Whenever Peter Bowles felt despondent he repaired to the nearest church to pray. He did that one day in 1975 and the following morning received two offers: Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends at the Garrick Theatre and The Good Life on BBC television, playing Jerry Leadbetter opposite Penelope Keith’s Margo.
Assuming he could not do both, he turned down The Good Life, which went to Paul Eddington. “I desperately wanted to get back into the theatre,” he explained, adding that he had tired of bit-parts on television. It was left to Richard Briers, who did both shows, to explain that he could have doubled up because the BBC filming was on Sundays. “Every week Briers used to show me his television cheques,” he lamented.
Before long Bowles had landed the role that would make his name: Richard DeVere, a recently widowed self-made millionaire, in the sitcom To the Manor Born (1979-1981). DeVere had bought the manor house on the Grantleigh estate from the newly widowed Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, played by Keith, whose reduced circumstances had forced her to move into the estate’s Old Lodge. Despite de Vere’s gentlemanly airs, fforbes-Hamilton regarded him as simply a “grocer”; worse, his real name was Bedrich Polouvicek and he had come to Britain in 1939. The pair’s love-hate relationship ran for 20 episodes, as well as Christmas specials in 1979 and 1997, with viewing figures averaging a remarkable 23 million per episode.
“The whole thing was a success,” recalled Bowles. “Success brings confidence and when you have confidence people begin to listen to what you say.” Yet there was a sting in the tail: a producer warned that he would never again work in drama: “He said, quite seriously, that I had ‘joined the other side’ and there was no going back.” It proved not to be the case.
Although Bowles was cast in other country squire parts such as Major Sinclair Yeates in The Irish RM (1983-85) and Guthrie Featherstone QC in Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-92), during his career he played almost every variety of role: he was David Hemmings’s agent in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) starring Vanessa Redgrave; the newspaper diarist Neville Lytton in Lytton’s Diary (1985-86), a show he devised for Thames TV; and Archie Rice in the 1986 revival of John Osborne’s The Entertainer at the Shaftesbury Theatre.
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Yet just when Bowles had perfected his upper-class gent guise, theatre and television became afflicted by the need for actors with street cred and grit. “Oh well,” he would sigh. “I’m just an elderly actor who remembers happier days.”
Peter John Bowles was born in London in 1936, the son of Herbert Bowles and his wife Sarah (née Harrison) who had been in service with the Earl of Sandwich and the Beaverbrook household respectively. He had a younger sister, Patricia, who in 2007 was appointed MBE for her work with the NHS in Lincolnshire. By the time of Peter’s birth his father was chauffeur to Captain David Margesson, leader of the Commons, who had a manor house in Warwickshire; the Bowles family lived in a thatched cottage in the grounds.
During the war Herbert, who could strip and rebuild a Rolls-Royce engine, worked at the company’s factory at Hucknall, near Nottingham. The family eventually moved into a council house with an outside lavatory and a tin bath and Bowles grew up believing “that I should always show respect for my betters”, a trait he believed “held me back terribly”. When his star eventually rose he bought himself a Rolls-Royce because “I wanted to show Dad I could buy my own cars”.
He was educated at High Pavement grammar school, where his ambition was to be a dentist “but only because they earned the magical £1,000 a year”. He appeared as Mark Antony in a school staging of Julius Caesar with John Bird, the future satirist, as Brutus. It led to a smaller role in a professional production at Nottingham Playhouse starring Derek Godfrey as Antony. On opening night Godfrey dried up in the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech and Bowles tried to prompt him, but at the interval was “given the worst dressing down of my life”.
After hearing that John Turner, another old boy, had gone to Rada, Bowles made inquiries and was admitted with a scholarship to cover his fees. “Before that I didn’t even know one could get paid for acting,” he said. He won an award as most promising actor of the year, while his mother worked nights to help with his living expenses.
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His cohort included Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates and Albert Finney, with whom he shared a flat in north London. It was highly competitive. “They threw down the gauntlet and said, ‘That’s my Macbeth. Beat that’.” Yet his background made him conform. “While the others were all developing into rebels, I came out perfectly trained for Rattigan drawing-room comedies of the kind that they stopped doing in the year I was first looking for work,” he said.
While his colleagues were destined for early stardom, he spent more than two decades in supporting roles, playing old men on stage and urbane villains in television episodes of The Avengers and The Saint. During his live television debut, the Armchair Theatre play Underground (1958), his fellow actor Gareth Jones suffered a heart attack and died off camera leaving the rest of the cast to improvise.
As a young man Bowles enjoyed female company, celebrating his 20th birthday by being driven around New York in a convertible by “a delightful strawberry blonde”. He also had a girlfriend called Wendy who later became “Australia’s strongest woman”. While playing an 80-year-old butler at Bristol Old Vic he was reunited with Susan Bennett, a Rada contemporary who was the leading lady, and they were married in 1961.
She later described the moment he proposed. “He asked me out to lunch — which was lovely. And at lunch he asked me out for a drink after the show. And after the show he asked me to marry him.” The couple had two sons, Guy, an investment manager, and Adam, a businessman, and a daughter, Sasha, who is an artist. “Every time we meet, I kiss them and tell them that I love them, and they do the same to me,” he said. In a profession littered with divorces his was a stable marriage, though not without its temptations. “I have had women breaking into my house and into my hotel bedrooms,” he once said, adding that he never succumbed.
Bowles’s first agent told him that he would not make it until he was 40. In fact, he was 41 when he landed his first leading role, as the upper-class patient Archie Glover in Only When I Laugh. Even that was not enough and he was about to leave Britain to become artistic director of a theatre in Adelaide when, aged 44, To the Manor Born made him a household name overnight. “The next morning I walked to my local newsagents, people waved at me and cars and lorries sounded their horns at me,” he said. Walking on to the West End stage that evening “I got a huge round of applause”.
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In 1992 Simon Gray wrote the comedy Running Late for Bowles in which he played a TV interviewer who gets his comeuppance one day when his life falls apart: “Days later I’m walking along Piccadilly, and run into Peter Hall, who says he enjoyed Running Late and adds, ‘I’d very much like to work with you’ — what a pickup line! — ‘Would you like to work with me?’ ” Hall offered him a part in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and so began their close association.
Fans of Bowles’s toff characters were legion, while his diffidence never entirely disappeared. On one occasion he had just ordered a ham sandwich in a hotel bar when Quentin Tarantino introduced himself, declared himself a fan and invited Bowles to supper. “I said, ‘That’s so kind of you but I’ve just ordered a sandwich’. So he said, ‘OK, we’ll take a rain check’, and walked off. Afterwards I thought, ‘What on earth have I done, turning down supper with Tarantino?’ ” Another time he learnt that his agent had inadvertently declined an invitation from Marlon Brando.
Bowles lived near Barnes Common, west London, in a house that, like its occupier, was tall and elegant. Despite being colour blind, he had decorated it with modern British paintings including a couple of Hockneys. In the high-walled garden, with its babbling brook, was a striking mural by his daughter.
He was taught to drive in 1962 by Kay Petre, a formidable competitor in 1930s British motor racing, and had been a keep-fit enthusiast since taking a Charles Atlas body-building course at the age of 11. Yet he remained an anxious hypochondriac and his memoir, published in 2010, was titled Ask Me if I’m Happy: An Actor’s Life.
It was not only despondency that set Bowles praying. In 2005 he was playing Rattigan meeting Joe Orton in Joe and I at the King’s Head Theatre, north London, and went into the church opposite. As he later recalled, he needed to ask for God’s help “because I was so nervous at having to strip off in the love-making scene”.
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Peter Bowles, actor, was born on October 16, 1936. He died of cancer on March 17, 2022, aged 85