Bill Roberts obituary

The Guardian

14-02-2025

My former husband William Roberts, who has died aged 80, was an American who made his career in Britain as an actor, director, voice artist and writer.
As well as stage, TV and film, he was much in demand for voice work. He read for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime and Woman's Hour, and narrated dozens of audiobooks for the RNIB and independent companies, as well as adapting American plays for the BBC and acting in several radio productions, including the highly popular Batman and Judge Dredd series.
He was widely recognised for his rich, resonant tones and sensitive readings of work by authors including Melville, Poe and Lovecraft. In the 1980s he was the voice of Texas Tom in a series of adverts for the Texas Homecare DIY stores, and more recently he voiced several characters in video games, most notably playing Vesemir in The Witcher series.
Born in Roseburg, Oregon, to Virginia Cooke, a telephone operator, and James Roberts, a truck driver, Bill got his early professional acting experience at the Oregon Shakespeare festival, in Ashland, where he also directed. He studied theatre arts at Humboldt State College, and came to Britain initially to do a diploma in drama at Manchester University. We met there as students and married in 1964. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980.
Together, he and I co-founded and ran two theatre companies. Bill worked in repertory, but was increasingly in demand as an actor and reader in radio: he once said he had played every American president for about two lines.
He appeared in the West End in several productions, in an acclaimed adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at the Mermaid theatre in 1980, and at the Hampstead Theatre Club and the Abbey theatre, Dublin, in Brian Friel's The Aristocrats in 2011. He toured extensively with these and other productions. He appeared in films including Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain (2003), and TV programmes such as Inspector Morse (1991) and World War II Behind Closed Doors (2008).
In his later years, living in London, he trained as a pilot and enjoyed many flights around Europe and the US in his own plane. Towards the end of his life he turned to writing fiction and biography under the name WE Roberts. His last work was a biography of the actor Marisa Pavan, The Quiet Twin (2025).
He is survived by his partner, Carolanne Lyme, and by our daughter, Emily, and two grandsons, Luke and Julian.