JOHN FRASER

(18 March 1931 - 7 November 2020)

The Scots actor and writer John Fraser, who has died from oesophageal cancer aged 89, was brought up in Glasgow. As a boy he was on BBC Radio’s Children’s Hour, and later became an ASM at Glasgow’s Park Theatre. His on-stage debut was in Oscar Wilde’s Salome as a page, and his TV debut was as David Balfour in the Kidnapped series in 1951. After more television and bit parts in films came a major role in Valley of Song (1953). His claim to fame was playing pilot ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood in The Dam Busters, about Barnes Wallis’s Bouncing Bomb. He was Inigo Jollifant in The Good Companions, played another pilot in The Wind Cannot Read, and in 1960 gave his two best performances in Tunes of Glory with Alec Guinness and The Trials of Oscar Wilde with Peter Finch who played Oscar to Fraser’s Lord Alfred Douglas. Both actors were brilliant and Fraser was particularly good as ‘Bosie’ in a mixture of petulance and camp and it earned him a Bafta nomination. He was in El Cid with Charlton Heston, Waltz of the Toreadors with Peter Sellers, Tamahine with Nancy Kwan, and a third pilot in Operation Crossbow. In Polanski’s Repulsion he watched Catherine Deneuve go mad, in A Study in Terror was a foil for John Neville’s Sherlock Holmes, and in Isadora played opposite Vanessa Redgrave’s dancing Miss Duncan. After that it was mostly television until Schizo (1976), his last feature film. Then it was TV, including Doctor Who, Rep, Young Sherlock and The Practice. As a gay actor he never wanted to work in America so, after 1996, he moved to Tuscany with his partner, the painter Rodney Pienaar. Fraser was also a writer of a memoir, Close Up, a play, Cannibal Crackers, and novels, including Clap Hands If You Believe in Fairies, about the thalidomide drug scandal.

MICHAEL DARVELL