TIMOTHY WEST

(20 October 1934 – 12 November 2024)

Timothy West, who has died at the age of 90, was one of Britain’s finest actors, making a substantial mark in the theatre, on television and on radio. He appeared in all kinds of roles in Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen and O’Neill, modern classics by Pinter, Rudkin and Rattigan, as well as contemporary works, and was a member of both the Royal Shakespeare and National Theatre companies. His work on television was no less variable, from Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky to Agatha Christie, J.B. Priestley and Joe Orton, and he appeared in both major TV soaps, EastEnders and Coronation Street. In films his range was wider still with thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Looking Glass War and The Thirty-Nine Steps and such historical subjects as Hitler: The Last Ten Days (as Karl Gebhardt), Cry Freedom and Endgame, on the fall of Apartheid.

Timothy Lancaster West was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, to the actors Lockwood West and his wife Olive Carlton-Crowe. They moved to Bristol and then lived in Ruislip in Greater London. When he expressed a desire to be an actor, his parents tried to dissuade him, so he became a furniture salesman and recording engineer but also joined an amateur drama group. His first theatre job at 21 was box-office manager at Frinton-on-Sea where he met his first wife, Jacqueline Boyer. They had a daughter, Juliet, but separated when his wife had mental problems. He made his debut as an actor in Summertime, in Wimbledon, and made his West End debut in 1959 in the farce Caught Napping at the Piccadilly Theatre.

From 1962 West joined the RSC in London, appearing in The Comedy of Errors, Timon of Athens and Love’s Labour’s Lost. He also appeared as Macbeth twice, did two Uncle Vanyas and four King Lears for companies such as Prospect, the English Touring Theatre, the Old Vic, the Bristol Old Vic and the Edinburgh Festival.

On television Timothy West played some real-life characters including the title role in Edward the Seventh, Horatio Bottomley in The Edwardians, Winston Churchill in Churchill and the Generals and The Last Bastion, Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII, as well as Thomas Beecham, Mikhail Gorbachev and Martin Luther. He displayed a brilliant sense of the absurd in Brass, John Stevenson and Julian Roach’s parody of a bleak 1930s Northern town with two feuding families, rich and poor, with West as the awful local benefactor Bradley Hardacre. His last TV appearance was in Doctors in 2014.

Timothy West’s first film was Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair, adapted from John le Carré’s spy thriller, in 1966. He then did Twisted Nerve for the Boultings, and another le Carré adaptation, The Looking Glass War. He played Dr Botkin in the historical epic Nicholas and Alexandra, and was one of the French Surete to be baffled by the plot to kill Charles De Gaulle in Fred Zinnemann’s excellent The Day of the Jackal (1973). After that he worked regularly in films including Cry Freedom, Richard Attenborough’s biopic of the South African activist Steve Biko. He played the King in Ever After, a new version of Cinderella with Drew Barrymore, and he was the Judge in 102 Dalmatians. In Richard Eyre’s Iris, with Judi Dench as the novelist Iris Murdoch, he played her friend Maurice, while his own son, Samuel West, was cast as the younger Maurice.

When he wasn’t acting, Timothy West was directing at the Forum, Billingham or Prospect Theatre or at the University of Western Australia. And if he wasn’t doing that, he was pursuing his many interests as an ambassador for children’s charities, or supporting the Talyllyn Railway in Wales and the Inland Waterways Association. This last led him to make programmes for Channel 4 with his wife Prunella Scales on canal boating. In 1984 he was appointed a CBE for his services to drama.

After his divorce from his first wife, West married Prunella Scales in 1963 and they have two sons, Samuel and Joseph, both actors. When Prunella contracted Alzheimer’s, she could no longer work but did appear with Tim on their canal jaunts and, at the time of writing, she is 92. Both were excellent actors and, in starting their own acting dynasty, they still exert their influence on their chosen profession. They just don’t make them like Tim and Pru anymore.

MICHAEL DARVELL