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From The Times
September 23, 2008
William Fox: character actor


Fox as the satirist Tobias Smollett with Constance Carling as his maid in The Grand Tour, a BBC film of 1970

Leaving drama school with a gold medal and the chance to go straight into the West End, William Fox was set fair for a glittering career. But starting out as a young actor in the early 1930s he was also destined for a long-playing role in Hitler’s war, a suspension of his theatrical ambitions that kept him out of the public eye just too long for the magic to work a second time.

Meanwhile, as a favourite of every director in search of a juvenile lead, Fox was able to savour the glamour and excitement of fashionable London. He first appeared in Somerset Maugham’s The Breadwinner along with Ronald Squire, a leading comedy actor of his day, and Peggy Ashcroft, whose affair with Paul Robeson was the source of much theatrical gossip. Opening at the Vaudeville in September 1930, the play enjoyed an eight-month run and Fox collected a batch of good notices. He did even better in J. B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner. It was the first success for the young director Tyrone Guthrie, while Fox was billed as a great discovery.

Rejecting the chance to join the Broadway cast for the play, he instead went to the Old Vic where the straight-laced Lillian Baylis confessed that the sight of this handsome actor in tights gave her “sensations”. In a company led by John Gielgud, Fox was reunited with Ashcroft, playing Orlando to her Rosalind. His one disappointment was missing out on Romeo, which went to Marius Goring. There were consolations, however. A lover of parties and lively conversation, Fox played life to the full while wondering occasionally at the luck that had brought him so far, so fast.

William Fox was born in 1911, the son of a wealthy trader who made and lost several fortunes along the coasts of the South China Sea. The family home was in Manila but his parents were always on the move and while still in infancy Fox was taken to Madrid, Paris and London. In 1916 he was sent to an English prep school. He went on to Haileybury, where he was destined to go to Oxford before joining the Asiatic Petroleum Company (later Shell) in Shanghai. An impressive salary with bright prospects was on offer. But then, at a critical moment when his father was out of contact somewhere on the high seas, Fox spotted an advertisement in The Times summoning young hopefuls to audition at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art.

Fox was awarded a scholarship but on one condition. Since he admitted to a well-to-do family, the money that would have come with the scholarship would instead go to the next candidate on the list. The deal was done. Fox abandoned his place at Oxford and wrote to tell his father, who gave him just one year to make good. He did this and more. But, as he later acknowledged, early success led him to overplay his hand, not least in domestic matters. At 21 he was married to the actress Carol Rees, seven years his senior, who was pregnant with their daughter. The relationship fell apart as their careers diverged.

Whenever theatre work was scarce, Fox turned to radio, a medium which occupied his talents as actor and writer for hundreds of drama productions. He often wrote under a pseudonym so that his fellow actors, over whom he sometimes had a choice in the casting, would be unaware of his involvement. His first broadcast was in 1934, when live transmissions were a minefield for stage actors used to visual display. As Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea, Marie Ney was so overcome with emotion that she flung her arms round Fox, sending his script flying into the corner of the studio. The long pause while Fox scrambled about on the floor was covered by heavy breathing.

Back in the West End, 1934 was Fox’s busiest year with five stage productions including Precipice, a play about ballet in which the dancing was left to Anton Dolin. After a brief Broadway interlude, Fox enjoyed a second Priestley triumph, appearing in the third of his time plays, I Have Been Here Before which ran until 1938. Also in the cast was Patricia Hilliard whom he married shortly before joining the Territorial Army. While undergoing military training, Fox earned plaudits as a Nazi officer in Weep for the Spring, a play about life in Germany under Hitler.

The rush of patriotism that led Fox to sign on for the TA meant that he was one of the first to be called up when war was declared and one of the last to be demobilised when it was all over. Most of his six years in the Army were spent in North Africa and the Middle East, where he helped to administer the meeting between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in Tehran in 1943. Fox emerged from the war unscathed but suffered the trauma of finding that his parents, who were interned when the Japanese invaded the Philippines, had been murdered just a few days before the Americans retook Manila.

Fox had adapted well to military life, to the point where a postwar return to the theatre no longer held the appeal he had once anticipated. There was also the problem that while he was now too old for juvenile roles, he had no experience as a leading actor. A new generation of directors was reluctant to take a chance on him. Temperamentally incapable of sitting around waiting for something to happen, Fox threw himself into organising the Reunion Theatre Association. The idea was to reacquaint agents and producers with actors who had been otherwise occupied for several years by staging extracts from well-known plays. One youngster so impressed Fox that he got his own agent to see him at work. Dirk Bogarde was immediately signed up.

For his living Fox turned to the wine trade, but though his business thrived he was soon drawn back to his first choice of profession as a character actor, chiefly on television where a commanding voice and clipped accent put him in line for ex-military types. A role he enjoyed disproportionately was that of Lady Chatterley’s husband in a building society commercial in which he shouted at the gamekeeper: “See if I care. I’m with the Woolwich.”

He made the occasional return to the theatre. He was at Stratford for the 1951 season of Shakespeare’s history plays where, as he put it, “the parts were fair to middling and the money unimpressive but certain”. In the West End he was the retired colonel in John Mortimer’s Two Stars for Comfort in 1962 and in the late 1970s, Uncle Gerald in a revival of The Family Reunion at the Vaudeville, the theatre in which Fox had made his first appearance 50 years earlier.

The climax of his career was also a first for Bill Fox. He appeared in opera as Haushofmeister in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne. The challenge of the role was to learn the lines in German and to deliver them in a Viennese accent. He was a triumph.

Always the most clubbable of actors, Fox spent many happy times at the Garrick — in the company of Kenneth More and Kingsley Amis — where in his later years he could often be heard expressing loud if not always well informed views on any subject under the sun. When his beloved wife Pat succumbed to Alzheimer’s he nursed her diligently until he became too frail to manage. She died in 2001.

He is survived by his daughter and his son.

William Fox, actor, was born on January 26, 1911. He died on September 20, 2008, aged 97

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Obituary: William Fox
Versatile actor and connoisseur of the civilised life

Eric Shorter
The Guardian,
Thursday September 25 2008


The actor William Fox, who has died aged 97, was also a soldier, playwright, wine-merchant - and connoisseur of the civilised life. On stage his charm and patrician authority flourished in everything from Shakespeare, Sheridan and Wilde to JB Priestley, Clemence Dane and John Mortimer. He made almost 50 television and film appearances, ranging from The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) to All Creatures Great and Small (1988), having made his debut on television, in February 1939, in Under Suspicion.

He featured on canvas, and on the air. With the Old Vic company (1932-33), he played opposite Peggy Ashcroft in As You Like It - their performance was captured by the English impressionist Walter Sickert - was a member of the BBC repertory company (1952-53, 1963-65), and wrote countless radio plays under many pseudonyms.

Fox was the son of a Manila-based merchant adventurer (who, with his wife, was randomly shot by a Japanese soldier in the Philippines capital in 1945). He was educated at a Sussex preparatory school, followed by Haileybury college in Hertfordshire. His father expected him to go to Oxford but, having performed in many school productions, he went to the Central School of Dramatic Art instead.

His father's proviso was that he did the two-year scholarship course in a year. He won the school gold medal in 1930, and was engaged for Somerset Maugham's hit at the Vaudeville, The Breadwinner. Having toured with the London Comedy Actors and Greater London Players (1931-32), he returned to the West End in Priestley's Dangerous Corner (1932). Then came the Old Vic and many other 1930s stage credits, including Terence Rattigan's first play, First Episode (1934).

Benn Levy's Young Madame Conti (1936) took Fox to the Music Box theatre on Broadway in 1937. Warner Bros, having granted him the rare privilege of a New York audition, offered a contract, but love conquered all. He preferred to be with his wife-to-be, Patricia Hilliard, then acting at the Oxford Playhouse. Together they had appeared as Valentine and Angelica in Congreve's Love for Love.

Soon after, while dining at the Savoy Grill, the couple received a note from another diner, Priestley. Joining him for coffee, he told them that he had never seen a couple "so much in love". After a brief audition, they both featured in his I Have Been Here Before at the Royalty.

The following year, the newly-weds, by now settled in ultra-modern Dolphin Square, were disturbed by the sound of Nazi marching songs being played by their neighbour, Unity Mitford. Thus was Fox, "after lunch at L'Ecu de France", inspired to join the Territorial Army. In 1939 he became full-time with the Royal Ulster Rifles, attaining the rank of major.

His war began with a ski battalion earmarked for Finland and its "winter war" against the Soviet Union. He enjoyed ski training at Chamonix in France but, following the March 1940 Finnish-Soviet armistice, he was sent to northern France with the British Expeditionary Force, only to be evacuated from Dunkirk that May.

After a spell at Staff College, Camberley - not entirely ignoring Belgravia, the Cafe de Paris and the Four Hundred Club - Fox spent the war in North Africa, Italy and Persia. In 1945 in Baghdad - after a few drinks - he helped create the Reunion Theatre Association, a successful scheme to find postwar work for service performers.

He returned to the London stage in January 1946 at the Q theatre in Day After Tomorrow. With the Reunion, he played impresario - and took roles in its London productions. He also co-wrote, and featured in, Exercise Bowler (1946), a play in which soldiers interrupted a light comedy to bring reality home to the audience. After several West End plays came an admired performance as Charles Surface in School for Scandal at the 1948 Bath festival. In 1951 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, under Anthony Quayle, where his Mowbray, to Michael Redgrave's Richard II, was acclaimed.

Fox then bought a Brighton wine business and dabbled in pictures, antiques and the stock market. But in 1961 he was back on stage, in South at the Lyric Hammersmith. Among his other later credits were Mortimer's Two Stars for Comfort (1962), Eliot's The Family Reunion (1979), An Ideal Husband at Chichester, and - a most immaculate performance - King George V in A Personal Affair (1982).

Fox was a clubman, through the Green Room in the 1930s, and later the Union Club, and the United Services. He got into trouble when he took the Queen Mother to an all-male sanctum within the Garrick - but the place was not a theatrical club, he observed, but "a glorious cross-section of friendly and interesting people".

He is survived by Amanda, the daughter of his first marriage, which was dissolved, and his daughter Alexandra and son Nicholas from his second marriage, to Patricia, who died in 2001.

William Hubert Fox, actor, born January 26 1911; died September 20 2008