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Waldhorn with Emma Chambers and Dawn French in The Vicar of Dibley. His background was vastly different from Horton’she is increasingly beguiled and charmed
by the vicar. He even reveals in one
episode that he has joined the Labour
Party in an attempt to win Geraldine’s
affections. A flustered Geraldine
accepts, and then rejects his proposal
of marriage, but their on-screen
chemistry worked well enough.
Testament to the actor’s craft, Wald-
horn cheerfully owned a background
that could not have been more different
from the Tory gentleman farmer he
portrayed in the series. The son of Aus-
trian Jewish refugees from Vienna, he
grew up in a then tough neighbourhood
in Gospel Oak, north London. His
future vocation was sealed by a school
trip to the Old Vic to watch Richard
Burton play Henry V. “I came home andsaid I want to be a Shakespearean actor,”
he recalled.
Gary Waldhorn was born in London
in 1943 to Liselotte (née Popper) and
Siegfried Waldhorn, who had come to
London some years before to escape
the Nazis. Gary won a place at Maryle-
bone Grammar School but the family
emigrated to New York City when he
was 13 because his father was struggling
to find work in London. He fared better
in America, where he became a
successful travel agent. Gary never lost
his British accent because the “girls just
flocked to me. I must have thought in
the back of my mind, ‘Why change?’ So
I remained English.”
He won a place to study acting at the
Yale School of Drama and graduatedwith a master’s in fine arts in 1967. The
same year he married fellow student
Christie Dickason, who would go on to
become a playwright and novelist. The
couple settled in Britain, where he
began to build up his reputation with
increasingly bigger roles at the
National Theatre, then based at the Old
Vic. The marriage would end in divorce.
He is survived by his son, Josh, who
lives in Australia.
As a young jobbing actor Waldhorn
made regular television appearances
throughout the Seventies, in series
such as Armchair Theatre, Crown Court,
The Sweeney, Space 1999, The Profes-
sionals and Minder. It paid the rent but
he felt somewhat unfulfilled until he
was invited to join a Royal ShakespeareCompany production of Good, written
by Cecil Philip Taylor, that was due to
transfer to Broadway in 1981.
Cast in the role of the psychiatrist
Maurice, he was drafted in after
another actor dropped out, but any
excitement at his triumphant return to
New York was stymied when American
Equity refused to grant him a work
visa because he had not performed for
the RSC before. To get around the
injunction an impromptu performance
of Good was staged in Stratford-upon-
Avon for one night only.
Waldhorn would go on to appear in
many Shakespearean productions over
the years, often in between filming the
Vicar of Dibley. He played the title role
in an acclaimed production of Henry IV
Parts I and II at the Old Vic in 1997 and
the King of France in a popular RSC
touring production of All’s Well That
Ends Well in 2004. He found that the
beards he grew for these regal roles did
not stop people from blurting out
references to the Vicar of Dibley, but
that generally he liked playing kings,
“because people do what you tell them
and you get to wear fantastic capes”.
Despite continued demand for his
services as a thespian on the boards,
Waldhorn hankered to do more
episodes of The Vicar of Dibley. Yet after
the third regular series ended in 2000,
Curtis was too busy writing film scripts.
Waldhorn confessed that he missed
playing what he called the “posh,
rather prattish squire” because the role
resonated with anyone who has ever
lived in a village. “People have to
recognise the truth of it to find it funny,”
he said.
Luckily for Waldhorn’s mother, now
widowed and living in retirement in
Florida, The Vicar of Dibley was shown
more or less permanently on repeat
and Mrs Waldhorn could check in with
her son every Monday night.Gary Waldhorn, actor, was born on
July 3, 1943. He died after a long illness
on January 10, 2022, aged 78Gary Waldhorn quit the BBC sitcom
Brush Strokes in 1990 because he was
wary of being typecast. For four years
he had endeared himself to viewers as
the blustering self-made Cockney busi-
nessman Lionel Bainbridge, endeav-
ouring in vain to foil the dodges of the
lothario painter and decorator in his
employ, Jacko (played by Karl How-
man). “I don’t want to be remembered
for the rest of my life as the man who
played Lionel Bainbridge,” he told the
News of the World.
TV comedy did not give up on him. A
decade later, the classically trained
Shakespearean actor could reflect on
the tragicomic irony of the fact that he
would always be remembered as Coun-
cillor David Horton, chairman of the
parish council who battles for supremacy
in a picturesque Oxfordshire village
with the Rev Geraldine Granger (Dawn
French) in the The Vicar of Dibley.
The popular and undemanding sit-
com written by Richard Curtis was first
broadcast in 1994 after the Church of
England’s decision to ordain women
priests. Waldhorn’s pompous squire
stood for all the outraged pillars of
communities in Middle England
struggling to come to terms with the
idea that they were now being preached
to from the pulpit by a woman.
Up to now Horton had wielded
absolute power in the parish council
comprising a colourful collection of
village idiots (including his own son
and daughter-in-law, played by Curtis
stalwarts James Fleet and Emma
Chambers). Yet his smug world view is
shattered as Geraldine starts to mobil-
ise this gallery of rustic fools for her
own schemes. Slowly Councillor Hor-
ton is transformed from a boorish
fuddyduddy to a likeable fuddyduddy as
He missed playing what
he called ‘the posh,
rather prattish squire’
Gary Waldhorn
Shakespearean actor best known for playing the pompous Councillor Horton in the undemanding sitcom The Vicar of Dibley
BBC/ALAMYEmail: [email protected]Powered by insatiable
curiosity and genetic good
fortune, the petite Zussman,
who was born five days before the
outbreak of the First World War,
started a blog in her nineties, published
a book aged 103 and saw patients until
she was 105.
Her sexology career began in earnest
in the Sixties, when shifting public atti-
tudes and greater scientific rigour led to
the field gaining academic credibility.
The sexual revolution, she believed,
started a trend for sex that was not so
much casual as “frantic” — an impulsive
pleasure-quest that risked an “emotionalShirley Zussman
Insatiably curious sex therapist who was influenced by Masters and Johnson and was still seeing patients at the age of 105
It was a rather intimate question to
pose on daytime television in 1993, but
Oprah Winfrey was keen to know.
“What’s going on in American bed-
rooms?” asked the talk show queen.
Not much, was the answer, at least in
the boudoir of Alice Grove. The problem,
she lamented in a Southern drawl in
front of a tittering studio audience, was
that Vern, her cowboy-booted and
ponytailed husband of four years, was
too tired for sex. After a long day at
work he preferred to flop on the sofa
and leaf through car magazines.
Winfrey turned to her guest expert,
one of New York’s best-known sex
therapists, to help the couple to redis-
cover the accelerator and the clutch. Re-
set your expectations and slowly feel your
way into it, Shirley Zussman advised.
“People often think that this has to be
a long, drawn-out orgy, almost, every
time they get together,” Zussman said.
But sex can be “comfortable and
enjoyable — what I call cosy”.
The impact of her counsel was open
to debate. A follow-up episode 21 years
later found the couple happily married
but living in separate houses. Still,
Zussman’s advice, delivered with an
impish grin, helped innumerable clients,
whether their hang-ups about hook-
ups were commonplace or specific to
her New York locale. “There’s an old
saying that when the Dow goes down
the erections go down,” she remarked.
crash” because of the lack of intimacy
and absence of relationship-building.
From the Seventies her patients did not
only cite physical dysfunctions such as
premature ejaculation, inability to
orgasm and impotence, but were more
open about passion-killing emotional
and social stresses, such as crammed
work schedules.
Zussman observed that the
Aids crisis instigated a fear
of sexually transmitted
diseases and a return
to conservative mores,
while technology
spawned internet
pornography. She
worried that smart-
phones created a
generation more
interested in touching
their screens than each
other.
She worked with her
husband, Leon Zussman, an
obstetrician-gynaecologist. They made
broadcast appearances, ran a human
sexuality programme in Long Island
and co-authored a 1979 book, Getting
Together: A Guide to Sexual Enrichment
for Couples. She served as president of
the American Association of Sexuality
Educators, Counselors and Therapists
and was a sex advice columnist for Glam-
our magazine. The most frequent ques-
tion from readers was: how do I orgasm?Zussman knew, and was influenced by,
the cultural anthropologist, Margaret
Mead, and William Masters and Vir-
ginia Johnson, the married couple who
established an institute in Missouri to
research and treat sexual dysfunction.
They were key figures in the study of
human sexuality, along with Alfred
Kinsey. At a party she met the Welsh
actor Michael Sheen, who portrayed
Masters in a television drama, Masters
of Sex, which ran from 2013 to 2016.
“I was introduced to Michael Sheen,
and he knew that I had known Masters
and Johnson,” Zussman told Time
magazine. “So he said, ‘tell me, how do
you think I’m representing him?’ I said,
‘I think you’re doing a pretty good job,
but there’s a major difference.’ He said,
‘what’s that?’ I said, ‘you’re handsome’.”
Shirley Edith Dlugasch was born in
New York City in 1914 to Louis, a doctor,
and Sara (née Steiner), a nurse. Her
father prospered after he was called to
the apartment of a man who had appar-
ently died in his bed. Alone in the room
and filling out some paperwork, he no-
ticed the man was breathing faintly. The
family said the young physician had
brought him back to life and word
spread that he was a miracle worker.
She studied psychology at Smith
College in Massachusetts, graduating
in 1934. The celebrated cook Julia Child
was a classmate at the all-female
university. “We thought men were thesexual experts and that pleasing our
partners was what it was all about,”
Zussman wrote. She took a master’s
degree at the Columbia University
School of Social Work in New York and
earned a doctorate in education from
Columbia. She married Leon in 1940;
he died in 1980. She is survived by their
son, Marc, a psychiatrist, and daughter,
Carol, a therapist.
When Zussman was born, the average
American woman was unlikely to live
for more than a couple of years after the
onset of the menopause. Today’s
extended life expectancies, she argued,
merit a shift in societal attitudes towards
sex in middle age and beyond. “People
are living longer than in any other
period in history and as people age they
are healthier, more active and more
imbued with a zest for life.”
People are also more candid about
their desires — frankness that she
welcomed, most of the time. “Someone
called me and said he needed some
help. He said ‘I’m a bad boy and I’m
looking for someone for spankings’,”
she recalled. “I had to make it clear that
that’s not within my range of expertise.”Shirley Zussman, sex therapist, was born
on July 23, 1914. She died on December 4,
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