Peter Sallis
Self-effacing actor treasured for his roles in Last of the Summer Wine and Wallace and Gromit
PETER SALLIS, the character actor, who has died aged 96, was most recognisable for his role as Clegg, the easy-going, self-effacing, unassertive member of the trio of north-country pensioners in the BBC television series, Last of the Summer Wine; he also lent his voice to another celebrated northerner, the unassuming, homely, if eccentric, inventor Wallace of Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit, whose stopmotion adventures earned worldwide critical and popular acclaim.
He had been an accomplished theatrical actor in some of the best post-war West End productions, but with his portrait of Clegg, the unadventurous observer of his two relatively boisterous companions in Roy Clarke’s long-running television comedy he became a star.
Short-built, round-faced, with watchful eyes and a faintly nasal voice of no great range which he made drily expressive, Sallis was one of the busiest players of his time because he specialised in little men, and never attempted anyone of heroic stature. He had a way of making quietness compelling.
Sinister or amiable, sly or jovial, passionate or pathetic, he brought hundreds of marginal characters to the centre of plays, films and television by his cultivation of a naturalistic style.
His understanding of, and feeling for, Chekhovian character went deep, especially as the well-meaning but alcoholically befuddled landowner Lebedev in Ivanov (Strand) and – alongside Ralph Richardson – as Chebutykin in Three Sisters (Greenwich).
But it was as the diffident and infinitely undaring Norman Clegg, with his cloth cap, friendliness and philosophical tendencies in Last of the Summer Wine that the actor seemed most at home. When asked if he did not find the series, which began in 1973 and continued, on and off, for 37 years, unendurable in its dramatic limitation, Sallis would reply that – on the contrary – there was nothing he had ever enjoyed doing more and he would like to go on doing it forever, partly because it was such fun and partly because he could put so much of himself into it.
Peter Sallis was born on February 1 1921 at Twickenham, south-west London, and educated at Minchenden Grammar School, Southgate. He spent two years in a bank because his father was a bank manager, though “I just didn’t understand what banking was for”.
During the Second World War, when he enlisted in the RAF and became a radio instructor at Cranwell, he met the actor Leslie Sands and the young would-be impresario, Peter Bridge, fellow-servicemen who encouraged him to act in productions at RAF Cranwell. He went to Rada on an Alexander Korda scholarship for ex-servicemen and first appeared on a professional stage in Sheridan’s The Scheming Lieutenant (Arts) before spending three years in repertory at Guildford, Chesterfield and Sheffield.
He was, for the next 20 years, among the busiest of West End supporting actors in some of the finest productions without making himself much of a name, save as an actor of taste who would rather appear in plays of quality than in long-running nonsense.
As well as with Ralph Richardson, Sallis acted with most of the leading players of the time, from Laurence Olivier (in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court), Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud to Edith Evans and Vivien Leigh. He was in Gielgud’s classical seasons at Hammersmith in 1952-53 (The Way of the World, Venice Preserv’d), Fry’s The Dark Is Light Enough (Aldwych), The Matchmaker (Haymarket), and Orson Welles’s version of Moby Dick (Duke of York’s). He was back at Hammersmith again with the pioneering 1959 company in Ibsen, Molière and Büchner.
Sallis made his first deep impression as the mysterious Peter in Edward Albee’s park-bench drama Zoo Story
(Arts, 1960) and his first appearance on Broadway in the musical Baker Street, in which he played Dr Watson.
He was in the thriller Wait Until
Dark (Strand) and he played Herr Schultz in Cabaret (Palace, 1968) opposite Judi Dench. But it took Last
of the Summer Wine, which started four years later, to project his kind of mild, thoughtful acting with its emphasis on men without much personality.
Television allowed Sallis to spread himself to full effect. His first appearance had been in 1948 at Alexandra Palace, where he took various roles in children’s programmes. He went on to appear as Pepys in The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1959), as the scientist Penley in Doctor Who, “The Ice Warriors” (1967), in The Pallisers (1974), and in episodes of Softly, Softly and Tales of the Unexpected among many others.
Just as he was about to play Clegg, however, two young students, Peter Lord and David Sproxton, were experimenting with stop-motion animating techniques on their kitchen table. In 1972 they co-founded Aardman Animations, and as graduates four years later they relocated to Bristol to begin a career in “claymation”. Nick Park, then fresh from the National Film and Television School, joined them in 1985.
His half-finished piece, A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (1989), had been in production for two years, and he had already approached Sallis asking that he record a voice. “Then, in 1989,” Sallis recalled, “the telephone rang and a voice said: ‘Hello, it’s me, it’s Nick Park. Remember me?’” They spent an afternoon in a Soho studio, recording what Park called “oohs and ahs” – the wordless exclamations of delight, fear and horror that soon characterised Wallace’s responses in future misadventures. The film won a Bafta award.
Park’s next film, The Wrong Trousers (1993), won an Academy Award, though the painstaking nature of claymation meant that Sallis was not necessarily popular at Aardman. He recalled a confrontation with an animator at a preview for The Wrong Trousers; exasperated after countless hours bringing Wallace to life frameby-frame, the man cried: “If I hear that voice of yours once more, I’ll break your bloody neck!” A third film, A
Close Shave, followed in 1995.
Wallace and Gromit’s first fulllength outing, The Curse of the Wererabbit (2005), won another Oscar. In 2008 Sallis starred in a new Wallace and Gromit adventure, A Matter of Loaf and Death. Two years later he furnished the voice for Wallace in the television miniseries Wallace and Gromit’s World of Invention.
His other films, often reprising his “little-man” role, included Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1960, Charlie Bubbles (1967), Inadmissible Evidence (1968) and Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970).
His autobiography Fading into the Limelight appeared in 2006. Sallis was appointed OBE for services to drama the following year.
A man of extreme shyness, he lived at a riverside house in Richmond, Surrey, where in retirement he enjoyed painting and gardening.
Peter Sallis and his actress wife, Elaine Usher, whom he married in 1957, separated 16 times before divorcing, and later remarried. She died in 2016. Their son, Crispian, is a film designer.