John Moffatt (actor)

Albert John Moffatt (24 September 1922 – 10 September 2012) was an English character actor and playwright, known for his portrayal of Hercule Poirot on BBC Radio in twenty-five productions and for a wide range of stage roles in the West End from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Moffatt's parents wished him to follow a career in a bank, but Moffatt secretly studied acting and made his stage debut in 1944.

He made his first stage appearance in 1944 at the Liverpool Playhouse, playing the Raven, in a touring production for children of The Snow Queen.

He made his debut in regular theatre at the Perth Repertory in 1945, where his colleagues included Alec McCowen, with whom he established a lifelong friendship.

Over the next five years he learnt his craft playing more than 200 parts in repertory companies at Oxford and Windsor, and the Bristol Old Vic.

At Oxford he and the young Tony Hancock played Ugly Sisters together.

Moffatt retained a fondness for pantomime; he became a celebrated Dame, and was the author of five pantomimes.

After five years in provincial repertory theatre he made his first London appearance in 1946.

In the early 1950s he was cast in small parts in productions headed by John Gielgud and Noël Coward, and achieved increasingly prominent roles over the next decade.

He was a member of the English Stage Company, the Old Vic, and the National Theatre companies.

His range was considerable, embracing the classics, new plays, revue and pantomime.

Moffatt began broadcasting on radio in 1950 and on television in 1953.

Moffatt made his first London appearance in 1950, as Loyale in Tartuffe at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

At the same theatre played the sinister waiter in Anouilh's Point of Departure, with Dirk Bogarde, making his West End debut when the production transferred to the Duke of York's. In 1951 he made his first appearance in revue, in Late Night Extra.

He was spotted by Binkie Beaumont, head of the theatrical production company H M Tennent, who cast him in prestigious West End productions.

Moffatt was able to play alongside two of his idols John Gielgud and Noël Coward: with the former in The Winter's Tale in 1951 and in Much Ado About Nothing in 1952, and with the latter in The Apple Cart in 1953.

With the English Stage Company at the Royal Court he appeared in Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity and Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan and attracted considerable attention as Mr Sparkish in Wycherley's The Country Wife.

The production transferred to the West End and Broadway.

He was, perhaps, less well known as a film actor but took part in twelve films between 1956 and 1987.

Moffatt was born in Badby, Daventry, Northamptonshire, the son of Ernest Moffatt and his wife Letitia, née Hickman, servants to Queen Alexandra at Marlborough House and Sandringham.

He was educated at East Sheen County School in west London, after which he spent three years as a bank clerk in the City of London.

In the evenings he attended drama classes given by John Burrell at Toynbee Hall.

Moffatt kept the lessons secret from his parents, who considered the theatre too insecure a career.

In September 1959 Moffatt joined the Old Vic company, playing in As You Like It, Richard II, Saint Joan, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V and Barrie's What Every Woman Knows.

He played Algy in The Importance of Being Earnest on a tour of Britain, Poland and Russia.

In 1962 he won the Clarence Derwent award as best supporting actor of the past season for his portrayal of Cardinal Cajetan in John Osborne's Play at the Royal Court, transferring to the West End and Broadway.

In 1963 Moffatt got his first starring role, as Lord Foppington in Virtue in Danger, a musical adaptation of Vanburgh's The Relapse.

The Times said of this, "It established Moffatt as our leading exponent of foppery and it remained one of his favourite parts."

In 1969 he joined Laurence Olivier's National Theatre company at the Old Vic.

His roles included Fainall in The Way of the World, Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, directed by Ingmar Bergman, Menenius in Coriolanus, Cardinal Arragon in The White Devil, a range of parts in The Captain of Köpenick and Sir Joshua Rat in Adrian Mitchell's Tyger.

In 1972 Moffatt was narrator and one of the main performers in the revue Cowardy Custard at the Mermaid, a compilation of the words and music of Noël Coward, who was present at the premiere.

Moffatt later played the playwright Garry Essendine in Coward's Present Laughter, another of his favourite roles.

In The Bed Before Yesterday by Ben Travers (1975), Moffatt gave what The Times considered one of his subtlest performances as the hen-pecked husband opposite the sexually rampaging Joan Plowright.

The Daily Telegraph commented that he made a touching theatrical virtue of both ruefulness and inadequacy.

In The Play's The Thing (1979) an adaptation by P. G. Wodehouse of a play by Ferenc Molnar, (Greenwich, 1979) he played a monocled, acid-tongued theatre director.

In The Observer, Robert Cushman wrote, "John Moffatt, a master of the languishing comic art of flicking off a line without ever losing it, may be giving the performance of his life."

William Gaskill's production of The Way of the World (Chichester and the Haymarket, 1983–84), was overwhelmingly a triumph for Maggie Smith as Millamant (described by The Guardian as "one of the great high comedy achievements of the past three decades"), but according to The Times, "the other great collector's performance is John Moffatt's Witwoud, a harmless old bitch got up like a coffee meringue, whose lines have never enjoyed more flawless touch and timing".

In Ronald Harwood's Interpreters (1985) Moffatt played a Foreign Office official striving to keep the peace between Maggie Smith's Nadia and Edward Fox's Viktor.

His most enduring role was that of Agatha Christie's Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, in a long sequence of radio adaptations of her novels, beginning in 1987 and continuing at intervals until 2007.

In 1992/3, Moffat played M. Comeliau, the Examining Magistrate, in ITV's Maigret starring Michael Gambon.