Gentle genius who lived in Manuel’s shadow
recalled John Cleese, “it would never occur to you for one moment that he was an actor. You would guess he was a senior civil servant, or a physician, or an academic, or perhaps a research scientist. He was quiet, thoughtful, beautifully mannered, well informed, observant and extremely kind. But once you put that moustache on him… Manuel appears as if from nowhere.”
Cleese wrote this affectionate foreword to Sachs’s 2014 autobiography, in which he recalls going to see an Alan Bennett play and was treated to “one of the funniest farcical moments I have ever seen”, when Sachs’s character, a piano tuner, is mistaken for a bra-fitter.
The offer to appear in was issued soon afterwards, and overnight turned Sachs, at almost 50, from a jobbing comedy actor – best known for Brian Rix farces (he was also appearing in
while was being filmed) – into a household name.
Sachs – who had been born in wartime Berlin to a Jewish father and Catholic mother, then escaped to Britain aged eight – suggested making his hapless waiter German. Cleese said no: Manuel had to be from Barcelona. “German waiters are seldom funny,” acknowledges Sachs’s old friend, broadcaster John Sergeant. Whereas the Spanish Manuel was “not simply comic gold. He became part of the national psyche.”
“There was still something of Andrew in Manuel,” insists another old friend, Esther Rantzen. “Manuel was an innocent, constantly trying to do his best for Mr Fawlty and always ending up getting it wrong. And, for me, Andrew was one of life’s innocents. He didn’t allow fame to change that about him.”
That was why, suggests Dame Esther, who first met Sachs when she was working as a production assistant in BBC Radio drama in the Sixties, “the whole nation rose up in rage when he was subjected to those stupid jokes by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross [who in 2008 left lewd messages about his granddaughter on Sachs’s answerphone, on air]. It couldn’t have been more misdirected.” Credit for the success of
– which ran for 12 episodes