Patrick Cargill: obituary

There are two kinds of farceur - the low and the high, writes Adam Benedick. Patrick Cargill aspired, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes lamentably, to both. Every actor needs to have range, even if the range between high and low farce can be greater than many of them suppose; but the proof of Cargill's range was his triumph as Charles in Coward's Blithe Spirit (Globe, 1970).

After watching his antics, in, say, Boeing-Boeing (1962), Say Who You Are (1965) or Two and Two Make Sex (1973), who would have supposed that the actor had the discipline as the husband bullied by both the quick and the dead in Coward's farce to get under the solemnly comic skin of that battered husband?

The truth perhaps is not so much that there are high and low farceurs as that there are high and low farces and that Cargill tended to wallow (from want of choice?) in the lower kind. Wallow is perhaps a clue to his acting, for it implies enjoyment on the farceur's part; once we sense that the farceur is having fun, our own is liable to dwindle. Farce, after all, is all about social or sexual plights, and who can find funny the plight of a father or a lover or whatever who seems to be enjoying himself, even by so much as a wink or a nod?

Cargill's repertoire of winks and nods could be prodigious, likewise his energy. Not all farce needs to be acted like a whirlwind with the whole company digging each other in the ribs and showing how sharp are their elbows and their timing; but Cargill found himself in many shows like that; and by the force of personality would impose on them what came to be called the Patrick Cargill part.

What this was exactly no one bothered to define but it usually meant an ageing and eager public schoolboy, slightly dim, somewhat lascivious, who wants to remain as true as he can to his upbringing as a supposed gentleman while at the same time fulfilling his lurid fancies.

The character, if it could be so dignified, derived as much from Cargill's looks, manner and wide-eyed air of enquiry as from any sense of actorly authorial insight. Some cynics used to wonder whether Cargill ever acted at all? Was he not always playing himself? The answer was - yes, more or less. And because the personality was amiable and affable in a silly- ass tradition of British farce, Cargill conquered all sorts of rotten writing and direction on both stage and screen by being himself more often than any supposed character.

Behind the heavy-lidded eyes with which he gazed down that prominent nose towards the thin line of his mouth with a certain haughtiness was an actor who since his Haileybury, Sandhurst and Indian army days had never thought of anything else much but acting.

He had ambitions towards urbanity and sophistication; and he deluded most of us that he possessed them. He also had a caustic sense of humour, which went down well at other characters' expense; and though everyone now remembers his frolics on television, especially as the aloof parent of two daughters in Father, Dear Father, and his comic foils in Hancock's Half Hour, Cargill was one of the hardest-working stage actors in the business from the mid-1940s to the 1980s.

Would any modern player think today of staying while in his twenties with an out-of-London rep for seven constant years? That was at Windsor. Then came a tiny part in a West End revue (another vanishing theatrical training ground) and sundry comedies and thrillers before, in the 1960s, he began to matter in farces.

His line in well-bred English philanderers, ageing lovers with virility crises, devil-may-care adulterers with ill-fitting false teeth and genteel dreamers of dirty weekends in Paris soon became popular.

If he rarely attracted much critical respect for his urgent oglings, tortured smiles and assorted becks and winks, Cargill knew how to prompt laughter for the simplest line with his always admired timing. Hard to realise now that the sentence "Marriage is like a bath, the longer you stay in it the colder it gets" drew roars of appreciation in 1973.

It was the naughty-boyish temperament which people found amusing, if not charming. You had to admire the cheek. If that is where the actor allowed his tongue to stray too visibly and too often (depending on the director) it is perhaps because actors are regularly accused of indulging themselves in farce when it is as often as not the author who has been indulging himself.

In "high" farce (like Blithe Spirit), Cargill was supremely long-faced and serious; and in the lower type he was perhaps too often tempted to add his own nods and becks and amused glances, as in for example Some of My Best Friends are Husbands (1976), as an old roue prevented from bedding his bride by visitors from his past.

Working for a firmer director, though, in Key for Two (1982) and a firmer writer (John Chapman), Cargill was in his disciplined element as a husband who supposed that he alone was Moira Lister's keeper; and it was the same actor who drew most of the laughter in William Douglas Home's After the Ball (Old Vic 1985) as he lapped up port and bribes - making mischief again, you see. No one knew better than Cargill how to imply it, relish it or share his joy with us in it.

Although he seldom worked as a director in the theatre he had a singular success with the Cooney-Chapman hit Not Now Darling (1968) and co-wrote the short-lived London stage comedy Ring For Catty (1956) which begat the film Carry on Nurse. More of that mischief was already in hand 40 years ago.

Patrick Cargill, actor and writer: born London 3 June 1918; died 23 May 1996.