On 23 November 1963 – the day after the assassination of President John F Kennedy – the actor William Russell, who has died aged 99, showing in a brand new BBC tv collection, approached what seemed like an old school police field in a scrapyard, from which an outdated chap emerged, saying he was the physician. Russell responded: “Physician Who?”
And so was launched one of the vital widespread TV collection of all time, though the viewing figures that night time have been low due to the political upheaval, so the identical episode was proven once more per week later. It caught on, huge time, with Russell – because the science schoolteacher Ian Chesterton – and William Hartnell because the Physician establishing themselves alongside Jacqueline Hill because the historical past instructor Barbara Wright and Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman.
Russell stayed till 1965, returning to the present in 2022 in a cameo look as Ian and, since then, taking part fortunately in all of the hoop-la and fanzine convention-hopping, signing and schmoozing that such a phenomenon engenders.
Earlier than that, although, Russell had achieved prominence within the title function of the ITV collection The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-57) – he was strongly constructed with an air of dashing bravado about him; he had been an RAF officer within the later levels of the second world struggle – and because the lead in a 1957 BBC tv adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, transmitted reside in 18 weekly episodes.
When Sir Lancelot went to the US, the primary British TV import to be shot in color for an American viewers, Russell rode down Fifth Avenue on a horse in full regalia, like some returning, mystical, medieval knight within the coronary heart of Normandy. The present was a smash hit.
By now he was established in films, enjoying a servant to John Mills in The Reward Horse (1952) and a clutch of second world struggle motion films together with They Who Dare (1954) reverse Dirk Bogarde, directed by Lewis “All Quiet on the Western Entrance” Milestone – he met his first spouse, the French mannequin and actor Balbina Gutierrez on a ship crusing to Cyprus to a location shoot in Malta – and Ronald Neame’s The Man Who By no means Was (1956), the primary Operation Mincemeat film, during which he performed Gloria Grahame’s fiance.
Till this level in his profession, he was referred to as Russell Enoch. However Norman Knowledge, with whom he performed within the knockabout comedy farce One Good Flip (1955) objected to his surname as a result of he felt (oddly) that it could publicise a vaudevillian rival of his referred to as Enoch. So, considerably meekly, and to maintain Knowledge comfortable, he turned William Russell, though, within the Eighties, for comfortable and productive intervals with the Actors Touring Firm and the RSC, he reverted to the title Russell Enoch. Later, he settled once more on William Russell. All very complicated for the historians. His doorbell throughout the street from me in north London bore the legend “Enoch”.
He was born in Sunderland, the one little one of Alfred Enoch, a salesman and small enterprise entrepreneur, and his spouse, Eva (nee Pile). They moved to Solihull, after which Wolverhampton, the place William attended the grammar college earlier than shifting on to Fettes school in Edinburgh and Trinity School, Oxford, the place his economics tutor was the sensible Labour parliamentarian Anthony Crosland.
However Russell didn’t “get” the economics a part of the PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) course and switched, a lot to Crosland’s aid, to English. In these years, 1943-46, he labored out his nationwide service and appeared in revues and performs with such proficient contemporaries as Kenneth Tynan, Tony Richardson and Sandy Wilson.
On graduating, he performed in weekly rep in Tunbridge Wells, fortnightly rep on the Oxford Playhouse and featured, modestly, within the Alec Guinness Hamlet of 1951 on the New (now the Noël Coward) theatre. He had huge roles in seasons on the Bristol Outdated Vic and the Oxford Playhouse within the early 60s, whereas on tv he was in JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with John Gregson, and was St John Rivers in Jane Eyre.
He performed Shylock and Ford (within the Merry Wives of Windsor) in 1968-69 on the Open Air, Regent’s Park, earlier than becoming a member of the RSC in 1970 because the Provost in Measure for Measure (with Ian Richardson and Ben Kingsley), Lord Rivers in Norman Rodway’s Richard III and Salisbury in a touring King John, with the title function performed by Patrick Stewart.
His billing slipped in films, however he performed small elements in good movies equivalent to Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve, as one of many Elders; as a passerby drawn into the violence within the Spanish-American slasher movie Lethal Manor (1990); and in Bertrand Tavernier’s Demise Watch (1980), a sci-fi futuristic fable about celeb, actuality TV and corruption, starring Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel.
With John Retallack’s Actors Touring Firm within the 80s, he was a lurching, apoplectic Sir John Brute in John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Spouse, possessing, mentioned Jonathan Keates within the Guardian, “a weirdly philosophical class”; a civilised Alonso, expertly discharging among the greatest speeches in The Tempest; and a quick-change virtuosic king, peasant, soldier and tsar in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 surrealist satire Ubu Roi within the Cyril Connolly translation.
Again on the RSC in 1989, he was the courtly official Egeus in white spats (Helena wore Doc Martens) in an impressive manufacturing of A Midsummer Night time’s Dream by John Caird, and each the Ghost and First Participant in Mark Rylance’s pyjama-clad Hamlet directed by Ron Daniels. In 1994 he took over (from Peter Cellier) as Pinchard in Peter Corridor’s pleasant manufacturing of Feydeau’s Le Dindon, retitled in translation An Absolute Turkey, which it wasn’t.
He rejoined Rylance in that actor/director’s opening season in 1997 on the new Shakespeare’s Globe. He was King Charles VI of France in Henry V and Tutor to Tim in Thomas Middleton’s riotous Jacobean metropolis comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. A few years later, in 2021, his son Alfred Enoch (Dean Thomas within the Harry Potter films), would play on the identical stage as a fired-up Romeo.
Russell is survived by his second spouse, Etheline (nee Lewis), a physician, whom he married in 1984, and their son, Alfred, and by his youngsters, Vanessa, Laetitia and Robert, from his marriage to Balbina, which led to divorce, and 4 grandchildren, James, Elise, Amy and Ayo.
