FLORID-FACED, bewhiskered and with a rich fruity voice, Frank Middlemass was one of Britain’s finest character actors. In a career that spanned more than 50 years, he appeared in seasons with the Old Vic and Royal Shakespeare companies, starred in numerous TV dramas and was best known on radio as Dan Archer in The Archers.
In the 1980s he won critical acclaim for his portrayal as the bumbling headmaster Algy Herries in Andrew Davies’s television adaptation of To Serve Them All My Days and more recently he gained a new generation of fans as Rocky Hardcastle, the unpredictable father of Geoffrey Palmer’s character in the TV sitcom As Time Goes By (1993-2005), opposite Judi Dench.
Middlemass, widely respected throughout the profession, was much in demand for TV costume dramas. He was a splendidly eccentric Uncle Pumblechook in the mini-series Great Expectations (1989) and he also played Mr Brownlow in Oliver Twist (1985). He was also memorable as Lord Derby in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981).
Frank Middlemass was born in 1919 in Eaglecliffe, Yorkshire, and educated at Stockton-on-Tees. After nine years in the Army, during which he was wounded at Dunkirk and rose to the rank of lieutenant- colonel, he began his acting career in rep, followed by seasons with the Old Vic companies in Bristol and London. With both companies he toured extensively abroad.
At Bristol he played Polonius, Friar Laurence and Pompey in Measure for Measure, and he was Toby Belch to Vivien Leigh’s Viola in Twelfth Night for the Old Vic Company which toured Australia and New Zealand in 1961. The tour proved to be fraught, largely because of Leigh’s insecurity and manic depression, but Middlemass struck up a close friendship with the star and on her birthday wrote and performed a spoof This Is Your Life sketch.
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Middlemass went on to become one of the West End’s most sought-after character actors. In 1968 he appeared in Little Boxes (Duchess Theatre), a double bill by John Bowen. In Trevor, the second play, his incredulity when, as a conventional father his daughter announced that she was living with a woman, was both tragic and comic. The following year at Nottingham Playhouse, and later the Old Vic, he was the Fool to Michael Hordern’s Lear in a superb production by Jonathan Miller, which was also televised.
Other notable stage roles included the Headmaster in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, Billy Rice in The Entertainer and the drunken Ulric Brendel in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1977), in which he was flamboyant in his speech and shabby in his attire. He memorably stole the notices when he played the solicitor, Finch M’Comas, in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell (Lyric, Hammersmith 1979).
When he joined the RSC he again played Polonius and he also returned to Friar Laurence, played Quince, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
He later appeared in the British premieres of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound (Greenwich 1991) and Tina Howe’s Painting Churches (Southampton 1991) and in 1992 he played George Booth in the Edinburgh Festival Production of Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance (Royal Lyceum). In 1996 he was Uncle Willie in The Philadelphia Story (Manchester Royal Exchange) and two years later was the Narrator in the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods (Donmar Warehouse). At 84 he was still touring the country, appearing as a wonderfully eccentric Canon Chasuble in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Middlemass had appeared in many radio dramas but achieved national fame in 1982 when he was cast as the fourth and final Dan Archer in The Archers. “Dan was killed off after a fatal attempt to rescue a sheep,” mused Middlemass. “You would have thought he’d have known better.”
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His television career began in the early 1950s in series such as Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green, and he also starred in early live TV dramas. By the 1980s he was one of television’s busiest actors, appearing in a host of series including The Avengers, Soldier Soldier, Dr Finlay, Miss Marple and others. In 1992 he was one of the original cast of the crime series Heartbeat, playing Dr Alex Ferrenby for 21 episodes. “I very much regret being killed off in Heartbeat,” he said. “It was one of my favourite roles.” In 1993 he played Clive Parrott in the series A Year in Provence, opposite John Thaw.
Middlemass’s film appearances were few but they were usually in distinguished productions such as Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), in which he played Sir Charles Lyndon, and the award-winning Second World War drama, One Against the Wind (1991), starring Judy Davis.
For many years Middlemass shared a flat with the actor Geoffrey Toone (obituary, June 3, 2005).
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Frank Middlemass, actor, was born on May 28, 1919. He died on September 8, 2006, aged 87.