Bernard Fox
Actor from Port Talbot who was in two feature films about Titanic
BERNARD FOX, who has died aged 89, was a Welsh-born character actor who was best known to television viewers as the bewhiskered warlock Dr Bombay in the popular 1964-72 fantasy sitcom Bewitched, and who also appeared in two classic films about the sinking of the Titanic, A Night to Remember (1958) and Titanic (1997).
The incantation “Calling Dr Bombay” in an episode of Bewitched would cause him to pop up in one of a range of outrageous costumes – a kimono, say, a matador’s traje de luces, a spacesuit or toga – often accompanied by attractive “nurses”. His antidotes for witch diseases and spells gone wrong would inevitably lead to worse complications and he usually ended his visits by teleporting away amid a fit of laughter at one of his own jokes.
Fox played the man in the crow’s nest who spots the iceberg in A Night to Remember and claimed to have learnt at the film’s premiere that his father had been on the doomed liner, as a steerage passenger who had tried to guide others to safety. In James Cameron’s later Oscar-winning film he was Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, the passenger who, in top hat and white scarf, orders Cognac as the ship goes down.
He was born Bernard Lawson at Port Talbot on May 11 1927 into an acting family. His parents were stage actors and his uncle, Wilfred Lawson, was a wellknown film and stage actor of his day. “I was carried onstage at 18 months,” he recalled. “I began at a very early age – before I could really memorise lines.”
As a child actor he took roles in stage productions such as Richard III (as one of the princes in the Tower) and by the age of 14 was also working as an assistant stage manager at a repertory theatre.
In 1943 he was called up and spent the last years of the war on a minesweeper in the Far East.
After the war he joined the York Repertory company and in 1952 was asked to join the ensemble at the Whitehall Theatre where he appeared in several Brian Rix farces. He appeared in other West End productions before moving into films and work for television, including the 1961 ITV sitcom Three Live Wires, whose producer suggested he try his luck in Hollywood. He moved there in 1962 and through the 1960s and 1970s was seldom out of work.
Apart from Bewitched, he also had a regular role in the popular CBS sitcom Hogan’s Heroes as the buffoonish Colonel Crittendon, and “guest-starred” in numerous series, including Barbary Coast.
He had small roles in many feature and television films, among them as a diamond thief in Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo (1977), and in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972) he played Dr Watson to Stewart Granger’s Holmes, with William Shatner of Star Trek doing a bad British accent as George Stapleton. A respected theatre historian, he maintained his links with the stage, appearing on Broadway in a 1978 production of 3 Rue de L’Amour with Louis Jourdan and Kathleen Freeman.
By the 1990s, however the roles had begun to dry up. He was on the verge of retiring when Titanic brought him a new lease of life. He went on to have fun as Winston Havelock, a veteran British airman clinging to dreams of imperial glory in The Mummy (1999). His final appearance was in Surge of Power: The Stuff of Heroes (2004).
Bernard Fox is survived by his wife Jacqueline, an actress whom he met on the set of The Amorous Prawn (1962 – she played a Cockney maid and he played a butler), and by a daughter. Another daughter predeceased him.