John Savident, who has died aged 86, was a skilled, colourful, sometimes broad but always memorable actor who played one of TV’s best loved soap opera characters – the bombastic but lovable butcher Fred Elliott in the ITV series Coronation Street – for more than a decade.
Fred, who first appeared in 1994 and became a regular two years later, was soon a favourite with viewers, thanks in part to the enjoyably imitable repetitive vocal tic that Savident invested him with: “Ashley, I say, Ashley,” he would utter when addressing his young nephew (later revealed to be his son), Ashley Peacock (Steven Arnold).
Savident claimed his delivery was inspired by a combination of the Looney Tunes cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn, loud men whose voices he had heard booming across northern pubs, and factory workers in Lancashire mills who would communicate in bellows and were forced to repeat themselves because of the din from the looms.
Expansively played and employing every one of the considerable number of comedic tricks at Savident’s disposal, Fred was the perfect Coronation Street player – absolutely truthful beneath the broader strokes of the characterisation. With his imposing frame and a rumbling voice that could be heard at the back of the stalls even at a whisper, Savident nailed the show’s quirky northern humour with masterful comic timing. Crucially though, he also had the dramatic skills to carry off Fred’s emotional, sometimes vulnerable scenes with a heartfelt and quietly spoken pathos.
And there was plenty of emotion to be had: Fred married three times and had proposals turned down by both Rita Sullivan (Barbara Knox) and Audrey Roberts (Sue Nicholls).
For his portrayal of Fred, Savident won the best comedy performance award at the first British Soap Awards in 1999. The following year, he was involved in a harrowing incident when he was robbed by a visitor to his flat near the Granada TV studios in Manchester – whom he had invited back after a charity event – and stabbed in the neck. Savident was lucky that the knife missed his artery: his assailant was jailed for seven years.
He left Coronation Street in 2006, declaring that he wanted to spend more time with his family, but later admitted to being disappointed that his bosses did not try harder to keep him on. Fred died of a stroke – after a last minute heart-to-heart with Audrey – on the day he was due to marry Bev Unwin (Susie Blake): unlucky in love to the last.
Savident was born in St Peter Port, Guernsey, the only son of John, a fisherman, and his Swiss wife, Karoline (nee Pfrinder). The family escaped from the German-occupied island in 1940 and settled in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Greater Manchester. He was educated at the grammar school there (now Ashton Sixth Form College) and in 1955 joined the Manchester police force as a cadet. He patrolled the east side of the city for a number of years and was seconded to the vice squad.
He had performed in amateur dramatics since childhood and when his local Prestwich Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society’s production of South Pacific was overseen by a visiting director, Savident jokingly asked to audition for his next show. To his surprise this resulted in the opportunity of a professional debut playing the Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Max Wall in the Hanley Christmas pantomime, Robin Hood (1961).
Newly married – to Rona (nee Hopkinson), a teacher (later a theatre director), whom he had met when they played husband and wife as amateurs in Rochdale, and wed earlier that year – and recently promoted to accident prevention officer in Manchester’s C Division, Savident was cautious about accepting the offer, but decided to take the plunge, figuring he could always go back to policing if it did not work out. He never had to: he soon joined Lincoln repertory theatre and two years later was at the National Theatre in London playing O’Dwyer in Trelawny of the Wells.
He won strong notices for many of his later roles at the National, including a drily manipulative Archbishop of Rheims in Saint Joan (directed by Ronald Eyre), an ebullient comic turn as the foolish duped husband Nicia in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, and – for the director Peter Hall – a powerfully savvy Cominius to Ian McKellen’s Coriolanus (all 1984).
He was also the comically officious Monsieur Richard Firmin in the first production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty’s theatre, 1986), and reunited with the original cast for the finale of the filmed in the filmed The Phantom of the Opera at the Albert Hall (2011).
After breaking into television in 1966, he eschewed regular roles in an attempt to avoid typecasting, preferring instead myriad guest turns in every genre. That said, he tended to specialise in sardonic establishment types, bossy ministers and despicable toffs: the air of haughty disdain and undercurrent of testiness they required came easily to him.
He was occasionally tempted by recurring parts, such as a plummy and eccentric intelligence officer in the children’s spy caper Tightrope (1972), a blustering home secretary in the dystopian drama 1990 (1977), the cheerfully conniving Sir Frederick “Jumbo” Stewart in the superior sitcom Yes Minister (1980), and the inebriate blackmailer Raffles in Middlemarch (1994).
He endeared himself to science-fiction fans with a memorably vivid turn as the duplicitous scientist Egrorian, a gloriously preening grotesque, in the 1981 Blake’s 7 episode Orbit, and a short-lived but enjoyably peevish, dyspeptic Squire in the Doctor Who serial The Visitation (1982).
On film he shared the screen with his boyhood idol Laurence Olivier in Battle of Britain (1969), and worked with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Richard Attenborough on Gandhi (1982). Then there was the Hollywood blockbuster Hudson Hawk (1991), Merchant Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993) and Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995).
After he left Coronation Street, Savident returned to the stage, playing Henry Hobson in Hobson’s Choice (at the Chichester Festival theatre, 2007), and to television in Above Suspicion (2009), Hotel Babylon (2009) and Holby City (2012).
He is survived by Rona and their children, Romany and Daniel.
• John Frederick Joseph Savident, actor, born 21 January 1938; died 21 February 2024
• This article was amended on 26 February 2024. An earlier version said that John Savident was Monsieur Firmin in the first production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera in 1987 when it should have said 1986.
