As the loud but endearing butcher Fred Elliott in Coronation Street, one could tell that John Savident had a broader hinterland than the average television soap actor. There was the booming voice acquired from his years in the theatre, and what the TV critic Grace Dent described as his ability when delivering the most workaday line to “add a wobble of the head or a camp tap of the fag that somehow made it profound”.
Savident switched effortlessly from comedy to pathos as his character pursued a disastrous love life, which included three marriages, an unrequited adoration of the hairdresser Audrey Roberts, played by Sue Nicholls, and a tendency to propose to every woman he set eyes upon.
“That was the beauty of working on the Street — one week there’d be comedy and the next you’d be reaching for your hanky,” he said.
His portrayal was old-school character acting at its best. He transcended the scripts and brought much of himself to the part, developing Fred as a man who would never use one word when ten would do and who said everything twice.
It was an idea partly borrowed from the Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn but was also based on his own upbringing in the Lancashire mill town of Ashton-under-Lyne in the immediate postwar years. The millworkers had to shout and repeat themselves to be heard above the noise of the looms and he noticed that the habit persisted outside the factory gates — everything was said twice.
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“The girls would come out of the factories with cotton fluff everywhere and the repetition got into normal usage,” he recalled. “So I started to put it into Fred’s speech. People would say, ‘Are you allowed to do that?’ But I said ‘bugger that!’”
Having introduced the mannerism, he joked that the show’s producers should pay him double because they were getting twice the number of words for their money.
Although his natural intonation was a clipped version of RP, he also added Lancastrian dialect words and phrases he had heard in his youth and created the catchphrase “I say”, which he turned into an instantly identifiable soundbite.
By the time he joined Coronation Street in 1994, he already had three decades of theatrical experience behind him in which he had played in everything from Restoration comedy to The Student Prince, trod the boards at the National Theatre and the Old Vic and appeared at the Chichester Festival with Sir Laurence Olivier.
He stayed on the Street for 12 years as one of its best-loved characters until he told the producers he wanted to leave, tired of living in a flat in Manchester all week while Rona (née Hopkinson), his wife of more than 60 years, and their two children, Romany and Daniel, were living in the home counties. He had met Rona, a teacher and later theatre director, when they played husband and wife as amateurs in Rochdale. She survives him with their children.
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He asked that in his last appearance in 2006, Fred should be written out by dying peacefully in his bed. The scriptwriters insisted on a more dramatic exit in which he dropped dead on his wedding day to Bev Unwin, played by Susie Blake, as Audrey finally confessed her love for him.
In 2000, at the height of his Coronation Street fame, he hit the headlines when he was stabbed by a man he met in a gay bar after making a personal appearance for World Aids Day. The man had claimed to be a drama student and Savident asked him back to his flat “to talk theatre”. He overpowered the actor with a knife, told him, “I bet you’ve never met a schizo before” and demanded his wallet and the keys to his classic Morgan sports car.
When Savident resisted, the man stabbed him twice in the throat. Savident managed to lock him out and to call the police before losing consciousness. He came round in hospital and his assailant was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Savident’s start in life had been as dramatic. He was born in 1938 in St Peter Port, Guernsey, the only son of John, a fisherman, and his Swiss wife, Karoline (née Pfrinder). His father was interned when the Nazis occupied the island in 1940. He managed to escape and flee with his family in a fishing boat to Britain, settling first in Huddersfield and then Ashton.
On leaving school he joined the Manchester police as a cadet in the same intake as John Stalker, the future deputy chief constable, whom he once rescued from a beating by fighting off a gang of barrow-boys.
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Savident became a keen member of amateur dramatic societies and after seven years in the police he left to concentrate full-time on his acting, making his professional debut as the Demon King in pantomime in Stoke-on-Trent.
Other roles over the years included small parts in the films A Clockwork Orange, Gandhi and The Remains of the Day and on the small screen in The Avengers, Doctor Who and Yes Minister, in which he played the Foreign Office mandarin “Jumbo” Stewart.
He also played Monsieur Firmin, the owner of the opera house in the original 1986 stage version of Phantom of the Opera, and was due to play Robert Maxwell in a West End musical about the newspaper tycoon until the show was cancelled for legal reasons three days before the opening night.
After leaving Coronation Street he returned to the theatre. He remained a great raconteur — one of his favourite stories involved encountering a woman in Harrods with a familiar face but whose name he could not recall. Convinced that they must have worked together, he asked what she was appearing in. It was Princess Margaret.
John Savident, actor, was born on January 21, 1938. He died after a long illness on February 21, 2024, aged 86