Warren Mitchell

Died: November 14, 2015

WARREN Mitchell, who has died aged 89, was an actor most famous for playing the loud-mouthed, chauvinistic, homophobic, sexist, racist, Tory-voting Alf Garnett in the popular television comedy Till Death Us Do Part. In reality, Mitchell was a left-wing socialist and the antithesis of the character he immortalised.

In some ways, the character was a trap for Mitchell – he was an admired and successful stage actor (and won two Olivier awards) but even 40 years after Till Death Us Do Part ended, he continued to be stopped in the street by people who recognised him as Alf.

More problematically, many viewers really thought he really was the working-class, anti-Semitic Tory bigot he portrayed (even though he himself was Jewish) and congratulated him for it. Mitchell and its writer Johnny Speight always defended the series though, and said it was better to expose outrageous views rather than hide them away, but the difficulty was that the satire of the show was lost on some who regarded Garnett as a loveable old rogue whose views were quite acceptable. Some viewers warmed to Alf Garnett, probably because he could be identified with the kind of reactionary and prejudiced figure found all over the country.

For Mitchell, this left him trying to come to terms with the contrast between him and his most popular character, although he once admitted that in some ways he was a bit like Alf Garnett himself. "Opinionated male chauvinistic pig at times, I suppose," he said. "As my wife Connie once said to me, 'you are like that awful Alf Garnett, only he's funny and you're not'."

Warren Mitchell was born Warren Misell in Stoke Newington, north London, on January 14 1926. His grandparents were Russian Jews who had emigrated to Britain in the early 20th century and began to work in the fish trade. Mitchell's father, who sold glass and china, was an orthodox Jew and for a time even refused to meet his son's wife because she was not of the faith. In contrast, Mitchell became a supporter of the Humanism and was an atheist.

He was educated at Southgate County School and later served in the Royal Air Force, completing his navigator training just as the Second World War ended. He had been reading physics at University College, Oxford, but quit that before completing the course, and became a professional actor in 1951 after two years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Mitchell had always nurtured an interest in acting (his mother had sent him to singing and dancing lessons from an early age) but it took a meeting with Richard Burton when they were serving in Canada together to cement his ambition.

However, he initially struggled to find work after leaving RADA and worked for a time as a railway porter and in an ice cream factory. For a time he also sold socialist newspapers in the street, crying out with his polished, actor-trained voice. That was when he developed his "working class" voice, which, he claimed, helped him sell more papers.

In time, he began to find regular work on television, on 1960s staples such as Danger Man, Secret Agent, and The Avengers, usually playing dangerous foreigners. "I played a funny foreigner or a sinister foreigner or a stupid foreigner, but always a foreigner," he said, "because I look sort of dark and can do accents."

His break in comedy came on the radio show Hancock's Half Hour, usually in supporting roles, again as the foreigner. Hancock was grateful to him when he dried on air (the show went out live in those days) and Mitchell was able to keep going, giving Hancock time to recover.

Mitchell also began to find work in films, appearing in more than 40 movies, the first of which was the 1954 crime thriller The Passing Stranger. He also appeared in the Beatles film Help!, the Spy Who Came in from the Cold with his old friend Richard Burton and Carry On Cleo, in which he played Spencius, one half of the old Roman traders Marcus et Spencius.

His association with Alf Garnett began in 1965 - 14 years after he became a professional actor - with the role of Alf Garnett in a Comedy Playhouse play, which developed into the TV series, although he was not the first choice for the part (that was Peter Sellers).

After the success of the play, a series started the following year and ran until 1975. His eye-rolling wife Elsie (the "silly moo") was played by Dandy Nichols, his daughter Rita by Una Stubbs and her argumentative husband by Tony Booth.

Later, after the success of the first series, there were also two film spin-offs and a regular touring stage production The Thoughts of Chairman Alf, which was also made into a television series. The character of Alf was also revived on television as In Sickness and in Health between 1985 and 1990, by which time much of Alf's anger was directed against the coming of old age.

Some of the jokes in the original series would scarcely be acceptable today, including: "She must have been on the Pill, the Virgin Mary - she only had one kid in 2,000 years", and "No wonder Gandhi wouldn't eat his dinner - they gave him Indian." It makes for difficult viewing, but that, said Speight and Mitchell, was always the point.

The character, although a Tory anti-socialist through and through, was no fan of Margaret Thatcher, believing a woman's place was "chained to the bloody kitchen sink", and blaming her husband Denis for not telling her "to keep her place".

There were other differences - Garnett was a supporter of West Ham United, but Mitchell was a Tottenham Hotspur man – but the actor played the monster with relish and always defended the right to do so and believed that television had gone soft in later years. "You can't be funny unless you offend people," he said. "Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred."

Although Mitchell is identified almost exclusively with Alf Garnett, he played a wide variety of roles during his career. Other TV appearances came in Lovejoy, Waking The Dead, and Kavanagh QC.

However, it was on stage that he received his greatest critical acclaim. In 1979, he played the lead in Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman and won an Olivier and the Evening Standard Theatre Award. He also appeared in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at the National and a successful tour of The Homecoming in the early 1990s. He won his second Olivier in 2004 for his role as the Yiddish furniture dealer Solomon in Arthur Miller's The Price. He was also Shylock in the BBC's 1980 Merchant of Venice.

Other successful roles included Ivan Fox, a Jew caught up in the religious chaos of Belfast in the BBC's So You Think You've Got Troubles, and Barquentine in the BBC's lavish adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast in 2000.

He suffered a stroke in August 2004 but was back on stage a week later, performing in Miller's The Price.

In February 2007, he played a leading role in the partially successful campaign to ban open-air concerts at Kenwood in London, because of the noise to the homes, including his own, in nearby Hampstead. As a result of the protests, the organisers were ordered to reduce the number of concerts to a level where it was not viable to hold any at all.

He had been married to Constance Wake since 1952. She survives him along with his two daughters and a son.