Warren Mitchell

Mitchell was born and raised in Stoke Newington, London. His father was a glass and china merchant. His family were Russian Jews[3] (originally called "Misell").[4]

He was interested in acting from an early age and attended Gladys Gordon's Academy of Dramatic Arts in Walthamstow from the age of seven. He did well at Southgate County School (now Southgate School),[5] a state grammar school at Palmers Green, Middlesex. He then studied physical chemistry at University College, Oxford, as a Royal Air Force cadet student[6] on a six-month university short course which the armed services sponsored for potential officers.[7] There he met his contemporary, Richard Burton, and together they joined the RAF in October 1944.[8] He completed his navigator training in Canada just as the Second World War ended.[9]

His wife, Constance Wake (1928–2017) was a film and TV actress in Behind the Headlines (1956 film), Maigret (1960 TV series) and others.

Richard Burton's description of the acting profession had convinced him that it would be better than completing his chemistry degree and so Mitchell attended RADA for two years, performing in the evening with London's Unity Theatre. After a short stint as a DJ on Radio Luxembourg, in 1951, Mitchell became a versatile professional actor with straight and comedy roles on stage, radio, film and television. His first broadcast was as a regular on the radio show Educating Archie, and this led to appearances in both the radio and television versions of Hancock's Half Hour.

By the late 1950s, he regularly appeared on television: as Sean Connery's trainer in boxing drama Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957), with Charlie Drake in the sitcom Drake's Progress (BBC, 1957) and a title role in Three 'Tough' Guys (ITV, 1957), in which he played a bungling criminal. He also appeared in several episodes of Armchair Theatre. During the first of these, Underground (1958), one of the lead actors died during the live performance.[10] He also had roles in The Avengers in addition to many ITC drama series including: William Tell, The Four Just Men, Sir Francis Drake, Danger Man and as a recurrent guest in The Saint, as in the second episode of the first season, "The Latin Touch" in 1962, depicting an Italian taxi driver.[9]

His cinema début was in Guy Hamilton's Manuela (1957), and he began a career of minor roles as sinister foreign agents, assisted by his premature baldness and facility with Eastern European accents. He appeared in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), the Hammer horror The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Carry On Cleo (1964), Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? (Gerry Levy, 1964), and Help! (Richard Lester, 1965) and played leads in All the Way Up (James MacTaggart, 1970), The Chain (Jack Gold, 1984), The Dunera Boys (Ben Lewin, 1985) and Foreign Body (Ronald Neame, 1986).[9]

In 1965, Mitchell was cast in the role for which he became best known, as the Conservative-voting, bigoted cockney West Ham United supporter Alf Garnett in a play for the BBC Comedy Playhouse series, broadcast on 22 July 1965. This was the pilot edition of the long-running series Till Death Us Do Part, with Gretchen Franklin, Una Stubbs and Anthony Booth. The part of Mum, played by Franklin, was recast with Dandy Nichols in the role when the programme was commissioned as a series.[11] Mitchell's real life persona was different from Alf Garnett, being Jewish, Labour-voting and a staunch supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The show ran from 1966 to 1975, in seven series, making a total of 53 30-minute episodes. While the series aimed to satirise racism, it actually also gained the support of many bigoted racists who perceived Alf as "the voice of reason".[12]

Mitchell reprised the role of Alf Garnett in the films Till Death Us Do Part (1969) and The Alf Garnett Saga (1972), in the ATV series Till Death... (1981), and in the BBC series In Sickness and in Health (1985–92). He also reprised his role as Alf Garnett in 1983 in the television series The Main Attraction where comedians recreated their famous acts from their past in front of a live and television audience (similar to An Audience with... that began in 1976). In 1997 he played the role in An Audience with Alf Garnett. The same year, ITV aired a series of mini-episodes called A Word With Alf, featuring Alf and his friends. All the TV shows and both films were written by Johnny Speight. When Speight died in 1998, the character of Alf Garnett was retired at Mitchell's request.

Mitchell had a long and distinguished career on stage and television. Other small screen roles included a 13-episode series, Men of Affairs with Brian Rix (ITV, 1973–74), based on the West End hit farce Don't Just Lie There, Say Something! There were also performances in 1975 in Play for Today (showing that he could play a serious character role in the episode, Moss[13]), as William Wardle, a crooked accountant in The Sweeney episode Big Spender (Thames Television for ITV, 1978), Lovejoy (BBC), Waking the Dead (BBC), Kavanagh QC (Central Television for ITV, he played a concentration camp survivor in the episode Ancient History),[14] as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (BBC, 1980) and Gormenghast (BBC, 2000). In 1991 he starred as Ivan Fox, a Jewish atheist from London living in Belfast in So You Think You've Got Troubles, a BBC One comedy series written by Maurice Gran and Laurence Marks.[15]

In 2001, he appeared in a Christmas Special episode of Last of the Summer Wine, "Potts in Pole Position".

He was a subject of the television programme This Is Your Life in 1972 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews.

On stage he received extensive critical acclaim for his performances as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman at the National Theatre directed by Michael Rudman (1979, being originally cast in the role by Stephen Barry at the Playhouse in Perth, Australia);[16] Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at the National Theatre; Pinter's The Homecoming at London's Comedy Theatre (1991) and Miller's The Price at the Apollo Theatre in 2003.[17][18][19]

Mitchell had a number of musical roles in his lengthy career, beginning with the role of Theophile in the original London production of Can-Can and the small role of Crookfinger Jake in The Threepenny Opera. He also sang briefly in the film Till Death Do Us Part and played Alfred Doolittle on the studio album of My Fair Lady, Music Hall Songs, songs of the First World War, and other recordings such as The Writing's on the Wall, from 1967, on CBS, all in the Alf Garnett persona, were released in LP and 45 rpm single form, too, in Britain and Australia.

In 2008, at the age of 82, Mitchell was performing alongside Ross Gardiner at the Trafalgar Studios, in London's West End, as a retired dry-cleaner in Jeff Baron's portrait of Jewish-American life Visiting Mr. Green.[20][21]

In 1976, his one-man show The Thoughts of Chairman Alf won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for best comedy in London's West End.[22] In 1982, he received an Australian Film Institute Award for best supporting actor in the film Norman Loves Rose.[23] He received two Laurence Olivier Theatre Awards—for playing Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (National Theatre, 1979) and as best supporting actor in a 2003 performance of The Price, also by Miller.[2][9] His role in Death of a Salesman also won him an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actor[24] and was highly praised by Peter Hall. Miller reportedly described Mitchell's performance as "one of the best interpretations of the part he had ever seen."[21]

Mitchell described himself in an interview as an atheist, but also stated that he "enjoy[ed] being Jewish".[25] He was a patron of the British Humanist Association.[26] In 1951, he married Constance Wake,[27] an actress who appeared in early 1960s television dramas such as Maigret. They had three children, son Daniel and daughters Rebecca and Anna.[20][28]

For over 20 years, Mitchell suffered pain from nerve damage, caused by transverse myelitis, and was a supporter of the Neuropathy Trust.[29][30][31] He suffered a mild stroke in August 2004. He was back on stage a week later, reprising his lauded role as a cantankerous old Jew in Arthur Miller's The Price.[32]

Mitchell was a socialist, who believed that the 2010 Labour Party leadership election had a lack of firebrands.[33]

Mitchell died at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London, on 14 November 2015, two months short of his 90th birthday after a long illness.[1][29]

• Warren Mitchell at IMDb
• Screenonline: Warren Mitchell
• TimeOut: Warren Mitchell Archived 29 September 2012 at the Wayback Machine