Erudite comic who divided audiences
John Sessions, who has died aged 67, came to prominence in the 1980s as one of the stars of the wildly popular comedy improvisation show Whose
Line Is It Anyway?, said The Daily Telegraph. Audience members were invited to suggest themes, and the panellists would improvise skits around them. A man of astonishing erudition, Sessions excelled at visiting the dentist in the manner of Ernest Hemingway, or describing a day at the seaside in the style of James Joyce. But while some were awed by his wit, versatility and learning, others simply found him “insufferable”.
In one episode, the panellists were asked to appear as the worst person to get stuck in a lift with, at which point Paul Merton stepped forward and, with a smirk, said: “Hello, my name’s John Sessions.” And though Sessions – who was also a skilled impressionist – was a regular “voice” on Spitting Image, when he was caricatured on the show himself, its makers depicted him disappearing up his own backside. A man beset by self-doubt, he said he knew he was a “bit punchable” – though he tried not to be. Stephen Fry, he told The Independent in 2013, “wears his knowledge very lightly”, whereas “I tend to sound a bit more like, well, a creep really. It’s my imparting of the information with a certain little bristle of pride or something.”
John Sessions was born in Largs, Ayrshire, in 1953, the son of John Marshall, a gas engineer, and his wife, Esmé (née Richardson), who worked in a bookshop, and who passed onto him a love of books. His father’s job later took the family to Bedford, and Sessions went first to the independent Bedford Modern School, and later to a grammar school in St Albans, where as a bookish, dreamy child, he was bullied. In his teens, he got drunk one night, came home and told his mother he was gay. She looked so horrified, he backtracked, and never mentioned the subject again. In the 1990s, he was “outed” by a reporter. His mother died six weeks later. He studied English Literature at the University
College of North Wales, in Bangor, and it was there that he started to perform in earnest. His twin sister, Maggie, had moved to Canada, and after he graduated, he started a PhD at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He worked on his thesis, on John Cowper Powys, for four years, but later described it as “200 pages of rubbish”. Returning to London, he won a place at Rada. “My plan was to try and do two careers at once – to be a comedian and an actor,” he explained. “For some years, I managed to juggle the two, but I never felt I joined either club.”
In 1987, Kenneth Branagh – a friend from Rada – directed him in his dazzling one-man show The Life of Napoleon, and in the same year, he played Lionel Zipser in the TV series
Porterhouse Blue. Whose Line is It Anyway?
started on Channel 4 in 1988, and Sessions appeared in its first three series. He voiced numerous characters on Spitting Image, including Laurence Olivier, and was the only voice artist to also be caricatured in latex (as one of Branagh’s “Brit Pack”). His career stagnated in the 1990s; he said that as he’d got older, his confidence had ebbed. He refused all stage roles until 2013. But in 1997, he co-created the TV comedy Stella
Street, which imagined a host of stars living on the same suburban street. Among the characters he played was Keith Richards, who runs the corner shop with Mick Jagger. When he met the Rolling Stones, they told him they watched the show. “Keith said he really enjoys it and he’s thinking of getting a little corner shop.”
More recently, he’d played serious roles which made use of his genius as a mimic: he was Geoffrey Howe in the 2009 Thatcher biopic Margaret, Harold Wilson in Made in Dagenham (2010) and Edward Heath in the 2011 film The Iron Lady. Having once been a Labour supporter, Sessions later voted UKIP. He also railed against Scottish independence. He’d played scores of characters, but “I am pretty much one,” he reflected, in a Guardian interview: “a grumpy old fool”. Stephen Fry, however, remembered him as “warm, vulnerable, lovable and loving”.