Dudley Sutton
Actor who premiered Joe Orton’s Mr Sloane and later starred as the jovial Tinker Dill in Lovejoy
DUDLEY SUTTON, who has died aged 85, was part of the new wave of actors, headed by Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Peter O’toole, who dominated British theatre and films during the Fifties and Sixties.
Once described as looking like a debauched cherub, he was one of the stars of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop but would only become a household name a quarter of a century later – as Tinker Dill, the jovial, boozy sidekick to television’s favourite antique dealer, Lovejoy.
In the late Fifties, Sutton was a drinking companion of Jeffrey Bernard and Brendan Behan; some critics felt that on the brink of stardom Sutton wasted his talent in the public bar and never fulfilled his potential. “I used to think if I drank as much as O‘toole I could be a big star too,” Sutton recalled. “What I did not realise was that O’toole became a star and then drank.”
Sutton found that for an actor without an established career, public misbehaviour could be problematical. “Richard Harris was always punching people,” he said, “I thought I’ll try that – didn’t work. All I got was arrested.”
Despite starring in a number of Behan’s plays, making several films, and becoming the first person to be cast in the title role of Joe Orton’s black comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane, Sutton never achieved the degree of stardom predicted for him.
Dudley Sutton was born on April 6 1933 in East Molesey, Surrey, the son of a slot machine manufacturer. Evacuated to the West Country during the war, he began acting at his Devon prep school: “I was pretty and I had blond hair and blue eyes and it was a boys only [school] so I had to play the girl, which was very difficult and embarrassing and confusing.”
After leaving school aged 16 and taking a series of casual jobs, in 1951 he signed on for 12 years with the RAF “hoping to scream around the skies in a jet”. Instead he found himself “slumming around in a truck”, so he bought himself out of the RAF in 1954 and took a job as a photographer at a Butlin’s holiday camp.
During his time in the RAF he had joined and eventually organised an amateur dramatics group. While at Butlin’s he won a scholarship to Rada.
Arriving in London in 1955, he wound up in Soho where he found work in a “rock and roll coffee bar” and “hung out with Teddy Boys and hookers and these amazing West Indians that were selling spliff ”. He felt he had truly arrived when, on a visit to Bernard Kops’s flat in Monmouth Street, he found a large fish lying in the middle of the playwright’s double bed: “I looked at the fish and said to myself: this is the real Bohemia.”
After five months he was expelled from Rada. But in 1957 Sutton joined Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company and within four weeks was appearing in the Soviet Union as Malcolm in a production of Macbeth at the Moscow Arts Theatre, and being “feted with vodka and caviar”.
Sutton performed in many of Joan Littlewood’s productions and in 1958 played Princess Grace in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage which went on tour to Paris. “On a carouse with Brendan Behan,” he remembered, “we wound up in a cave under Les Halles with Littlewood, Marcel Marceau and a violinist who impressed us by playing, quite drunk and bent double under the low ceiling, Bartok’s Unaccompanied Sonata.”
Sutton made his West End debut in One More River in 1958. The following year he reprised his role in The Hostage in a West End production. “Offers began to flow in,” he remembered, “including a six month scholarship to study mime in Paris.” He sent his brother (“as a ringer”) in his stead, and claimed that he had attended the course, undiscovered, for four months.
Then, after appearing in a successful run of The Hostage on Broadway, Sutton returned to Britain to appear in another Irish play, Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark. “I’m not ruddy Irish,” Sutton said, “but to producers its all the same. Once you’re Irish, you’re Irish.”
In 1961 he married the American actress Marjorie Steele, with whom he had one child. She was ex-wife of the multi-millionaire Huntingdon Hartford and when they met she was living on alimony of £21,000 a year. She gave it up when she married Sutton, but that marriage, too, broke down after four years.
Sutton made his screen debut in Sidney J Furie’s anti-capital punishment film The Boys (1962) as one of four young men put on trial for the murder of a nightwatchman. The following year he played a gay motorcyclist in the same director’s The Leather Boys. “It was a risky part to take,” he recalled, “but then I was very political and although I am not gay myself, I really did care about the trouble my gay friends were having.”
It was possibly his performance in the film that persuaded the producers of the 1964 premiere of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane at the New Arts Theatre to cast Sutton as the murderous young lodger who sparks sexual jealousy between his middleaged landlady and her brother. Some critics found the play shocking, but Sutton, described by one as “a broken nosed Adonis, a leather boy with the head of ‘Bubbles’ and the heart of a psychopath”, won favourable reviews.
With the break-up of his marriage, however, his career began to founder. He lost his licence to a drink-driving charge, was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and spent much of the rest of the Sixties, as he put it, “on the p--s”.
He resurfaced in 1971, acting for no pay in a community theatre in Hoxton. The same year he appeared in Ken Russell’s The Devils and in 1972 he returned to the Theatre Workshop for a revival of The Hostage. He appeared as Feste in a 1973 production of Twelfth Night, playing him as a busker, and in 1977 starred in Sam Shepard’s play, Curse of the Starving Classes. Film credits included The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Fellini’s Casanova (both 1976).
In 1981 he made his television debut as the “roaring father” in Juno and the Paycock, and during the 1980s he made appearances in series such as Bergerac, The Beiderbecke Affair, and as the ginger-haired Soviet spy Oleg Kirov in the BBC’S adaptation of John le Carré’s Smiley’s People (1982). In 1990 he returned to the stage to play the protagonist in Hangover Square, Patrick Hamilton’s chronicle of low-life London.
He enjoyed a career renaissance from the late 1980s as Tinker Dill in the perennially popular Lovejoy, the comedy crime series about dodgy antique dealers, set in East Anglia and starring Ian Mcshane in the title role.
Initially Sutton was reluctant to play Lovejoy’s alcoholic sidekick, but the producers persuaded him to change his mind: “I said … I wanted to play something more elegant for a change, so they said I could wear what I liked. I lived opposite the Chelsea Antique Market at the time, so I knew what antique dealers looked like and I said ‘I’ll wear my Chelsea Arts Club outfit’ and they said ‘what’s that?’ I said it was a three-piece tweed suit, silk hankie and a beret I bought in Paris, and that’s how it came about.” Tinker Dill’s friendship with Lovejoy turned out to be the backbone of the show.
Sutton’s later roles included the con man Wilfred Atkins in Eastenders (2004), William Blake in Peter Ackroyd’s BBC television series The Romantics (2006), and Freddie’s granddad in the E4 teenage drama Skins (2010).
He is survived by the child of his marriage.