Tony Britton
Actor of stage, film and TV best known for his suave good humour in sitcoms such as Don’t Wait Up
TONY BRITTON, the actor, who has died aged 95, was for six decades a figure exuding light and theatrical charm on the stage, in films and on television. His finest moment in the theatre was probably as Colonel von Schmettau opposite Celia Johnson in William Douglas Home’s The Dame of Sark, which told the story of the Channel Island under wartime occupation and played at Wyndham’s for six months in 1974.
Douglas Home had wanted Sir John Clements for the part, but when he saw Britton conceded that “no choice could have been better made”. Britton was convincing as the benign aristocratic anti-nazi German Commandant.
He got on well with Dame Celia (as she became), who found him cosy, kind and sympathetic. She invited him to read poetry in Nettlebed church. They reprised the roles two years later for an Anglia Television production.
With easy, warm authority Britton also made a hit of the role of Professor Higgins in two long-running and much travelled revivals of My Fair Lady. In the mid 1960s he toured the provinces for two and a half years, and in the late 1970s undertook a four-year run through Britain and Canada, ending in the West End. He was nominated for a Society of West End Theatre Award for best actor in a musical.
Of this production the critic BA Young wrote: “Mr Britton gives a beautifully acid performance of that arrogant artificer, his awareness of others totally lost beneath his devotion to his professional pursuits.”
Anthony Edward Lowry Britton was born in a room above a pub in Birmingham on June 9 1924 and educated at Edgbaston Collegiate School, Birmingham, and Thornbury Grammar School in Gloucestershire. He began work in an estate agent’s office and then an aircraft company, and made his first professional appearance as an actor when he was 18, in Esther Mccracken’s Quiet Weekend at Westonsuper-mare, in 1942. During the war he served in the Royal Artillery.
Post-war, he was in repertory theatre before his first West End appearance as Ramases in Christopher Fry’s The Firstborn at London’s Winter Garden Theare in 1952. He followed this playing Vizard in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple when Alec Clunes ran the Winter Garden.
In 1953 Britton joined Anthony Quayle’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford, where he stayed for two seasons. Kenneth Tynan singled out his performance in The Merchant of Venice as Bassanio, “an attractive scamp”, opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Portia, “a cool Zephyr”.
Thereafter Britton acted in whatever came along, be it a farce, Shaw or Shakespeare. He specialised in pseudo-gents, military types and clergymen, his wavy hair dyed a soft marmalade colour, and was sufficiently self-confident to advertise himself with no photo in Spotlight, normally the prerogative of the great stars. But as later he gained popularity in light television comedies, he found himself isolated from more rewarding classical stage roles.
He played in The Night of the Ball in the West End in 1955, and Gigi with Leslie Caron the next year. After a season with the Old Vic, in Chekhov’s The Seagull, and as Henry Percy in Henry IV Part 1, he was an absent-minded ornithologist on a murder charge in Kill Two Birds at St Martin’s Theatre in 1962.
Other theatrical roles included Julian in Cactus Flower, Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance (both 1967), Roger
Lawrence in Ronald Gow’s derivation from Henry James, A Boston Story (1968), Mr Paradine in Somerset Maugham’s Lady Frederick (1970), the husband in Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s farce, Move Over Mrs Markham (1971) and the flirtatious guardian uncle of the heroine in No, No, Nanette in 1973. He appeared in The Chairman (1976), The Bells of Hell (1977) and Murder Among Friends (1978), later rejoining Anthony Quayle’s Compass Theatre to take more serious roles in classics such as Saint Joan, The Tempest and King Lear (in which he played Gloucester to Quayle’s King).
After more provincial tours, Britton began a long link with the Chichester Festival, in A Man For All Seasons (as Sir Thomas More, 1987), The Silver King (1990), Tovarich (1991), Henry VIII (as Cardinal Wolsey, 1991), and Getting Married (as the Bishop of Chelsea, 1993). He also directed three plays at Chichester – An Ideal Husband, Hay Fever and Molière’s The Sisterhood.
In the 1950s Britton had featured in films such as the low-budget Salute The Toff (1952) and – for the revitalised British Lion company – he took leading roles in the legal drama The Birthday Present (1957) and Behind the Mask (1958), about hospital surgeons.
Operation Amsterdam (1959), a forgettable war film in which he played a British intelligence officer, led him into friendship with Peter Finch, who would sleep on Britton’s sofa on rough evenings, “curled up like a foetus”, and whom Britton visited in a nursing home when he collapsed.
The association brought Britton a reputation as something of a hellraiser, as he caroused round London in the wake of Finch and Trevor Howard, investing most of his money in a Fulham Road wine shop. In later life he would muse on “fast cars, women, nightclubs”, adding with a sigh: “I had a great time!”
Among Britton’s other films were The Rough and the Smooth (he veered towards the smooth) in 1959 and The Break in 1963. He brought dignity to the part of Roger Danvers’s (Peter Sellers’s) agent, Andrew, in There’s A Girl in My Soup in 1970, his conservative character unnerved by the all-american Goldie Hawn.
In Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) Britton was a sad middle-aged businessman to whom Glenda Jackson resorted for desultory sex. In The Day of the Jackal (1973) he essayed a regional accent for the bluff Inspector Thomas.
On television Britton established himself in sitcoms. In 1969 he had a small role in the second series of Father, Dear Father, in which Patrick Cargill starred as an urbane thriller writer, beset with problems created by his daughters. He played Joss Spencer in And Mother Makes Five with Wendy Craig and Richard Coleman (1974-76). Then in Robin’s Nest from 1977 to 1981 he played the disapproving father of Vicky (Tessa Wyatt, in real life the runaway wife of the disc jockey Tony Blackburn), who opened a bistro with her boyfriend (Richard O’sullivan).
For Arthur Hopcraft’s ITV play The Nearly Man (1974, followed by an inferior series), in which he played a middle-aged, middleclass Labour MP at odds with his constituents, he was nominated for a Bafta. Among his other TV credits were Romeo and Juliet, The Six Proud Walkers, Melissa and Strangers and Brothers.
Britton’s most enduring role on television was in Don’t Wait Up on BBC One from 1983 to 1990. He played Dr Toby Latimer, who had separated from his wife Angela (Dinah Sheridan) and moved in with his son (Nigel Havers). The series achieved good ratings in the mid-evening slot. Again on the BBC, he starred as the eminent but vain actor, Vivian Bancroft, lording it over his young wife (Susan Hampshire) in Don’t Tell Father, which fizzled out after one series in 1992.
In later life Britton read a number of Dick Francis novels for audiobook recordings. He was an habitué of the Garrick Club, and will be remembered as the father of Fern Britton, presenter of Ready, Steady, Cook and This Morning.
Britton was married twice, first to Ruth Hawkins, the mother of his two daughters. After their divorce he married a Danish sculptress, Eva Birkefeldt, with whom he had a son.
Tony Britton, born June 9 1924, died December 22 2019