Nicky Henson
Actor who did a star turn as a medallion-wearing lothario who infuriates Basil in Fawlty Towers
NICKY HENSON, who has died of cancer aged 74, carved out a route through show business that embraced singing and playing guitar in a 1960s pop band, acting in stage revues and performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but he will be best remembered for his cameo as a playboy in a 1979 episode of Fawlty Towers.
In “The Psychiatrist”, Henson played a hotel guest called Mr Johnson, his shirt unbuttoned to the navel revealing a hairy chest covered in gold chains and talismans (including an Egyptian fertility symbol), who provokes the ire of Basil (John Cleese) by flirting with Sybil (Prunella Scales).
Basil, who insists that this Romeo looks like an orangutan, launches a mission to catch the guest sneaking a woman into his room. He makes a fool of himself – while his manic behaviour is observed by a psychiatrist.
“Whenever there is a need in British television for a goodlooking younger man with a loutish or aggressive attitude, the part often goes to Nicky Henson,” wrote the historian of popular entertainment, Anthony Slide. “Always with a girl and often without a shirt.”
Show business was in the performer’s blood. He was born Nicholas Victor Leslie Henson in London on May 12 1945 to Harriet (née Collins), a music-hall dancer and actress who performed under the name Billie Dell, and Leslie Henson, a popular comedian notable in variety and farces for his croaky voice, funny faces and collection of hats.
Henson was educated at St Bede’s School, Eastbourne, and Charterhouse in Surrey, where he discovered his love of performing. Playing the first Gravedigger in Hamlet brought out his comedy skills, as he threw skulls around during the prince’s “Alas, poor Yorick!” speech.
On leaving Charterhouse, Henson took a stage management course at Rada (1961-62), where he formed a band, the Wombats, which included Ian Ogilvy as the drummer.
Then, the leading agent Richard Stone, who had seen Henson performing in a school revue, secured him an audition with EMI Records. He landed a solo recording deal that began in 1963 with the single Till I See You Cry on EMI’S Parlophone label.
His career continued with musical performances in cabaret before his West End break came in the Alan Melville revue All Square, starring Beryl Reid (Vaudeville Theatre, 1963).
He followed it by playing the arch villain Mordred in the original London production of
Lerner and Loewe’s hit Broadway musical Camelot (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1963-64).
One of his fellow actors in the show, Paul Ferris, teamed up with him to form a singing duo, although their 1966 single Love Song, which they also wrote, failed to chart. The pair signed a three-year contract to write songs for Cliff Richard and the Shadows.
During this period Henson took his revue skills to David Frost’s satirical television series The Frost Report, and landed small roles in comedy films, among them alongside James Robertson Justice in Father Came Too! (1964) and with Leslie Phillips in Doctor in Clover (1966).
Moving up the cast list, he played the boyfriend of Barry Evans’s dream woman in the quintessential Swinging Sixties drama Here We Go Round the
Mulberry Bush (1967). A year later, Henson progressed to more serious roles when he played Trooper Robert Swallow in the classic horror film Witchfinder General – alongside Ferris, who also wrote the score, and Ogilvy.
This English Civil War drama packed with gratuitous violence finishes with Henson shooting dead with his flintlock the torturing witch-hunter played by Vincent Price, as Ogilvy starts to axe his nemesis to death.
War was the theme of Henson’s next film, Mosquito Squadron (1969), in which he played the doomed RAF navigator Flight Sergeant Wiley Bunce, then in 1970 he was Goldie Hawn’s selfish boyfriend in There’s a Girl in My Soup, with Peter Sellers, before he returned to horror for Psychomania and Vampira.
Henson landed title roles in The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones in 1976 and in the James Bond spoof No 1 of the Secret Service the following year. But he always said he took lucrative screen work to allow him to appear in his first love, the theatre.
In 1970 he had become a founding member of the Young Vic, and that year he played The Soldier in The Soldier’s Tale.
He stayed with the company until 1973 and, six years later, turned down a three-film Hollywood contract in favour of playing “Simple” Simon Yepihodov, providing comic relief, in a National Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard at the Olivier Theatre.
He also starred there as Treves in The Elephant Man in 1982.
His RSC roles included Henry Straker in Man and Superman (Savoy Theatre, 1977) and, at both Stratford-upon-avon and the Barbican (1985-86), Touchstone in As You Like It and Frank Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Henson’s final RSC role, at
Stratford in 2005, signalled the end of his theatre career, five years after he was diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy.
“I got my dream part as Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night at the RSC, but the physical strain of the part and the side-effects of the drug meant I had to give it up,” Henson recalled.
“I knew then I’d never act on stage again, which broke my heart.”
His television career had by then embraced sitcoms – playing an advertising executive in The Happy Apple (1983) and the intermittent part (1990-91) of Diana Weston’s ex-husband in The Upper Hand – and drama, taking the title role in the 1995 remake of Shine on Harvey Moon.
Henson also brought authority to cameos such as Honey Edwards’s father, Jack, in Eastenders during 2006 and the entertainer and petty criminal Charles Grigg in Downton Abbey in 2010 and 2013.
In the cinema, he was seen in Mike Leigh’s back-street abortion drama Vera Drake (2003) as a private doctor mentioning the “delicate matter of money” to an upper-class young woman who becomes pregnant.
Henson was the uncle of Countryfile television presenter Adam Henson and brother of his farmer father, Joe, who died in 2015.
Following the break-up of his first marriage, to the actress Una Stubbs (1969-76), Henson had a five-year relationship with another actress, Susan Hampshire.
In 1986 he married the prima ballerina Marguerite Porter.
She survives him, along with their son and the two sons of his first marriage.