Latest news with #ChristopherBenjamin
Daily Mail
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Doctor Who, Thunderbirds and Peppa Pig legend whose iconic voice entertained millions leaves staggering amount in his will
A Thunderbirds and Doctor Who legend left a stunning £1.2million in his will. David Graham, who died last year aged 99, was famed as the voice of the Daleks and was beloved as Grandpa on Peppa Pig. On Thunderbirds he starred as Lady Penelope's chauffeur and reformed safecracker Parker - as well as voicing Gordon Tracey and Brains, the technical genius behind International Rescue. Probate documents show Mr Graham left an estate with a net value of £1,235,001 - while the gross value rose to £1,242,770. Among the beneficiaries are his nephew Jonathan Smith, who received 20 per cent, and his niece Elizabeth Rehfeld, who received 30 per cent. Both now live in the US. Further, smaller percentages were given to were given to friends, including the actor Christopher Benjamin, who also appeared in Doctor Who. In a touching dedication, Mr Graham told his pal: 'I would like Christopher to know that this small gift is a token of my gratitude for his devoted friendship to me throughout my professional life. Man has no better friend.' Mr Benjamin died in January this year, before he would have been able to read the inscription. He further donated money to a raft of charities, including the Prostate Cancer Charity, the Nightingale House Home for the Ages Jews, the North London Hospice, the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture, Jewish Care, Save the Children Fund, World Jewish Relief and the Actors Benevolent Fund. The remaining money dictated in the will, which was made in 2010, was to be given to his sister Ruth, and she were to die before him it would pass to her children Elizabeth and Jonathan. David's distinctive cockney accent and loyal but mischievous character became one of Thunderbird's most beloved elements. Although primarily known for his voice work, Graham also appeared on screen in various British television series. He had roles in dramas, comedies, and crime shows such as The Saint and The Avengers. For his role as Grandpa Pig, his TV character was married to Granny Pig and was father to Mummy Pig and Aunt Dottie. He reprised his role as Parker in Thunderbirds, the CGI-animated reboot of the classic series that premiered in 2015. Taking to X, the profile of the late creator of Thunderbirds, Gerry, confirmed his passing on Friday by posting: 'We're incredibly sad to confirm the passing of the legendary David Graham.' 'The voice Parker, Gordon Tracy, Brains and so many more. David was always a wonderful friend to us here at Anderson Entertainment. We will miss you dearly, David. Our thoughts are with David's friends and family.' Mr Graham explained his inspiration for Parker in a 2019 appearance on Good Morning Britain. He performed the role ever since his first meeting with Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson in the 1960s. Speaking about their first interactions, he said: 'Well I was doing a TV film, rather ropey script, and he said to me during the shoot that he was hoping to make children's films so I said well I'm not bad at voices and accents.' TV presenter Ben, then went on to discuss the voice of Parker and asked David if he and Gerry both worked on it together. He said: 'The voice of Parker is so distinctive as well, did you and Jerry work on that together? Was it your idea?' To which David revealed: 'He took me to a pub and there was an old guy waiting on tables and he came up and said "Would you like to see the wine list, sir?"' David then laughed and added: 'So that was the birth of Parker. I kind of enriched the voice. That was the birth of him'. Mr Graham was also a member of Lawrence Olivier's company at the National Theatre. His successful career also included providing the voice for Wise Old Elf and Mr Gnome for Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom, shown in the UK on Channel 5. He also had brief appearances in ITV's Coronation Street, The Bill and London's Burning and BBC dramas Doctors and Casualty. Gerry Anderson passed away in 2012 aged 69 from a long illness.
The Guardian
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Christopher Benjamin obituary
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
