In a long career as a character actor, Geoffrey Chater came to personify Middle England. With an intuitive feel for bourgeois sensibilities, he portrayed establishment figures that ranged from barristers and bank managers to stockbrokers and a Tory minister. He was solid and dependable on and off screen. In Brideshead Revisited he was a British consul and in Sir Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi he played the chairman of the inquiry into the Amritsar massacre.
Perhaps his most memorable performance came in If . . . , Lindsay Anderson’s savage 1968 satire about an insurrection at a boys’ public school, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Chater played the school chaplain who was shot and bayoneted by his nemesis, Malcolm McDowell, as the leader of the juvenile revolt, and was then seen in the film’s most iconic scene, appearing from inside the drawer of the headmaster’s desk to shake hands with his murderer.
Five years later he teamed up with Anderson and McDowell again in O Lucky Man! (1973), a comic allegory on capitalism and a kind of sequel to If . . . . in which he was promoted from chaplain to bishop.
One of his most popular roles came in the 1980s television series Mapp and Lucia adapted from EF Benson’s books and starring Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan in the title roles. Chater played the immaculately correct and courteous Algernon Wyse, pottering about magnificently in monocle, plus-fours and floppy bow tie.
Give or take the wardrobe department’s period touches, he gave every impression that he was in his element and was barely acting at all. He was also on home turf: the series was filmed in Rye on the East Sussex coast and while they were on location, Chater delighted in entertaining cast and crew to lunches and dinners at his home in the nearby village of Iden, where he lived for more than half a century.
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Like a real-life Algernon, he was president of the Iden Bowls Club and read the morning lesson at services at the local church until the 2020 lockdown. When he wasn’t being the heart and soul of village life, he could often be found, proverbial plus-fours rolled up to his knees, shrimping in the sea off Camber Sands.
The characters he played were often mildly pompous and fuddy-duddy, but he could do vulnerable or disdainful as required. With his amiable, good-natured face, trusting smile and occasional scowl and curled lip, he carried it all off with poise and an ineffable decency.
If Chater was never quite a household name, his face was certainly familiar in the nation’s sitting rooms and his curriculum vitae listed appearances in more than 150 television shows. His credits included Dixon Of Dock Green, Dad’s Army, Rumpole of the Bailey, One Foot in the Grave and The Bill.
A passionate cricket enthusiast and a long-time member of MCC, he enjoyed playing in his younger days in charity matches alongside cricketing greats such as Denis Compton. On his 90th birthday he held a luncheon at Lord’s for his Iden friends, who on arrival at the ground were greeted with a message on the scoreboard showing his four score years and ten followed by the words “not out”. He had hoped for a similar celebration when he reached his century but lockdown forced the fixture to be abandoned.
He once joked that as he grew older, the pavilion stewards moved him to the aged members’ row and that as each of his fellow cricket enthusiasts died off, he got perilously closer to the edge of the bench.
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Geoffrey Michael Chater Robinson was born in Barnet, Hertfordshire in 1921 to showbusiness parents. His father, Lawrence Chater Robinson, was a composer of music for dance bands and his mother, Peggy, was an actress who used the stage name Gwendoline Gwynne. It was seeing her in The Wind and The Rain at London’s St Martin’s Theatre when he was 11 that persuaded him that he wanted to follow her on to the stage.
Educated at Marlborough College, he signed up in 1940 to join the Royal Fusiliers. He went on to serve as a captain in India and Burma, where he wrote and performed in revues for the troops.
Chater never spoke of the atrocities he saw committed by the Japanese during the Burma campaign. His favourite war story involved having to demonstrate to his battalion how to pack a mule without being kicked and the amusement of his comrades when the beast ruined the script by sending him flying through the air.
On his return to “Civvy Street” in 1946, he shortened his surname and went into weekly rep, paying his dues at theatres in Windsor, Hereford and Birmingham. He made both his West End and television debuts in 1951. However, most of his subsequent TV credits were one-off roles, for he eschewed long-running parts, fearing that they would interfere with his first love, which was the theatre.
Chater’s stage roles ranged eclectically from Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to Noël Coward and Terrence Rattigan and he appeared prolifically at the Old Vic, the RSC, the Royal Court and the National Theatre.
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He is survived by his wife, Jennifer (née Hill), whom he married in 1949, and by their children Annabel, Simon and Piers.
His final appearance came in 2005 in Midsomer Murders, before he retired to Iden to the bowls club and to read the lessons at his beloved All Saints Church in a theatrical voice that never lost its lustre.
Geoffrey Chater, actor, was born on March 23, 1921. He died on October 16, 2021, aged 100