(17 February 1937 - 28 September 2017)
The Oxford-born actor Benjamin Whitrow, who has died aged 80, was a great man of the theatre who also had a flourishing career on television and in films. Never the big star, he nevertheless graced any production with a passionate affection playing roles that had a certain authority or oddity about them. He had the great ability of turning caricatures into real characters. Beginning in the theatre in the late 1950s, Whitrow eventually joined the companies of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre at The Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Chichester Festival Theatre, appearing not only in many classic plays, but also in late 20th-century plays by the likes of Alan Bennett, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton, Simon Gray, Peter Nichols and David Hare, and he was even in Hecht & MacArthur’s The Front Page and Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Whitrow made a great impression on television in The Merchant of Venice, Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, Alan Bennett’s Afternoon Off, Harry’s Game, The New Statesman, and as Thomas Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, but was particularly memorable as Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1995). Whitrow’s entry into the cinema was an uncredited role in The Small World of Sammy Lee in 1963. Later on he was in Quadrophenia, Brimstone and Treacle and Clockwise, memorably playing John Cleese’s headmaster, then Personal Services, Hawks with Timothy Dalton, On the Black Hill, from the Bruce Chatwin novel, Louis Malle’s Damage, Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin, Michael Hoffman’s Restoration, Charles Sturridge’s Fairy Tale: A True Story, and he was the voice of Fowler in Chicken Run. Among his last work on TV were New Tricks, Wolf Hall and The Musketeers. Benjamin Whitrow was married to Catherine Cook with whom he had two children, Hannah and Thomas. He also fathered a son, Angus, with the actress Celia Imrie.
MICHAEL DARVELL
