Jonathan Cecil

Jonathan Cecil
Born
Jonathan Hugh Gascoyne-Cecil

(1939-02-22)22 February 1939
Westminster, County of London, England
Died22 September 2011(2011-09-22) (aged 72)
Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith, England
Alma materLondon Academy of Music and Dramatic Art
OccupationActor
Years active1963–2011
Spouse(s)Vivien Heilbron
(m. 1963; div. 1975)
Anna Sharkey
​
(m. 1976⁠–⁠2011)​
FatherLord David Cecil

Jonathan Hugh Gascoyne-Cecil (22 February 1939 – 22 September 2011), known as Jonathan Cecil, was an English actor.

Early life

Cecil was born on 22 February 1939,[1] in Westminster,[2] the son of Lord David Cecil and the grandson of the 4th Marquess of Salisbury.[1] His other grandfather was the literary critic Sir Desmond MacCarthy. He was the great-grandson of the Conservative Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury.[3]

Brought up in Oxford, where his father was Goldsmith Professor of English, Cecil was educated at Eton, where he played small parts in school plays, and at New College, Oxford, where he read modern languages, specialising in French, and continued with amateur acting[4][5] in the Oxford University Dramatic Society.[3]

At Oxford, his friends included Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.[6] In a production of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, he played a lunatic called Troubadour and a woman who sells pigs.[5] Of his early acting at Oxford, Cecil said

I was still stiff and awkward, but this was rather effective for comedy parts, playing sort of comic servants in plays, and in the cabaret nights we had.[5]

After Oxford, he spent two years training for an acting career at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where he was taught (amongst others) by Michael MacOwan and Vivian Matalon and where his contemporaries included Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi.[5]

Career

Cecil's first television appearance was in playing a leading role opposite Vanessa Redgrave in "Maggie", an episode of the BBC television series First Night transmitted in February 1964, which he later called "a baptism by fire because I was being seen by half the nation". After that he spent eighteen months in repertory at Salisbury, of which he later commented, "You learnt how to make an entrance and make an exit." His parts at Salisbury included the Dauphin in Saint Joan, Disraeli in Portrait of a Queen, Trinculo in The Tempest, and "all the Shakespeare".[5]

His first West End part came in May 1965 in Julian Mitchell's dramatisation of A Heritage and Its History at the Phoenix, in which he got good notices, and his next was in a Beaumont production of Peter Ustinov's Half-Way up the Tree, directed by Sir John Gielgud.[5]

In film and television, Cecil almost always played upper class characters. His work included the role of Cummings in The Diary of a Nobody (1964), and in the series of adaptations from P. G. Wodehouse, What Ho! Jeeves (1973–1981) he played the recurring character Bingo Little.[7] He was Captain Cadbury in the Dad's Army episode "Things That Go Bump in the Night" (1973) and Mr Herbert in all six episodes of Oh Happy Band! (1980), both produced by David Croft, Bertie Wooster in Thank You, P. G. Wodehouse (1981), Ricotin in Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On (1983), and Captain Hastings (to Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot) in Thirteen at Dinner (1985), Dead Man's Folly and Murder in Three Acts (both 1986). In 2009 he appeared in an episode of Midsomer Murders. He has been called "one of the finest upper-class-twits of his era".[4]

He also worked in radio, where his credits included The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[8] and The Brightonomicon. He also appeared in The Next Programme Follows Almost Immediately, playing characters with foreign accents. Additionally, he stood in for Derek Nimmo in the role of the Bishop's Chaplain, the Reverend Mervyn Noote, in the second series of the radio episodes of the ecclesiastical sitcom All Gas and Gaiters, which ran for twenty episodes.

He narrated audio books of many of P. G. Wodehouse's books, performing voice characterisations for each character, and becoming possibly the most known narrator to ever perform the series.

Cecil wrote occasionally for The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. In one piece he noted

Handsome young male actors of the older school have tended, in my experience, to be somewhat vapid and vain. I write this in no spirit of envy — comic and character actors, like proverbial blondes, usually have more fun.[9]

He also admitted that "most of my experience has been in comedy, that’s the way life has taken me ... if I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t do parts with more depth".[5]

Personal life

Cecil was married twice. He met the actress Vivien Heilbron when both were studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and they were married in 1963. They later divorced.[10] In 1976, Cecil married secondly the actress Anna Sharkey, whom he had met while appearing at the Mermaid Theatre in 1972.[10]

Cecil died from pneumonia on 22 September 2011 at Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith, aged 72. He had suffered from emphysema.[10][11]

Filmography

References

  1. ^ a b Burke's Peerage, vol. 3 (London: Burke's Peerage Limited, 2003), p. 3506
  2. ^ "Jonathan H Cecil" in the England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, January February and March 1939 (1939), p. 158
  3. ^ a b Hayward, Anthony (26 September 2011). "Jonathan Cecil: Actor who specialised in upper-class twits and found his perfect role in Bertie Wooster". The Independent. Archived from the original on 29 August 2023. Retrieved 1 November 2023.
  4. ^ a b Gore-Langton, Robert (8 July 2006). "Floreat Etona". The Spectator. Archived from the original on 6 March 2019. Retrieved 1 November 2023.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g Cecil, Jonathan (13 December 2006). "Interview with Jonathan Cecil" (Interview). Interviewed by Daniel Buckle. Theatre Archive Project. Archived from the original on 7 June 2008.
  6. ^ "Jonathan Cecil". The Daily Telegraph. 24 November 2011. Archived from the original on 6 March 2019.
  7. ^ Listener and BBC Television Review, Vol. 89 (1973), p. 812
  8. ^ Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts (2012), p. 19 Archived 1 November 2023 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ^ Cecil, Jonathan (13 November 2004). "A modest triumph". The Spectator. p. 46. Archived from the original on 25 August 2010. Retrieved 1 November 2023.
  10. ^ a b c Billington, Michael (25 September 2011). "Jonathan Cecil obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 2 December 2016. Retrieved 12 October 2023.
  11. ^ "Jonathan Cecil: Comic actor who specialised in playing upper-class twits and immersed himself in P. G. Wodehouse". The Times. 24 September 2011. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on 6 March 2019. Retrieved 1 November 2023.

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