Sam Beazley obit

Sam Beazley obituary

Harry Potter actor and antiques dealer who worked with Gielgud in the 1930s and returned to the screen and stage at age 73 

He was not on the list.

Few actors can have enjoyed a career as unusual as that of Sam Beazley, who has died aged 101. After appearing as a child actor in Where the Rainbow Ends, the Edwardian children’s standard, and as a teenager with John Gielgud’s company in two of the most famous Shakespeare productions of the 20th century, he abandoned the London stage, depressed by a bad review. He went on to run an antique shop in London, but returned to acting full time when he retired at 73, working steadily on stage, screen and TV, playing an infinite variety of old men, including Professor Everard in the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007).

Beazley came from a Wirral family in the cotton-broking business. His father, Gordon, had emerged from the first world war shell-shocked and often ill. His mother, Nelto (Gordon’s first cousin), turned to her father, the MP Osmond Williams, for financial help. She had married in haste and repented at leisure, separating from Gordon in the 1920s after the cotton crash caused the family fortune to slump.

Sam followed passively where his stagestruck mother led. “You don’t want to go back to school do you? Wouldn’t it be far more fun to go on tour?” she suggested, after Sam had appeared in a London run of Where the Rainbow Ends. “Yes, if you think so,” agreed Sam, who enjoyed practising the Charleston, and most of all loved delving into antique shops, a hobby of which his mother did not approve.

Thanks to Nelto’s flair for making contacts, Sam was launched upon the professional stage. Portmeirion, where his mother made their summer home, was a fashionable seaside haunt and when Gielgud arrived with his partner, John Perry, one summer, she secured an introduction. Thanks, perhaps, to Sam’s good looks and upper-crust manners, though he was untrained and untutored at 18, he was invited to join Gielgud’s theatre company.

He had small parts in two historic productions: as Player Queen to Gielgud’s Hamlet in 1934, and Paris in a starry Romeo and Juliet, which Gielgud directed while alternating the roles of Romeo and Mercutio with Laurence Olivier. Peggy Ashcroft played Juliet and Edith Evans the nurse. In Hamlet, Sam was happy and felt himself “adequate”. He would sit in the wings listening to the sound of “the perfect Hamlet. And it felt as if there was an electric charge in the air.”

Then disaster struck. “The Paris of Sam Beazley is lamentably dim,” the Tatler critic wrote. Sam agreed. “I was alarmed, stiff and deeply unhappy,” he wrote later. “I decided I simply hadn’t got the knack.” Aside from a tour in a popular potboiler, Beazley gave up acting.

When the second world war came he flew to the colours. “What can you do?” asked the recruiting sergeant. “Nothing,” he replied, “I’m an actor.” Yet his military career ended with distinction in occupied Italy. After being demobbed he returned to his first true love and opened an antique shop that flourished.

When he retired, he decided to see if he might rediscover “the knack” and act again. He succeeded, playing old men on screen and stage for two decades – notably Professor Everard, a former headmaster of Hogwarts who lived on inside his portrait in Albus Dumbledore’s office, in the fifth of the Harry Potter film series. Beazley danced in Midsomer Murders (2000) and took an ecclesiastical turn as the vicar of Longbourn in the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice. He secured Shakespeare roles at the National. He made a delicious cameo appearance in a National production of His Girl Friday (a version of The Front Page) in 2003, tentatively inquiring “Is this the way to death row?”

As the senile grandfather in Festen, a family scandal drama (2004, at the Almeida, transferring to the West End), Beazley seized the best acting chances of his life. He sat at a dinner party languidly interjecting odd and disconnected reminiscences from the jumble of a confused mind. He was comic, chilling and pathetic. He proved he had the knack.

Beazley’s later years were happy ones, with the curses of old age passing him by until he broke his leg falling from a ladder, eventually becoming immobile.

Two brothers predeceased him. He is survived by his sister-in-law, Jennifer, and four nieces, Eva, Olwen, Harriot and Joscelyne.

 

Filmography

Production          Year        Role       Notes

Madame Sousatzka         1988     Festival Guest   

Portrait of a Marriage     1990     Lord Carnock      1 episode

Pride and Prejudice         1995     Vicar      1 episode

Midsomer Murders         2000     Cyril Toft              Episode: "Blue Herrings"

Passionnément 2000     Matthew            

Johnny English   2003     Elderly Man at the hospital         

Doctors 2003     Tom       Episode: "House of Cards"

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason            2004     Very Old Man    

Torchwood         2006     Alan Ellis              

Kingdom              2007     Mr. Bewley          1 episode

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix             2007     Everard