Jeremy Child
Actor
BORN SEPTEMBER 20, 1944 – DIED MARCH 7, 2022, AGED 77
WITH his public school accent and confidence, actor Jeremy Child was often the first name casting directors thought of when looking for someone to play a Foreign Secretary.
One of his more memorable incarnations was his depiction of Francis Pym in Ian Curteis’s The Falklands Play in 2002.
His demeanour had previously led to him being cast as the posh twit in The Glittering Prizes in 1976 and a year later as an ex-public schoolboy in ITV play Cork And Bottle.
However he had emerged as a strong talent with roles in Jane Eyre in 1970 and Oh! What A Lovely War a year earlier.
In Edward And Mrs Simpson in 1978 he played the role of Piers Leigh and had a small part in hit film A Fish Called Wanda in 1988. In 2011’s The Iron
Lady he played a minister in the government of Margaret Thatcher.
Sir Coles John Jeremy Child was born in Woking, Surrey. His father Major Sir Coles John Child worked in the Foreign Office and his mother Sheila was Canadian-born.
Seeing Peter Pan in the West End fuelled an ambition to act from the age of six and he joined the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School as a young man.
In 1971 he married Deborah Grant, who appeared in crime series Bergerac. They had a daughter, Melissa.
He later married actress, Jan Todd, who was in a 1984 version of The Boy Friend. They had a daughter, Leonora, and a son, Alexander, who succeeds in the family baronetcy created in 1919.
In 1987 he married magazine publisher Elizabeth Morgan, who died in 2019. They had a daughter, Eliza, and a son, Patrick.