Peter Vaughan, actor – obituary

Peter Vaughan, actor – obituary

Peter Vaughan,  the actor, who has died aged 93, was a masterly exponent of menace on stage, screen and television for more than half a century. 

His best-known television roles were that of “genial” Harry Grout (“Grouty”), the fearsome tobacco baron, in Porridge; the doting father of Wolfie Smith’s girlfriend in Citizen Smith; Tulkinghorn in the BBC’s 1985 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House; and latterly he reached a vast new international audience as Aemon Targaryen, the blind Maester of the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones.

Tall, burly, quietly spoken with a strong chin, thin lips and small, staring eyes set close and deep, Vaughan on stage had an arresting theatrical presence which never stooped to charm an audience, and usually made it nervous. Poise was the key to much of his success – a studied stillness to which he added a streak of the sinister. Hence his ability in certain dramas to drum up tension at a glance.

Peter Vaughan in 1967 in an episode of Armchair Theatre
Peter Vaughan in 1967 in an episode of Armchair Theatre Credit: Rex Features

He created not only a gallery of marginal characters whose nervous hold on the audience was unrelenting, if not chilling, but also a sense of mystery with his quiet, reserved manner. If he ever smiled, it seemed to veil a threat. His timing and movements took their cue from a faith in the art of pacing; he acted through pauses and silences and a kind of slow scowl which, in profile, made him resemble an eerie Mr Punch. 

Among Vaughan’s more memorably innocuous characters were Gladstone to Dorothy Tutin’s Queen Victoria in Portrait of a Queen (Bristol Old Vic and Vaudeville, 1965) and, nearly 30 years later, the silent, aged parent (Mr Stevens Senior) to Anthony Hopkins’s dedicated manservant in the film The Remains of the Day (1993). 

Peter Vaughan and Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day
Peter Vaughan and Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day Credit: SNAP/REX/Shutterstock

More typically unattractive of his stage portraits was his poisonously racist American juror (No 10) in Harold Pinter’s West End production of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men (Comedy, 1996). But the part with which made Vaughan’s name in the London theatre was that of the oily, overdressed Ed in Entertaining Mr Sloane (Arts and Wyndham’s, 1964).

Joe Orton’s second play famously drove The Daily Telegraph’s WA Darlington to feel  as if “snakes were writhing round my feet”. But, in what became known as “the dirty play row” in an era still subject to stage censorship, Vaughan’s performance as a heavy-breathing sexual deviant confronted by a ruffian who had made his sister pregnant and murdered their father transcended all the controversy.

Addressing the intruder , Vaughan’s murmured “Your youth pleads for leniency, and by God I’m going to give it to you” conveyed a chilling message.

Peter Vaughan with Tony Hancock  in 1963
Peter Vaughan with Tony Hancock  in 1963 Credit: ITV/REX/Shutterstock

A familiar face on television in scores of plays and series, Vaughan’s later credits included Fox; The Choir; The Fatherland; Winston Greeves in Mistress of Suspense and Marek in Lovejoy. His performance as Felix Hutchinson, the embittered trade unionist afflicted by Alzheimer’s, in Our Friends in the North, won him wide acclaim. Among his film credits were Christopher Hampton’s Secret Agent and the role of Giles Corey in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

The son of a Potteries banker, Peter Ewart Ohm was born at Wem, Shropshire, on April 4 1923, and brought up in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire. From Uttoxeter grammar school, he went into repertory at the Grand, Wolverhampton, as an assistant stage manager.

Between spells at other reps before and after Army service in the Second World War, Vaughan queued for his dole with the actor Donald Pleasance before starting to get parts in films and in the West End, mainly, at first, in translated plays from the Continent.

In Michael Langham’s staging of Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire as The Gay Invalid (Garrick, 1951), he was the chemist who fed the hypochondriac  his unnecessary potions. In Sam Wanamaker’s production of Marcelle-Maurette’s version of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (Winter Garden, 1955) he played a passer-by whom the audience (such was Vaughan’s way with a minor role) supposed would turn out to be more important than he was.

In the German-derived whodunnit, Night of the Fourth by Jack Roffey and Gordon Harbor (Westminster, 1956) Vaughan was a fingerprint expert; and in Lucienne Hill’s adaptation of Max Regnier’s Paddle Your Own Canoe (Criterion, 1957) a shifty lawyer.

After stealing most of the notices in Entertaining Mr Sloane and striking an authoritative note as Gladstone in Portrait of a Queen, Vaughan’s West End credits went on to include numerous detectives and policemen, including Sgt Rough in the thriller Gaslight (Criterion), and roles in such new plays as Travelling North (Lyric, Hammersmith), Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings (Ambassadors) and The Overgrown Path (Royal Court).

Peter Vaughan in Chancer in 1990
Peter Vaughan in Chancer in 1990 Credit: ITV/REX/Shutterstock

In Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is An Ass (Edinburgh Festival and National Theatre) he played Fitzdottrel; and in the cinema Vaughan’s credits included The Punch and Judy Man; The Devil’s Agent; The Horse Without a Head; Rotten to the Core; The Man Outside; The Naked Runner; A Twist of Sand; Straw Dogs (as a notably vile Cornish yokel); Savage Messiah; Madigan; The Blockhouse; The Seaweed Children; Zulu Dawn; Time Bandits; The French Lieutenant’s Woman; The Missionary; The Razor’s Edge and Brazil.

Peter Vaughan in The Gold Robbers
Peter Vaughan in The Gold Robbers Credit: ITV/REX/Shutterstock

His other television credits included Deadline Midnight; The Gold Robbers; Treasure Island; Oliver Twist; Great Expectations; Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years; Henry VIII; Under The Hammer; Czech Mate; Chancer and Harry’s Kingdom. 

In his late eighties Vaughan added gravitas to the sumptuous HBO television fantasy series Game of Thrones when he appeared as the wise old man Maester Aemon, of the royal house of Targaryen. 

Peter Vaughan with his wife Lillias in 1969
Peter Vaughan with his wife Lillias in 1969 Credit: Chris Ware/Getty Images

A keen cricketer as a young man, he gave up the game “because I got a split nose and a cracked jawbone, which can be expensive for an actor”. A lifelong supporter of Left-wing causes, he lived for many years in a rambling, centuries-old farmhouse near Crawley, Sussex, a New Town experiment of which he thoroughly approved.

Peter Vaughan was twice married: first, in 1952, to the actress Billie Whitelaw (dissolved 1964), and secondly, in 1966, to the actress Lillias Walker, who survives him with a son and twin stepdaughters, one of whom, Victoria, is married to the Scottish actor Gregor Fisher, who played the title role in Rab C Nesbitt.

Peter Vaughan, born April 4 1923, died December 6 2016

 

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