batman

RIP Mr Goddard.

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smudge

More sad news of yet another unique and memorable actor. Wonderful as Hugh Burden's upper crust boss in THE MIND OF MR. J.G. REEDER, amongst many other appearances. Glad he got the chance to have a nice, quiet retirement and a decent innings...

Respect.

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

Joenoir

Because he always looked about twenty years older than his actual age, like Harbottle, I also thought he had already passed away. He was indeed an excellent villian in William Tell.

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.

Santonix

Very sad, as a child I well remember his villanous Gessler in William Tell.

R.I.P.

Pam1927

I too am amazed to hear that Willoughby Goddard has only just left us. I bought the DVD box set of William Tell last year and enjoyed seeing the series again enormously - it was even better than my childhood memories of it! Amazing that there was only a 4-year age difference between him and Conrad Phillips.

A great character actor!

Pam

It's nice to be nice...

John Llewellyn Moxey

A memorable actor and a great loss. R I P

John Llewellyn

Kitty

Sadly Willoughby died on Apr 11/2008.
See obituary in The Times Apr 14.

julian_craster

julian_craster

Sadly Willoughby died on Apr 11/2008. See obituary in The Times Apr 14. SEE: http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/ac...ard-r-i-p.html

Frank63

Some geezer was talking about Willoughby Goddard
this morning (15/04/08 ) on Classic FM. I missed the begining of his spiel , maybe he was mentioning his recent death after playing the William Tell Overture, he did say, the DJ that is, that Mr Goddard was a very nice person.

RIP Lamburger Gessler

" I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception" Groucho Marx

julian_craster

Obituary
Willoughby Goddard
Imposing actor who played Landburger Gessler and Toby Belch

Eric Shorter
Wednesday April 16, 2008
The Guardian

Willoughby Goddard, who has died aged 81, was a British character actor whose conspicuous rotundity nearly always played a significant part in his stage and television career of more than 40 years. In roles as judge or professor, landlord or chairman, his figure may have been bulky, but there was something to add to it: his height. In 1958-59 he loomed up on the small screen in 39 episodes, alarmingly but at his best, as Landburger Gessler, the hated Austrian leader against Conrad Phillips' William Tell and the poor people of 14th-century Switzerland. In the tale of crossbow markmanship, Goddard failed to arrest Tell, who fled to the mountains, which meant that Gessler would never get his man. Instead he was seen to find his solace in eating close-up vast quantities of food with scene after scene of Gessler's face as he stuffed it with meat.

Goddard did not put himself forward as a grotesque. He was, in fact, a most gentlemanly actor: game for anything. But the character stuck and he never failed to command in his characterisation of a favourite figure of Shakespeare's - Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. Goddard's voice counted as well as his shape. When his niece was about to despatch Sir Toby to an old people's home, it was the joy of hearing the clarity of Goddard's speech - "it is a pleasure to hear this actor merely murmuring" - that drove a critic to rave about it.
During a tour overseas in 1968 for the Prospect Players, he found himself playing Sir Toby and claimed to have lost "eight inches round the middle". It was due to a complaint he caught in Cairo. He played Belch in another version of Twelfth Night (Round House, Chalk Farm, 1973) directed by Toby Robertson, saying - as a way of inducing goodwill with the producer - "if you make a good suggestion and it works, it gets into the production". One critic observed that Belch was "so comfortable and substantially in the picture as to deserve painting in his alcoholic haze". Goddard became one of the best of useful Shakespeareans.

Much as he preferred the theatre, it was television and the odd film that kept him going, and in shows such as Drake's Progress (1957) and the Charlie Drake Comedy Hour he appeared in his more amusing moments. As Lord Charley in Charley's Grants in 1970 he did his best to become "a gentlemanly actor" in seeking artistic grants from Hattie Jacques as head of the Heritage Trust. It was also Goddard who ran the vast public prosecutor's office as Sir Jason Toovey in one of the Edgar Wallace collection of short stories The Mind of Mr JG Reeder, featuring Hugh Burden as JG.

One of his more recent small-screen appearances was as Professor Siblington in Porterhouse Blue (1987), when gazing solemnly up at the spires of the university as the sky filled with inflated condoms. Goddard knew all about straight faces.

Born in Bicester, Oxfordshire, he made his first stage appearance as the Steward in Oxford Playhouse's 1943 revival of Shaw's Saint Joan. After seasons in repertory, especially at the Bristol Old Vic, he played the evangelist Attwater in Donald Pleasence's Ebb Tide with what the critic WA Darlington called "an unction worthy of Robert Morley".

In Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1960), Goddard was judged by Caryl Brahms to be a Wolsey who constituted "the fleshliest cardinal in the business," but why (she still wanted to know) was he not also cast in the film of Oscar Wilde?

As Mr Bumble in the Broadway transfer of Oliver!, Goddard was rated "wonderfully fat and bullish"; and back in London as an amusing Marmaduke Muleygrubs JP, in the Victorian musical Jorrocks. In 1974 he was the woman-shy landowner Bolshintsov in Turgenev's A Month in the Country at Chichester, and in Donald Sinden's Othello he showed more of his famous teamwork with the RSC in 1980 as the Duke of Venice. As if to show how Goddard's corpulence was not always meant as a joke, his playing of a north countryman in John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (Old Vic, 1984) left the house wonderfully straightfaced in the most straightfaced of modern plays.

His career was curtailed by arthritis, but he was a keen supporter of his local cricket club. He was married to Ann Phillips, with whom he had a son.


Willoughby Wittenham Rees Goddard, actor, born July 4 1926; died April 11 2008

julian_craster

Willoughby Goddard: Rotund actor often cast as a baddie


INDEPENDENT
Thursday, 1 May 2008

Willoughby Goddard used his rotund figure most effectively in portraying archetypal screen baddies for 40 years. The actor even openly acknowledged himself as "one of the fatties in the business". He will be best remembered by many who grew up during the 1950s and 1960s as Gessler, the villainous Austrian governor who was the Swiss hero's enemy in The Adventures of William Tell (1958-59).

Goddard's carefully measured hamming up of his performance ensured that Landburgher Gessler's humiliation was complete as the crossbow-firing Tell (played by Conrad Phillips) constantly outwitted the evil tyrant in a quest to rid Switzerland of Austrian occupation.

The actor relished playing a character who would stop at nothing to capture and kill his arch-enemy, in one of ITV's earliest children's adventure series, based on the 14th-century story by Johann von Schiller. The blustering Gessler's tactics included using assassins disguised as resistance heroes and trying to turn the Swiss against their outlaw leader by framing him for crimes he had not committed.

Goddard's performance was made the more chilling for the fact that Gessler was clearly modelled on a Hitler-era military governor, in a children's programme that drew parallels between the Austrian occupation of Switzerland 600 years earlier and the Nazis' more recent actions in Europe.

Born in Bicester, Oxfordshire in 1926, Goddard was a keen swimmer as a child and set a record for swimming the Isis. On leaving school, he set his sights on the stage and, with no drama-school training, made his professional début at the Oxford Playhouse as the Steward in Saint Joan (1943), before joining the repertory company at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre.

He first appeared in the West End as Mr Holmes in Jack Roffey's whodunit No Other Verdict at the Duchess Theatre (1954), where he subsequently played Gowing in an adaptation of George and Weedon Grossmith's satire The Diary of a Nobody (1955).

Over the next few years, Goddard made a big reputation for himself. On stage, he played Cardinal Wolsey in the original production of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (Globe Theatre, 1960), although he did not act in the play on Broadway. He rectified that on being perfectly cast in the role of Mr Bumble when Lionel Bart's musical Oliver! opened in New York (Imperial Theatre, 1963-64). The actor also proved to be a definitive Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, taking the role on tours with Prospect Productions (1968, 1972-74) and with the Royal Shakespeare Company (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1979 and Aldwych Theatre, 1980).

Goddard had already played Mr Bumble in a 13-part BBC serialisation of Oliver Twist (1962) on television, a medium where his face had become familiar in classic serials, as Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre (1956), Mr Creakle in David Copperfield (1956), Mr Rumbold in The History of Mr Polly (1959) and the Rev Mr Chadband in Bleak House. After his role in The Adventures of William Tell, he also appeared in popular action series such as Danger Man (1961), The Avengers (1961, 1969) and The Saint (1969), before becoming a regular in two crime dramas.

He was the civil servant Sir Geoffrey Norton, the only link with the outside world for two criminologists working in – and confined to – a special government department, in The Man in Room 17 (1965-66). Then came a similar role, as Sir Jason Toovey, head of the Department of Public Prosecutions, home to the investigator and title character, in The Mind of Mr J.G. Reeder (1969, 1971).

But such was Goddard's range that he was just as adept at comedy – appearing alongside Charlie Drake in the sketch shows Drake's Progress (1957-58) and The Charlie Drake Comedy Hour (1972), as well as an episode of the sitcom The Worker (1970) – and he played the art thief Tun-Ju in a story in the children's fantasy series Ace of Wands (1970).

His last regular screen role was in Porterhouse Blue (1987), Channel 4's award-winning adaptation of Tom Sharpe's satire about an archaic Cambridge University college, in which he played Professor Siblington, memorably seen gazing up at inflated condoms floating among the spires. He revived one of his greatest performances, as Cardinal Wolsey, for his last television appearance, in God's Outlaw (a historical drama about William Tyndale, 1988).

Many of his other character roles were as judges, doctors and clergymen. Similarly, in the cinema he was cast as a squire in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) and an innkeeper in Joseph Andrews (1976), two of his rare film appearances.

Anthony Hayward

Willoughby Wittenham Rees Goddard, actor: born Bicester, Oxfordshire 4 July 1926; married 1950 Ann Phillips (one son); died 11 April 2008.

Mr Flash

Can anyone confirm that the actor in this picture is Willoughby Goddard?
Any help in ID-ing him would be much appreciated

wearysloth

Seems like it to me

susanduic

I don't think that is WG.............I think it is a very short Welsh? north of England actor who may still be with us. I'll think about it some more...............

susanduic