the times | Friday March 18 2022 51
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One half of Britain’s 1964
Olympic golden couple
Robbie Brightwell
Page 52Bowles with Penelope Keith, his co-star in To the Manor Born, in 1981, and in Alan Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment, 1990came out perfectly trained for Rattigan
drawing-room comedies of the kind
that they stopped doing in the year I
was first looking for work,” he said.
While his colleagues were destined
for early stardom, he spent more than
two decades in supporting roles, play-
ing old men on stage and urbane
villains in television episodes of The
Avengers and The Saint. During his live
television debut, the Armchair Theatre
play Underground (1958), his fellow ac-
tor Gareth Jones suffered a heart attack
and died off camera leaving the rest of
the cast to improvise.
As a young man Bowles enjoyed fe-
male company, celebrating his 20th
birthday by being driven around New
York in a convertible by “a delightful
strawberry blonde”. He also had a girl-
friend called Wendy who later became
“Australia’s strongest woman”. While
playing an 80-year-old butler at Bristol
Old Vic he was reunited with Susan
Bennett, a Rada contemporary who
was the leading lady, and they were
married in 1961.
She later described the moment he
proposed. “He asked me out to lunch —
which was lovely. And at lunch he asked
me out for a drink after the show. And
after the show he asked me to marry
him.” The couple had two sons, Guy, aninvestment manager, and Adam, a busi-
nessman, and a daughter, Sasha, who is
an artist. “Every time we meet, I kiss
them and tell them that I love them, and
they do the same to me,” he said. In a
profession littered with divorces his
was a stable marriage, though not with-
out its temptations. “I have had women
breaking into my house and into my
hotel bedrooms,” he once said, adding
that he never succumbed.
Bowles’s first agent told him that he
would not make it until he was 40. In
fact, he was 41 when he landed his first
leading role, as the upper-class patient
Archie Glover in Only When I Laugh.
Even that was not enough and he was
about to leave Britain to become artistic
director of a theatre in Adelaide when,
aged 44, To the Manor Born made him a
household name overnight. “The next
morning I walked to my local news-
agents, people waved at me and cars
and lorries sounded their horns at me,”
he said. Walking on to the West End
stage that evening “I got a huge round
of applause”.
In 1992 Simon Gray wrote the comedy
Running Late for Bowles in which he
played a TV interviewer who gets his
comeuppance one day when his life falls
apart: “Days later I’m walking along Pic-
cadilly, and run into Peter Hall, who says
he enjoyed Running Late and adds, ‘I’d
very much like to work with you’ — what
a pickup line! — ‘Would you like to work
with me?’ ” Hall offered him a part in
Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and
so began their close association.
Fans of Bowles’s toff characters were
legion, while his diffidence never entire-
ly disappeared. On one occasion he had
just ordered a ham sandwich in a hotel
bar when Quentin Tarantino intro-
duced himself, declared himself a fan
and invited Bowles to supper. “I said,
‘That’s so kind of you but I’ve just or-
dered a sandwich’. So he said, ‘OK, we’ll
take a rain check’, and walked off. After-
wards I thought, ‘What on earth have I
done, turning down supper with Taran-
tino?’ ” Another time he learnt that his
agent had inadvertently declined an in-
vitation from Marlon Brando.
Bowles lived near Barnes Common,
west London, in a house that, like its
occupier, was tall and elegant. Despite
being colour blind, he had decorated it
with modern British paintings includ-
ing a couple of Hockneys. In the high-
walled garden, with its babbling brook,
was a striking mural by his daughter.
He was taught to drive in 1962 by Kay
Petre, a formidable competitor in 1930s
British motor racing, and had been a
keep-fit enthusiast since taking a
Charles Atlas body-building course at
the age of 11. Yet he remained an anx-
ious hypochondriac and his memoir,
published in 2010, was titled Ask Me if
I’m Happy: An Actor’s Life.
It was not only despondency that set
Bowles praying. In 2005 he was playing
Rattigan meeting Joe Orton in Joe and
I at the King’s Head Theatre, north
London, and went into the church
opposite. As he later recalled, he
needed to ask for God’s help “because I
was so nervous at having to strip off in
the love-making scene”.Peter Bowles, actor, was born on
October 16, 1936. He died of cancer on
March 17, 2022, aged 85Whenever Peter Bowles felt despond-
ent he repaired to the nearest church to
pray. He did that one day in 1975 and the
following morning received two offers:
Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends at the
Garrick Theatre and The Good Life on
BBC television, playing Jerry Lead-
better opposite Penelope Keith’s Margo.
Assuming he could not do both, he
turned down The Good Life, which went
to Paul Eddington. “I desperately
wanted to get back into the theatre,” he
explained, adding that he had tired of
bit-parts on television. It was left to
Richard Briers, who did both shows, to
explain that he could have doubled up
because the BBC filming was on Sun-
days. “Every week Briers used to show
me his television cheques,” he lamented.
Before long Bowles had landed the
role that would make his name: Richard
DeVere, a recently widowed self-made
millionaire, in the sitcom To the Manor
Born (1979-1981). DeVere had bought
the manor house on the Grantleigh es-
tate from the newly widowed Audrey
fforbes-Hamilton, played by Keith,
whose reduced circumstances had
forced her to move into the estate’s Old
Lodge. Despite de Vere’s gentlemanly
airs, fforbes-Hamilton regarded him as
simply a “grocer”; worse, his real name
was Bedrich Polouvicek and he had
come to Britain in 1939. The pair’s love-
hate relationship ran for 20 episodes, as
well as Christmas specials in 1979 and
1997, with viewing figures averaging a
remarkable 23 million per episode.
“The whole thing was a success,” re-
called Bowles. “Success brings confi-
dence and when you have confidence
people begin to listen to what you say.”
Yet there was a sting in the tail: a pro-
ducer warned that he would never
again work in drama: “He said, quite se-
riously, that I had ‘joined the other side’
and there was no going back.” It proved
not to be the case.
Although Bowles was cast in other
country squire parts such as Major Sin-
clair Yeates in The Irish RM (1983-85)
and Guthrie Featherstone QC in Rum-
pole of the Bailey (1978-92), during his
career he played almost every variety of
role: he was David Hemmings’s agent in
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up
(1966) starring Vanessa Redgrave; the
newspaper diarist Neville Lytton in
Lytton’s Diary (1985-86), a show he de-
vised for Thames TV; and Archie Rice in
the 1986 revival of John Osborne’s The
Entertainer at the Shaftesbury Theatre.
Yet just when Bowles had perfected
his upper-class gent guise, theatre and
television became afflicted by the need
for actors with street cred and grit. “Oh
well,” he would sigh. “I’m just an elderly
actor who remembers happier days.”
Peter John Bowles was born in
London in 1936, the son of Herbert
Bowles and his wife Sarah (née Harri-
son) who had been in service with the
Earl of Sandwich and the Beaverbrook
household respectively. He had a
younger sister, Patricia, who in 2007
was appointed MBE for her work with
the NHS in Lincolnshire. By the time of
He was driven around
New York by ‘a delightful
strawberry blonde’
Obituaries
Peter Bowles
Diffident actor who rose from humble beginnings to stardom playing the self-made millionaire Richard DeVere in To the Manor Born
REX/SHUTTERSTOCKPeter’s birth his father was chauffeur to
Captain David Margesson, leader of the
Commons, who had a manor house in
Warwickshire; the Bowles family lived
in a thatched cottage in the grounds.
During the war Herbert,
who could strip and re-
build a Rolls-Royce en-
gine, worked at the
company’s factory
at Hucknall, near
Nottingham. The
family eventually
moved into a
council house
with an outside
lavatory and a tin
bath and Bowles
grew up believing
“that I should always
show respect for my
betters”, a trait he believed
“held me back terribly”. When
his star eventually rose he bought him-
self a Rolls-Royce because “I wanted to
show Dad I could buy my own cars”.
He was educated at High Pavement
grammar school, where his ambition
was to be a dentist “but only because
they earned the magical £1,000 a year”.
He appeared as Mark Antony in a
school staging of Julius Caesar with
John Bird, the future satirist, as Brutus.It led to a smaller role in a professional
production at Nottingham Playhouse
starring Derek Godfrey as Antony. On
opening night Godfrey dried up in the
“Friends, Romans, countrymen”
speech and Bowles tried to
prompt him, but at the in-
terval was “given the
worst dressing down
of my life”.
After hearing
that John Turner,
another old boy,
had gone to Rada,
Bowles made in-
quiries and was
admitted with a
scholarship to cover
his fees. “Before that
I didn’t even know one
could get paid for act-
ing,” he said. He won an
award as most promising actor
of the year, while his mother worked
nights to help with his living expenses.
His cohort included Peter O’Toole,
Alan Bates and Albert Finney, with
whom he shared a flat in north London.
It was highly competitive. “They threw
down the gauntlet and said, ‘That’s my
Macbeth. Beat that’.” Yet his back-
ground made him conform. “While the
others were all developing into rebels, Ir Herbert,
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