Jonathan Cecil obituary | Stage

Jonathan Cecil obituary

The actor Jonathan Cecil, who has died of pneumonia aged 72 after suffering from emphysema, spent much of his career playing upper-class characters. That is hardly surprising since his father was Lord David Cecil, Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University, and Jonathan's grandfather was the 4th Marquess of Salisbury. Although often typecast as a comic blueblood, there was infinitely more to Jonathan than that. He excelled in Chekhov and Shakespeare, and four times played Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, always investing the character with a silvery pathos. In 1998 he had an outstanding season at Shakespeare's Globe, where he appeared in As You Like It and Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, in which he played Sir Bounteous Progress – "gazing benignly", as John Gross wrote, "on almost everything, even his own undoing".

I first met Jonathan in the late 1950s at Oxford where he was studying modern languages at New College. As student actors, we tended to appear in the same productions, although he was on another level to myself. We were both in Oxford University Dramatic Society productions of Coriolanus and The Birds. Then, in the baking summer of 1959, we were in a tour of Bartholomew Fair, co-directed by Ken Loach, that went to Leicester and Stratford-on-Avon. My chief memory is of Jonathan playing a gangling Jonsonian eccentric with exactly the right single-minded obsessiveness. There was absolutely no aristocratic "side" to Jonathan: two of his closest college friends were Dennis Potter and the director Roger Smith, who could hardly have come from more different backgrounds.

Jonathan was born in London and educated at Eton. After leaving Oxford, he spent two years studying at the London Academy of Dramatic Art where he met his first wife, Vivien Heilbron, whom he married in 1963. Given that in the mid-1960s there was a shortage of actors capable of playing upper-crust characters, he quickly found work. Within a few months of graduating, he was playing a lead opposite Vanessa Redgrave in a TV series called First Night.

There followed 18 months at Salisbury Rep, where he honed his craft and played the Dauphin in Saint Joan, Disraeli in Portrait of a Queen and Trinculo in The Tempest. At Lincoln Rep, where I was working at the time, he played a pantomime dame with a stylish swagger that led him, with all the illogic of the genre, to sing an old Marie Lloyd music-hall number, When I Take My Morning Promenade.

Although rarely the star, Jonathan had more than four decades of constant employment in theatre, film and television. He made his West End debut in 1965 in Julian Mitchell's adaptation of Ivy Compton-Burnett's A Heritage and Its History. Two years later, he appeared in Peter Ustinov's Halfway Up the Tree, which gave him a lifetime's worth of anecdotes about its gargantuan star Robert Morley, his hapless replacement Jimmy Edwards and John Gielgud's feathery indecision as a director. This was followed by appearances in Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class (in 1969), a new adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Lulu (1971) and a revue, Cowardy Custard (1972), at the Mermaid, where he met Anna Sharkey who became his second wife, in 1976.

Of all Jonathan's West End appearances, the one that stands out is an Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville in 1988 starring Michael Gambon, Jonathan Pryce and Greta Scacchi. Jonathan was playing the impoverished landowner Telegin, known as "Waffles", which is an often overlooked part. As I wrote at the time: "Jonathan Cecil plays him as a bright, buoyant man in middle-age, permanently affronted by the fact that people cannot remember his name. He gives you the man's whole history; and when he rushes from the room in terror at Vanya's explosive anger, you sense exactly the nervy vulnerability that led his wife to desert him."

On film, Jonathan had a long and distinguished career that included appearances in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), Mel Brooks's History of the World: Part One (1981), Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On (1983) and Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit (1988). He starred opposite Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot in three television films, as Hastings, the Belgian detective's baffled foil. Jonathan was in constant demand whenever a comic toff or a bumbling cleric was called for on TV.

He appeared in several PG Wodehouse adaptations and, in later years, as Jonathan grew slightly weary of the rigorous demands of theatre, he became a master of the audio book, recording more than 40 of Wodehouse's novels and stories. He also had a profound knowledge of theatrical history, especially the music hall, which showed itself in the book reviews he wrote for the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. One of his idols was the critic and essayist Max Beerbohm, whose biography his father had written and whose work Jonathan, with the aid of Roger Frith, turned into a one-man show, The Incomparable Max.

It was his ebullient friendship that I most cherish. He and Anna, who were inseparable, were superb hosts. Their Sunday lunch-table would ring with laughter as Jonathan would regale us with theatrical stories or recall his music-hall heroes.  He is survived by Anna and his siblings, Hugh and Laura.

Jonathan Hugh Cecil, actor, born 22 February 1939; died 22 September 2011

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