Bounder, criminal, evil. Dandy, Duke or Diplomat. Peter Bowles, who died of cancer at the age of 85, could be all of these incarnations and often two or three of them at once.
Always distinguished and highly regarded, Bowles himself gruffly admitted that he was not a “star” until he, at the age of 43, played Richard DeVere, the former Kostermonger became Supermarket Tycoon, in the BBC hit comedy series To the Manor Born (1979-81). ), written by Peter Spence, in which he confirmed the meanings and high social status of Penelope Keith’s not-so-funny widow Audrey fforbes-Hamilton.
The sure premise of a classic class-conscious comedy was that Audrey, obsessed with debt and death, was forced to retire and build a home in the lodge on her own property, now in the possession of a monstrous arrivalist. The ripples of resentment, compromise, and green sessions of hearts combined were the fuel of two brilliant comic performances; while Keith had already achieved national stardom in The Good Life – Bowles refused the role taken in that series by Paul Eddington – this was his moment, and he embraced it with pleasure.
Subsequently, he sporadically appeared on the West End stage as an authentic leading actor, and initiated, often as a co-advisor, or “Original Idea” supplier, a series of major television series including Only When I Laugh (1979-82), in which he played with James Bolam and Christopher Strauli as one of three troublesome hospital patients under the supervision of Richard Wilson’s irascible doctor; The Irish RM (1983-85), in which he played a tetchily-disposed Army Major serving as resident magistrate in Ireland (“Bowles Saves Channel 4” ran a headline after it opened to rave reviews and big faces); and Perfect Scoundrels (1990-92), with Bowles and Bryan Murray playing sympathetic Conmen, the Robin Hoods of recent days chosen only deserving victims.
The phenomenon of a posh evil or cultured cad was nothing new. But Bowles could suggest complications over the superficial suave. He often paraded his charm as a veil for real menace or nastiness, as well as Spivvery, and there was always a hint of phoniness around the smooth-talking self-assurance. Even on stage or off-set, he was always impeccably dressed in pronounced pin-stripes and high, starched collars.
This was a result of his background. Both his parents were in the housekeeping, but only, as they had said before, on the quality. An only child, Bowles was born in Upper Boddington, Northamptonshire, 12 miles from Banbury, to Sarah Jane (nee Harrison) and Herbert Bowles. Herbert was the valet of Drogo Montagu, son of the Earl of Sandwich, while Sarah was a nanny for Lady Jeanne Campbell, Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter, whose mother married the Duke of Argyll.
In 1940 the Bowleses moved to a two-up, two-down (with outside toilet) in Nottingham, where Herbert now worked for Rolls-Royce and Peter was educated at the High Pavement Grammar School, also alma mater of Comedian John Bird. Encouraged by his own aptitude and schooling, following the example of two former students, Philip Voss and John Turner, who both successfully entered the acting profession, Bowles secured a scholarship to Rada in London.
He shared an apartment with Albert Finney (other contemporaries including Peter O’Toole, Richard Briers and Alan Bates) and he won the Kendal Prize; he and Finney were promptly signed by the top US talent agency MCA.
Bowles made his professional debut in Julius Caesar’s Nottingham Rep in 1955 and made his debut the following year in London and New York in Romeo and Juliet (in the small role of Abraham) with Old Vic, where he soon became friends with his future friends. Colleagues James did. Villiers and Bryan Pringle.
He thought he had found his way to classical theater distinction at the Royal Court in 1960, when he appeared in John Arden’s This Happy Haven (as the only unmasked character) and with Rex Harrison in Chekhov’s Platonov. The Arden game was led by William Gaskill, who also led classes in movement, masks, improvisation, and game construction, which Bowles loved. When Gaskill was appointed as Associate Director in the new National Theater by Laurence Olivier, Bowles asked Gaskill to take him on with other Royal Court actors, such as Joan Plowright, Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely, but Gaskill refused.
Newly married, in 1961, to actor Susan Bennett, and soon to start a family, he starred in film and television, leaving the theater for 11 years after appearing briefly with Coral Browne (in Bonne Soupe at Wyndham’s in 1961) and in a De Séan O’Casey plays at the Mermaid. He appeared as a film gangster in Ken Annakin’s black and white The Informers (1963), followed by four major screen projects: Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), starring David Hemmings (who played a photographer) and Vanessa Redgrave; Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), also starring Hemmings and Redgrave, as well as Trevor Howard and John Gielgud; Richardson’s Laughter in the Dark (1969), adapted from Edward Bond by Vladimir Nabokov, in which the wife of a blind art dealer gets her lover to move in with them (Nicol Williamson replaces a dismissed Richard Burton during the shoot); and Peter Medak’s film from Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1970), in which he provided Alan Bates and Janet Suzman as parents of a disabled child with remarkable support as a well-meaning old school friend.
His last major film was Sidney Lumet’s The Offense (1973), in which Sean Connery had a great performance as a flaky cop, interviewing a child abuse suspect (Ian Bannen) in a psychodrama adapted by John Hopkins from his own stage play This Story of Är.
Two decades of the television star were introduced from the start, in 1976, by a 16-year association with Rumpole of the Bailey as Guthrie Featherstone QC MP and a much-loved episode of Rising Damp, with Leonard Rossiter, in 1977, in which he crossed out as a Cravat-wearing playwright named Hilary, shares his flirtatious “rehearsal” attention between Frances de la Tour and a long-haired Richard Beckinsale.
He returned to the theater in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends (1975) in Garrick, humiliated by his wife (Pat Heywood), pushed to the limit by a sad and boring friend (Briers), and in 1976 had his lunch for six months. with a witty tour as North Country Labor MP in Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Lines at Almost Free on Rupert Street before being handed over – to run for seven years – to the arts.
He played another, more erratic, Labor deputy in Nichols’ Born in the Gardens at the Globe (now the Yellow God) opposite Beryl Reid as his soothing mother, and received a resounding plaudits as Archie Rice in John Osborne his The Entertainer at the Shaftesbury in 1986, even though the character’s bad side had died slightly.
He was much more at home than the macho medallion man Vic Parks, an armed robber became television prom, in Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment at the Globe (now Yellow God) in 1990, unforgettable ways with the have-a-go hero of his. Crime in a suburban bank branch, Michael Gambon’s lolloping clerical nonentity.
The morning after the broadcast of Running Late (1992), a beautiful Simon Gray drama in which he played a television inquisitor that dissolved in his personal life, Bowles met director Peter Hall, who invited him to his Company in a 1993 revival of Dem Terence Rattigan’s separate tables in the Albery (now Noël Coward). His double of Rattigan’s devastated newspaper columnist in a game and furtive group of women in cinemas (“It must be in the dark, and with strangers”) and the other has garnered tremendous critical acclaim and has had nine seasons of extraordinary work with Hall’s company announced, plays major roles in Molière and Shaw, Coward and Chekhov, in the Theater Royal, Bath, and in the West End.
He also appeared in this Indian summer of his stage career for producer Bill Kenwright in two popular warhorses, Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth and Frederick Knott’s Wait Until Dark, both re-imagining the lead roles as more sinister aspects of his smooth and threatening default setting. .
It was as if he had finally recovered from the disappointment of not joining the National 50 years earlier. He even had soft feuds with Penelope Keith in a Hall Revival of Sheridan’s The Rivals at Haymarket in 2011; while Keith imperiously dismissed her malapropisms, he slipped elegantly around the stage in smooth gray silk as a forbiddingly dyspeptic, rakish Sir Anthony Absolute. There was a slight decline in his last stage appearance as Father Merrin in a pointless but ingeniously staged version of The Exorcist at the Phoenix Theater in 2017. Pre-recorded voice of Ian McKellen as a demon.
Bowles, who collected British art and kept fit, he said, with “physical jerks”, was named Variety Club’s ITV Person of the Year in 1984 and awarded an honorary doctorate by Nottingham Trent University in 2002. He published an anecdotal memoir, Ask Me If I’m Happy (2010), and a handbook on what he called “the work of the play”, Behind the Curtain (2012).
He is survived by his wife, Susan, and their three children, Guy, Adam and Sasha.
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