Cor blimey! Alf Garnett star leaves just £46k...
Few actors are as indelibly printed on the British national consciousness as warren Mitchell. In a career lasting over six decades, he won a fistful of awards, including a BAFTA for his portrayal of the Conservative-loving, west Hamsupporting, London docker Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, one of the BBC’s classic sitcoms.
So his fans will be surprised that Mitchell, who died in 2015 aged 89, left a gross estate of just £46,271 — reduced, after tax, to £44,737.
The will, which was drawn up in 1981 and has just been published, records that his estate was left in trust for his wife, Connie, whom he married in 1951, and their three children, Rebecca, Daniel and Anna.
At first glance the figure might suggest that his brilliance went almost unrewarded, at least in financial terms. However it is more likely to be proof of astute tax planning.
Mitchell was regularly congratulated by members of the public for the ‘common sense’ he spoke as Alf, who condemned grammar school boy edward Heath, then Tory leader, for his failure to have attended a ‘proper’ school like eton.
His fictional alter ego rejected the Labour Party, believing them to pretend to represent the working class, while all they’d do in power is feather their own nests.
However in real life Mitchell was a staunch socialist like Till Death Us Do Part’s creator, the late Johnny Speight, and another of the series’ stars, Cherie Blair’s father, Tony Booth, who played Alf’s son-in-law, ‘Scouse git’ Mike Rawlins. In 1989 Mitchell took dual Australian-British citizenship, saying that he preferred Australia’s egalitarian culture to what he considered the hidebound structure of British society.
Perhaps he was more receptive in his later years to the New Labour ethos personified by Lord Mandelson, who famously declared that he was ‘intensely relaxed’ about people becoming ‘filthy rich’.
Land Registry records disclose that he purchased a substantial house in Highgate in 1992. Happily, Connie remains its owner — unencumbered by a mortgage.
A neighbouring house in the street sold a little over a year ago for £8.25 million. Bloody marvellous, as Alf would have said.