Timothy West, veteran stage and television actor married for more than 60 years to Prunella Scales

West, a ‘jobbing actor’, was modest and gently spoken, qualities which gained the affection of two million viewers of Great Canal Journeys

Timothy West, the actor and director, who has died aged 90, was, until about 10 years ago, best known for the range of his portrayals of an assortment of famous persons from Henry VIII to Edward VII, Winston Churchill to Stalin, Horatio Bottomley to Thomas Beecham, Bodkin Adams to Doctor Johnson.
In later life he touched the hearts of a new generation of television viewers in the documentary series Great Canal Journeys (2014-20), which saw him and his wife, Prunella Scales, who was suffering from dementia, travelling on narrowboats together on inland waterways in Britain, Europe and further afield.
West once said that while he was thankful to be too large to play Hitler, “I do love playing awful people.” He played most of them on television; but it was the theatre he loved best, especially the out-of-London theatre. He assisted in its postwar revival both as actor and director.
Short, stocky, balding and beefy, with a thrustful chin, West rarely acted in trivia. He belonged to a theatrical generation which believed that regional theatres and companies that toured the classics deserved as much funding as the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, though he worked for both.
His heart lay not only in the newly subsidised repertory movement, but also in companies created to tour the classics. He served the Prospect Theatre Company, for example, on and off for 14 years in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Bristol Old Vic with comparable devotion in the 1980s and 1990s.
He was with Prospect – under whose restless banner such players as Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi first rose to prominence in the great classical roles – to the bitter end as its last director when it was disbanded at the Old Vic in 1981; and during a funding and policy crisis at the Bristol Old Vic, of which he was an associate director, he came forward at its Theatre Royal as Solness in The Master Builder (1989), as Uncle Vanya (1990), and as James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1991).
He had also in his time played Prospero, King Lear, Macbeth, Shylock and (on television) Richard II and Edward II. The truth, however, was that West, one of the most sensitive and intelligent of actors, did not always carry the guns, or possess the physical attributes, for the great dramatic roles.
He was at his best in character parts, as hard-headed, down-to-earth realists in north-country comedies – like Bradley Hardacre in the television comedy drama Brass; as outright villains such as Claudius in Hamlet (for which the London Theatre critics voted him best supporting actor of 1976); as wry, sly, menacing observers like Brack in Hedda Gabler; or as dictatorial egocentrics like those historical monsters he impersonated so well from time to time.
He was also a first-rate sophisticated drawing-room actor, as Hugh Whitemore’s It’s Ralph (Comedy, 1991) wittily proved. As something of an off-stage intellectual himself, the actor had the rare gift of conveying it in some of his characterisations.
Timothy Lancaster West was born into a theatrical family in Bradford on October 30 1934 and educated at the John Lyon School, Harrow, and Regent Street Polytechnic. His mother was the actress Olive Carleton-Crowe, his father the character actor Lockwood West, both of whom urged him to avoid the theatre at all costs.
But at the age of 22, frustrated by stints as a salesman of office furniture and as a recording engineer, he attached himself as an assistant stage manager to the Wimbledon Theatre, where his first stage part was the Farmer in Ugo Betti’s Summertime (1956). Then came three years of rep at Salisbury, Hull, Wimbledon, Northampton, Worthing and Newquay, before his first West End engagement, as Talky in the boarding-school farce Caught Napping (Piccadilly, 1959).
By the early 1960s he had joined Peter Hall’s new Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Ginger in David Rudkin’s study of ritualised Black Country violence, Afore Night Come (Arts, 1962), and he went on to take numerous roles in RSC productions at the Aldwych and at Stratford-upon-Avon.
West soon began to realise that his future might not lie with the RSC, though, and in 1966 he turned instead to Prospect Productions (later known as Prospect Theatre Co) where stars-to-be such as Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi were making their names as a touring ensemble in classics which were often launched at the Edinburgh Festival.
He toured with Prospect for the next six years. Among many roles with the company he appeared as Bolingbroke to McKellen’s Richard II and as Mortimer to McKellen’s Edward II in productions which ran at the Edinburgh Festival, the Mermaid and the Piccadilly before touring Europe. In 1971 he played King Lear at the Edinburgh Festival and Venice Biennale, repeating the role at the reopened Theatre Royal, Bristol.
After several more roles in Bristol, including Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV at the Bristol Old Vic (1972), in 1973 he got the chance to run his own theatre, The Forum in Billingham, after which he played the disillusioned doctor in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (to Dorothy Tutin’s Natalya) at Chichester Festival. He was so well cast that as co-director of Prospect he played it again in 1975 in the West End.
Seizing another chance to run his own theatre, this time the Gardner Centre, Brighton, he played Macbeth and George in Stoppard’s Jumpers, and staged Pinter’s The Homecoming, before returning to the RSC as a superbly sinister Judge Brack to Glenda Jackson’s Hedda Gabler for a tour of Australia, the US and Canada ending at the Aldwych. With Prospect again he was a sinister Claudius to Jacobi’s Hamlet and Enobarbus with Barbara Jefford as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra.
Shortly after West unexpectedly found himself appointed artistic controller of the Old Vic Theatre Company in 1980 (where Prospect had been based since 1977), Prospect lost its state grant and was wound up.
Yet there followed two of West’s most characteristic performances: as the great orchestral conductor Thomas Beecham in Caryl Brahms’s play Beecham (Salisbury, 1979, and Apollo, 1990), and as the Soviet dictator Stalin trying to persuade Prokofiev and Shostakovitch to write more patriotic and tuneful music in David Pownall’s Master Class (Leicester Haymarket, Old Vic and Wyndham’s).
In Master Class, West, wrote one reviewer, had created “a fully rounded monster, by turns brutal and sentimental, broad and subtle, philistine and musicianly, formidable and unpredictable”.
From 1959 he appeared in scores of television series and television plays, starring in such shows as Brass as the ruthless self-made businessman Bradley Hardacre, the sitcom Not Going Out, in which he played Geoffrey Adams, father of Lucy and Tim, The as well as Coronation Street (Eric Babbage, 2013) and EastEnders (Stan Carter, 2014-15).
Although, much to his relief, he was never asked to play the Führer, he played his nemesis Winston Churchill three times, in From Churchill and the Generals (1979), The Last Bastion (1984), and Hiroshima (1995). He was memorable as the ruthless Josiah Bounderby in a television adaptation of Dickens’s Hard Times in 1977, as the pompous baronet Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House (2005), and as the unpleasant businessman Rex Fortescue munching poisoned marmalade in the Joan Hickson Miss Marple story A Pocketful of Rye (1985).
In 2019 he was the gently bewildered Private Godfrey in a recreation of three missing episodes of the BBC comedy Dad’s Army, and his last acting appearance on television was in Doctors on BBC One, broadcast in the week of his death.
His film work included the role of Commissioner Berthier in Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal, as well as The Looking Glass War, Nicholas and Alexandra, Hedda, Joseph Andrews, The Devil’s Advocate, Oliver Twist, Cry Freedom and Consuming Passions.
In a memoir published in 2001, West quoted the self-deprecating remark of Richard Strauss: “I may not be a first-rank composer but I think I may be a first-rate composer of the second rank.”
In contrast to some of the more unpleasant characters he played, West, who described himself as a “jobbing actor”, was a modest, gently spoken man – qualities which earned him the affection of more than two million viewers who tuned into the Channel 4 series Great Canal Journeys, in which he and his wife Prunella Scales (best known as Sybil in Fawlty Towers) fronted for five years from 2014.
After West’s first marriage, to Jacqueline Boyer, was dissolved, he and Prunella Scales had married in 1963, having met two years earlier when they were cast together in the BBC play She Died Young, and became friends doing the crossword together, eating Polo mints and making each other laugh.
They were together for 61 years and, as a result of the authentic charm of the Channel 4 series, the couple, whose devotion to each other was obvious, became known to the public simply as “Tim and Pru”.
“What elevated the filming from the usual actors-on-a-jolly was their genuine passion for narrowboats… and West’s honesty from the start that Pru had, a year before in 2013, been officially diagnosed with vascular dementia,” observed Louise Carpenter in The Sunday Telegraph.
“Far from alarming a TV audience the public fell in love with them, tuning in to see their journeying in the face of what West referred to on screen as Pru’s ‘condition’, which would eventually end the show on West’s 85th birthday in October 2019, because it had become too difficult. The final compilation special, in which West said ‘goodbye’, had the most hardened of TV critics weeping.”
In 2023 he published Pru and Me: A Love Story.
Timothy West, who was appointed CBE in 1984 for his services to the entertainment industry, is survived by his wife, by their two sons, one of whom is the actor Sam West, and by a daughter from his first marriage.
Timothy West, born October 30 1934, died November 12 2024