John Savident, who has died aged 86, was a skilled, colourful, sometimes broad but always memorable actor who for over a year played one of TV’s most beloved soap opera characters – the bombastic but lovable butcher Fred Elliott in the ITV series Coronation Street. decade.
Fred, who first appeared in 1994 and became a regular two years later, quickly became a favorite with viewers, thanks in part to the enjoyably imitable repetitive vocal tic with which Savident invested him: “Ashley, I say Ashley,” he said than. when he addressed his young cousin (later revealed to be his son), Ashley Peacock (Steven Arnold).
Savident claimed that his delivery was inspired by a combination of the Looney Tunes cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn, loud men whose voices he had heard booming through northern pubs, and factory workers in Lancashire factories who communicated with each other by bellowing and being forced to repeat themselves because of the noise of the looms.
Played extensively, using all the comic tricks at Savident’s disposal, Fred was the perfect Coronation Street player – absolutely truthful beneath the broader strokes of the characterization. With his imposing figure and a booming voice that could be heard even when whispered from the back of the stalls, Savident captured the show’s quirky northern humor with masterful comic timing. Crucially, however, he also had the dramatic skills to convey Fred’s emotional, sometimes vulnerable scenes with a sincere and quietly spoken pathos.
And there was a lot of emotion to be had: Fred married three times and the proposals were turned down by both Rita Sullivan (Barbara Knox) and Audrey Roberts (Sue Nicholls).
For his portrayal of Fred, Savident won the award for Best Comedy Performance at the first British Soap Awards in 1999. The following year he was involved in a harrowing incident when he was robbed by a visitor to his flat near the Granada TV studios in Manchester. – whom he had invited after a charity event – and stabbed him in the neck. Savident was lucky that the knife missed his artery: his attacker was jailed for seven years.
He left Coronation Street in 2006, stating that he wanted to spend more time with his family, but later admitted he was disappointed that his bosses did not try harder to keep him in work. Fred died of a stroke – after a last-minute heart-to-heart with Audrey – on the day he was to marry Bev Unwin (Susie Blake): unlucky in love until the end.
Savident was born in St Peter Port, Guernsey, the only son of John, a fisherman, and his Swiss wife Karoline (née Pfrinder). The family escaped from the German-occupied island in 1940 and settled in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Greater Manchester. He was educated at grammar school there (now Ashton Sixth Form College) and joined the Manchester Police as a cadet in 1955. He patrolled the east side of the city for a number of years and was seconded to the vice squad.
He had performed in amateur drama since childhood and when his local Prestwich Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society’s production of South Pacific was overseen by a visiting director, Savident jokingly asked to audition for his next show. To his surprise, this resulted in the possibility of a professional debut as the Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Max Wall in the Hanley Christmas pantomime, Robin Hood (1961).
Newly married – to Rona (née Hopkinson), a teacher (later theater director), whom he had met when they played husband and wife as amateurs in Rochdale, and married earlier that year – and recently promoted to accident prevention officer in Manchester’s C Division, Savident was cautious with accepting the offer, but decided to take the plunge, figuring he could always rejoin the police force if things didn’t work out. He never had to do that: he soon joined the Lincoln repertory theater and two years later played O’Dwyer in Trelawny of the Wells at the National Theater in London.
He gained widespread attention for many of his later roles at the National, including a dryly manipulative Archbishop of Reims in Saint Joan (directed by Ronald Eyre), an exuberant comic turn as the foolish duped husband Nicia in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, and – for the director Peter Hall – a powerfully clever Cominius from Ian McKellen’s Coriolanus (all 1984).
He was also the comic official Monsieur Firmin in the first production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty’s Theatre, 1987), a role he recreated with the original company in the filmed The Phantom of the Opera at the Albert Hall (2011).
After breaking into television in 1966, he eschewed regular roles in an attempt to avoid typecasting, preferring instead numerous guest roles in every genre. That said, he tended to specialize in sardonic establishment types, bossy ministers and despicable toffs: the air of haughty contempt and an undercurrent of severity that these required came easily to him.
Occasionally he was tempted by recurring roles, such as a pudgy and eccentric intelligence officer in the child spy caper Tightrope (1972), a tempestuous Home Secretary in the dystopian drama 1990 (1977), the cheerfully conniving Sir Frederick ‘Jumbo’ Stewart in the superior sitcom Yes Minister (1980), and the drunken blackmailer Raffles in Middlemarch (1994).
He endeared himself to science fiction fans with a memorably vivid turn as the duplicitous scientist Egrorian, a gloriously preening grotesque, in Blake’s seventh episode Orbit from 1981, and a short-lived but enjoyably cantankerous, dyspeptic Squire in the Doctor Who series The Visitation. (1982).
On film he shared the screen with his childhood idol Laurence Olivier in Battle of Britain (1969), and collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Richard Attenborough on Gandhi (1982). Then there was the Hollywood blockbuster Hudson Hawk (1991), Merchant Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993) and Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995).
After leaving Coronation Street, Savident returned to the stage, playing Henry Hobson in Hobson’s Choice (at the Chichester Festival theatre, 2007), and on television in Above Suspicion (2009), Hotel Babylon (2009) and Holby City (2012) .
He is survived by Rona and their children, Romany and Daniel.
• John Frederick Joseph Savident, actor, born January 21, 1938; died February 21, 2024