PETER BOWLES
(16 October 1936 – 17 March 2022)
Perhaps never a major star of the cinema, the British actor Peter Bowles, who has died from cancer at the age of 85, was certainly a leading man on television and in the theatre. Most will remember the very popular comedy series To the Manor Born with Penelope Keith, which ran from 1979 to 1981. Scripted by Peter Spence it featured the relationship between an upstart, Czech-born glorified grocer (Bowles) who buys up a grand manor house while the former owner (Keith) is reduced to living in the estate's lodge. A typically British comedy of class manners, it obviously struck a chord with the BBC's viewers who lapped it up, mainly because of the forceful acting of the two leads.
In a wide-ranging career and often playing two-faced characters clutching an iron bar hidden in a velvet-glove, Peter Bowles was the past master at being upper class, fastidious and superciliously bumptious but nonetheless captivating in an almost acceptable way. He demonstrated his aloofness in such TV series as Emergency - Ward 10 (1966), The Main Chance (1970), Brett (1971), Crown Court (1973), Napoleon and Love (1974), Rising Damp (1977), Pennies from Heaven (1978) and Only When I Laugh (1979-82), Eric Chappell's classic comedy set in a hospital with James Bolam.
Peter Bowles was born in Northamptonshire to parents Herbert and Sarah Bowles who were both in service. At school, Peter evinced an interest in acting and subsequently went to Rada where he studied with the likes of Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole and Alan Bates, after which he joined The Old Vic, went into repertory, including Nottingham and the Bristol Old Vic. Later he joined the Royal Court and the West End in London, after which he began his career in television.
He had appeared in odd films and TV work from 1956, but it was Jay Lewis's Live Now - Pay Later in 1962 that gave him his first reasonable film part. It was followed by a very odd British musical by Leslie Bricusse called Three Hats for Lisa which starred Joe Brown. Dead Man's Chest (1965) was a Merton Park Edgar Wallace quickie, but the following year saw Bowles in Michelangelo Antonioni's London film, Blow Up, and then in Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade as the Paymaster.
Television kept Bowles busy until the films of The Assassination Bureau and Laughter in the Dark, Tony Richardson's version of the Nabokov novel. Eyewitness (1970) was John Hough's thriller with Mark Lester and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, a film of Peter Nichols' play with Alan Bates and Janet Suzman. Endless Night had an Agatha Christie story and The Offence (1973), Sidney Lumet's gripping film of the John Hopkins play starred Sean Connery as a mad police sergeant and Bowles as a detective inspector. There were a few more reasonable films including Guy Hamilton's Try This One for Size (1989), a crime comedy from the novel by James Hadley Chase, and later on Colour Me Kubrick, The Bank Job, Lilting with Ben Whishaw, and Off the Rails (2021) in which Bowles played a vicar, his last screen role.
Apart from To the Manor Born, Peter Bowles will also be remembered for his other television successes The Irish R.M., Lytton's Diary (which he created), The Bounder and Perfect Scoundrels, not forgetting his part as Guthrie Featherstone, Horace Rumpole's arch-enemy in Rumpole of The Bailey. I personally recall his excellent performance as Archie Rice in the 1986 revival of John Osborne's The Entertainer at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in which Bowles played the sad, empty-eyed comedian with a mixture of raffishness and old-world charm.
Peter Bowles was married to the actress Susan Bennett and they have three children, Sasha, Guy and Adam. He published his autobiography, Ask Me If I'm Happy: An Actor's Life in 2010 and then Behind the Curtain: The Job of Acting in 2012.
MICHAEL DARVELL