room at the Top but American show-business was not too welcoming: in 1960 she did manage to get a role in a Broadway musical, Tenderloin, but not one which enabled her to get her name on the adverts.
In 1983, the National Film Theatre showed Isle of Paris, and in a flurry of press releases Miss Norden announced that she had no intention of making a comeback. She did, however, appear at the National Film Theatre with a press agent, in a profusion of diamonds and an elaborate pill-box hat, her full-length velvet dress under a riding habit in several shades of green, none of them too different from the paint on the walls of NFT 2. She laughed a little too loudly during the duel scene and the rest of us laughed through all of it.Miss Lejeune was right: for connoisseurs of bad movies it is the most cherishable of them all.
Mine Own Executioner, poster, from left, Christine Norden, Kieron Moore, Burgess Meredith, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
The actor Bernard Archard, who has died aged 91, established a forbidding presence as Lt Col Oreste Pinto, a character based on a real-life wartime counter-espionage interrogator, in the BBC television series Spycatcher (1959-61). Tall and angular, with receding hair and a prominent chin, he became a regular authority figure and inquisitor, though not in leading roles. Archard was born in Fulham, London, where his parents were mayor and mayoress; his father was also a jeweller. He won a scholarship to Rada (1938-39), and an early stage role came as Orsino to Jessica Tandy’s Viola in Twelfth Night at the Regent’s Park open air theatre.
During the second world war, he was a conscientious objector, and was sent to work on land owned by the Quaker movement. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1948, in a production of the Glyndebourne Children’s Theatre, he met fellow actor James Belchamber, who was his partner for nearly 60 years.ore Making his way around regional repertory, Archard worked at Chesterfield with Margaret Tyzack and at Sheffield with Paul Eddington, Peter Sallis and Patrick McGoohan; like many, he believed McGoohan to be a truly great actor, and they worked together again in a couple of episodes of McGoohan’s 1960s TV series Danger Man. In the mid-1950s, Archard and Belchamber ran a touring repertory company, based in Torquay, with Hilda Braid among its players. They also collaborated on the book and lyrics for Our Jack, a musical based on Walter Greenwood’s The Cure For Love, in 1960.
Nevertheless, by 1959 Archard was thinking about emigrating to Canada with Belchamber. He postponed his trip to appear in a TV medical drama, then again to do Treason (1959), a Sunday-night play about the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. Unknown to him, this rush of work resulted from a plan by writer-producer Elwyn Jones to demonstrate his suitability for Spycatcher.
Masterminded by Robert Barr, Spycatcher was also produced in the documentary manner, to the extent that Archard was not given billing in the Radio Times until some time into the run. Unlike later, action-orientated spy series, Pinto’s half-hour cases, sometimes little more than two-handers, were based on true stories. The debriefing of wartime refugees afforded many opportunities for Archard’s incisive qualities. One episode saw him get the desired answers from a suspect by throwing darts at a photo of Hitler.
Running for three seasons, the series brought Archard much recognition; he was wryly amused about receiving “two direct offers of marriage and about a dozen oblique ones”. Athough half of the episodes still exist, it has never been revived. Nonetheless, when on a continental tour of My Fair Lady in 1983, Archard’s presence in Amsterdam caused excitement – Pinto having been Dutch.
He was proud of his role as a magistrate in Terence Rattigan’s last play, Cause Celebre, in the West End in 1977, with Glynis Johns. Anthony Shaffer’s mocking The Case of the Oily Levantine, at the same venue, Her Majesty’s Theatre, two years later, was less successful. However, a full-scale theatrical disaster came with Peter O’Toole’s Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980. Archard played Duncan; he had previously been Angus in Roman Polanski’s film version, in 1971.
In the film version of Dad’s Army (1971), Archard was a regular general dismissing Captain Mainwaring as a “damn bank clerk!” He was in several of the popular Edgar Wallace B-movies, as well as John Huston’s playful The List of Adrian Messenger (1963); he and Huston had a mutual friend in Deborah Kerr.
He was the Duke of Wellington in Number 10 (YTV, 1983), an anthology series depicting prime ministers. For publicity purposes, the actors who took the roles were photographed with Margaret Thatcher; Archard was not impressed by her, but then, he had been a lifelong reader of this paper. He also played a government figure in Hidden Agenda (1990), Ken Loach’s controversial film derived from the John Stalker inquiry.
After retiring in his early 80s, Archard lived contentedly in Somerset with Belchamber, who survives him.
· Bernard Joseph Archard, actor, born August 20 1916; died May 1 2008
The actor and folk-singer Theodore Bikel, who has died aged 91, was a multilingual polymath whose career on stage, screen and television stretched across seven decades. As a character actor in film, the thickset Austrian-born Jew was called upon to play a vast range of foreigners, many of them in uniform. But if truth were told, Bikel, who had a fine baritone speaking and singing voice, was given little chance to shine (or sing) in his 50-film career.
More satisfying was his finely toned performance as Tevye the milkman in Fiddler on the Roof, whom he played more than 2,000 times all over the US. Although Zero Mostel originally created the part on Broadway in 1962, and Topol played it in Norman Jewison’s 1971 film, for US theatregoers Bikel became identified as much with the role as Yul Brynner was with The King and I. Bikel, who criticised Mostel for his “improvised shtick”, based Tevye on his grandfather, who had “a similar lively relationship with God”.
Apart from Fiddler on the Roof, the other Broadway musical with which Bikel was associated was The Sound of Music (1959-63), in which he created the role of Captain von Trapp (played in the film by the more handsome Christopher Plummer). During the out-of-town tryouts for the hit musical, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein felt that the captain should have a song that bids farewell to the Austria he loved. Using Bikel’s guitar-playing and folk-singing talents, they wrote Edelweiss. The simple, patriotic song in waltz time ends with the line: “Bless my homeland for ever.” However, Bikel had little cause to bless his homeland. Born in Vienna, he fled with his family to Palestine after the Nazi invasion in 1938. His father, an insurance salesman and ardent Zionist, named his son after Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism. Bikel, who began acting in his teens, providentially made his professional stage debut as a Tsarist village clerk in Tevye the Milkman (1943), based on Aleichem, at the Habimah theatre in Tel Aviv, after which Bikel co-founded the city’s Cameri theatre a few years later.
In 1946, Bikel went to London to study at Rada (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) before getting small roles on the West End stage. One of them happened to catch the attention of Michael Redgrave, who recommended him to Laurence Olivier, at the time directing the first UK production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1949). Bikel was praised in the difficult role of Mitch, the sensitive mother’s boy, who awkwardly courts Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh). His other London stage success was as the Russian colonel in Peter Ustinov’s satire The Love of Four Colonels (1951).
At the same time, Bikel’s film career began with John Huston’s The African Queen (1951) where, at the climax on board ship, he is the unflinching German naval officer prepared to hang Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn for spying. Huston cast him again in Moulin Rouge (1952), in which Bikel has a short scene as King Milo IV of Serbia (miswritten Milan IV on his calling card), one of the first people to buy a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec (José Ferrer). Bikel then cropped up briefly in British war films as a Dutch prisoner in The Colditz Story (1955), and a German officer in Above Us the Waves (1955).
He continued in much the same way, but in bigger parts, when he went to Hollywood after appearing on Broadway in Tonight in Samarkand (1955) as a French police inspector opposite Louis Jourdan. In The Enemy Below (1957), Bikel is the sympathetic second-in-command on a U-boat in the second world war, being hunted by the American captain (Robert Mitchum) on a destroyer.
For Stanley Kramer, Bikel played a sadistic French general ordering the execution of rebel Spaniards (including Frank Sinatra) during the Napoleonic wars in the absurd, overblown epic The Pride and the Passion (1957) and an American at last in The Defiant Ones (1958). Bikel was delighted to be given the role of the sheriff in pursuit of two escaped convicts chained together (Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier), for which he had an impeccable southern accent. Of his Oscar-nominated performance, the New York Times noted: “In the ranks of the pursuers, Theodore Bikel is most impressive as a sheriff with a streak of mercy and justice, which he has to fight to maintain against a brutish state policeman.”
Back to foreigners, Bikel was effectively slimy as a Greek fifth-columnist pitted against foreign correspondent Mitchum in 1941 before and after the German invasion of Greece in Robert Aldrich’s The Angry Hills (1959). However, perhaps his best remembered film role, albeit a very short one, was as the phonetics expert Zoltan Kapathy, who hopes to expose Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) as a fraud in My Fair Lady (1964), but finally declares her not only Hungarian but of royal blood. Kapathy is later described by Professor Higgins (Rex Harrison) as that “hairy hound from Budapest. Never leaving us alone. I’ve never known a ruder pest!”
Bikel won the role of the Russian captain of a submarine that accidentally runs aground on the New England coast in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! (1966), because he was able to play a convincing Russian speaker. Off the beaten track, Bikel found himself in 200 Motels (1971), a surrealistic vision of life on the road for Frank Zappa and his band Mothers of Invention. As government agent Rance Muhammitz, Bikel is a satanic figure who wanders around dispensing hamburgers from a fuming briefcase.
Meanwhile, Bikel had a parallel career on television, appearing mainly as eastern Europeans in series such as Ironside, Charlie’s Angels, Falcon Crest and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Another side to his life arguably brought him more fame than acting. From 1955, Bikel recorded many albums including Jewish and Russian folk songs backed by him on acoustic guitar. In 1959, he co-founded the Newport Folk festival, where he often teamed up with Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez.
In the 1960s, Bikel became increasingly involved with civil rights causes – he was arrested protesting against the Vietnam war – and was an activist for the Democratic party. His offstage activities included his hands-on presidency of Actors’ Equity (1973-82), and of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America from 1988. Among his other interests were keeping the Yiddish language alive and his love of Israel, though not an uncritical one.
Bikel is survived by his fourth wife, Aimee Ginsburg, whom he married in 2013, and two sons, Robert and Daniel, from his second marriage, to Rita Weinberg Call. That and his first marriage, to Ofra Ichilov, ended in divorce. His third wife, the conductor and pianist Tamara Brooks, died in 2012.
• Theodore Meir Bikel, actor, singer and political activist, born 2 May 1924; died 20 July 2015
