Obituary (long) Patrick Cargill-"Father Dear Father"
Robert J. Boyne
From "The Times" of London. I hope this is of interest.
<Picture>©
Cargill, left, as Patrick Glover with his two screen daughters, played by
Natasha Pyne and Ann Holloway, and Jeremy Child as Timothy in Father, Dear
Father, 1972
PATRICK CARGILL
Patrick Cargill, actor and dramatist, died yesterday aged 77. He was born on
June 3, 1918.
PATRICK CARGILL was the star of two immensely popular situation comedies of the
1970s, Father, Dear Father and The Many Wives of Patrick. The first of these
elevated Cargill from a familiar-looking character actor whose name no one
could ever quite remember to a household hero among harassed fathers of teenage
daughters. Having come up the hard way, through years of repertory theatre,
Cargill was amused by the sudden rise in his stock: "It's perfectly hilarious
the way I get accosted by everyone from bowler-hatted business types on the
Tube to Covent Garden porters, telling me they have daughters like mine.
Apparently having daughters is a perfectly classless thing."
Cargill was a light, suave actor, whose impeccable comic talents were not
notably stretched by some of the television work he took on. They were seen to
better advantage in a production such as the Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin
adaptation of Feydeau farces, Ooh La La!, in the late 1960s. Contrary to the
sort of parts he played, Cargill was neither a worn-down father nor an habitual
womaniser in real life. He was a bachelor who surrounded himself at home with a
regular menagerie of animals, and who talked about acting with schoolboyish
enthusiasm. But fate had given him the sort of sharp, haughty face and
heavy-lidded, world-weary expression which immediately conjured up libertines
and villains. It was a face reminiscent of dry Martinis and white Jaguars.
Edward Sydney Patrick Cargill seemed destined from childhood for a very
different life. His father was a major in the Indian Army. After his younger
brother had died in a boating accident in India, Patrick reluctantly considered
himself bound for a military career in order to please his father. He went from
Haileybury to Sandhurst then on to India as a young officer. But he changed his
mind when he was out there and resigned his commission.
Family tradition had collided with the smell of the greasepaint, and lost.
Cargill had grasped every opportunity to appear on stage as a youth, having
taken his first role in a school play as Lady Macbeth. He returned to Britain
with ten shillings in his pocket. He made his inauspicious professional debut
at Bexhill-on-Sea, dressed as Adam in the Garden of Eden wearing nothing but a
pair of green fig-leaf swimming trunks. But the war briefly pulled him back to
the Army and he returned to India, this time as an entertainments officer.
After the war he returned to Britain and to 15 years in repertory theatre. He
maintained that a grounding in the theatre was essential for any actor, even
for one who wanted to specialise in film and television. The often hilarious,
sometimes dispiriting, slog of long runs, back-to-back performances and crowded
dressing rooms made Cargill resilient, brought him many friends in the
businesss and provided him with a fund of amusing anecdotes.
He remembered one particular occasion, when he was appearing in an Agatha
Christie play, and had to cry: "You mean it's . . . " before the interval
curtain came down. Cargill delivered the cliff-hanging line, stood there
pointing his finger, and waited hopefully. The curtain remained stubbornly
raised. He repeated the line several times with mounting embarrassment: "You
can't mean it", "Do you really mean to say it's . . . " before eventually
shuffling off into the wings, to find the offending stagehand, drunk, and
unconscious next to the curtain.
In his youth Cargill was often cast as villains, and he played these with the
right degree of silken treachery. Gradually he diversified into comedy. He
learnt a good deal about comic timing from his hero, Tony Hancock, and he
played the Scottish doctor in Hancock's famous episode The Blood Donor. There
he uttered the immortal line, "Yes, Mr Hancock, but we're not all Rob Roys".
He began to write his own scripts and plays and staged a comedy set in a
sanatorium, co-written with Jack Beale, Time on Their Hands, at the Q Theatre
in 1954. Ring for Catty (1956), again set in a hospital, was another moderate
success at the Lyric. A more recent play, Don't Misunderstand Me, which he
toured all over Britain in the 1980s, is about to be performed in Paris.
During the 1960s, with middle age looming, Cargill's professional prospects
improved markedly. The revue High Spirits at the Hippodrome brought good
notices, and he became familiar to television audiences through his performance
as a secret agent in Top Secret, and via appearances on The Avengers and The
Prisoner. He notched up three-and-a-half years in the successful West End
comedy Boeing-Boeing at the Apollo, and played Inspector Gluck in the new
Beatles film, Help! In 1966, while appearing in Say Who You Are at Her
Majesty's, he was spotted by Charlie Chaplin, and chosen to play the part of
Hudson, the gentleman's gentleman, in A Countess from Hong Kong.
In 1967 Cargill had his big break when he was offered the chance of his own
television situation comedy on ITV. Father, Dear Father was written especially
for him and cast Cargill as Patrick Glover, a talented thriller-writer, but a
hopelessly inept father of two mini-skirted teenage daughters. The show was an
enormous popular success, not only in Britain but abroad. Cargill's urbane
character became so popular in Australia that he lived for a while in Sydney to
make a special antipodean version of the series.
The adaptations of the Georges Feydeau farces were first televised in the late
1960s, and repeated many times. Cargill played a different character in each of
the one-hour dramas. An excellent supporting cast was gathered around him,
which included Judi Dench, Joan Sims, Richard Briers and Bernard Cribbins.
There was an elegance about the plays, and an extravagence of language which
took Cargill a long way from the occasional banalities he had to utter in
modern situation comedy, and he was grateful for the change of pace.
Father, Dear Father ran until 1973. In 1976 Cargill returned to the small
screen with The Many Wives of Patrick, about a middle-aged playboy who is
trying to divorce his sixth wife in order to remarry his first. That show ran
until 1980.
Cargill had been one of the inescapable faces of television comedy during the
1970s. In the last decade of his life he returned to his first love, the stage.
He starred as Gordon in Key For Two at the Vaudeville (1983); Sir Joseph Porter
(the Ruler of the Queen's Navee) in HMS Pinafore at Queen Elizabeth Hall; and
took the title role in Captain Beaky at the Playhouse in 1990. Recently he
toured with British Airways Playhouse, run by his friend Derek Nimmo.
When he was young, he had shared his home in Sheen with a cat, hamster, monkey,
dog and parrot. In 1987 he moved to Henley, and lived with his ward, James
Markowski, and a housekeeper. His health had been frail since last December
when it was discovered that he had cancer. But he refused to give up hope, and
was determined to beat the illness until only a few days ago.
--
Robert J. Boyne, N.Vancouver, B.C.,Canada
(rjb...@direct.ca)
*****************************************
"What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?"
Super-Tramp (1871-1940), British poet.
Tholian
I would like to say how said I am at his death, I loved his bumbling
middle-class Englishman in Father-Dear-Father.
r
--What time is it - Vadertime
Rock - naughty by nature, Grunge - Violent by design
La de da de, we're here to party - TPE
--Tholian--
Mad Scientist
I was very saddened to hear of Patrick's death. Father-Dear-Father brings
back happy memories for me - not that I actually can recall *that* much of
it in any detail. Maybe I was just happy at the time for other reasons and
remember this by association. Either way, the fact that the series has
never AFAIK been repeated reinforces the idea that it *was* something special.
If I could see the series again I *know* that it would make me happy even
if it was totally diabolical - know what I mean?
Prof.
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