Mellifluously voiced actor took his final bow
Tim Pigott-Smith had distinctly mixed feelings about the role in The Jewel in the Crown which made him a household name.
Set in the final years of British rule in India, the 14-part marathon television adaptation of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet in which he memorably played the malevolent and sadistic police superintendent Ronald Merrick, came to be regarded as a pinnacle of British television drama.
Pigott-Smith described the fame it brought him as ‘‘a millstone’’, although he admitted that it was a ‘‘nice one to have around my neck’’.
The series was a huge success in America and he was offered ‘‘telephone numbers’’ by Hollywood to play ‘‘sadomasochistic villains with scars on their faces’’, but turned them all down to focus on stage acting.
His mellifluously patrician voice and versatility as a character actor have brought distinction to many films and TV dramas over 45 years.
Before his powerful portrayal of Merrick, he consulted a criminal psychologist to gain an insight into his character’s inner life, an attention to detail which was to become a trademark.
Many years later when he played Lear on stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, he spent weeks conducting medical research into the symptoms of dementia.
The key to playing Merrick, the psychologist told him, was to capture his contempt for his fellow human beings, a quality he portrayed physically by practising jutting his jaw in front of the mirror.
The result was a compelling characterisation of viciousness so intense that viewers seemed unable to differentiate between life and art. In his own words, it made him ‘‘the man people love to hate’’.
He refused to let his 9-year-old son watch the series, an old friend informed him his wife did not want him in their house and he was chased out of a north London antiques emporium by a knifewielding shop owner who thought Merrick had come to burgle him.
The performance won him a Bafta for best actor.
Filming took 18 months, much of it on location in Udaipur, Rajasthan, against the romantic backdrop of the city’s lake palace.
The production was beset with mishaps and a fire at Granada Television’s Manchester warehouse destroyed all the costumes and props, including a prosthetic arm worn by PigottSmith’s one-armed character.
He would have happily lost the prosthetic but a replacement limb was swiftly commissioned.
A decade later he complained that people were still squeezing his arm to see if it was real.
He struggled with the attention which celebrity brought: ‘‘I couldn’t go anywhere without people stopping me. That’s what telly does - you spend hours in people’s homes and they feel they own you.’’
He claimed that after making The Jewel In The Crown he never watched it again, apart from a brief moment when he accidentally caught a repeat channel-hopping while waiting for a taxi: ‘‘I thought, who’s that bloke? I recognise him.’’
When the filming in India ended, Pigott-Smith returned to the provincial stage, where his thespian heart lay.
In protest at attempts to typecast him, he staged Bengal Lancer at Leicester Haymarket, a one-man show in which he played 16 characters.
He also became artistic director of Compass, a touring company founded by Sir Anthony Quayle and for whom he directed productions of Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Amadeus and played Brutus in Julius Caesar.
Not long before his death from liver cancer in 1989, Quayle asked Pigott-Smith to take over as actor- manager.
Pigott-Smith just as tearfully agreed.
His commitment to the live stage remained unshakeable.
At one point he was playing in three Shakespearean productions for the National Theatre in the same week - Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.
‘‘The stage is my favourite place to be,’’ he said. ‘‘With film and television, you get very little time to practice your craft. But the stage is exciting, every performance is different. Why else would you do something for pounds 400 a week?’’
The excitement extended to a penchant for ad-libbing. One night at the Old Vic, where he was appearing in The Iceman Cometh with Kevin Spacey, he scolded a woman in the front row who had put her bare feet on the edge of the stage: ‘‘Ma’am, you might think this is a coffee table, but it’s where I work.’’
He regarded his Lear, which he waited until he was 65 to play, as the pinnacle of his achievement. ‘‘I was very proud of that and I’m not proud of much stuff,’’ he said.
He made a further rare admission of satisfaction in his performance opposite Helen Mirren in a physically draining four-and-a-half-hour production of Mourning Becomes Electra at the National.
He died suddenly as he was preparing to play Willy Loman in a touring production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which was due to open in Northampton this week.
Tall and commanding, he was often typecast as a figure of authority, in and out of uniform, and claimed that his first television role, in which he played a cavalry officer, was purely down to his military sounding doublebarrelled name.
He went on to play a foreign secretary in the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, a prime minister when he appeared as Herbert Asquith in the film 37 Days and a monarch in King Charles III. A television adaptation of the latter will be screened by the BBC later this year.
He was appointed OBE [Officer of the Order of the British Empire] in the 2017 new year’s honours list.
Despite playing so many establishment figures, his own politics leant towards the left.
He funded his indulgence for live theatre with lucrative supporting roles in such Oscarnominated pictures as The Remains of the Day, Gangs of New York and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, while his perfectly honed, authoritative tones made him the king of the voiceovers for Prudential, BMW, Kleenex and Barclays among countless others.
His son recalled that as a schoolboy he thought his father’s most impressive claim to fame was uttering the immortal words, ‘‘And all because the lady loves Milk Tray.’’
Acting, he confessed, was an ‘‘obsession’’ which consumed his life and he was married for 45 years to fellow actress Pamela Miles, with whom he had a son, Tom, a concert violinist.
A popular and jovial figure around north London’s Highgate village where he lived for many years before moving to nearby Hampstead, he formed part of an informal ‘‘clique’’ of local actors who included Jonathan Pryce, Victoria Wood and Clive Owen.
He could often be seen in the local pubs, good-naturedly complaining about the price of a pint with an ironic ‘‘Good Lord!’’ when it came to his round.
Friendly and unpretentious, he was always happy to chat when approached by admirers, especially if they did not ask about the prosthetic arm.
Timothy Peter Pigott-Smith was born in Rugby in 1946 and educated at Wyggeston Boys’ School, Leicester.
An only child, he was a boy chorister at Leicester Cathedral but when he was 16 the family moved to Stratford-upon-Avon, when his father Harry was appointed editor of the local newspaper. His mother Margaret was a talented amateur actress and the move was a timely one for a drama-obsessed teenager: Peter Hall had established the Royal Shakespeare Company in the town the previous year.
The director later said of PigottSmith: ‘‘The great thing about him is that he now has the confidence to make a complete fool of himself in rehearsal, and only the great actors have that.’’
He studied at Bristol University before training as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and began his professional career in 1969.
One of his first TV roles came in Doctor Who and other pre- Jewel In The Crown highlights included his portrayal of Brendan Bracken in the 1981 series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years.
Yet it was the stage which remained his forte. ‘‘Being involved in something live, chemical, fleeting, changing,’’ he enthused. ‘‘It’s the possibility of magic.’’