Joss Ackland obituary
There was something grand, large, embracing about the actor Joss Ackland, who has died aged 95. He was a fixture in British films for several decades and a stalwart of the Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company – he played Falstaff in the opening RSC production of Henry IV, Parts One and Two, in the new Barbican Centre in 1982 – and the West End stage.
He appeared in more than 100 films, and countless TV plays and series, usually, in later years, white-haired and bearded, but always with energy and force, whether as the cuckolded husband, Jock Delves Broughton, in Michael Radford’s White Mischief (1987) with Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance, or as the drug-running heavy in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.
At the Old Vic in 1958-59, Ackland played Toby Belch, Caliban, Falstaff in The Merry Wives, and Pistol, in a company that included Maggie Smith, Moyra Fraser, John Moffatt, Barbara Jefford and Alec McCowen; for all of them, this season was a highlight and a turning point in their separate careers.
Ackland went on to play leading roles for Bernard Miles at the Mermaid, where he was an associate director, and the titular cockney hunting enthusiast in the musical Jorrocks (1966) by Beverley Cross and David Heneker at the New theatre (now the Noël Coward). His later London stage roles encompassed a tragic, powerful Mitch in the 1974 revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar
Named Desire, with Claire Bloom, a brilliant, almost spooky Frederick Egerman in Hal Prince’s 1975 London premiere of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (with Jean Simmons and Hermione Gingold) and a monumental Perón in Prince’s Brechtian production of Evita by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1978.
It is interesting that he never felt happy, or at home, in any of these performances. Ackland was what is sometimes known as a “difficult” actor; he felt at odds with new ideas, hating the rehearsal process of Trevor Nunn at the RSC, or even the concept that his Captain Shotover in Nunn’s magnificent Chichester festival production of Shaw’s Heartbreak House in 2000 might be a valid “political” interpretation. He remained a proud, old-fashioned maverick, a middle-range, supporting actor of considerable weight.
He was born in north London, the son of Norman Ackland, an Irish journalist, and his wife, Ruth (nee Izod), and was educated at Dame Alice Owen’s school in Islington, though he left aged 15 determined to become an actor. He worked in a brewery, and in a dairy, in Bedford, before a chance meeting with his father’s cousin, the playwright Rodney Ackland, propelled him towards the Central School of Speech and Drama.
He made a London debut in The Hasty Heart at the Aldwych in 1945 and played minor roles at Stratford-uponAvon in 1947 alongside Donald Sinden and Paul Scofield, followed by seven years in rep at Croydon, Wimbledon, Chesterfield and Coventry.
He met his future wife, Rosemary Kirkcaldy, born in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and also an actor, when he appeared with her in JM Barrie’s Mary Rose in Pitlochry in 1951, and they married at the end of the year. Still with no real breakthrough, the couple decided to try their luck in South Africa in 1954, where Joss worked as a field assistant on a tea plantation in Beira, Mozambique, before moving to Cape Town for two years, and spending six months in Johannesburg, where he appeared in plays by Terence Rattigan and Coward with Moira Lister and Dulcie Gray.
The Acklands returned to Britain