Philip Voss obituary
Compelling actor whose versatile career encompassed Doctor Who, James Bond and the RSC
He was not on the list.
The commanding actor Philip Voss, who has died of cancer and complications from Covid-19 aged 84, was renowned for his style and accomplishment as an always handsome presence on the stage, with wonderful vocal skills and unimpeachable diction.
Commenting on his 1981 performance – “the best since George Devine” 17 years earlier – as the doctor, Dorn, in Chekhov’s The Seagull, the critic Robert Cushman also noted that Voss was a link to the high-comedy tradition in the British theatre without being a throwback; he never sounded old-fashioned.
The Chekhov was one of an outstanding roster of productions in that decade (1975-85) with the Shared Experience theatre company of director Mike Alfreds, a period Voss described as his “happiest and most productive years in the theatre”, during which he appeared in classic revivals of Marivaux’s Les Fausses Confidences, Gogol’s Marriage (in this, one of Chekhov’s favourite plays, Voss was a hilarious and predatory matchmaker) and an all-grey, wittily conceived version of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.
Alfreds and Shared Experience were a breath of fresh air, and hugely influential in their use of third-person narrative (their cut-price version of Bleak House preceded the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby by a couple of years and was produced on the same principle of actors sharing the narrative while dodging in and out of character), and in their fast, flexible staging, with beautiful costumes.
Voss, magnificently imposing – big voice, big head, big presence, but a wicked twinkle about him, too – was an anchor in a company of exceptional actors.
He went with Alfreds to the National Theatre in 1987 to form a new in-house ensemble – including Siân Thomas, Mark Rylance and Sylvestra Le Touzel – to mount two ambitious five-hour epics. In an adaptation of Eugène Sue’s 1844 novel The Wandering Jew, Voss was a killer Jesuit in a tale of a viciously contested fortune, “resembling some hissing sclerotic reptile”, said the critic Peter Kemp; and in Goldoni’s landmark trilogy La Villeggiatura, or Countrymania, he was a grandiloquent, heroic sponger in scenes satirising the hedonistic carnivals and banquets in Venice.
Voss went on to play major roles with the RSC in the 1990s before a return to the National in the new millennium. His television career had begun in the first (1963) season of Doctor Who, with William Hartnell, as Acomat, the leader of Mongolian bandits, in the Marco Polo story, and as a young Dulcian, Wahed, a humanoid pacifist killed by Quarks, a few years later, with Patrick Troughton as the second doctor. His last television role was as Ian McKellen’s acid-tongued brother, Mason, in the sitcom Vicious (2013-16).
Voss was born in Leicester, the elder son of James Voss, a pharmacist, and his wife, Viola (nee Walmsley). When the family moved to the village of Wollaton, near Nottingham, Philip attended the city’s High Pavement school. He joined a local amateur theatre and, after national service with the RAF, trained for the stage at Rada. He worked in rep, as well as in television, in the 1960s, playing Henry V and appearing in The Happiest Days of Your Life at the Hornchurch Rep, and Sparkish in The Country Wife for the director Giles Havergal at the Watford Palace.
In the late 1970s he was also a member of the BBC Radio Drama Company, working with the directors Jane Morgan and Celia De Wolff, in subsequent years, on The Lord of the Rings (he was Lord of the Nazgûl), Carey Harrison’s trilogy The Sea Voyage and as George Dillingham in David Garnett’s Aspects of Love. On film, he popped up in Octopussy (1983) with Roger Moore as James Bond, Trevor Nunn’s Lady Jane (1986), Bob Rafelson’s Mountains of the Moon (1990) and as Laura’s father in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).
But theatre was his oxygen, and he needed the “live” room.
At the RSC through the 1990s, he at last played the great
leads as of right: a supple, humorous Menenius to Toby Stephens’s boyish,
febrile Coriolanus; a voluptuous, mincingly fastidious Sir Epicure Mammon in
Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (directed by Sam Mendes); an ideal Ulysses,
relishing every syllable, in Troilus and Cressida (Joseph Fiennes and Victoria
Hamilton); a spinsterish Malvolio; and a grave and weighty Shylock. He was a
shrewd old fox of a Prospero in The Tempest on tour.
Voss returned to the National in 2002 as an impoverished yet uproarious old count in Chekhov’s Ivanov, directed by Katie Mitchell, and was the perfect Boyet in Trevor Nunn’s idyllic Love’s Labour’s Lost. For Peter Hall at the Theatre Royal, Bath, he was a scruffy, vituperative Jaques in As You Like It in 2003 and, in 2011, a wily Worcester and a gullible old Shallow in the two parts of Henry IV.
In or out of hose, he was always modern, and direct. He graced new plays by Antony Sher (The Giant at Hampstead in 2007, with Leonardo and the firebrand Michelangelo competing to carve David), Alexi Kaye Campbell (Apologia at the Bush, also in 2007, as a camp old campaigning friend of Paola Dionisotti’s radical art historian) and Jonathan Harvey (Canary in 2010 at the Liverpool Everyman, in which he played both Mary Whitehouse and a closet gay police chief).
In the early 1970s, he settled in Bushey, Hertfordshire, with his longstanding partner, the writer John Peacock, with whom he shared his passions for gardening and music. They entered into a civil partnership in 2006. John died in 2017. He is survived by his younger brother, John.
Actor
Doctor Who: The Novel Adaptations (2012)
Doctor Who: The Novel Adaptations
Podcast Series
RobotUnder-Sergeant (voice)
2016
1 episode
Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen in Vicious (2013)
Vicious
8.1
TV Series
Mason
2013–2016
11 episodes
Rachel McAdams and Domhnall Gleeson in About Time (2013)
About Time
7.8
Theatre Judge
2013
Law & Order: UK (2009)
Law & Order: UK
7.7
TV Series
Justice Reynolds
2011
1 episode
The Brides in the Bath (2003)
The Brides in the Bath
6.5
TV Movie
Mr Justice Scrutton
2003
Dinotopia (2002)
Dinotopia
6.4
TV Series
Cortez
2002
1 episode
Animated Tales of the World (2000)
Animated Tales of the World
7.9
TV Series
Official (voice)
2002
1 episode
In Motion
TV Series
Narration (as Phillip Voss)
2000
1 episode
Second Sight (1999)
Second Sight: Hide and Seek
7.3
TV Movie
David Ingham
2000
North Square (2000)
North Square
8.0
TV Series
Judge Christian Darling
2000
1 episode
Trial & Retribution (1997)
Trial & Retribution
7.6
TV Series
Lord Justice Henry Bradpiece
2000
1 episode
Paul McGann and Danny Sapani in Fish (2000)
Fish
7.2
TV Series
Ivan Vishnevski
2000
6 episodes
Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Adrian Scarborough, and
Alison Steadman in Let Them Eat Cake (1999)
Let Them Eat Cake
8.2
TV Series
Physician
1999
1 episode
Where the Heart Is (1997)
Where the Heart Is
6.8
TV Series
Gerald Webster
1999
1 episode
Animated World Faiths (1998)
Animated World Faiths
5.3
TV Series
Herald (voice)
1998
1 episode
Alive and Kicking (1996)
Alive and Kicking
6.5
Duncan
1996
Testament: The Bible in Animation (1996)
Testament: The Bible in Animation
7.1
TV Series
Lord PotipharMenes (voice)
1996
1 episode
Richard E. Grant and Susan Lynch in A Royal Scandal (1996)
A Royal Scandal
6.6
TV Movie
Sir Robert Gifford
1996
Boon (1986)
Boon
6.4
TV Series
Jeremy Walters
1995
1 episode
A Village Affair (1995)
A Village Affair
5.9
TV Movie
Richard Jordan
1995
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992)
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales
7.9
TV Series
ShepherdJudge (voice)
1994
1 episode
The Dwelling Place (1994)
The Dwelling Place
7.0
TV Mini Series
Cunningham
1994
3 episodes
Rowan Atkinson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hugh Grant, Andie
MacDowell, Simon Callow, John Hannah, and Charlotte Coleman in Four Weddings
and a Funeral (1994)
Four Weddings and a Funeral
7.1
Laura's Father - Wedding One
1994
The Secret Rapture (1993)
The Secret Rapture
5.7
Civil Servant
1993
Jonny Lee Miller in Bad Company (1993)
Bad Company
8.0
TV Movie
D.C.S. Stewart
1993
Northern Crescent
8.9
TV Movie
Education Chief
1992
The Paradise Club (1989)
The Paradise Club
7.3
TV Series
Monsignor Drayford
1990
1 episode
Mountains of the Moon (1990)
Mountains of the Moon
7.1
Colonel Rigby
1990
Everyman (1977)
Everyman
7.3
TV Series
Polish man
1989
1 episode
John Benfield, Gaby Dellal, and Philip Sayer in Floodtide
(1987)
Floodtide
7.6
TV Series
Vicar
1987
1 episode
John Thaw and Kevin Whately in Inspector Morse (1987)
Inspector Morse
8.2
TV Series
Coroner
1987
2 episodes
John Cleese in Clockwise (1986)
Clockwise
6.6
Headmaster
1986
Cary Elwes and Helena Bonham Carter in Lady Jane (1986)
Lady Jane
7.1
Herald
1986
Daniel J. Travanti in Murrow (1986)
Murrow
6.8
TV Movie
Censor
1986
Tom Courtenay, Robert Glenister, and Nichola McAuliffe in Me
and the Girls (1985)
Me and the Girls
6.9
TV Movie
Prof. Lembach
1985
Kenneth Cranham in Shine on Harvey Moon (1982)
Shine on Harvey Moon
7.6
TV Series
Vicar
1985
1 episode
Leslie Ash, Jill Gascoine, and Rosalyn Landor in C.A.T.S.
Eyes (1985)
C.A.T.S. Eyes
6.4
TV Series
Mr. Jenkins
1985
1 episode
The Afternoon Play
Podcast Series
Alister Whiting (voice)
1984
Roger Moore, Maud Adams, and Kabir Bedi in Octopussy (1983)
Octopussy
6.5
Auctioneer
1983
Donald Churchill in Goodnight and God Bless (1983)
Goodnight and God Bless
TV Series
George
1983
1 episode
Pig in the Middle (1980)
Pig in the Middle
5.3
TV Series
Police Inspector
1983
2 episodes
Noele Gordon in Crossroads (1964)
Crossroads
4.4
TV Series
Walter FallonRaymond Hillier
1980–1981
17 episodes
Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson in Hopscotch (1980)
Hopscotch
7.1
Helicopter Pilot
1980
Escape (1980)
Escape
TV Series
Capt Jurgen Schumann
1980
1 episode
John Fraser, Georgina Hale, and Joan Sims in Lady Killers
(1980)
Lady Killers
7.3
TV Series
Auguste de Mean
1980
1 episode
Christopher Benjamin and John Normington in Spy! (1980)
Spy!
TV Series
Solms
1980
1 episode
Lillie (1978)
Lillie
8.0
TV Mini Series
Edward Carson
1978
1 episode
Jubilee (1977)
Jubilee
6.0
TV Series
Newsreader
1977
1 episode
Raffles (1975)
Raffles
7.8
TV Series
Albany Manager
1975
1 episode
Elizabeth Bell in Melissa (1974)
Melissa
7.5
TV Mini Series
Det. Chief Insp. Carter
1974
3 episodes
Peter Blythe and Sharon Maughan in Dial M for Murder (1974)
Dial M for Murder
6.8
TV Series
Inspector
1974
1 episode
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
6.3
Ernst
1974
Crime of Passion (1970)
Crime of Passion
8.0
TV Series
Chief Insp. Marsan
1972
1 episode
Elizabeth R (1971)
Elizabeth R
8.7
TV Mini Series
King Richard
1971
1 episode
Ray Barrett, Geoffrey Keen, and Philip Latham in Mogul
(1965)
Mogul
6.9
TV Series
Bosun
1970
1 episode
Paul McGann, Colin Baker, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, William
Hartnell, Sylvester McCoy, Jon Pertwee, and Patrick Troughton in Doctor Who
(1963)
Doctor Who
8.4
TV Series
WahedAcomat
1964–1968
4 episodes
Clinton Greyn and Veronica Strong in Virgin of the Secret
Service (1968)
Virgin of the Secret Service
7.6
TV Series
Captain Nigel Bratby
1968
1 episode
Theatre 625 (1964)
Theatre 625
7.6
TV Series
Piotr Ollendorf
1967
1 episode
Out of the Unknown (1965)
Out of the Unknown
7.5
TV Series
Police Officer
1965
1 episode
No Hiding Place (1959)
No Hiding Place
7.4
TV Series
Jaroslav Konowski
1964
1 episode
Maupassant (1963)
Maupassant
9.2
TV Series
Belloncle
1963
1 episode
Suspense (1962)
Suspense
5.9
TV Series
Randolph Yerbray
1963
1 episode
Probation Officer (1959)
Probation Officer
6.7
TV Series
Paul
1962
1 episode
Drama 61-67 (1961)
Drama 61-67
7.5
TV Series
Policeman
1962
1 episode
Top Secret (1961)
Top Secret
6.8
TV Series
Doctor's Assistant
1962
1 episode
Self
Ian Cullen and Toby Hadoke in Who's Round (2013)
Who's Round
8.5
Podcast Series
Self (voice)
2014
1 episode
Taking Over the Asylum: The Making of Frankenstein and the
Monster from Hell (2013)
Taking Over the Asylum: The Making of Frankenstein and the
Monster from Hell
Video
Self
2013
Palácio de Cristal (2001)
Palácio de Cristal
TV Series
Self
2001
1 episode
Archive Footage
Recharge and Equalise
6.8
Video
Wahed (archive footage)
2010
No comments:
Post a Comment