Benjamin Whitrow
Veteran actor of stage and screen much cherished for his role as Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
BENJAMIN WHITROW, the actor who has died aged 80, was one of the chief delights of the BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1995), in which he played Mr Bennet.
With no other character in the series did Andrew Davies, the writer, stick so closely to Jane Austen’s original dialogue, and Whitrow delivered the withering put-downs aimed at his featherbrained wife (played by Alison Steadman) with laconic aplomb. He managed to suggest both the character’s pride in his own dry wit and his slightly desperate sense that it was wasted on his scatty family.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Hugh Massingberd hailed Whitrow’s “definitive” interpretation of a character too often “portrayed as henpecked cipher” as “the performance of his career”.
Along with his co-star Colin Firth, who played Darcy, Whitrow was nominated for a Best Actor Bafta, but both lost to Robbie Coltrane as Cracker. But his performance is still regularly enjoyed in repeat showings of the series.
Benjamin John Whitrow was born in Oxford on February 17 1937, the younger of two sons of Philip and Mary Whitrow. Philip Whitrow was a history master who had once taught Laurence Olivier (who would later employ Benjamin at the National Theatre) and young Benjamin attended the Dragon School, where his father was teaching. He went on to Tonbridge and then to Rada on a Leverhulme scholarship. From 1956 to 1958 he did National Service in Malaysia with the King’s Dragoon Guards. He made his professional debut at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1959 in a production of Brer Rabbit, with the young John Thaw as Brer Fox.
He worked extensively around the country, and in 1962 played Sir Harry Bumper opposite Ralph Richardson and Margaret Rutherford in John Gielgud’s production of The School for Scandal at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. In 1967 he embarked on seven years with Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic.
After leaving the National he was often seen in the West End in new plays that became classics, including Harold Pinter’s premiere of Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged (Queen’s, 1975), Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Linen (Arts, 1976), Peter Nichols’ Passion Play (Aldwych, 1981) and Anthony Minghella’s Made in Bangkok (Aldwych, 1986). His viperish Thomas Cromwell opposite Charlton Heston’s Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (Savoy, 1987) was praised as “superlative”, and he reprised the role on film in 1988.
The slender, ascetic-looking Whitrow was not obvious casting for Falstaff, whom he played in The Merry Wives of Windsor with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratfordupon-avon in 1992, and the critics unanimously declared he should have been Justice Shallow, a part he did eventually play to great acclaim in 2001 in Michael Attenborough’s outstanding RSC production of Henry IV Part Two (Barbican) opposite Desmond Barrit’s Falstaff.
In between he returned for another stint with the National Theatre, notably as John Ruskin in Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1998). He was affecting as Vivienne Haigh-wood’s father in Tom and Viv (Almeida, 2006) and as John of Gaunt in Richard II (Bristol Tobacco Factory, 2011). He was particularly good in two Sheridan plays, forming a fine double act as Sir Anthony Absolute with David Tennant as his son in The Rivals (RSC, 2000 – “You can see the chip in the old block and the old block in the chip,” wrote the Sunday Telegraph’s John Gross) and as Crabtree in The School for Scandal (Tobacco Factory, 2015).
Of his performance in Philip King’s classic farce See How They Run (Richmond, 2006), Charles Spencer in the Telegraph observed that he “perfectly combines benevolence and bewilderment as the Bishop blessed with the play’s greatest line: ‘Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars!’”
On television he followed Pride and Prejudice with another outstanding period drama, playing the benevolent Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones (1997). He appeared in dozens of other series over the course of half a century including The New Statesman (as a Labour politician affecting an Irish accent to win working-class votes), Crossroads, The Pallisers, Rumpole, Inspector Morse and Wolf Hall.
For the cinema he was Phil Daniels’ boss in Quadrophenia (1979), a slick public school headmaster in the John Cleese farce Clockwise (1985) and a widower romancing Eileen Atkins in the romantic comedy Scenes of a Sexual Nature (2006). Particularly cherished was his role voicing Fowler, the cockerel who is an RAF veteran, in the animation Chicken Run (2000).
He enjoyed golf, which he professed to play badly, and was a bridge fiend; he was even permitted by Olivier to play in the wings while performing at the National.
He married, in 1972, Catherine Cook, from whom he was later separated; they had a daughter, Hannah, and a son, Thomas. In the 1990s the actress Celia Imrie asked him to father a child with her, although she insisted that she did not want a romantic relationship and required no financial or emotional support. Their son Angus was born in 1993 and in the event Celia Imrie declared: “He has proved to be a marvellous father to Angus. And his whole family has been very welcoming.” Angus Imrie followed his parents into acting. He plays Josh Archer in The Archers.
Benjamin Whitrow is survived by his three children.
Benjamin Whitrow, born February 17 1937, died September 28 2017