The actor Timothy West has died aged 90, leaving behind an illustrious legacy of roles that mixed Shakespeare with soaps. Yesterday, his family paid tribute to “a long and extraordinary life on and off the stage”.
From EastEnders on the BBC to the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Bradford-born thespian starred in a wide range of roles over a career that spanned more than half a century. He was awarded a CBE for his services to drama in 1984.
West played King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth, along with Prospero and Falstaff, plus politicians from Stalin to Churchill (three times, in fact).
At one point he even ended up as the creative director of London’s Old Vic, until a furore over Peter O’Toole’s 1980 production of Macbeth put him off running a theatre company for good. In his 2001 memoir, A Moment Towards the End of the Play, West recalled his dawning horror as he realised the production was a disaster.
“As I stood dinner-jacketed and suicidal in the foyer, old friends passed me, smiling encouragingly. I managed a sickly return smile and watched, powerless to save the passengers as they pushed their way determinedly up the gangways of the Titanic,” he wrote.
“The following morning I was woken at seven o'clock by a phone call from the London Evening Standard. Was I actually disowning the production? I said there had never been any question of my being asked to own it; that it had been understood from the outset to be Peter O'Toole's own production,” West recalled.
“At lunchtime, out came the evening papers with the big headline, West Disowns Macbeth, on the front page.”
His television career proved much more enjoyable. He had roles in several classic thrillers of the Seventies, including Day of the Jackal (1973), a spy story based on Frederick Forsyth novel that has just been rebooted on Sky starring Eddie Redmayne, and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1978).
West did an excellent line in dour men in Dickens adaptations, starting with the 1977 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, where he played arch capitalist mill owner Josiah Bounderby. He reprised the grumpy Victorian role as Mr Bumble in the 1982 TV movie of Oliver Twist, and played idle aristocrat Sir Leicester Deadlock in Bleak House (2005).
He once again played a mill owner in Brass (1983), a 32-episode TV comedy series satirising soap operas that followed the exploits of two opposing families in the the fictional northern town of Utterly. West starred as Bradley Hardacre, who owns the coal mine, most of the town, and a shiny Rolls Royce.
There were some military roles too. Fans of the cruelly cancelled Gentleman Jack (2018) might recognise him as Anne’s father, Captain Jeremy Lister. He also played Private Godfrey in the 2019 remake of Dad’s Army.
West had roles in not one but two major British soaps, both of which bumped him off. In 2013 he played Eric Babbage on Coronation Street, getting embroiled in a love triangle before dying at the bar of the Rovers Return.
He then played Stan Carter from 2014 to 2015 in EastEnders, the curmudgeonly and somewhat manipulative patriarch of the Carter clan, eventually killed off in a dramatic cancer storyline.
Together with his wife, Faulty Towers star Prunella Scales, he charmed viewers with 10 series as the presenters of Great Canal Journeys, where they toured the canals of the UK and Europe. The couple were keen narrowboaters and campaigned for canal revivals.
Wests final television appearance aired yesterday on the penultimate episode of the BBC soap Doctors.
