Roy Dotrice
Actor who broke records as John Aubrey in Brief Lives and played Leopold Mozart in Amadeus
ROY DOTRICE, the actor, who has died aged 94, was a supreme impersonator of old men, his evocations of the whims, wheezes, mannerisms and vocal quirks of the doddery carrying more conviction than the efforts of truly ancient players.
Although he had nothing against younger characters and played scores of them in a career that extended over half a century in plays, films and on television, it was his portrayal in the one-man show Brief Lives of the 17th-century biographical writer John Aubrey which made his reputation all over the world. His 1,782 performances earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records.
Dithering, waffling, pottering and musing his way through an old man’s memories on a stage filled with remnants of a closely observed life, Dotrice animated the writer’s doings, past and present. He kept audiences alert with his chatter about government, religion and the Civil War, as well as sex, fashion and daily London life amid a chaos of tattered volumes, grimy papers, guttering candles and the inevitable cracked chamber pot.
His seeming submersion of his own personality into Aubrey’s – sometimes disgusting, sometimes comical, always human – seemed so authentic that some doubted if he would ever be able to act another part without the shadow of old Aubrey intruding. Indeed it was said to be his disquisition on a lawyer who “gained more by his prick than his practice” that inspired Hugh Massingberd, founder editor of The Daily Telegraph’s obituaries page, to adopt Dotrice playing Aubrey as his stylistic inspiration in the mid-1980s.
The son of a master baker, Roy Louis Dotrice was born in the Channel Islands on May 26 1923, and was educated at Guernsey’s Dayton and Intermediate Schools. He had left and was working as a clerk when war broke out; he found a boat and rowed across the Channel for four days to join the RAF, lying about his age.
Dotrice trained as a wireless operator/air gunner, and in April 1942 joined No 106 Squadron equipped with the Manchester bomber. Three weeks later he took off on the night of May 2/3 for a minelaying operation off the coast of Schleswig-holstein. His aircraft was shot down over the island of Pellworm, near Sylt. The seven-man crew all baled out and were made Pows. Dotrice was incarcerated at Stalag Luft VI at Heydekrug, on the Baltic coast.
He soon took an interest in the theatre, first being given women’s parts because he had not started shaving, but later graduating to men. As the Russians advanced westwards, in July 1944 the camp was evacuated at 24 hours’ notice. After a nightmare journey in cattle trucks, Dotrice and his fellow prisoners arrived at Fallingbostel camp, south of Hanover. Almost three years to the day after his bale-out, Fallingbostel was liberated in May 1945.
Dotrice appeared in Back Home, a touring revue given by repatriated Pows in aid of the Red Cross, and was discharged from the RAF in January 1946 with the rank of warrant officer.
He had learnt so much from performing in the camps that he was offered a scholarship to Rada. When
Back Home ended in Manchester, however, he went to see Manchester Repertory Company’s production of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street and was appalled by the standard of acting, concluding that “if I couldn’t do as well as that without going to Rada, I ought to be shot.”
He declined the Rada scholarship, offered his services to the repertory company and was given the lead in Terence Rattigan’s Flarepath, to begin the following Monday.
He spent 10 years in northern repertory theatres, recalling that actors in the 1940s were paid sixpence for an entrance round of applause and a shilling for an exit round – enough to buy a packet of cigarettes and fish and chips on the way home: “Actors used all kinds of tricks. You could be doing an ordinary drawing-room comedy, and some old actor would go up to the French doors, and, nothing to do with the script, would turn and say: ‘One, two, three, four, and to hell with the lot of you,’ bang his foot and that would start his exit round.”
After two years directing his own repertory company on Guernsey, Dotrice moved in 1957 to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-avon, where, four years later, he became one of Peter Hall’s first long-term contract players with the renamed Royal Shakespeare Company.
During his career he performed in every one of Shakespeare’s plays, but it was as Chekhov’s aged Feers and as Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part II, that the actor – still in his thirties – showed a special talent for portraying characters twice his age.
From the day he went to Stratford, Dotrice rarely found himself in youthful roles, and he became one of the company’s most reliable and versatile middle-range players, able to strut and fret with plausible authority as kings and dukes, princes and generals. His Ajax in Troilus and
Cressida and his Bedford in Henry VI were particularly vivid characterisations in an era when Hall’s leadership brought audiences some of the finest Shakespearean productions in the post-war theatre.
In perhaps the most inspiring of all Hall’s revivals – the Wars of the Roses trilogy – Dotrice helped to illuminate the Shakespeare histories with a noble study of John of Gaunt and a dashing and impatient Hotspur, while his bespectacled, wheezing Shallow compared with Olivier’s masterly interpretation of the same semi-senile role nine years earlier.
The actor who made the greatest impact on Dotrice was Olivier. One night when they were in Othello at the Old Vic, “something had happened to Olivier,” Dotrice recalled. “He was giving a marvellous performance … We all congregated in the wings to watch him. Then we take the curtain call, and as they went past me, I said: ‘Well done, Larry.’ He went to his dressing room, and slammed the door. I knocked on his door and said, ‘What the hell’s the matter with you, Larry? It was a wonderful performance tonight.’ He said, ‘I knew it was. But I don’t know how the f--- I did it’.”
But it was Brief Lives, first performed at the Hampstead Theatre club in 1957, which led later to an invitation to Broadway and changed Dotrice’s career. After another stint with the RSC, in the new American plays The Latent Heterosexual and God Bless (Aldwych, 1968), he took his one-man show to the Criterion for 213 performances in 1969. Tours followed of leading provincial theatres, and of Canada and the United States. Brief Lives then came back to the Mayfair Theatre for 150 performances in 1974 before another Broadway season, an Australian tour and a television performance.
During the 1980s, Dotrice turned to subjects other than Aubrey for solo performances. After The Passion of Dracula he impersonated Abraham Lincoln in Mr Lincoln, playing in Canada and the United States before London. He then joined the American Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford, Connecticut, to play Henry IV, Henry V and Falstaff. His third one-man show, Winston Churchill, was seen only in the US and he was back at the Old Vic as Magwitch in Great Expectations before returning to Broadway for revivals of An Enemy of the People and Noël Coward’s Hay Fever.
Among Dotrice’s many films were Heroes of Telemark (1965), A Twist of Sand (1968), Lock Up Your Daughters (1969), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), Amadeus (1984), playing Mozart’s father Leopold, and The Eliminators (1985). His television appearances included Dear Liars, The Caretaker (for which he won an Emmy award), Clochemerle, Dickens of London, Family Reunion and Young Harry Houdini.
On Broadway, Dotrice was nominated for a Tony award for his portrayal of Drumm in Hugh Leonard’s graphic work in A Life, then in 2000 was a Tony winner for his performance in A Moon for the Misbegotten.
In his later years, Dotrice committed himself to another virtuoso project in the form of the audiobook recordings for George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones, voicing 224 characters in total. Having rejected a role in the globally successful television adaptation for health reasons, he eventually featured in the second series as Hallyne the Pyromancer.
Roy Dotrice was appointed OBE in 2007. He married, in 1946, the actress Kay Newman. She died in 2007 and they are survived by their three daughters, Evette, Michele and Karen, all of whom became actresses.
Roy Dotrice, born May 26 1923, died October 16 2017