Remembering Graham Crowden

Tall, lanky Scottish actor Graham Crowden, known globally as Tom Ballard in the enormously successful BBC hit Waiting For God, has died at age 87. His obituary from the Guardian UK...

Graham Crowden obituary
Actor with great stage presence who found his metier in comic and satirical roles.

Michael Coveney

There was something extra-terrestrial about the character actor Graham Crowden, who has died aged 87 – a mix of the ethereal eccentricity of Ralph Richardson and the Scottish lunacy and skewiff authoritarianism of Alastair Sim. He specialised in portraying doctors, lawyers or teachers in a satirical way.

Crowden was a tall, red-haired, serious and sometimes professionally diffident man – he turned down the opportunity of succeeding Jon Pertwee as the fourth Doctor Who, remarking that working with a lot of Daleks did not sound like much fun. He had a tremendous stage presence, always moving with an emphatic, loping gait.

Despite his eminence in plays at the Royal Court and the National Theatre, where he introduced roles in works by NF Simpson and Tom Stoppard, and in films directed by Lindsay Anderson, he did not become widely familiar until he starred in a BBC television sitcom, Waiting for God (1990-94).

In that series, he and Stephanie Cole played two residents of a Bournemouth retirement home who made life difficult for both officials and their own families while finding each other increasingly compatible. Crowden was Tom Ballard, a widower and retired accountant, who feigned more dementia than he suffered, winning both sympathy and laughter.
Michael Aitken's script addressed public anxieties over an increasingly ageing population, just as Crowden's first big television series, Andrew Davies's A Very Peculiar Practice (1986), prophesied the rampant commercialisation of university education. Crowden played Jock McCannon, the decrepit, alcoholic Scots head of a university medical centre.

He embodied other laughable figures in a clutch of distinctive British movies, three of them directed by Anderson, and all starring Malcolm McDowell: If… (1968) charted revolution in a public school, with Crowden a flummoxed history master; and the picaresque tale O Lucky Man! (1973) deployed another mad scientist performance, which was then developed into a larger role in Britannia Hospital (1982), an anarchic, state-of-the-nation lampoon in a run-down hospital preparing for a royal visit.

Not surprisingly, Crowden was also cast as a Master of Lunacy in Peter Medak's film of Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class (1972), starring Peter O'Toole, and as Leader of the Fanatics in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky (1977), a post-Python medieval comic fantasy based on Lewis Carroll's poem.

Crowden was born in Edinburgh of Presbyterian stock, the third of four children of a classics teacher. He left the Edinburgh academy to work in a tannery, and in 1940 joined the Royal Scots Youth Battalion. His military career was cut short when he was accidentally shot by his own platoon sergeant.

A chance encounter with the Journey Into Space actor Andrew Faulds led him to a spear-carrying role at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1944, followed by a busy period in rep nationwide, culminating in a King Lear at the Bristol Old Vic and a season at the Glasgow Citizens.

His London debut came in 1956 as George Bernard Shaw's silly-ass, man-about-town Charles Lomax in Major Barbara, before he joined the newly formed English Stage Company at the Royal Court. His first role in Sloane Square was in a production of Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle. This led to appearances in plays by Wole Soyinka, Fernando Arrabal and David Cregan, and a production of Simpson's major play, One Way Pendulum, in 1959. Crowden was ideal as Mr Groomkirby, an amateur prosecuting counsel at the Old Bailey established in his own living room. He then appeared alongside Rex Harrison in Chekhov's Platonov, and with Alec Guinness and Eileen Atkins in Ionesco's Exit the King, providing, said Irving Wardle, "brilliant tangential comedy" as a "wizard-like" doctor.

From the Court he joined the new National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1965, playing Augustus Colpoys in a warm, seductive revival of Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells, Colonel Melkett in Peter Shaffer's hilarious Black Comedy and a definitive, logic-chopping Sir Politic Would-Be in Tyrone Guthrie's staging of Ben Jonson's Volpone.

In 1967 Crowden played three important NT support roles – the Player in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; Foresight in Congreve's Love for Love; and Augustin Feraillon in Jacques Charon's legendary production of Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, introducing the fine John Mortimer translation that is about to be revived on the same stage by Richard Eyre. He took time out from the National to play Henry IV in both parts, and Prospero (directed by Jonathan Miller), at the Mermaid Theatre, but returned for Stoppard's second major premiere, Jumpers, in 1972. Again, he was cast perfectly, alongside Michael Hordern and Diana Rigg, as the sinister, pop-eyed university vice-chancellor, Archie, who seduces the philosopher George Moore's wife.

Two other stage roles stand out. He was a touching partner to Vanessa Redgrave in the 1978 revival of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea at the Royal Exchange, Manchester; and a glorious Vincent Crummles in the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby in 1980 almost convinced Bernard Levin that Dickens, after all, had not based the character on Harold Macmillan.

Despite suffering a stroke, Crowden remained active. He was always engaged in Equity affairs and went on Aldermaston marches. His last film was Calendar Girls (2003) and his last stage appearances of note were in Pinero's The Magistrate at Chichester in 1998 and as an eccentric old general with a death wish in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None at the Gielgud Theatre in 2005.

Crowden is survived by his wife, Phyllida Hewat, whom he married in 1952, a son and three daughters, one of whom, Sarah, followed him into acting.

• Clement Graham Crowden, actor, born 30 November 1922; died 19 October 2010