Donald Sinden obit

Sir Donald Sinden - obituary

Sir Donald Sinden was an actor with a gift for comedy whose voice resonated on stage and screen for more than 50 years

 He was not on the list.

Sir Donald Sinden, the actor, who has died aged 90, was variously described as “orotund and declamatory”, “magnificently resonant” and “a complete ham”; his talents, admittedly, owed little to method acting, but made him one of the best and most recognisable comedy actors on the circuit.

In a career which spanned 50 years of film and theatre Sinden, to his lasting irritation, became best-known for his work in television, a medium he deplored. But his establishment English demeanour provided perfect casting for comedies exploiting cultural or class differences.

He became a household name when he starred with Elaine Stritch in the LWT sitcom Two’s Company (1975-79), in which he played the feisty American grande dame’s inept English butler. He later repeated his success in the Thames Television sitcom Never the Twain (1981-91), in which he played an upper-crust antique dealer forced into business with a downmarket rival (played by Windsor Davies).

His success on television meant that Sinden’s other achievements, in the film and theatre world, were often overlooked.

During the 1950s, he immersed himself in cinema work, appearing in more than 20 films, including The Cruel Sea (1953), in which he shared top-billing with Jack Hawkins, and Mogambo (1954), a huge safari epic in which Sinden received fourth billing after Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly, as Kelly’s cuckolded gorilla-hunting husband.

When the British film industry stalled in the 1960s, Sinden’s film career stalled with it. By the end of that decade, however, he had secured a place for himself at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he gave critically acclaimed performances in leading roles including as the Duke of York in The Wars of the Roses (1963), opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Margaret; Lord Foppington in The Relapse (1967); and as King Lear (for which he won the 1977 Evening Standard Award for Best Actor). In 1979 he played the title role in Othello, directed by Ronald Eyre, becoming the last “blacked-up” white actor to play the role for the RSC.

It was, perhaps, the role of Malvolio in Twelfth Night that showed Sinden at his best; yet it is the one that — paradoxically, given that the role is often regarded as a comedy part — he found most difficult to play. When he reread the play in preparation for the RSC production in 1969, he telephoned the director John Barton. “I’m afraid you may have to recast Malvolio,” he said, “I find him tragic.” Barton agreed, and in his exploration of the role, Sinden exposed a whole range of moods, from offended dignity to ebullience and madness. Of Malvolio’s final humiliation, Sinden later wrote: “There is no fight left in Malvolio... the degradation is too great... there is but one thing left for Malvolio — suicide.”

The theatre was always Sinden’s true home, and in the 1980s his passionate interest in its history led to the establishment of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. Another great passion was English church architecture, his encyclopedic knowledge of which led to both a television series, The English Country Church, in 1988, and a book on the subject. “My grandfather was an architect,” Sinden explained, “and it was he who told me always to look up. That’s where all the best things are in churches.”

By the 1980s Sinden was firmly established as a television celebrity, a position consolidated by the regular appearances of a Sinden puppet on ITV’s satirical Spitting Image. The puppet represented Sinden as a grotesque parody of “the actor’s actor” posturing theatrically and endlessly pleading for a knighthood.

Sinden was not amused by the caricature. “When have I ever suggested I wanted a knighthood?” he asked. “I don’t watch the programme because I don’t find it in the least funny.” He would accept a well-deserved knighthood in 1997.

Donald Sinden was born in Plymouth on October 9 1923. He suffered constantly from asthma as a child and as a result missed most of his schooling. “I not only did not pass an examination,” he recalled, “I never took one.” At 16 he became an apprentice joiner to a Hove firm which manufactured revolving doors. “I earned 6s 6d a week,” he said, “and enjoyed it enormously.”

Sinden claimed that he had no aspirations towards acting until he was 18. “My cousin Frank was called up for the RAF,” he remembered. “He asked me if I’d do his part in an amateur production at Brighton Little Theatre.” Donald was talent-spotted by Charles Smith, who organised the Mobile Entertainments Southern Area company (known as MESA), a local version of the wartime entertainments service Ensa. “Of course I thought he wanted me because I was miraculous,” Sinden remembered, “but I know now it was because it was wartime and he couldn’t get anyone else.”

Rejected by the Navy because of his poor health, Sinden joined Charles Smith’s company in 1941. “I stayed an actor because I was awfully interested in girls,” Sinden explained. “Actresses were a lot better looking than joiners.” After four years with MESA he spent six months in Leicester with a repertory company and two terms at the Webber Douglas School of Dramatic Art.

Donald Sinden joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon for the 1946-47 season. In October 1947 he made his West End debut as Aumerle in Richard II, and in 1948 joined the Bristol Old Vic. He left Bristol to appear as Arthur Townsend in The Heiress, an adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square. Sinden had nine lines and appeared in all 644 performances of the show.

In 1952 he was noticed by the film director Charles Frend while playing the Brazilian Manuel Del Vega in Red Letter Day. “Charles Frend spotted me,” Sinden remembered. “He said he’d always wanted to meet a blue-eyed Brazilian.”

The following year Sinden joined the Rank Organisation and was offered the part of Lieutenant Lockhart in The Cruel Sea, for which he had to spend an uncomfortable 12 weeks filming at sea.

He recalled his time in Africa filming Mogambo as the least enjoyable of his career, largely because of its director, John Ford, whom Sinden described as “the most dislikable man I ever met”. He was particularly irritated by Ford’s peremptory direction techniques: “On one occasion he had Clark Gable backing towards a cliff. Ford kept shouting 'Further back!’ and Gable just disappeared over the edge. We found him stuck in a tree 15ft below.”

After playing Tony Benskin, a womanising medical student in Doctor in the House (1954), Sinden began to find himself being typecast in comic roles. He played Benskin and characters like him for the next eight years.

When the British film industry began to falter in the early Sixties, Sinden’s film career ended. “It was a bad time for me,” he said. “I was 40, married with two children and no work at all.” His first attempts at a return to the theatre were unsuccessful. He was turned down after Peter Hall had made him audition for the RSC. Sinden later described Hall as a “pipsqueak”.

However, after their initial differences Sinden joined the company and appeared in The Wars of the Roses, an epic amalgam of the relevant Shakespeare history plays, put together by Hall and John Barton, which lasted more than 10 hours and won ecstatic reviews.

Sinden went on to make a name for himself as a comedian and farceur. He appeared as Robert Danvers in There’s a Girl in My Soup at the Aldwych in 1966, and won Best Actor awards for his appearances in the Ray Cooney farces Not Now, Darling (1967), Two into One (1984) and Out of Order (1990). In 1976 he was nominated for a Best Actor Tony Award for his performance on Broadway as Arthur Wicksteed in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus.

 

Filmography

 

Film

Year     Title            Role            Notes

1948    Portrait from Life            Minor Role    

1953    The Cruel Sea            Lockhart         

Mogambo            Donald Nordley           

A Day to Remember            Jim Carver 

1954    You Know What Sailors Are            Lt. Sylvester Green           

Doctor in the House  Tony Benskin           

The Beachcomber            Ewart Gray    

Mad About Men     Jeff Saunders         

1955    Simba            Inspector Drummond  

Above Us the Waves  Lt Tom Corbett           

Josephine and Men     Alan Hartley

An Alligator Named Daisy            Peter Weston           

1956    The Black Tent            Col Sir Charles Holland           

Eyewitness            Wade  

Tiger in the Smoke            Geoffrey Leavitt          

1957    Doctor at Large            Dr Tony Benskin  

Rockets Galore! Hugh Mander           

1959    The Captain's Table            Shawe-Wilson 

Operation Bullshine            Lt. Gordon Brown

1960    Your Money or Your Wife     Pelham Butterworth     

The Siege of Sidney Street            Mannering       

1962    Twice Round the Daffodils            Ian Richards          

Mix Me a Person  Philip Bellamy, QC   

1968    Decline and Fall... of a Birdwatcher            The Prison Governor         

1971    Villain            Gerald Draycott          

1972            Rentadick        Jeffrey Armitage         

1973    The National Health            Mr Carr / Senior Surgeon Boyd 

Father Dear Father  Philip Glover 

The Day of the Jackal            Assistant Commissioner Mallinson         

1974    The Island at the Top of the World  Sir Anthony Ross  

1975    That Lucky Touch            British Gen. Armstrong       

1990    The Children            Lord Wrench           

1995    Balto            Doc            Voice

2003    The Accidental Detective            Professor Stein            Credited as Sir Donald Sinden

2012    Run for Your Wife            Man on bus       (final film role)

Television

Title      Year            Role            Notes

The Mystery of Edwin Drood            1960            John Jasper  TV serial (lost)

Our Man at St. Mark's 1963-66        Rev. Stephen Young            TV series (Rediffusion) Mostly lost

The Prisoner            1967            The Colonel            TV serial (Ep 7 Many Happy Returns)

The Organization            1972            David Pulman TV series (Yorkshire Television)

Two's Company            1975–79        Robert            TV series (LWT)

Never the Twain   1981–91        Simon Peel      TV series (Thames Television)

The Canterville Ghost   1996            Mr Umney TV movie

Richard II            1997            Duke of York            TV movie

Alice in Wonderland            1999            Voice of the Gryphon            TV movie, voice

Judge John Deed    2001–07        Sir Joseph Channing            TV drama recurring character

Midsomer Murders            2008            Colonel Henry Hammond            TV series, episode Shot at Dawn

Agatha Christie's Marple 2010            Sir Henry Clithering            TV series, episode "The Blue Geranium"