Charles Simon

Charles Simon, actor and playwright: born Tettenhall Wood, Staffordshire 4 February 1909; married 1940 Nancy McDermid (died 1958; two daughters), 1965 Sheila Eves (died 1998; one son); died Harrow, Middlesex 16 May 2002.

Charles Simon's extraordinary career as a professional actor – extending over virtually 80 years – was arguably the longest in British stage history. However, the role for which he will ever be remembered was on radio, as Dr Jim Dale in The Dales (the erstwhile Mrs Dale's Diary), the long-running BBC soap.

His career began in 1923 when, at the age of 14, he was paid £1 a week to recite "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" ("Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew / And watching his luck was his light o' love, the lady that's known as Lou") in front of a screen showing the silent film based on Robert W. Service's epic ode. And it ended less than a month ago, after he had completed a film with Peter O'Toole, with the eerily apposite title The Final Curtain.

Although he was rarely out of work, the final two decades of his life were astonishingly busy, public (and thus directorial) recognition perhaps at last sparked off by his notable performance as the grotesque George Adams in Dennis Potter's celebrated television serial The Singing Detective in 1986. He was then in his late seventies.

At the age of 60, he made his début at the National Theatre in Jim Cartwright's touching drama about old age, Bed, and then stayed with the company, taking over the part of the Colonel in Trevor Griffiths's Piano (the character has a flatulence problem: Simon later modestly admitted that not all the eructatory explosions came from him – "I had a special fart-machine under the chair for when I couldn't quite manage it myself"). He also played in Peer Gynt, Brecht's The Good Person of Sichuan, Alan Bennett's popular revise of The Wind in the Willows (as the tetchy magistrate in the trial scene), and Arthur Miller's The Crucible. This might have seemed pretty good for a man in his eighties, but Simon was only, as it were, gearing up for a startling, and extended, burst of creative energy.

During the 1990s he was seen in important character roles on both the large and small screens: in Shadowlands (1993) with Anthony Hopkins; American Friends (1991) with Michael Palin; and, on television, Kingsley Amis's Stanley and the Women with John Thaw. At the age of 95, he embarked upon a gruelling world tour of Measure for Measure, and topped off his global peregrinations with a visit to Hollywood to film a commercial for Microsoft.

In 2000 he gleefully played Lord Carnivore to Glenn Close's Cruella De Vil in 102 Dalmatians, as well as a memorably venomous old man in "Beyond the Grave" (a play in Caroline Graham's Midsomer Murders series) which involved thwacking all and sundry with his walking stick and toppling into an open grave.

Born a Black Countryman (at Tettenhall Wood, near Wolverhampton, in 1909) and Gloucestershire-bred, Charles Simon left school at 14 to enrol at the Irving Academy of Dramatic Art in Cheltenham. With a similar shocking precocity he wrote, at 17, an early radio play for BBC's Midlands Region, The Tutor of Ratshorne, in which he played all the parts himself. In 1927, he made his acting stage début touring with Sir Seymour Hicks and, in 1928 – not yet 20 – his Stratford début with Sir Frank Benson's company.

In 1936, having worked with Hicks and Benson, two of the 20th century's greatest actor-managers, Simon decided to have a crack himself, founding the Darlington Repertory Theatre, which lasted for 15 years. During the Second World War, he served in the RAF.

In the 1950s, Simon joined BBC Radio's celebrated Drama Repertory Company, playing high-profile Third Programme roles, as well as butlers, villains, m'learned friends and Cockney gas-fitters in rather lighter dramas on the old Home Service and Light Programme.

In 1963 he was chosen as the "new" Dr Jim Dale (Douglas Burbidge and James Dale having preceded him), about whom his fussy wife was eternally, and famously, "worried". (Val Gielgud, then Head of Radio Drama and a notorious detester of serials, confronted him and intoned, "Goodbye, Charles! Another good actor gone to the dogs!")

Mrs Dale was then played by the formidable ex-film and musical comedy star Jessie Matthews, then in a psychologically fragile state. The partnership lasted six years – playing to audiences of over seven million – before the BBC in 1969 axed the show, mainly because of Matthews's continual and lengthy "indispositions" (the actress Ruth Dunning had to take over on several occasions).

Though now heading towards retirement age, Simon seemed not to notice or care, taking on the arduous role of MC at the Lyceum Theatre Music Hall in London. He then embarked on his glorious Indian summer of film and television appearances which lasted until his death.

Jack Adrian