Joss Ackland, who has died at the age of 95, was a fine actor: part, you might say, of the dependable backbone of the British entertainment industry. With more than 130 film and TV roles to his credit, he was constantly in work. And even if he was rarely the star – a notable exception was his performance as CS Lewis in the original 1985 TV version of Shadowlands – he was always a reassuring presence. Ackland had a gift for quiet understatement, and for exuding power and authority; those seemingly contradictory talents were visible in a quartet of superb stage performances for which I shall always remember him.
One of the hardest things for an actor to convey is a modest goodness, and Ackland did it consummately in John Osborne’s The Hotel in Amsterdam at the Royal Court in 1968. He played Gus, a film editor and one of a group of friends who flee for a weekend from a tyrannical producer. Gus, a fussy hypochondriac whose wife is being ardently pursued by a charismatic writer, was the butt of the group, but Ackland endowed him with an unforgettable calm cheerfulness.
You could hardly have a more different role than Shakespeare’s Falstaff, which Ackland played in the two parts of Henry IV with which the RSC opened its tenancy of the Barbican in 1982. He was a practised Shakespearean, having spent two seasons at the Old Vic in the late 50s, but his RSC Falstaff was in another league. At the time I called it a great performance because it captured the rich duality of the character. Ackland showed us that Falstaff is, in the words of WH Auden, “a comic symbol for the supernatural order of Charity” and, at the same time, a brutal, earthbound realist. But Ackland was also a sportive Falstaff. Invited to assume the role of the king in the mock-play scene in the Eastcheap tavern, a wicked gleam came into Ackland’s eye as he cried: “Shall I?”
His ability to oscillate between the everyday and the exceptional was apparent in two of the big musicals, both directed by Hal Prince, in which he played leading roles. In Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music at the Adelphi in 1975, he was Fredrik Egerman, a middle-aged lawyer married to a young wife but still attracted to the worldly thespian Desiree Armfeldt. Ackland perfectly caught the tension between Egerman’s present sexual frustration and memories of tender fulfilment with the desirable Desiree. Prince was so impressed with Ackland that he cast him immediately as Argentinian president Juan Perón in the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical Evita in 1978. Elaine Page was the obvious star and some critics objected to the musical itself: Bernard Levin called it an “odious artefact” that, in glamourising Eva Perón, celebrated fascism. But there were no cavils about Ackland’s performance as a brilliantined, square-shouldered symbol of power who could well have risen to the top even without his wife’s charisma.
Ackland’s supreme gift, however, was for portraying baffled decency, and two other performances from a long list highlight that. One was in the 1987 movie White Mischief, in which he a played a member of Kenya’s hedonistic Happy Valley set who stands trial for the murder of his wife’s lover. It is a role that must have had strange geographical echoes for Ackland since, in 1954, he temporarily abandoned acting to manage a tea plantation in Kenya.
One of his other great performances came in a TV play by Michael Frayn, First and Last (1989), in which he played a retired man who walks from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. That play has strong memories for me because I begged and pleaded with a Bafta committee on which I was sitting for it to be given the top drama prize. I lost the argument, but Ackland’s performance, as a man who undertakes a self-punishing task out of a mixture of personal ambition and marital unhappiness, has stayed with me and confirms that he was an actor with an unrivalled capacity for showing the complexity lurking behind the facade of the seemingly ordinary.
