PETER VAUGHAN

(4 April 1923 - 6 December 2016)

The British actor Peter Vaughan had an immensely successful career on stage, film and television over a period of some 75 years from provincial rep (at the age of 16), right up to his last film, Albatross (2011). Here was a great character actor who could play any part, charming or villainous, with equal conviction. He may be best remembered for his role in the sitcom (and film) of Porridge, as the arch-criminal Harry Grout who ruled with relish over Slade Prison’s family of felons. Vaughan was also in many of the popular TV series from the 1950s onward, up to and including Game of Thrones in 2015. He was particularly outstanding in the BBC’s Our Friends in the North.

He began his career on stage but by 1954 was on television, too, until he started appearing, uncredited, in films such as The 39 Steps with Kenneth More, Sapphire, Village of the Damned and Make Mine Mink, playing policemen in all four. More police roles came his way in I Thank a Fool, The Devil’s Agent, Hancock (on TV), and The Victors. Stepping out of character in 1964 Vaughan played a parsimonious insurance investigator in the B-feature Smokescreen, in which he was not the heavy for a change but an interesting and eccentric loner. 

Other of his films include Hammer’s Fanatic with Tallulah Bankhead, the Boultings’ Rotten to the Core, The Naked Runner, The Bofors Gun, Straw Dogs, The Pied Piper, Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah and Valentino, John Huston’s The Mackintosh Man, Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits and Brazil, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. He was particularly moving as Anthony Hopkins’s father in The Remains of the Day. Vaughan was married twice, both to actresses, first to Billie Whitelaw for 14 years from 1952 and then Lillias Walker for fifty years until his death.

MICHAEL DARVELL