Tony Haygarth obituary

Tony Haygarth, who has died aged 72, was a salt-of-the-earth Liverpudlian actor who became a familiar face on television in series such as Emmerdale (in which he played Mick Naylor), The Bill and New Tricks, while sustaining a reputation as one of Britain’s most distinctive, and reliable, supporting actors on the main national stages.

In the mid-1990s this reputation became a little more serious when he won Equity’s Clarence Derwent award for his performance as a compromised racetrack commissioner in Sam Shepard’s Simpatico, a wonderful series of duologues in junk towns on the freeway running from Los Angeles to the desert, at the Royal Court; and secured an Olivier award nomination for his magnificent performance as the blustery redneck Juror No 3 in Harold Pinter’s West End revival of Twelve Angry Men.

These were pivotal performances in a career that embraced new writing, poetry and classic roles such as the dustman Alfred Doolittle, father of Eliza, in Shaw’s Pygmalion, directed by Peter Hall at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2007 and the Old Vic, in 2008. Haygarth’s garrulous class warrior, “one of the undeserving poor ruined by middle-class morality”, phrased his comic speeches in rapidly articulated gulps. He more than held the stage alongside Tim Pigott-Smith’s superb Henry Higgins and a beguiling, willowy newcomer, Michelle Dockery (soon to be cast as Lady Mary in Downton Abbey), as his determined daughter.

Tony, born and bred in Anfield, Liverpool, was the only child of Stanley Haygarth, a bus conductor, and his wife, Mary. He was educated in Liverpool at All Saints Catholic primary school and Marlborough college, where he developed an enthusiasm for Shakespeare and started writing poetry. From 1963 onwards he worked variously as a lifeguard in Torquay, a psychiatric nurse at Sefton general hospital and as an escapologist and fire-breather in a travelling circus. He started reading his poetry, and that of others, with the Liverpool poets clustered around Roger McGough and Brian Patten.

After he saw the light while performing in an amateur pantomime, his father, in an act of inspirational encouragement, dispatched him and his friend Geoffrey Hughes to London with a few pounds each to try to become actors (Hughes would become Eddie Yeats in Coronation Street). Haygarth worked in schools tours and was first noted in London when Stanley Eveling’s Dear Janet Rosenberg, Dear Mr Kooning, directed at the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, by Max Stafford-Clark, went south to the Royal Court; he played a diehard royalist developing a relationship, first by post, then face-to-face, with a young admirer, played by Susan Carpenter.

Haygarth had a notable physical presence, robust and gentle at the same time – he was good at playing incredulous outsiders and eccentrics – and an utterly distinctive voice, liquid, slightly lisping, treacly and musical. He made a film debut in Ralph Thomas’s Percy (1971), with Hywel Bennett as the hyper-active recipient of a penis transplant, and followed with vivid cameos in Otto Preminger’s The Human Factor (1979), Tom Clegg’s McVicar (1980), as Renfield in John Badham’s Dracula (1979) starring Frank Langella and Laurence Olivier, and in Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital (1982).

By this time, in the early 1980s, he was a key member of Bill Bryden’s Cottesloe company at the National Theatre, the hard-drinking outfit whose dispersal was said to have resulted in an 80% nose-dive in takings in the Green Room bar. This stream of work included appearances in The Crucible, the Eugene O’Neill “sea plays” season, Tony Harrison’s The Mysteries, the world premiere of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and the role of a devious, corner-cutting Sancho Panza opposite Paul Scofield’s magnificently moth-eaten Don Quixote on the Olivier stage.

The television series Kinvig (1981), which was devised for him by the sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale, and cast him as an antiheroic electrical repairman whose interplanetary adventures lead him to fight for the Earth’s preservation, was only a modest success.

He never stopped writing poetry and had two plays directed by Adam Meggido on the London fringe: The Lie (2001) at the King’s Head was a study of Marlowe’s violent death; and Dark Meaning Mouse (2003) at the Finborough followed AL Rowse in ascribing the identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets to Emilia Bassano. This supposition was bolstered by Haygarth’s conviction that a Nicholas Hilliard miniature of an “unknown woman” in the V&A, dated 1593, was in fact the beautiful, dark-haired Emilia.

His last 10 years of stage work included participation in two outstanding NT ensembles in Mamet’s Edmond, led by Kenneth Branagh, and John Guare’s synthesis of The Front Page and the movie His Girl Friday, with Alex Jennings and Zoë Wanamaker, both in 2003. He was the seedy nightclub manager Mr Boo in the 2009 West End revival of Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice – his precariously applied ginger hairpiece had an exciting life of its own; and the sea captain in Hall’s valedictory all-star Twelfth Night in 2011, once more in the Cottesloe, with Rebecca Hall as Viola.

Haygarth married the theatre producer Carole Winter in 1985 and, although they divorced in 2013, she cared for him after his diagnosis with prostate cancer, and in 2014 with Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia. He is survived by Carole and their daughters, Katie and Becky.

George Anthony Haygarth, actor, born 4 February 1945; died 10 March 2017

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKuklrSme5FpaHBnnZa%2FcH2TaKuopqlitaLFxpqpraBdpK%2BqwNSaqbI%3D