WARREN MITCHELL

(14 January 1926 - 14 November 2015)

British actor of Russian stock who often played cockneys or shady foreigners, in radio, films and TV from 1951, taking character parts in Hancock’s Half Hour, Drake’s Progress, Big Guns, Nicholas Nickleby, Three Tough Guys, Danger Man etc. Haunted many low-budget British B-pictures playing waiters, shopkeepers, ambassadors and crooks. After Bootsie and Snudge, The Saint and The Avengers TV series along came Till Death Us Do Part and its sequels in which Johnny Speight’s scripts for Alf Garnett made Mitchell a star comic performer and earned him a BAFTA gong. Among award-winning stage appearances were his Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Pinter’s The Caretaker and The Homecoming and Arthur Miller’s The Price. Early on (1957) he wrote a couple of episodes of the BBC’s early family soap, The Grove Family.

MICHAEL DARVELL