Philip Latham obit

Philip Latham, actor who played the dry aristocrat Plantagenet in the BBC’s The Pallisers – obituary

He caught the eye in the oil-industry drama The Troubleshooters and excelled at playing benign characters with strong moral values 

He was not on the list.

As the refined and aristocratic Plantagenet Palliser who rises to become prime minister in the BBC’s splendid adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, Philip Latham was on television screens for most of 1974.

He should not have been, however, for the series, regarded by many as the finest of the BBC’s literary costume dramas, started in January and was meant to have been finished by June. However, political events in the real world intervened so that the final episodes of the 26-part series full of Victorian political intrigue were not broadcast until November.

When The Pallisers began, it offered a much-needed escape into a more glamorous world during the grimness of the three-day week and the nightly shutdown of television at 10.30pm. With an oil crisis and a coal miners’ strike plunging the nation into semi-darkness, Ted Heath, the prime minister, called an election in February under the slogan “Who governs Britain?” The BBC feared that screening Latham’s fictional adventures in party politics during the campaign risked compromising its impartiality and the series was suspended.

It was a prescient decision, for truth uncannily followed fiction. In Trollope’s story, Latham’s character becomes prime minister after neither the Conservatives nor Liberals are able to form a majority. Heath’s Conservative government lost its majority and unsuccessfully attempted to form a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberal Party, leading to Harold Wilson heading a minority Labour administration.

In September Wilson called the second election of the year and transmission of The Pallisers was disrupted again. Finally, a BBC strike meant that the last two episodes did not go out until November, 44 weeks after the first episode was broadcast.

It had been commissioned as an attempt to replicate the success of 1967’s The Forsyte Saga — some at the BBC even referred to The Pallisers as “son of Forsyte” — but the unforeseen elongation of the series arguably robbed it of the same cultural impact as its role model. Yet many critics felt it to be a better all-round production, with superior scripts by Simon Raven and a fine cast that included established stars such as Susan Hampshire and Martin Jarvis, both of whom had appeared in The Forsyte Saga, and also brought to the screen such up-and-coming performers as Derek Jacobi, Penelope Keith and Jeremy Irons. An imposing figure who stood more than 6ft, with his patrician features framed by mutton-chop whiskers, Latham was perfectly cast as the top-hatted central character.

Already a well-known face on television, Latham had enjoyed cameos in shows from Maigret and The Saint to Z Cars and Dr Finlay’s Casebook. Playing Palliser opposite Hampshire as his wife, Lady Glencora, should have elevated him to the top rank. Yet although he was only in his mid-forties The Pallisers remained the high tide of his career.

A handful of film roles followed, including Force 10 from Navarone (1978) in which he appeared alongside Harrison Ford and Edward Fox, and there were TV cameos in the 20th anniversary episode of Dr Who and in The Professionals. Yet he never built on the triumph of The Pallisers in the way one might have expected. By the end of the decade he had retired to the Cotswold village of Broadwell near Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, with his wife, Eve (née Pitt-Payne). They were married for 50 years until her death in 2010.

He is survived by their son, Andrew, and daughter, Amanda, who is director of fundraising for a national charity. In retirement he had lived happily on his royalties while pottering in his garden and tending his stamp collection.

Why Latham did not achieve greater celebrity is difficult to fathom, though the unease he felt in playing baddies may not have helped his cause. He appeared in several Hammer horror films in the Sixties yet he was known to have been distressed by a publicity shot of him with bloodied knife in hand. His gentle temperament was suited to more benevolent roles.

Charles Philip Latham was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, in 1929, the son of Lillian (née Purdy) and Arthur Latham, who won the Military Cross in the First World War and was later an executive in charge of global sales at Tate & Lyle. He was educated at Felsted School, where he took a leading role in school plays and was a talented hockey player. After National Service in the Royal Artillery, he graduated from Rada in 1951 and went into repertory theatre.

He began appearing on television in 1955 and his breakthrough role came two years later as an alcoholic in the BBC drama Rock Bottom.

His film debut had come two years earlier in an uncredited role in The Dam Busters. His daughter recalled watching the film as a child during its regular television repeats. “We could only glimpse him once or twice,” she recalled. “We used to scream ‘There’s Daddy!’ every time he came on and the dog would rush to the front door barking.”

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