There is a dying breed of classically trained, romantic, heroic actors who should not be consigned to oblivion in theatrical memory, and Frank Barrie, who has died aged 88, is a notable example.
The youngest leading actor at the Bristol Old Vic in the late 1960s, Barrie was always part of that noble tradition, one that stemmed from William Macready and Edmund Kean in the earlier Victorian era. A current reminder of it comes in Ralph Fiennes’s intriguing evocation of Henry Irving in David Hare’s new play Grace Pervades, but it is now largely forgotten.
Barrie scored his biggest international success in a solo show about Macready (titled Macready!), which he wrote himself and which opened at the Northcott theatre, Exeter, in 1979 and then, after a triumphant season on Broadway, at the Arts in London. It subsequently toured in 65 countries.
He put the extravagance and what might be unkindly dubbed “affectation” of Macready, a great Shakespearean actor, into a contemporary perspective, with due acknowledgement of his attempts to modernise the theatre, a profession of which Macready was openly, and paradoxically, contemptuous. Two chairs, a table and a cloak were all it took.
Barrie was delightful company, full of memories and anecdotes, rather like his contemporary stylists, Keith Baxter and John Fraser, who, unlike him, both committed their reminiscent stories to print.
Tall and strikingly handsome, he impressed, as the critic Michael Ratcliffe once said, as a character actor of elegance, sympathy and wit. Another critic, Harold Hobson, while praising his Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet at the Bristol Old Vic as “splendidly manly and romantic”, added that few Mercutios could have lived with more swagger or died with more panache, or bitterness, than his.
And yet his highest profile performance as far as today’s public were concerned was probably that of Dot Cotton’s smooth gentleman friend, Edward Bishop, in EastEnders on television in 2010-11. Bishop was a local choirmaster whom Dot (June Brown) befriended but shied away from – when Bishop tried to up the affectionate tempo – on the reasonable grounds of her still being married.
There were other television appearances – as Coriolanus and King Lear for RTE in Dublin in the early 70s; in the BBC’s Doctors soap (2008 and 2012, different characters); as Eglamour in Two Gentlemen of Verona (1984); and in a screen version of Macready! in 1985. But Barrie’s natural habitat was the stage.
He was born Frank Smith in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, as the third child of Annie (nee Carter) and Arthur, a press photographer. The family moved to York after their house was bombed in the second world war. He attended Archbishop Holgate’s school in the city, and took part in the York Mystery Plays before taking a degree in English at Hull University, where he was president of the debating society and where he met a fellow student, Mary Lloyd, whom he married in 1960.
There followed four years in weekly and fortnightly rep – in Harrogate, Ipswich, Salisbury and Sheringham, Norfolk – changing his surname to Barrie (in memory of an admired actor, John Barrie) on the advice of an agent before joining the Bristol Old Vic in 1965. Over several seasons there he played Oedipus Rex, Richard II, Long John Silver, Alfie (in Bill Naughton’s play), Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Lucio in a Tyrone Guthrie production of Measure for Measure.
In 10 years he had acquired a huge range of experience, and a complete skill set for the opportunity that now arose to join Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1969. He was recommended to Olivier by his assistant, Donald MacKechnie, who had worked with Barrie on Macready!
He auditioned for, and was immediately cast as, Mirabell in Congreve’s Restoration masterpiece The Way of the World (opposite Geraldine McEwan), then Wendoll in Thomas Heywood’s stark Jacobean domestic tragedy, A Woman Killed with Kindness, Brachiano in John Webster’s glittering The White Devil, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (Olivier as Shylock, Joan Plowright as Portia, Jonathan Miller director) and Barelli in Pirandello’s Rules of the Games, adapted by Hare, with Plowright and Paul Scofield.
In the 70s he played Hamlet and Richard III for the director Richard Digby Day at the Theatre Royal, York, where he returned in 1984 as a tremendous Morose, the grumpy old noise-hating character, in Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman. Also, in the York Minster, he played Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and, in Regent’s Park, London, Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
His later London credits included Royce Ryton’s Motherdear (1980) at the Ambassadors, a right royal predecessor of The Crown, set in Sandringham House between 1888 and 1922, in which he stalked magnificently as the prime minister Lord Rosebery opposite Margaret Lockwood as the Princess of Wales, later Queen Alexandra; another Way of the World at the Haymarket in 1984, playing the adulterous, conniving Fainall in a superb revival by William Gaskill headlined by Maggie Smith and Plowright, and a 1991 revival at Wyndham’s of Christopher Hampton’s inverted Molière-sque comedy, The Philanthropist, as the self-centred bestselling novelist Braham, alongside Edward Fox and Tim Brooke-Taylor.
Two delightful, nostalgic gems in tiny London theatres marked his farewell to the stage: as Noël Coward in Chris Burgess’s Lunch with Marlene (Kate O’Mara as a slinky Dietrich) at the New End in Hampstead in 2009, and – a real collector’s item – as the financier Sir Claude Burton in Ivor Novello’s last musical, Gay’s the Word (lyrics by Alan Melville) at the Jermyn Street theatre in 2013.
Frank and Mary lived in Brockley, south London, for their last 40 years. He is survived by Mary, their daughter, Julia, grandchildren Becky and Dudley, great-granddaughter Pearl and his older siblings, Nancy and Harold.