There was something grand, grand and encompassing about the actor Joss Ackland, who has died at the age of 95. He was a fixture in British films for decades and a stalwart of the Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company – playing Falstaff in the opening RSC production of Henry IV, parts one and two, at the new Barbican Center in 1982 – and on the West End stage.
He appeared in more than 100 films and numerous TV plays and series, usually, in later years, with white hair and a beard, but always with energy and vigor, whether as the cuckolded husband, Jock Delves Broughton, in Michael Radford’s White Mischief (1987) with Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance, or as the drug addict in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.
At the Old Vic in 1958-59, Ackland played Toby Belch, Caliban, Falstaff in The Merry Wives and Pistol, in a company that also included Maggie Smith, Moyra Fraser, John Moffatt, Barbara Jefford and Alec McCowen; for all of them, this season was a highlight and a turning point in their individual careers.
Ackland next played leading roles for Bernard Miles at the Mermaid, where he was associate director, and the titular cockney yacht enthusiast in Beverley Cross and David Heneker’s musical Jorrocks (1966) at the New Theater (now the Noël Coward). His later London stage roles included a tragic, powerful Mitch in the 1974 revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, with Claire Bloom, a brilliant, almost creepy Frederick Egerman in Hal Prince’s 1975 London premiere of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (with Jean Simmons and Hermione Gingold) and a monumental Perón in Prince’s Brechtian production of Evita by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1978.
It’s interesting that he didn’t feel happy or at home at any of these performances. Ackland was what has been called a ‘difficult’ actor; he felt at odds with new ideas and hated Trevor Nunn’s rehearsal process at the RSC, or even the concept that his Captain Shotover in Nunn’s magnificent festival production of Shaw’s Heartbreak House at Nunn’s Chichester in 2000 could be a valid ‘political’ interpretation can be. He remained a proud, old-fashioned maverick, a mid-level supporting actor with considerable gravitas.
He was born in North London, the son of Norman Ackland, an Irish journalist, and his wife Ruth (née Izod), and was educated at Dame Alice Owen’s school in Islington, although he left at the age of 15 with the firm intention to become an actor. He worked in a brewery and dairy in Bedford before a chance meeting with his father’s cousin, the playwright Rodney Ackland, drove him to the Central School of Speech and Drama.
He made a London debut in The Hasty Heart at the Aldwych in 1945 and played small roles in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1947 alongside Donald Sinden and Paul Scofield, followed by seven years in rep at Croydon, Wimbledon, Chesterfield and Coventry.
He met his future wife, Rosemary Kirkcaldy, a native of Nyasaland (now Malawi) and also an actor, when he appeared with her in JM Barrie’s Mary Rose in Pitlochry in 1951, and they married at the end of the year. Still without a real breakthrough, the couple decided to try their luck in South Africa in 1954, where Joss worked as a field assistant on a tea plantation in Beira, Mozambique, before moving to Cape Town for two years and spending six months in Johannesburg. , where he appeared in plays by Terence Rattigan and Coward with Moira Lister and Dulcie Gray.
The Acklands returned to Britain in 1957 with a growing family – they would have seven children – and Ackland was suddenly in demand, first at the Oxford Playhouse with director Frank Hauser, then at the Old Vic and the Mermaid, where between 1962 and 1964 his major roles included Bluntschli in Shaw’s Arms and the Man, the suicidal Kirilov in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed and the title role in Brecht’s Galileo. His lightness of touch in contemporary plays benefited John Osborne’s sizzling Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) at the Royal Court and Duke of York’s, and John Mortimer’s comic short plays, Come As You Are (1970), with Glynis Johns, Pauline Collins and John Mortimer. Denholm Elliott with the Duchess.
He made his first television impact as the narrator of 26 episodes of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian Stories in the early 1960s, but he cemented that public status and even affection with his Joe Gargery in the BBC’s 1974 Great Expectations (Michael York as Pip, Margaret Leighton as Miss Havisham) and as CS Lewis in the award-winning television film of William Nicholson’s Shadowlands in 1988.
In between, apart from opening the Barbican with the RSC – after his gigantic Falstaff with a great Captain Hook in Nunn and John Caird’s reinterpretation (designed by John Napier) of Peter Pan – Ackland was a moving Gaev at The Cherry Orchard in Chichester opposite Bloom in 1981 and an imposing “heavy” at the National in Harley Granville-Barker’s The Madras House in 1977 (with Scofield) and in Jean Seberg, a disastrous 1983 Marvin Hamlisch musical directed by Peter Hall.
He underwent the cathartic experience of playing ‘Sir’ in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser to clear houses in 1982 while on tour with Kenneth Haigh, but he always hoped that one day he would play King Lear in the afternoon and evening Sir; he never did that.
And while his films include such contrasting oddities as One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975) with Peter Ustinov and Helen Hayes and Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), he became a more familiar face on television in 1970s series, such as The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Great Expectations (the cast also included Sarah Miles and James Mason) and an all-star 1987 version of Priestley’s When We Are Married (he played the edible photographer), starring Timothy West and Prunella Scales one of the three couples who are not married after all.
Film and television appearances in the 1990s included acclaimed theatrical emanations in Chichester as the target of Lauren Bacall’s revenge in The Visit in 1995, as Shaw’s underwear millionaire John Tarleton in Misalliance in 1997, and as that great Captain Shotover, the best since Colin Blakely is at the National. His last stage appearance, in 2012, was as a surprisingly authoritative, goateed King George V in The King’s Speech at Wyndham’s Theatre.
In his 1989 autobiography, I Must Be in There Somewhere (the phrase is that of an old actor searching for his identity in a cigar box with nose putty, sticks of grease paint and methylated spirits), Ackland described some offstage dramas, such as a fire. at his home in Putney, south-west London, in 1963; Rosemary, then pregnant with their sixth child, survived the disaster despite breaking her back. She was told she would never walk again but did so 18 months later, leaving Stoke Mandeville hospital with calipers.
The couple’s eldest son, Paul, died in 1982 and in 2000 Rosemary was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. She died two years later, in 2002. She had told her side of the story in the diaries she kept for more than 50 years, which Ackland edited and described in his second book, My Better Half and Me (2009).
Ackland, appointed CBE in 2001, is survived by his son Toby and five daughters, Melanie, Antonia, Penelope, Samantha and Kirsty, and 34 grandchildren and 30 great-grandchildren.
• Joss (Sidney Edmond Jocelyn) Ackland, actor, born February 29, 1928; died November 19, 2023