Warren Mitchell

Warren Mitchell (born Warren Misell; 14 January 1926 – 14 November 2015) was a British actor.

He was a BAFTA TV Award winner and twice a Laurence Olivier Award winner.

His wife, Constance Wake (1928–2017) was a film and TV actress in Behind the Headlines (1956 film), Maigret (1960 TV series) and others.

Richard Burton's description of the acting profession had convinced him that it would be better than completing his chemistry degree and so Mitchell attended RADA for two years, performing in the evening with London's Unity Theatre.

There he met his contemporary, Richard Burton, and together they joined the RAF in October 1944.

He completed his navigator training in Canada just as the Second World War ended.

In the 1950s, Mitchell appeared on the radio programmes Educating Archie and Hancock's Half Hour.

He also performed minor roles in several films.

By the late 1950s, he regularly appeared on television: as Sean Connery's trainer in boxing drama Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957), with Charlie Drake in the sitcom Drake's Progress (BBC, 1957) and a title role in Three 'Tough' Guys (ITV, 1957), in which he played a bungling criminal.

He also appeared in several episodes of Armchair Theatre.

After a short stint as a DJ on Radio Luxembourg, in 1951, Mitchell became a versatile professional actor with straight and comedy roles on stage, radio, film and television.

His first broadcast was as a regular on the radio show Educating Archie, and this led to appearances in both the radio and television versions of Hancock's Half Hour.

His cinema début was in Guy Hamilton's Manuela (1957), and he began a career of minor roles as sinister foreign agents, assisted by his premature baldness and facility with Eastern European accents.

His other film appearances include Three Crooked Men (1958), Carry On Cleo (1964), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965), The Assassination Bureau (1969) and Norman Loves Rose (1982).

During the first of these, Underground (1958), one of the lead actors died during the live performance.

In the 1960s, he rose to prominence in the role of bigoted cockney Alf Garnett in the BBC television sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (1965–75), created by Johnny Speight, which won him a Best TV Actor BAFTA in 1967.

He appeared in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), the Hammer horror The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Carry On Cleo (1964), Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? (Gerry Levy, 1964), and Help! (Richard Lester, 1965) and played leads in All the Way Up (James MacTaggart, 1970), The Chain (Jack Gold, 1984), The Dunera Boys (Ben Lewin, 1985) and Foreign Body (Ronald Neame, 1986).

He also had roles in The Avengers in addition to many ITC drama series including: William Tell, The Four Just Men, Sir Francis Drake, Danger Man and as a recurrent guest in The Saint, as in the second episode of the first season, "The Latin Touch" in 1962, depicting an Italian taxi driver.

In 1965, Mitchell was cast in the role for which he became best known, as the Conservative-voting, bigoted cockney West Ham United supporter Alf Garnett in a play for the BBC Comedy Playhouse series, broadcast on 22 July 1965.

This was the pilot edition of the long-running series Till Death Us Do Part, with Gretchen Franklin, Una Stubbs and Anthony Booth.

The part of Mum, played by Franklin, was recast with Dandy Nichols in the role when the programme was commissioned as a series.

Mitchell's real life persona was different from Alf Garnett, being Jewish, Labour-voting and a staunch supporter of Tottenham Hotspur.

The show ran from 1966 to 1975, in seven series, making a total of 53 30-minute episodes.

While the series aimed to satirise racism, it actually also gained the support of many bigoted racists who perceived Alf as "the voice of reason".

Mitchell reprised the role of Alf Garnett in the films Till Death Us Do Part (1969) and The Alf Garnett Saga (1972), in the ATV series Till Death... (1981), and in the BBC series In Sickness and in Health (1985–92).

Other small screen roles included a 13-episode series, Men of Affairs with Brian Rix (ITV, 1973–74), based on the West End hit farce Don't Just Lie There, Say Something! There were also performances in 1975 in Play for Today (showing that he could play a serious character role in the episode, Moss ), as William Wardle, a crooked accountant in The Sweeney episode Big Spender (Thames Television for ITV, 1978), Lovejoy (BBC), Waking the Dead (BBC), Kavanagh QC (Central Television for ITV, he played a concentration camp survivor in the episode Ancient History), as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (BBC, 1980) and Gormenghast (BBC, 2000).

He held both British and Australian citizenship and enjoyed considerable success in stage performances in both countries, winning Olivier Awards in 1979 for Death of a Salesman and in 2004 for The Price.

Mitchell was born and raised in Stoke Newington, London.

His father was a glass and china merchant.

His family were Russian Jews (originally called "Misell").

He was interested in acting from an early age and attended Gladys Gordon's Academy of Dramatic Arts in Walthamstow from the age of seven.

He did well at Southgate County School (now Southgate School), a state grammar school at Palmers Green, North London.

He then studied physical chemistry at University College, Oxford, as a Royal Air Force cadet student on a six-month university short course which the armed services sponsored for potential officers.

He reprised the role in the television sequels Till Death... (ATV, 1981) and In Sickness and in Health (BBC, 1985–92), and in the films Till Death Us Do Part (1969) and The Alf Garnett Saga (1972).

He also reprised his role as Alf Garnett in 1983 in the television series The Main Attraction where comedians recreated their famous acts from their past in front of a live and television audience (similar to An Audience with... that began in 1976).

In 1997 he played the role in An Audience with Alf Garnett.

The same year, ITV aired a series of mini-episodes called A Word With Alf, featuring Alf and his friends.

All the TV shows and both films were written by Johnny Speight.

When Speight died in 1998, the character of Alf Garnett was retired at Mitchell's request.

Mitchell had a long and distinguished career on stage and television.