Peter Bowles obit

To The Manor Born star Peter Bowles dies aged 85

He was best known for his role in the BBC sitcom starring alongside Dame Penelope Keith.

 

 He was not on the list.

Bounder, criminal, villain. Dandy, duke or diplomat. Peter Bowles, who has died aged 85 of cancer, could be all of these incarnations and often two or three of them at once.

Always distinguished and highly regarded, Bowles himself ruefully admitted that he wasn’t a “star” until, aged 43, he played Richard DeVere, the former costermonger turned supermarket tycoon, in the BBC’s hit comedy series To the Manor Born (1979-81), written by Peter Spence, in which he contested the affections, and the superior social status, of Penelope Keith’s not so merry widow Audrey fforbes-Hamilton.

The sure-fire premise of a classic class-conscious comedy was that Audrey, beset with debts and death duties, was obliged to downsize and set up home in the lodge on her own estate, now in the ownership of a monstrous arriviste. The ripples of resentment, compromise and green shoots of affection were the fuel of two brilliant comic performances; while Keith had already achieved national stardom in The Good Life – Bowles had turned down the role taken in that series by Paul Eddington – this was his moment, and he seized it with relish.

Thereafter, he appeared sporadically on the West End stage as an authentic leading player, and initiated, often as a co-deviser, or “original idea” supplier, a string of major television serials including Only When I Laugh (1979-82), in which he starred with James Bolam and Christopher Strauli as one of three troublesome hospital patients under the supervision of Richard Wilson’s irascible doctor; The Irish RM (1983-85), in which he played a tetchily disposed army major serving as a resident magistrate in Ireland (“Bowles Saves Channel 4” ran one headline after it opened to rave reviews and large viewing figures); and Perfect Scoundrels (1990-92), with Bowles and Bryan Murray playing likable conmen, latter-day Robin Hoods choosing only deserving victims.

The phenomenon of a posh villain or cultured cad was nothing new. But Bowles could suggest complications beyond the superficially suave. He often paraded his charm as a veil for true menace or nastiness, as well as spivvery, and there was always a hint of phoniness around the smooth-talking self-assurance. Even off-stage or off-set he was always impeccably dressed in pronounced pin-stripes and high, starched collars.

This was a result of his background. Both his parents were in domestic service, but only, as they used to say, to the quality. An only child, Bowles was born in Upper Boddington, Northamptonshire, 12 miles from Banbury, to Sarah Jane (nee Harrison) and Herbert Bowles. Herbert was valet to Drogo Montagu, son of the Earl of Sandwich, while Sarah was nanny to Lady Jeanne Campbell, Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter, whose mother married the Duke of Argyll.

In 1940, the Bowleses moved to a two-up, two-down (with outside lavatory) in Nottingham, where Herbert now worked for Rolls-Royce and Peter was educated at High Pavement grammar school, alma mater too of the comedian John Bird. Encouraged by his own aptitude in school plays, and the example of two former pupils, Philip Voss and John Turner, who had both entered the acting profession with success, Bowles secured a scholarship to Rada in London.

He shared a flat with Albert Finney (other contemporaries included Peter O’Toole, Richard Briers and Alan Bates) and he won the Kendal prize; he and Finney were promptly signed by the top US talent agency MCA.

Bowles made his professional debut in Julius Caesar at Nottingham Rep in 1955 and debuts in London and New York the following year in Romeo and Juliet (in the small role of Abraham) with the Old Vic, where he made fast friends with his future colleagues James Villiers and Bryan Pringle.

He thought he had found his pathway to classical theatre distinction at the Royal Court in 1960, when he appeared in John Arden’s This Happy Haven (as the only unmasked character) and with Rex Harrison in Chekhov’s Platonov. The Arden play was directed by William Gaskill, who also led classes in movement, masks, improvisation and play construction that Bowles relished. When Gaskill was appointed an associate director at the new National Theatre by Laurence Olivier, Bowles begged Gaskill to take him with other Royal Court actors, such as Joan Plowright, Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely, but Gaskill refused.

Newly married, in 1961, to the actor Susan Bennett, and soon to start a family, he plunged into film and television, abandoning the theatre for 11 years after brief appearances with Coral Browne (in Bonne Soupe at Wyndham’s in 1961) and in a Séan O’Casey play at the Mermaid. He signed up as a movie gangster in Ken Annakin’s black-and-white The Informers (1963), followed by four major screen projects: Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), co-starring with David Hemmings (who played a photographer) and Vanessa Redgrave; Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), also with Hemmings and Redgrave, as well as Trevor Howard and John Gielgud; Richardson’s Laughter in the Dark (1969), adapted by Edward Bond from Vladimir Nabokov, in which a blinded art dealer’s wife gets her lover to move in with them (Nicol Williamson replaced a sacked Richard Burton during the shoot); and Peter Medak’s film of Peter Nichols’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1970) in which he lent notable support as a well-meaning old schoolfriend to Alan Bates and Janet Suzman as the parents of a disabled child.

His last major film was Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1973), in which Sean Connery gave a great performance as a flaky police officer interviewing a child abuse suspect (Ian Bannen) in a psychodrama adapted by John Hopkins from his own stage play This Story of Yours.

 

Two decades of television stardom were prefigured by the start, in 1976, of a 16-year association with Rumpole of the Bailey as Guthrie Featherstone QC MP and a much-loved episode of Rising Damp, starring Leonard Rossiter, in 1977, in which he wafted through as a cravat-wearing playwright called Hilary, dividing his flirtatious “rehearsal” attentions between Frances de la Tour and a long-haired Richard Beckinsale.

He returned to the theatre in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends (1975) at the Garrick, humiliated by his wife (Pat Heywood), pushed to the limit by a bereaved and boring friend (Briers), and in 1976 filled his lunchtimes for six months with a hilarious turn as a north country Labour MP in Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Linen at the Almost Free in Rupert Street before it transferred – to run for seven years – at the Arts.

He played another, more unctuous, Labour MP in Nichols’s Born in the Gardens at the Globe (now the Gielgud) opposite Beryl Reid as his bereaved mother, and won resounding plaudits as Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer at the Shaftesbury in 1986, even if the character’s nasty edge was slightly blunted.

He was much more at home as the macho medallion man Vic Parks, an armed robber turned television celebrity, in Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment at the Globe (now Gielgud) in 1990, memorably crossing paths with the have-a-go hero of his crime in a suburban bank branch, Michael Gambon’s lolloping clerical nonentity.

The morning after the transmission of Running Late (1992), a fine Simon Gray drama in which he played a television inquisitor unravelling in his personal life, Bowles bumped into the director Peter Hall, who invited him to join his company in a 1993 revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables at the Albery (now Noël Coward). His double of Rattigan’s wrecked newspaper columnist in one play and furtive groper of women in cinemas (“It has to be in the dark, and with strangers”) in the other attracted huge critical praise and heralded nine seasons of outstanding work with Hall’s company, playing major roles in Molière and Shaw, Coward and Chekhov, at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and in the West End.

He also, in this Indian summer of his stage career, appeared for the producer Bill Kenwright in two popular warhorses, Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth and Frederick Knott’s Wait Until Dark, re-imagining both leading roles as more sinister aspects of his smooth and menacing default setting.

It was as though he had at last fully recovered from the disappointment of not joining the National 50 years earlier. He even resumed mild hostilities with Penelope Keith in a Hall revival of Sheridan’s The Rivals at the Haymarket in 2011; while Keith fired off her malapropisms imperiously, he glided elegantly around the stage in sleek grey silks as a forbiddingly dyspeptic, rakish Sir Anthony Absolute. There was a slight tailing off in his last stage appearance as Father Merrin in a pointless but ingeniously staged version of The Exorcist at the Phoenix theatre in 2017. The schlock horror of the 1973 movie and Bowles’s own decent performance were all upstaged by the overwhelming, pre-recorded voice of Ian McKellen as the Demon.

Bowles, who collected British art and kept fit, he said, with “physical jerks”, was voted the Variety Club’s ITV personality of the year in 1984 and awarded an honorary doctorate by Nottingham Trent University in 2002. He published an anecdotal memoir, Ask Me If I’m Happy (2010), and a handbook on what he called “the job of acting”, Behind the Curtain (2012).

He is survived by his wife, Susan, and their three children, Guy, Adam and Sasha.

Filmography

Film

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1961      Wings of Death Williams               Short

1962      Live Now, Pay Later         Reginald Parker                

1963      The Informers   Peter the Pole    Uncredited

1965      Three Hats for Lisa           Pepper

Dead Man's Chest            Joe        

1966      Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World               Paris Singer         TV film

Blow-Up               Ron       

1968      The Charge of the Light Brigade Paymaster Captain Duberly         

1969      The Assassination Bureau             Jealous lover of 'La Belle Amie'   Uncredited

Laughter in the Dark       Paul      

The Stiffkey Scandals of 1932      Roland Oliver, KC              TV film

Taste of Excitement        Guardi

1970      Eyewitness         Victor Grazzini  

1972      A Day in the Death of Joe Egg      Freddie                

Shelley Byron    TV film

Endless Night     Reuben               

1973      The Offence       Cameron             

The Legend of Hell House             Hanley

Thinking Man As Hero    Frank Cordroy    TV film

1977      For the Love of Benji       Ronald

The Disappearance          Jefferies              

Stigma Peter     TV film

1988      Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun     Lord Jack Carberry           TV film

1989      Try This One for Size       Igor       

1993      Passport to Murder         Inspector Bullion              TV film

1995      The Steal              Lord Childwell   

1998      Little White Lies                Oliver    TV film

1999      Tumbled              Mr. Gilzean         Short

2000      One of the Hollywood Ten            Jack Warner      

2001      In Love and War                Melville                TV film

2005      Colour Me Kubrick           Cyril      

2007      Ballet Shoes        Sir Donald Houghton      TV film

2008      Freebird               The Chairman   

The Bank Job      Miles Urquart   

2011      Love's Kitchen    Max Templeton               

2014      Lilting    Alan      

Peterman            Old Boy               

2015      Meet Pursuit Delange: The Movie             Sir Edward Mead             

2016      Not Waving        Archie   Short

2017      We Are Tourists                William                

2018      Together              Philip    

2021      Off the Rails        Vicar     

 

Television

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1958      Armchair Theatre             Simpson               Episode: "Underground"

1959      The Last Chronicle of Barset        Constable            Episode: "How Did He Get It?"

1961      Doctor Knock     First Countryman             Episode: "Act 2"

Magnolia Street                Benny Edelman                 Series regular

ITV Play of the Week       Lieutenant Myers             Episode: "Conflict in the Sun"

1962      Armchair Theatre             Pete       Episode: "Thank You and Goodnight"

1963      It Happened Like This     Edwardes            Episode: "Superstitions"

Crane    Nikkolai Drax      Episode: "Three Days to Die"

The Avengers    Neil Anstice        Episode: "Second Sight"

1964      The Saint             Maurice Kerr      Episode: "Lida"

Drama 61-67      Captain Buckley                Episode: "The Crunch"

The Protectors Dr. Fothergill      Episode: "The Bottle Shop"

The Great War   Winston Churchill            Episode: "So Sleep Easy in Your Beds"

ITV Play of the Week       Razumikhin         Episode: "Crime and Punishment"

Danger Man       Gamal   Episode: "Fish on the Hook"

Armchair Theatre             Morgan                Episode: "The Pretty English Girls"

Dermot Llewelyn              Episode: "A Certain Kind of Silence"

No Hiding Place                 Joe Bask               Episode: "Real Class"

1965      Machin Episode: "A Fistful of Trouble"

Public Eye            Freddy Episode: "A Harsh World for Zealots"

Love Story           Jack Everett        Episode: "Never Sup at Home"

Crane    Vincent Morrow               Episode: "A Cargo of Cornflour"

Edgar Wallace Mysteries               Joe         Episode: "Dead Man's Chest"

Jury Room           Detective-Inspector        Episode: "The Side of Mercy"

Six of the Best    Tom Brown         Episode: "Me and My Big Mouth"

Famous Gossips                Garçon de café Episode: "Oscar Wilde: Monsieur Sebastian Melmoth"

Out of the Unknown       Policeman           Episode: "Some Lapse of Time"

The Avengers    John Harvey        Episode: "Dial a Deadly Number"

1966      Emergency Ward 10        Philip Royston   Recurring role

Sunday Night     Melville                Episode: "The Quarry: Portrait of a Man as a Paralysed Artist"

Redcap Butros   Episode: "Buckingham Palace"

The Informer     Jack Hart              2 episodes

The Baron            Jim Gaynor          Episode: "You Can't Win Them All"

Armchair Theatre             Sergeant Howlett             Episode: "Don't Utter a Note"

1967      The Avengers    Thyssen                Episode: "Escape in Time"

The Saint             Serge     Episode: "The Art Collectors"

Armchair Theatre             Toby Meres        Episode: "A Magnum for Schneider" (Pilot of "Callan" series)

Adam Adamant Lives!    D.K. Davies          Episode: "Another Little Drink"

The Troubleshooters      Abbas Ramzi       Episode: "My Daughter Knows Her Way Around"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Harvey Deacon Episode: "Playing with Fire"

The Prisoner       'A'           Episode: "A. B. and C."

1968      Dr. Finlay's Casebook      Professor Baxter               Episode: "The Dynamizer"

The Avengers    Ezdorf   Episode: "Get-A-Way!"

Champion House              Degnos Episode: "The Golden Fleece"

Love Story           Brian     Episode: "The Egg on the Face of the Tiger"

Sherlock Holmes               Joseph Harrison                Episode: "The Naval Treaty"

1969      Happy Ever After              Tony Bulstrode Episode: "The Party Piece"

Department S    Borowitsch          Episode: "Six Days"

W. Somerset Maugham                 Robert Crosbie Episode: "The Letter"

The Gold Robbers            Stockbroker        Mini-series

Softly, Softly       Conn      Episode: "One Thing Leads to Another"

Take Three Girls                Jeremy Mandl-Fry            2 episodes

1970      Ryan International           Alain      Episode: "The Dead Live Longer"

The Main Chance             Roger Lamb        Episode: "The Best Legal System in the World"

Happy Ever After              Michael                Episode: "The Ambassador"

1971      Hadleigh              Robert Charlton                Episode: "Breakdown"

The Ten Commandments             Tommy Radd      Episode: "Black Eye on Sunday"

Brett      William Saxby    Series regular

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes     Inspector Saunders         Episode: "The Woman in the Big Hat"

The Persuaders!               Mitchell                Episode: "Element of Risk"

ITV Sunday Night Theatre             Jack Campbell-Barnes    Episode: "Who Killed Santa Claus"

1972      The Shadow of the Tower             Bernard de Vignolles       Episode: "A Fly in the Ointment"

Alexander the Greatest Paul Clutton-Browne      Episode: "Renata's Secret Affair"

Harriet's Back in Town    Jack        2 episodes

The Protectors Gregor Kofax      Episode: "Triple Cross"

1973      The Adventures of Black Beauty                 Mr. Duffield        Episode: "Wild Justice"

Crown Court       Gerald Somerville             3 episodes

Cheri     Patron   2 episodes

Arthur of the Britons       Hecla     Episode: "Rowena"

Omnibus              Oscar     Episode: "The Runaway"

Murder Must Advertise Major Todd Milligan        Mini-series

1974      Napoleon and Love          Captain Murat   Mini-series

Special Branch   Igor        Episode: "Downwind of Angels"

Good Girl             Colin Peale          Series regular

1975      Public Eye            Croxley Episode: "They All Sound Simple at First"

Thriller Superintendent Lucas    Episode: "The Double Kill"

Survivors              David Grant        Episode: "The Fourth Horseman"

Churchill's People            Thistlewood       Episode: "Death of Liberty"

Comedy Playhouse          Patrick Episode: "Only on Sundays"

Space: 1999        Balor     Episode: "End of Eternity"

1976      The Crezz             Ken Green           Series regular

I, Claudius           Caractacus          Mini-series

1977      A Roof Over My Head     Jack Askew         Episode: "A Roof Over My Head"

Rising Damp       Hilary    Episode: "Stage Struck"

1978      BBC Play of the Month   Inspector Hounslow        Episode: "Flint"

Pennies from Heaven     Prosecuting Counsel       Episode: "Says My Heart"

The Sunday Drama          Prince Borodski                 Episode: "The Marrying Kind"

Bless Me, Father               Fred Bowlby       Episode: "The Doomsday Chair"

1978–1992          Rumpole of the Bailey    Guthrie Featherstone    Series regular

1979      Tales of the Unexpected               Major Haddock Episode: "Neck"

Turtle's Progress               Superintendent Percy Weston   1 episode

1979–1982          Only When I Laugh          Archie Glover     Series regular

1979–2007          To the Manor Born          Richard DeVere                 Series regular

1980      Nanny Knows Best           Billy Benson       

1981      Vice Versa           Paul Bultitude    Series regular

1982–1983          The Bounder      Howard Booth   Series regular

1983      Storyboard          Neville Lytton    Episode: "Lytton's Diary"

1983–1985          The Irish R.M.    Major Sinclair Yeates      Series regular

1985–1986          Lytton's Diary     Neville Lytton    Series regular

1987–1988          Executive Stress                Donald Fairchild                Series regular

1990–1992          Perfect Scoundrels          Guy Buchanan   Series regular

1992      Screen One         George Grant     Episode: "Running Late"

2000      Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)    Captain Graves Episode: "The Best Years of Your Death

2003      Holby City            Bernie Farraday                Episode: "Love Nor Money"

2005      Jericho Fleming                Mini-series

2008      Agatha Christie's Poirot Sir Roderick Horsfield     Episode: "Third Girl"

2010      Masterpiece Mystery     Episode: "Hercule Poirot, Series X: Third Girl"

2011      The Sarah Jane Adventures         Lionel Carson     Episode: "The Man Who Never Was"

2015      Citizen Khan       Lord Anstruther                Episode: "Farley Manor"

2016      The Life of Rock with Brian Pern                 Brian Pern's Father          Episode: "The Thotch Reunion"

Murder                 Greville Cotterall              Mini-series

2016–2019          Victoria                 Duke of Wellington         Series regular