The actor Frank Williams, who has died aged 90, was finest referred to as the Rev Timothy Farthing in Dad’s Military, one of many BBC’s hottest TV collection. Though this mild-mannered vicar was a little bit of a joke and a ditherer, Williams himself was a deeply spiritual man, an Anglican churchgoer.
Certainly, in his later years he served three phrases (1985-2000) as a consultant of the diocese of London in the Normal Synod, the place he expressed opposition to the ordination of girls – he left the vote, which went towards him in 1992, in tears – however by no means left the church, and infrequently spoke up for higher remedy of homosexual individuals.
He joined Dad’s Military, which ran from 1968 to 1977 (and has not often been off the display since), at first of the third collection, in 1969, when the vicar’s church corridor in Walmington-on-Sea was commandeered by the aged platoon for drill and strategic planning. It was not an association Farthing welcomed.
Aside from Ian Lavender because the “silly boy” Pike, Williams was the youngest member of the solid and recorded the friendships and camaraderie of the collection, along with tales of location capturing in Thetford, Norfolk (the place the actors used the Bell Resort as a house from dwelling) in his memoir, Vicar to Dad’s Military (2002).
It amused him that, having as soon as donned the canine collar, he progressed on different display outings by way of the clerical ranks: as an archdeacon (“finally!”) within the remaining episode of the BBC’s 1987 Self-importance Honest serialisation, then as a bishop in You Rang, My Lord? a comedy collection set within the Twenties that ran for 3 years (in 25 episodes of fifty minutes every) from 1990, written by the Dad’s Military crew of Jimmy Perry and David Croft.
Born in Edgware, north London, Frank lived there all his life, shopping for a home one and a half miles from his mother and father’ dwelling (he was an solely baby) in 1956. His grandfather had owned a big material enterprise in Wales. His father, William Williams, a Welsh nonconformist, married to Alice (nee Myles), who gave Bible courses, began different small companies and, inheriting cash, retired earlier than Frank was born.
Through the conflict years Frank went to a college quickly housed in St Andrew’s Church, Edgware, earlier than attending two personal faculties and boarding for 2 years at Ardingly faculty, West Sussex, in his early teenagers earlier than returning to Hendon county college the place, in his remaining 12 months, he performed the lead position in The Ghost Prepare by Arnold Ridley, an eventual good friend and colleague as Charles Godfrey in Dad’s Military.
His life from then on was both within the church – he worshipped at St Margaret’s, Edgware, switching later to John Keble in Mill Hill – or on the newbie stage. He made his movie debut, as a soldier within the trenches, in The Protect of Religion (1956) for the Rank Organisation’s spiritual division, following with a business debut as a cameraman in The Further Day (1956), a movie about making a movie, with Sid James and George Baker.
As a younger man, he was an everyday viewers member on the Watford Palace. Having befriended Jimmy and Gilda Perry, who ran the Palace as a repertory theatre within the 50s (a friendship that led ultimately to his time in Dad’s Military) earlier than it turned a civic theatre underneath Giles Havergal, he each acted with the corporate and wrote performs for them.
Though his a number of thrillers – all of them featured the phrase “Homicide” within the title – have been widespread with newbie firms, they by no means made his title. That occurred on TV, as he popped up first as a dying affected person in Emergency Ward 10 after which, crucially, as Captain Pocket in The Military Recreation (1957-60), a Granada TV comedy collection starring Bernard Bresslaw (“I solely arsked”), Invoice Fraser and Alfie Bass, written by Sid Colin (with contributions from Barry Took and Marty Feldman) and set in a military surplus depot and transit camp at Nether Hopping, someplace in Warwickshire.
On this interval he additionally performed stooge characters in a number of Norman Knowledge movies together with The Sq. Peg (1958) and The Bulldog Breed (1960), earlier than shifting on to extra “respectable” motion pictures corresponding to Anthony Asquith’s The VIPs (1963), Peter Yates’s Theft (1967) and Otto Preminger’s The Human Issue (1979), the latter with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard from the Graham Greene novel.
His sporadic stage appearances included a 1965 season on the Royal Court docket in NF Simpson’s The Cresta Run and with Vienna’s English Theatre, the oldest such organisation in mainland Europe, in two performs by Simon Grey within the 70s. A stage model of Dad’s Military, directed by Roger Redfarn, surfaced on the Shaftesbury theatre in 1975, with interpolated music corridor sequences that includes Invoice Pertwee, the ARP warden, as Max Miller and Arthur Lowe, Captain Mainwaring, as Robb Wilton, after which on tour.
In what turned out to be his farewell efficiency in 1996, he was inspirationally solid by Jonathan Miller as previous Peter Quince in A Midsummer Evening’s Dream on the Almeida theatre in Islington in 1996, apologising to Cosy with an “Oops, sorry love”, when he ignored him within the prologue to the Pyramus and Thisbe play and mouthing everybody else’s strains anxiously within the wings.
By the point of the 2016 movie model of Dad’s Military, Williams was the one actor reprising his unique position. Lavender was within the solid too, however now as a brigadier.
Crucial individuals in his life have been his mother and father and a churchgoing good friend, Betty Camkin, who died in 1992, so he all the time valued the “household life” together with his colleagues, particularly these in Dad’s Military. In later years, he was a distinguished member of the Council of Fairness, the actors’ union, and likewise served on the panel of the Olivier Awards.
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