There is a dying breed of classically trained, romantic, heroic actors who should not be consigned to oblivion in theatrical memory, and Frank Barrie, who has died aged 88, is a notable example.
The youngest leading actor at the Bristol Old Vic in the late 1960s, Barrie was always part of that noble tradition, one that stemmed from William Macready and Edmund Kean in the earlier Victorian era. A current reminder of it comes in Ralph Fiennes’s intriguing evocation of Henry Irving in David Hare’s new play Grace Pervades, but it is now largely forgotten.
