Peter Sallis
Star of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ who was also the voice of Wallace
PETER SALLIS, the character actor, who died on June 2 aged 96, was most recognisable for his role as Clegg, the easy-going, self-effacing, unassertive member of the trio of Yorkshire pensioners in the BBC television series Last of the Summer Wine.
He also lent his voice to another celebrated northerner, the unassuming, homely, if eccentric, inventor Wallace of Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit, whose stop-motion adventures earned worldwide critical and popular acclaim.
He had been an accomplished theatrical actor in some of the best post-war West End productions, but with his portrait of Clegg, the unadventurous observer of his two relatively boisterous companions in Roy Clarke’s long-running television comedy, he became a star.
Short-built, round-faced, with watchful eyes and a faintly nasal voice of no great range which he made drily expressive, Sallis was one of the busiest players of his time because he specialised in little men.
Sinister or amiable, sly or jovial, passionate or pathetic, he brought hundreds of marginal characters to the centre of plays, films and television by his cultivation of a naturalistic style.
His understanding of, and feeling for, Chekhovian character went deep, especially as the well-meaning but alcoholically befuddled landowner Lebedev in Ivanov and — alongside Ralph Richardson — as Chebutykin in Three Sisters.
But it was as the diffident and infinitely undaring Norman Clegg, with his cloth cap, friendliness and philosophical tendencies in Last of the Summer Wine that the actor seemed most at home. When asked if he did not find the series, which began in 1973 and continued, on and off, for 37 years, unendurable in its dramatic limitation, Sallis would reply that — on the contrary — there was nothing he had ever enjoyed doing more and he would like to go on doing it forever.
Peter Sallis was born on February 1, 1921 at Twickenham, south-west London, and educated at Minchenden Grammar School, Southgate. During the Second World War, when he enlisted in the RAF and became a radio instructor at Cranwell, he met the actor Leslie Sands and the young would-be impresario, Peter Bridge, fellow-servicemen who encouraged him to act in productions at RAF Cranwell. He went to Rada and first appeared on a professional stage in Sheridan’s The Scheming Lieutenant before spending three years in repertory.
He was, for the next 20 years, among the busiest of West End supporting actors in some of the finest productions without making himself much of a name, save as an actor of taste who would rather appear in plays of quality than in long-running nonsense.
As well as with Ralph Richardson, Sallis acted with most of the leading players of the time, from Laurence Olivier (in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court), Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud to Edith Evans and Vivien Leigh.
Sallis made his first deep impression as the mysterious Peter in Edward Albee’s park-bench drama Zoo Story and his first appearance on Broadway in the musical, Baker Street, in which he played Dr Watson.
Sallis was in the thriller Wait Until Dark and he played Herr Schultz in Cabaret opposite Judi Dench. But it took Last of the Summer Wine to project his kind of mild, thoughtful acting with its emphasis on men without much personality.
Just as he was about to play Clegg, however, two young students, Peter Lord and David Sproxton, were experimenting with stop-motion animating techniques at their kitchen table. In 1972 they co-founded Aardman Animations, Nick Park, then fresh from the National Film and Television School, joined them in 1985.
His half-finished piece, A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (1989), had been in production for two years, and he had already approached Sallis asking that he record a voice. “Then, in 1989,” Sallis recalled, “the telephone rang and a voice said: ‘Hello, it’s me, it’s Nick Park. Remember me?’ ” They spent an afternoon in a Soho studio, recording what Park called “oohs and ahs” — the wordless exclamations of delight, fear and horror that soon characterised Wallace’s responses in future misadventures. The film won a Bafta award.
Park’s next film, The Wrong Trousers (1993), won an Academy Award. A third film, A Close Shave, followed in 1995.
Wallace and Gromit’s first full-length outing, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), won another Oscar. In 2008, Sallis starred in a new Wallace and Gromit adventure, A Matter of Loaf and Death. Two years later, he furnished the voice for Wallace in the television miniseries Wallace and Gromit’s World of Invention.
His autobiography, Fading into the Limelight, appeared in 2006. A man of extreme shyness, he lived at a riverside house in Richmond, Surrey, where in retirement he enjoyed painting and gardening.
However, he had a very robust private life, with many infidelities. Peter Sallis and his actress wife, Elaine Usher, whom he married in 1957, separated 16 times before divorcing, and later re-marrying. She died in 2016. Their son, Crispian, is a film designer.