R.I.P. Nicholas Selby

[Reza]

Nicholas Selby obituary

A familiar face on TV and a stage actor at the cutting edge

Michael Coveney, guardian.co.uk

Wednesday 4 May 2011 18.16 BST

ITV ARCHIVE

Nicholas Selby, who has died aged 85, was, in
many ways, the archetypal supporting actor:
dependable, grave and imposing while emitting a
sense of authoritarian decency, courtesy and old
school charm. And yet, although he was a familiar
face on television, playing majors, judges and
elderly peers – and a chief constable in the
long-running late-1960s police series Softly
Softly – he was linked with radical theatre work
at the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was one of the earliest associate artists.

Selby was, in fact, an old-fashioned socialist,
hailing from a working-class family in Holborn,
central London, where his father worked for a
rubber company. The family lived above a cinema,
where young James (he later changed his name at
the behest of Equity), the youngest of three,
watched all the new releases free of charge.

He made his stage debut in JB Priestley's Dangerous Corner in Preston, Lancashire, for Ensa, the services entertainment wing, before going abroad, serving in Egypt and Palestine during the second world war. After
training from 1948 to 1950 at the Central School
of Speech and Drama, London – where he forged
lifelong friendships with his fellow students
Richard Mayes and Richard Pasco – he appeared in
repertory theatres for 10 years in Liverpool,
Birmingham, Coventry, York, Hornchurch and Cambridge.

He made his London debut in 1959 at the Fortune
in William Douglas-Home's Aunt Edwina, joining
the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in
1960 to appear in Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. He had met, and liked, Pinter when the playwright was acting under another name (David Baron) in repertory. Also in 1960, Selby played the eccentric Mr Hardrader,
with an imaginary dog, in John Arden's The Happy
Haven, and in Chekhov's Platonov, opposite Rex Harrison.

But it was at the RSC that Selby made his true
mark during a 10-year association, starting in
the history plays cycle of The Wars of the Roses,
directed by Peter Hall and John Barton. He was
the ideal Lord Chief Justice in Henry IV, gruff
and flinty, impatient with Hugh Griffith's
lubricious Falstaff, then a supercilious King of
France in opposition to Ian Holm's Henry V and a
cringing, skin-saving Bishop of Winchester in
contrast to David Warner's saintly Henry VI.

His RSC association coincided with the arrival of
Trevor Nunn. Selby appeared as the Duke in Nunn's
breakthrough production of Thomas Middleton's The
Revenger's Tragedy in 1967, and he was prominent
in Nunn's all-white nursery production of The
Winter's Tale (as Camillo) in 1969 and his 1971
Henry VIII, starring Donald Sinden.

Selby returned briefly to the Royal Court to
appear opposite Ralph Richardson in John
Osborne's West of Suez in 1971, and later, in
1975, as the humanely aristocratic Lord Milton in
The Fool, Edward Bond's play about the poet John
Clare. He played the leading, autobiographical
role of Garry Essendine in Noël Coward's Present
Laughter at the Birmingham Rep before resuming
RSC duty in William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes at
the Aldwych in 1974, and in Terry Hands's
extravagant, exciting production of Peter Barnes's Bewitched in the same year.

When Peter Hall led the National from the Old Vic
on to the South Bank, Selby signed up to play
Menander in Hall's luxuriant 1976 staging of
Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, led by Albert
Finney wielding a curtle-axe in leather chaps. He
also chipped in tellingly as Van Swieten in the
first performance of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus
(1979) with
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/mar/20/2>Paul
Scofield, Felicity Kendal and Simon Callow.

His few film performances included Duncan in
Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971), with Jon Finch
and Francesca Annis, and the Speaker in Nicholas
Hytner's The Madness of King George (1994),
written by
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/alanbennett>Alan
Bennett. In between, television kept him busy
throughout the 1970s and 80s. He was in seven
episodes of the hugely popular Poldark; swished
his cloak as Sir Walter Raleigh in Glenda
Jackson's Elizabeth R; and popped up as the
peppery Uncle George Wooster, with an
"unsuitable" girlfriend, in
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/stephen-fry>Stephen
Fry and
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/hugh-laurie>Hugh
Laurie's Jeeves and Wooster series.

Selby made his last West End appearance in 1987,
taking over the role of AD Knox, the King's don
wearied by war and Wittgenstein, in Hugh
Whitemore's Breaking the Code, starring Derek
Jacobi as the code-breaker Alan Turing, when it
moved from the Haymarket to the Comedy. And he
rejoined the RSC to reprise Duncan in Adrian
Noble's Macbeth in 1988 (with Miles Anderson and
Maureen Beattie) and to play a definitive Alonso
in Hytner's production of The Tempest, starring John Wood as Prospero.

Selby was a relaxed and unfussy actor, as he was
a man. He was happy in his career, not
particularly ambitious, and renowned for wanting
to cut lines rather than give himself too much to
do. At the RSC, he got the wardrobe department to
provide hidden extra pouches and pockets in his
costumes so he would never have to be separated
from his beloved pipe. And in the early days at
Stratford-upon-Avon, he would roam the
countryside with Sinden to indulge his hobby of
architecture in general, and old churches in particular.

Most of his later years were dedicated to caring
for his wife, Kathleen, who suffered from
Alzheimer's disease. Selby had long since removed
his details from Spotlight and, although he died
in September 2010, the news of his death emerged only last month.

Kathleen died in 2007. He is survived by their
daughter, Alison, and two grandchildren.

• Nicholas (James) Ivor Selby, actor, born 13
September 1925; died 14 September 2010