Television & radioObituary

Bill Wallis obituary

Television and radio character actor with a familiar rich voice

Not many actors encompass political satire on the radio, comedy at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Bertolt Brecht in the regions, but Bill Wallis – plump, short, bespectacled, basso-voiced, rather like an old and fruity, homely owl – who has died aged 76, did just that. And a good deal more in a wide-ranging career of 50 years.

I got to know him a bit when he played Falstaff – as the token professional – in an Oxford University Dramatic Society production of The Merry Wives of Windsor in Worcester College gardens in the late 1960s. He was excellent company in our buttery bar and someone we all aspired to emulate as an academically qualified theatrical.

By then he was renowned for having taken over the Alan Bennett roles in Beyond the Fringe in the mid-1960s; being an exemplar in the Michael Palin/Bill Oddie school of varsity revue; and giving the funniest onstage impersonation of a living politician – Harold Wilson – in Joan Littlewood's Mrs Wilson's Diary (1967) by John Wells and Richard Ingrams, based on their lampoon in Private Eye.

He was cast as Wilson, he said, because the great Littlewood had never encountered anyone so "solidly and boringly" middle-class as he was at her auditions. The improvised show was about "just another day" in the life at No 10, but followed Westminster's real-life dramas so closely that Wallis's ludicrously self-opinionated Wilson accepted the resignation of the bibulous foreign secretary, George Brown, half an hour before it was actually announced in Whitehall.

Wallis was born in Guildford, Surrey, the only son of Albert Wallis, a trainee fishmonger turned engineer, and his wife, Anne, a nurse. He was educated at Farnham grammar school and won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge. He fell among thieves such as Peter Cook and David Frost at the university and this defined his acting persona. He always brought an outsider-ish, cynical quality to his portrayals, a critical, analytical approach that Brecht would have admired. Indeed, one of his finest performances was as Brecht's Azdak, the even-handed judge, in a performance of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Most of his major performances were shadows to the more celebrated efforts of his peers in the great roles, but they were no less worth remembering. In recent years he had been an acclaimed King Lear at the Bristol Old Vic and a definitive, delightful Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol.

His theatrical heyday was with the director Michael Bogdanov, first at the Leicester Phoenix in the 1970s and subsequently at the Young Vic in London. Wallis played a succession of Shakespearean roles that not even his more lauded peers could emulate: Mercutio, Claudius, Richard III, Feste, King Lear and Titus Andronicus; as well as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. He also appeared in the West End premiere of Alan Ayckbourn and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jeeves at Her Majesty's theatre in 1975.

He became a nationally recognised voice on the BBC radio satirical sketch show Week Ending in the 1970s and 80s. When asked about a leaving present, Wallis suggested a good bottle of wine for each year; he was given two cases of the finest burgundy.

In 1978 he appeared in the first BBC radio episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as both Mr Prosser and Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz (he could not continue for contractual reasons). Wallis appeared in three series of Blackadder on BBC television, and popped up to good effect, too, in the first episode of Midsomer Murders on ITV.

With the RSC in the 1991-92 season in Stratford-upon-Avon and London he was acutely cast as a bottle-nosed Bardolph in Henry IV Parts One and Two (understudying a sickly Robert Stephens as Falstaff, he went on quite often); Twelfth Night's Toby Belch in an otherwise disastrous RSC debut production by Griff Rhys Jones; and as the gullible Anabaptist pastor Tribulation Wholesome in Sam Mendes's brilliantly acted production of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.

Wallis suffered from multiple myeloma, a type of bone marrow cancer, for 15 years, but kept busy with radio and audio-recording work throughout. He was married first to Jean Spalding in 1960 and, after their divorce, to Karen Mills in 1979. Karen survives him, along with his children Kathryn and Dickon from his first marriage and Rose and Bert from his second marriage, and five grandchildren.

Bill (William) Wallis, actor, born 20 November 1936; died 6 September 2013

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