R.I.P. Peter Barkworth, 1929-2006

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Reza
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London Guardian - November 3, 2006


Simple Simon beginnings led to a rewarding acting career


Peter Barkworth, 1929-2006
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THE actor and director Peter Barkworth claimed to have felt "the sheer sensual pleasure of acting" when he first appeared on a stage. He was five years old, in the Cubs and appearing as Simple Simon in a church hall in his English home town of Margate, Kent.

What followed was a notable stage career, though Barkworth became known to a wider audience on television. He established his presence with his role as Kenneth Bligh in the boardroom drama The Power Game (1965), and in Brian Clark's Telford's Change (1979), opposite Hannah Gordon. In that 10-part series he played a high-flying banker who opts for the quiet life in Dover.

In the intervening years his small screen roles came in such productions as Dr Who, The Avengers (1961-69), Paul Temple (1971) and Colditz (1972).

At the Haymarket - his favourite theatre - in 1972 he had his first leading stage part in London, as Edward VIII in Royce Ryton's abdication drama, Crown Matrimonial - a role he later repeated on television.

In 1977, Barkworth won a Royal Television Society award and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts best actor award for his portrayal of a British academic adrift in Stalinist Czechoslovakia in Tom Stoppard's Professional Foul. Later television work included the part of Stanley Baldwin in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981). Barkworth's film work began in 1959 with A Touch of Larceny. Roles followed in No Love for Johnnie (1961), Where Eagles Dare (1969) and Patton (1970). His last was in Wilde (1997).

Born Peter Wynn Barkworth, he moved with his family from Margate to Bramhall, Cheshire, when his father was promoted to sales manager in Manchester. He was educated at Stockport school and, as an 11-year-old in 1940, began taking part in concerts for the war effort - and enjoying the applause. After he played the role of Macbeth, the producer rewarded the cast with a trip to see John Gielgud in Hamlet at the Opera House in Manchester. Barkworth was duly impressed.

He appeared at the Stockport Hippodrome while still at school and had some parts with the BBC drama repertory company. His headmaster wanted him to go to university but Barkworth won an acting scholarship, and his father gave up tobacco and alcohol to support him.

After national service, Barkworth acted at Folkestone and then in Sheffield. His first London appearance was in Henry James's Letter from Paris, in 1952, which was roundly booed and ended after three weeks. Rows among the cast of Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance (1954) made him so depressed he nearly gave up the stage.

"Of all the jobs I have ever had, teaching at RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] is the one I should least like to have missed," Barkworth wrote in First Houses (1983).

From the mid-1950s into the early 1960s he taught acting technique. His pupils included Anthony Hopkins, Simon Ward, Richard Wilson and Diana Rigg. He had attended Fabia Drake's classes as a student and learnt more from her, he said, than from any other teacher.

Back on stage his roles included Captain Christopher Mortlock in Noel Coward's South Sea Bubble (1956), with Vivien Leigh. He was the cynical Sir Benjamin Backbite in Gielgud's production of The School for Scandal (1962), which went to New York.

At the Globe in 1976, in Michael Frayn's Donkeys' Years, he was one of the former undergraduates who return to their Oxford college for a reunion with their old flame (Penelope Keith).

Barkworth wrote an erudite script for his one-man Siegfried Sassoon (1987), which he gave at the Hampstead theatre, in the West End and on tour.

Barkworth's other books include About Acting (1980), The Complete About Acting (1991) and For All Occasions (1997).

In November 1999 a new theatre in Stockport was named after him.

Wendy Trewin

The Guardian
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