1965
Macnee, then 43 with
Catherine Woodville, 27, after their wedding at Hampstead register
office
Photograph: PA/PA
1986
Macnee with his wife
Baba at their home in La Jolla, California
Photograph:
Crollalanza/Rex Shutterstock
1989
At his home in Palm
Springs, Californa, to launch his autobiography
Photograph: Frederic
Meylan/Sygma/Corbis
obituary
Actor best known
as John Steed, bowler-hatted hero of The Avengers
Dennis Barker
Thursday 25 June
2015 21.01 BST /
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jun/25/patrick-macnee
Despite a long and
diverse career in the theatre and cinema, Patrick Macnee, who has
died aged 93, will be remembered as John Steed, the
umbrella-twirling, bowler-hatted hero of the stylish derring-do TV
series The Avengers. The programme, written and presented in
“swinging” 1960s London, was thrilling and dynamic, and it made a
star of Macnee and his sidekicks Honor Blackman (as Cathy Gale) and
Diana Rigg (as Emma Peel).
In 1960, the series
Police Surgeon, produced by ABC with Ian Hendry as its star, had come
to an end. The writer Brian Clemens was asked to devise a show on
similar lines, but more light-hearted, and came up with The Avengers,
in which Hendry would be a doctor, David Keel, being helped in his
search for revenge on the drug-dealer killers of his lover by a shady
and enigmatic man, John Steed, from some mysterious intelligence
service.
The show was
immediately popular, with Hendry and Macnee investigating
assassinations, lethal radioactivity, missing scientists and
political extremists. Macnee was told to develop the character of
Steed in any way he fancied. “They were very sweet people and they
just gave me the name,” he recalled. “They said: ‘Have you read
the James Bond books? Go away and make up a character.’”
When Hendry left the
show after the first series, the emphasis shifted towards the
flamboyant Steed. From the time the series took root in 1961 until
1969 when it was wound up, and by which time a third female sidekick,
Tara King (played by Linda Thorson) had joined him, Macnee as Steed
was the constant factor.
He reprised the role
in 1976 when Clemens launched The New Avengers, which partnered
Macnee with Gareth Hunt (as Mike Gambit) and Joanna Lumley (as
Purdey), and ran for two series. Macnee claimed that Steed was based
on his own ironic approach to life. During the second world war, many
of his friends had been killed, he said, and he had acquired a “wry
detachment” which he liked to think he had infused into The
Avengers.
Macnee was born in
London, the son of Daniel, a racehorse trainer at Lambourn,
Berkshire, and his wife, Dorothea (nee Hastings), a niece of the Earl
of Huntingdon. Macnee claimed that his family life had been chaotic
and was dominated by a “tight group of women”. He was sent to
boarding school – Summerfields, Oxford – at the age of five and
then to Eton, where he recalled being whipped. While at Eton, he
opened a betting book, helped by the racing tips passed on to him by
his father. He also raced his own greyhound at the dog track in
nearby Slough.
Macnee later said
that he felt that first school and then the armed forces (in 1942 he
went into the Royal Navy and commanded a motor torpedo boat) stifled
his emotions. It was to escape this psychological straitjacket that
his thoughts turned to the stage. He won a place at the Webber
Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, London, and became a leading man at
Windsor Rep.
Unimpressed by the
overall prospects in post-war Britain, he went off to Canada, where
there were opportunities for young actors on TV. He sent much of his
earnings back to his wife, the actor Barbara Douglas, whom he had
married in 1942. He also took parts in many US TV shows and stage
productions. In 1949 he appeared in a TV version of Macbeth and in
1953 was in Othello. In 1951 he played the young Jacob Marley in the
film of Scrooge (A Christmas Carol in the US). He was working in
London in a rare production role, on the documentary series Winston
Churchill: The Valiant Years, when he was offered the part in The
Avengers.
He appeared in more
than 150 stage plays from his 20s to his 70s, including the Broadway
production of Sleuth in the early 1970s and the leading role in
Killing Jessica in the West End of London in 1986-87. He played both
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson several times. A memorable big-screen
part was as Sir Denis Eton-Hogg in This Is Spinal Tap (1984). He was
also in The Howling (1981) and the Bond film A View to a Kill (1985).
Kinky Boots,
recorded by Macnee and Honor Blackman in 1964, finally made the
charts in 1990.
The cult status of
The Avengers continued to grow, and in 1990 a recording of Kinky
Boots made by Macnee and Blackman and first released by Decca in
1964, which at the time had failed to reach the charts, made the UK
top 10. In 1998 a film version of The Avengers, starring Ralph
Fiennes as Steed and Uma Thurman as Emma Peel, featured Macnee as the
voice of Invisible Jones. The following year he appeared with his
former New Avengers co-star Lumley in a TV adaptation of Rosamunde
Pilcher’s Nancherrow (1999).
Macnee’s first
marriage ended in divorce, as did his second, to the actor Kate
Woodville. His third wife, Baba Sekely, died in 2007. He is survived
by the two children of his first marriage, Rupert and Jenny.
• Daniel Patrick
Macnee, actor, born 6 February 1922; died 25 June 2015
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