Television & radioObituaryBernard Hepton obituary
Actor best known for his roles in the TV series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Colditz and I, ClaudiusNever on the front cover, but always somehow familiar, Bernard Hepton, who has died aged 92, was one of those actors you were always glad to see again. He could be plain and morose, or authoritative and stern, or he could be extremely funny, but he never let you down, whether as the German Kommandant with a human streak in the popular TV series Colditz (1972-74), or as an ordinary, humdrum “television watcher” in Jack Rosenthal’s sitcom Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975), with Rosemary Leach.
The 1970s was Hepton’s decade of greatest activity and exposure. He was hardly off our small screens, appearing as Thomas Cranmer in two BBC Tudor blockbusters, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), starring Keith Michell, and Elizabeth R (1971), with Glenda Jackson in the title role.
Then he popped up as the Greek freedman, Pallas, in I, Claudius (1976), and the high-ranking intelligence officer Toby Esterhase in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), starring Alec Guinness, a role he repeated with subtler inflections and a less English accent (the Hungarian-born character had retired and was running an art gallery) in Smiley’s People, also with Guinness, three years later.
In addition, he was a flustered press officer in Philip Mackie’s The Organisation (1972), a satire on power games co-starring Peter Egan and Donald Sinden; an incompetent, very funny boss figure in Eric Chappell’s The Squirrels (1975), set in a television rental company; and a Belgian resistance fighter, Albert Foiret, running a restaurant patronised by Nazis while smuggling out prisoners of war in the BBC’s Secret Army (1977-79).
As an actor, he could transform himself without makeup into a king or a countryman. His voice was strong, Yorkshire-tinged, his bearing firm, his timing impeccable, his range quietly stupendous. Chronically shortsighted, he could hide effectively behind spectacles, but without them he bared an unusual moon-like face, curiously blank and expressive at the same time.
He was born in Bradford and grew up in the same street as JB Priestley 20 years before, the son of Bernard Heptonstall, an electrician, and his wife, Hilda, who came from a family of mill workers. The tedium of his duty as a teenage fire-watcher in wartime was relieved by some one-act plays the woman in charge brought along, and this led him to join the amateur drama company based at Bradford Civic Playhouse.
His eyesight exempted him from the call-up, so he trained as an aircraft engineer, and a draughtsman. But he continued with the playhouse and when the incoming director, Esmé Church, founded her short-lived drama school in 1945, he was her first student; Robert Stephens, another of her proteges, said of Hepton, “immediately, you could see that he was brilliant”.
He went straight into fortnightly rep in York for two years, worked at Windsor and hung around Birmingham Rep, the most talked about regional theatre of the day. Barry Jackson, its founder, became his second great mentor after Church, and he graduated from small roles in 1952 to director of productions for Jackson in 1955.
He had eased this promotion by accidentally becoming proficient as a fight director with a fellow Rep actor, and he was invited down to the Old Vic in London to arrange the fights for Richard Burton’s Hamlet in 1953. Back in Birmingham, he directed RC Sherriff’s The Long Sunset and Peter Ustinov’s Romanoff and Juliet, and undertook Beckett’s monologue of reminiscences in Krapp’s Last Tape.
Now well-established, after Jackson departed from the Rep, Hepton took on the directorship of Liverpool Playhouse in 1963, only to run into disagreements with a conservative board over his daring choice of repertoire, including Max Frisch’s The Fire-Raisers and John Osborne’s Luther. He also took up cudgels in the Guardian with Peter Hall, arguing that there should be six national theatres throughout Britain, and not just one in London, all funded equally and of equal status.
For someone so highly regarded within his profession it is surprising that he never worked with the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company. Instead, leaving Liverpool within a year, he joined the newly founded BBC2 channel in 1964, with ideas of producing and directing there.
But he was soon back in front of the camera, having made his TV debut as Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons in a live broadcast in 1957; this was an earlier version (first broadcast on radio in 1954) of the 1960 play (and subsequent film) starring Paul Scofield.
He played Wemmick in a Hugh Leonard 1967 serialisation of Great Expectations, and Mr Farebrother in a 1968 version of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. And in 1969 he was a fascinating Caiphas in Dennis Potter’s controversial Son of Man, in which Colin Blakely was a disconcertingly real, socialist-minded Jesus, inevitably incurring an accusation of blasphemy from Mary Whitehouse and her Clean-Up TV campaign. It was one of the finest Wednesday Plays in that hallowed BBC single-play slot.
In the 80s Hepton achieved a lifelong ambition in playing Inspector Goole in a BBC production of Priestley’s An Inspector Calls and resumed his association with BBC classic serials as Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park (Sylvestra Le Touzel was Fanny Price, an 11-year-old Jonny Lee Miller little Charles) and as the withered rag-and-bone man Krook in Bleak House (Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock, Denholm Elliott as Jarndyce).
He chilled us on Christmas Eve, 1989, as the landowner Sam Toovey in Herbert Wise’s production of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, and delighted us further in Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s wonderful The Old Devils in 1992.
The BBC’s Emma, again adapted by Davies, in 1996 was thought by many far superior to the Hollywood take on the same Jane Austen novel in the same year, starring Gwyneth Paltrow; the BBC cast a lively Kate Beckinsale as the headstrong heroine, with Hepton as her hypochondriac father, Mr Woodhouse, and notable support from Samantha Morton, Olivia Williams and Mark Strong.
On stage he landed Tesman in Hedda Gabler at the Bristol Old Vic and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at the Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford, but other classical roles eluded him. He made amends of a sort in the 1982 London premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings, first at Greenwich and then at the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue, in which he was the self-effacing star of the show as the muddled doctor with aspirations to puppetry. This was a brilliant performance in a galaxy of comic turns, including those by Diane Bull, Marcia Warren and Peter Vaughan as a self-styled lounge fascist.
His film career was limited, too, embracing a third go at Thomas Cranmer in Waris Hussein’s big-screen follow-up to the BBC series, Henry VIII and his Six Wives (1972), and small roles in two Michael Caine movies, Mike Hodges’s terrific Get Carter (1971) and John Frankenheimer’s The Holcroft Covenant (1985).
Hepton married in 1957 the actor Nancie Jackson, who played his wife Alice in A Man for All Seasons, and they settled in Barnes, south-west London, with a fine collection of paintings.
Two years after Nancie’s death in 1977, he married Hilary Liddell. She died in 2013, and he is survived by a niece and nephew.
Bernard Hepton (Heptonstall), actor, born 19 October 1925; died 27 July 2018
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