Versatile actor who became famous for Alf Garnett role

Warren Mitchell, who has died aged 89, was the supreme example of a good actor kidnapped by one character.

Until he was 40, he was one of television's reliable, unsung performers. Then he was cast as Alf Garnett, the hectoring, foul-mouthed London dockland bigot of Till Death Us Do Part and its derivatives.

Johnny Speight's original BBC series ran intermittently from 1966 to 1975, with repeats following. In 1981 the show briefly moved to ITV under the title Till Death ...

From 1985 until 1992 it was back on the BBC as In Sickness and in Health, with Alf and his stoical wife Else (Dandy Nichols) rehoused in a council maisonette and some of the original anger in the scripts now directed at old age and infirmity. There were also two spin-off feature films, the first of which, in 1969, also called Till Death Us Do Part, was in fact a prequel set during the London blitz.

Until the late 1990s Mitchell would periodically polish up his one-man stage show, The Thoughts of Chairman Alf, originally written for him by Speight. He once said he saw Alf as his pension fund.

He took the show to the West End of London, on to TV and video, and toured Australia with it so successfully that for a while he settled there and took Australian citizenship.

Theatre honours

And although he went on to play Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s

Death of a Salesman

at the National Theatre (1979), star in

King Lear

(1996) and win awards for his performance in another Miller play,

The Price

(2003), he continued to acknowledge the importance of Alf Garnett: “I’ve been lucky, I’ve worked with all the greatest writers: Shakespeare, Pinter, Speight. Johnny deserves his place with them.”

Son of Monty and Annie Misell, he was born in north London into a Russian-Jewish émigré family, its name later anglicised to Mitchell. From Southgate county grammar school, Mitchell went to University College, Oxford, in 1944, on one of the last of the six-month university short courses which the armed services sponsored for potential officers.

A fellow student was Richard Burton, who was to occupy a mixed role in Mitchell's reminiscences of that period. A casual anti-Semitic remark of Burton's so shocked Mitchell that he screamed at him, "Do you know what we're fighting the war for?"

Burton apologised, and seeing him on another occasion launched into the impromptu delivery of a Shakespeare speech that planted in Mitchell the ambition to be an actor.

After two years in the RAF he studied at Rada in London, and made his professional debut at Finsbury Park Open Air theatre in 1950.

TV roles

Television soon took him up, and he made comedy appearances alongside Tony Hancock and Benny Hill. He was meanwhile turning up in every popular thriller series from

Danger Man

to

The Avengers

, as well as films, but increasingly typecast, often as a villain. “I played a funny foreigner, or a sinister foreigner, or a stupid foreigner, but always a foreigner, because I look sort of dark and can do accents.”

Only a few months later the first series of Till Death Us Do Part began, and though Mitchell continued to take other parts it was difficult to shake off Alf Garnett. Not until 1980 could he sink his teeth into something sufficiently daunting – Shylock in the BBC Television Shakespeare Merchant of Venice.

Mitchell went uninhibitedly for the full ringlets and gaberdine portrayal: when he spat out “I am a Jew” the spittle caught the light. But as he lamented his ruin while tearing at his breast with slow, repetitive movements you were reminded – far more than with any “noble” or politically correct Shylock – of the cruelty of the play’s “happy ending”.

His Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman had by then already won him praise from the critics and their award as actor of the year. "Instead of trying to turn him into a crumbling Titan," wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian, "he presents us with a baggy-trousered shrimp of a man whose very presence evokes the dust and fatigue of the road."

In the case of his King Lear, whom he played fittingly in his 70th year, it seems to have been the other way round. “Such a big, powerful performance,” noted Robin Thornber, “that he makes most of his fellow actors look like walk-ons.”

The production also prompted Mitchell to talk about his own family.

Family tensions

People told him they found Lear’s banishing of Cordelia in the first scene of the play hard to believe. “Are you joking?” he replied. ”You should come round to our house for dinner any Sunday night. One of my daughters is sure to walk out, slamming the door and yelling, ‘You’re impossible!’”

In fact his relationship with his children was close, and his marriage to the actor Constance Wake was one of the longest-lasting in show business.

What Mitchell himself thought of Garnett was mulled over in scores of newspaper interviews. Politically or in racial attitudes they were at opposite poles, but, like Speight, Mitchell believed that to expose bigotry and racism could only be beneficial.

Ah! said objectors, that was to overlook the fact that millions applauded Alf’s utterances and were encouraged by them. Neither case really made much sense. The truth was that Speight had dreamed up, and Mitchell realised, a comic monster who had a life of his own whether they wanted it or not.

Mitchell is survived by Constance, and children Rebecca, Daniel and Anna.