ANTHONY HEAD

(20 February 1954 – 1 June 2026)

It is not every actor who can owe a fruitful career to a TV commercial. In the Nescafé Gold Blend commercials, which aired for six years from 1987, Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan had an ongoing, onscreen romance over their instant coffee. It sounds corny but it worked as viewers got hooked on their developing relationship – and it probably didn’t harm the sales of the premium beverage, either. Since then Anthony Head will probably be best remembered for playing Sarah Michelle Gellar’s mentor and surrogate father figure in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon’s supernatural coming-of-age series ran for six years from 1997.

Anthony Stewart Head was born in Camden Town, London, to Seafield Head, a documentary filmmaker, and the actress Helen Shingler. He has an older brother, the actor and singer Murray Head, most famous for his on-screen kiss with Peter Finch in the Oscar-nominated Sunday Bloody Sunday, and for singing the chart-topping ‘One Night in Bangkok’ from the Tim Rice musical Chess. Anthony was educated at Sunbury Grammar School in Surrey and then enrolled at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Coming from a family of entertainers, he knew from the age of six that he wanted to be an actor. One of his first theatrical appearances was in Godspell in 1978 and in the same year he began to appear on television. Before Buffy came along, he starred as Frank-N-Furter in a West End revival of The Rocky Horror Show and then in Las Vegas. After the success of Gold Blend and Buffy his future seemed assured. Much TV work followed, on both sides of the Atlantic, one of his more recent successes being Ted Lasso, in which he played the smarmy Rupert Mannion, former owner of the football club Richmond F.C.

His first feature film was Just Jaeckin’s adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1981) in which he played a German party guest. He was in Mike Hodges’ IRA drama A Prayer for the Dying with Mickey Rourke and Bob Hoskins, in Woody Allen’s crime romance Scoop with Woody, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson, Craig Ferguson’s I’ll Be There with Charlotte Church, Imagine Me & You, Oliver Parker’s romcom with Piper Perabo, as well as Repo! The Genetic Opera by Darren Lynn Bousman, The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and Head playing her deputy Geoffrey Howe, the fantasy adventure Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters and Let the Wrong One In, an Irish horror comedy. His last film was Upgraded (2024), an Amazon Prime romcom in which he was on scene-stealing form. He may not have had many leading roles in major film productions but he was always in work thanks to that self-confessed twinkle in his eye and a little nudge from Nescafé.

Anthony Head met his life partner, the animal welfare advocate Sara Fisher, in 1982. They never married but stayed together until Sarah died in 2025. They had two daughters, Emily and Daisy. Anthony died, aged 72, following complications with pneumonia. 

MICHAEL DARVELL