Actor known for Warship and Buccaneer
Born: May 19, 1938;
Died: June 25, 2019
BRYAN Marshall, who has died aged 81, was an actor who rarely seemed to be off British television screens in the 1970s and early 1980s. Wearing a look of apparent concentration, the brown-haired Marshall was an unshowy craftsman of acting, whose presence seemed to denote productions for grown-ups. Alternating between single plays, literary adaptations, and playing more than his share of policemen, he starred in Warship (BBC, 1976), as commander of the appropriately named HMS Hero, and as head of an air-charter company in Buccaneer (BBC, 1980). Then, having as he put it “felt like a bit of adventure”, he restarted his career in Australia.
He was born in Battersea, and attended Salesian College there before winning a scholarship to RADA. Upon graduating in 1963, he spent four months at the Bristol Old Vic, before his West End debut in The Golden Rivet in 1964, a play satirising television.
His first series in that medium was United (1965-66), a twice-weekly BBC series about a football team in which he played the captain - sadly, no episodes exist in the archives. He was then in two of BBC2’s first classic serials in colour, Vanity Fair (1967) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1968-69). Unusually, when Marshall played the dashing Captain Wentworth in Persuasion (ITV, 1971), the Jane Austen adaptation was made by Granada, not the Corporation.
Having once stated “he yearns to be in a role where he can get his hands dirty and where he doesn't have to wear a suit”, Marshall earned his wish, attaining two of his best acting opportunities. In a Play For Today by Tom Clarke, Stocker’s Copper (BBC, 1972), he played a striking miner in 1913 who becomes friendly with a policeman (Gareth Thomas) sent to monitor him.
Then, he was touching in Country Matters, adapted from H.E. Bates, as a seemingly taciturn farmer who unwittingly loses his only chance of love, through his illiteracy.
Marshall had the male lead in Liza Of Lambeth (Shaftesbury, 1976), publicized as ‘London’s Own Musical’ and adapted from Somerset Maugham, then starred in a three-part thriller from BBC Scotland, The Mourning Brooch (1979).
His Warship role was reflected on the big screen in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), as a doomed but heroic submarine commander aiding James Bond. Buccaneer was one of several Sunday evening BBC1 series from producer Gerald Glaister: Marshall’s Big Businessman character bore the retrospectively awkward name of Tony Blair.
Marshall played a corrupt council official in The Long Good Friday (1980). In 1983, he relocated to a home near the sea, “but only 15 minutes from the centre of Sydney”. In that city in that year, he did a revival of Born Yesterday at Her Majesty’s Theatre, and at the Comedy, Melbourne.
He was a villain menacing a trio of protagonists, including a very young, and frizzy-haired, Nicole Kidman in BMX Bandits (1983). Director Brian Trenchard-Smith claimed an embittered speech, where Marshall’s ‘Boss’ character complained of being let down by life Down Under, was improvised by the actor.
Marshall did the expected rounds of Neighbours (1987) and Home and Away (1998 and 2003), plus the more dramatically ambitious Embassy (1990-91), as an Australian ambassador to a fictitious Far Eastern country. His last role was in A Moody Christmas (2012), a comedy-drama series.
GAVIN GAUGHAN
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