Christopher Benjamin obituary

The Guardian

26-01-2025

With a portly but athletic physicality, a rich baritone voice, a bloodhound, drooping visage and a sarcastic sense of humour, Christopher Benjamin, who has died aged 90, was a backbone actor on television, but mostly stage, for many years.
With the Royal Shakespeare Company – for whom he featured from 1978 to 2002 – he played a huge variety of roles, but was especially memorable in the wonderful Nicholas Nickleby of 1980, when he played the definitive old actor laddie, Vincent Crummles.
He had a sort of internet afterlife when his role as Henry Gordon Jago in the BBC TV 1977 Doctor Who saga The Talons of Weng-Chiang was reprised in an audio supernatural mystery series from 2010 to 2021.
Everything in his career was based on the boards. He was a go-to Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream – he played the role five times, at the Bristol Old Vic, Regent's Park, on Radio 3, for the RSC (in 1996 sporting a vintage crash helmet and buck teeth) and finally at Glyndebourne – his farewell to the stage – in the director Jonathan Kent's 2012 revival of Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen, including bowdlerised scenes from Shakespeare.
His other signature Shakespearean role was Falstaff, whom he played three times: at Salisbury Rep in 1961 (Henry IV Part 1); in Regent's Park (Henry IV Part 1) in 2004, his padding and flushed visage utterly authentic in what the critic John Gross described as a benign and beguiling reading; and, his happiest experience, at Shakespeare's Globe in The Merry Wives of Windsor, staged in Elizabethan costume in 2008 and touring both the UK and the US – the New York Times said he resembled 'a helium-filled satyr'.
Benjamin was born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, the second son of William, a piano tuner and music shop owner in the town and his wife, Eve (nee Coles), a commercial clerk for the Avon rubber company and secretarial accountant in the shop. He was educated at Lord Weymouth grammar school in Warminster (now Warminster school), excelling in drama, music and cricket, leaving in 1953 to be a choir master – his initial plan – and to do his national service in the RAF, before going on to Rada in London and making his professional debut in 1958 as Julius Caesar at the Library theatre, Manchester.
He was in regional rep between 1958 and 1965, playing many leading roles at the Bristol Old Vic. In 1965-66 he joined the English Stage Company at the Royal Court to play the mayor in John Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance and Allwit in Thomas Middleton's classic Jacobean city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
One of the most brilliant productions he appeared in was Michael Blakemore's 1967 revival of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the old Saville (via Glasgow Citizens and Nottingham); he was a hatchet-faced thug in the orbit of Leonard Rossiter's legendary performance in the title role.
Perhaps his finest West End hour arrived in Alan Strachan's 1988 revival, transferred from Greenwich to the Duke of York's, of one of Alan Ayckbourn's earliest, and funniest, plays, How the Other Half Loves, through which Robert Morley had trampled on its long-running premiere in 1969.
As Frank Foster, host of a simultaneously enacted dinner scene on successive evenings in different houses (same table), exerting contrasting class pressures on the same pair of hapless guests, he evinced a Morleyesque avuncular authority but dug much deeper into the character to find insecurity masked by bonhomie.
He became renowned as an expert Shavian, giving colourful, inherently comic performances in two of Shaw's early social/satirical classics: as the self-satisfied doctor Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington in The Doctor's Dilemma at the Bristol Old Vic in 1987; and as Thomas Broadbent, a bumptious civil engineer carving up the Irish countryside in the face of agitation for home rule in Strachan's superb 1971 revival of John Bull's Other Island at the Mermaid theatre in 1971.
These plays are hardly ever done today. A further reminder of what treasure is disappearing from the nation's repertory (take a bow, National Theatre), and with actors of Benjamin's vintage, was the 1994 revival of George Colman and David Garrick's Georgian comedy The Clandestine Marriage at the Queen's (now Sondheim) theatre. Nigel Hawthorne, who also directed, was the rheumatic roué Lord Ogilvy, Benjamin a city merchant anxious to trade off his daughters in exchange for a title.
At least the National nailed down the status of Michael Frayn's Noises Off as a farcical masterpiece in Jeremy Sams's blissful revival in 2000, with Benjamin as the bibulous old ham actor Selsdon Mowbray, bumbling about amid the onstage scenes of mayhem in search of his stashed bottles.
Benjamin's RSC association began with Howard Barker's Hang of the Gaol (1978) in which the civil service arranged a cover-up of a prison fire, and his many notable RSC performances included a perfect, pedantic, comical Holofernes and Polonius in the Roger Rees-led Love's Labour's Lost and Hamlet (both in 1984-85); and a drunken Stephano and fatuously self-admiring Dogberry in the 1988 Derek Jacobi-led revivals of The Tempest and Much Ado about Nothing.
His expert coloration of words was a perennial feature of his acting, with a musical command of inflection and tone. He played Julius Caesar again, for Peter Hall returning to the RSC in 1995, a suitably irate Capulet in the 1995 Romeo and Juliet directed by Adrian Noble, an ideal Kent (not boring, as so often) opposite Hawthorne's King Lear in 1999 and another delightful though more emphatic Dogberry in the 2002 Much Ado with Nicholas Le Prevost and Harriet Walter.
Benjamin was on TV and radio from 1965, appearing in Z Cars, The Avengers, The Saint, Jason King and, notably as the same character, Potter, in Danger Man and its more surreal, sci-fi spin-off, The Prisoner, both starring Patrick McGoohan. He was Prosper Profound in The Forsyte Saga (1967), Sir William Lucas in Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Squire Trelawney in Treasure Island (1999).
Every performance was imbued with a rare mixture of gravitas and sly wit, qualities he fleetingly demonstrated in a handful of movies including the disastrous 1974 remake of Brief Encounter (with Richard Burton and Sophia Loren), David Yates's The Tichbourne Claimant (1998, with John Gielgud and Stephen Fry) and François Ozon's Angel (2007, with Romola Garai and Sam Neill).
He met Anne Taylor, an actor and writer, at Rada and they married in 1960 (she having adopted the stage name of Anna Fox). She survives him, as do their three children, Kate, Sebastian and Emilia, and three grandchildren, Bertie, Madeleine and Sam.
Christopher John Benjamin, actor, born 27 December 1934; died 10 January 2025