When you watch British films produced by Bryan Forbes and Richard Attenborough between Whistle Down the Wind in 1961 and Shadowlands in 1993, you will find that Gerald Sim, who has died aged 89, was in most of them, usually playing a detective, a doctor or a magistrate of some kind, always trustworthy and on the right side of the law.
He was one of those quiet, unassuming actors whose presence guaranteed dependability: instantly recognisable, soon forgotten, always welcome; an open moon face, a clarion-clear voice (the result of a proper training in repertory theatre), a discreet presence. He was definitely part of the British screen “family”, not least because he was the younger brother of the actor Sheila Sim, Attenborough’s wife.
Coincidentally, he worked at the Leicester Haymarket in 1979 with the actor Karen Lewis before she even met and married Michael Attenborough, the director son of Richard and Sheila. Gerald and Karen appeared together in Howard Barker’s Claw and Frederic Raphael’s An Early Life, Raphael’s first stage play after his break-out success with The Glittering Prizes on television.
“I pray you, remember the Porter,” says that character in Macbeth, played by Sim in the notoriously chaotic and blood-boltered Peter O’Toole production directed by Forbes at the Old Vic in 1980. Alas, we don’t remember him, only a megalomaniac O’Toole and a stranded, though bewitching, Frances Tomelty as Lady M.
But we do remember him as the smooth-as-silk rector in the BBC sitcom classic To the Manor Born (three series, 1979-81) starring Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles, and he also memorably donned the dog collar on TV in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin (1976), a PG Wodehouse Playhouse series (1978) and Keeping Up Appearances (1990) starring Patricia Routledge. His last screen appearance was in a Christmas special one-off episode of To the Manor Born in 2007. Keith said he was not only “enchanting”, but generous and good, as well; she had first worked with him in rep at the Thorndike theatre in Leatherhead, Surrey, in an early revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves.
Sim was born in Liverpool, the son of Stuart Sim, a first world war veteran and an employee of Barings Bank, and his wife, Ida (nee Carter). The family moved south to Croydon, and Sim was educated at Cranbrook school in Kent, and trained for the stage at Rada. He made his film debut in Roy Boulting’s Fame is the Spur (1947), starring Michael Redgrave, a thinly veiled account of Ramsay MacDonald’s rise to power, and followed his detective in Whistle Down the Wind (with Alan Bates and Hayley Mills) with a doctor in Forbes’s best film, produced by Attenborough, The L-Shaped Room (1962), with Leslie Caron and Tom Bell.
He featured in all the following Forbes films – King Rat (1965), The Wrong Box (1966), with Peter Sellers, Ralph Richardson and Tony Hancock, and The Whisperers (1967), with Edith Evans and Eric Portman – before embarking on the first of seven star-studded Attenborough films as a chaplain in Oh! What A Lovely War (1969). He had third billing, and more prominence, behind Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick, in Roy Ward Baker’s wittily adventurous horror movie Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and was notable in two of the biggest TV series of the late 1970s, The New Avengers and Edward and Mrs Simpson. He retired early, but not before completing work on Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), which starred Ben Kingsley, and as doctors in Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987), with Denzel Washington as Steve Biko and Kevin Kline as the journalist Donald Woods, and in Chaplin (1992), which starred Robert Downey Jr.
Sim was married to the actor Deirdre Benner and lived happily in Hampton, on the Thames, with a fruitful garden and a dog. He loved cricket and was surprisingly keen on computers.
Deirdre predeceased him. He spent his last years in the actors’ home, Denville Hall, with his sister Sheila occupying a room between those of himself and Attenborough, who died last August. The family had actively supported the home for many years.
He is survived by Sheila.
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