Why Anthony Head was underrated

The death of the great actor should make us reassess him

In 2005, I saw a revival of Simon Gray’s play Otherwise Engaged, a comedy of manners about a publisher attempting to spend an afternoon listening to Parsifal but being interrupted by a variety of people who want something from him. I am unconvinced that it is a great play, despite being both witty and affecting in quintessential Gray style, but it boasted a starry cast, led by Richard E Grant and David Bamber, and a Rolls-Royce production of the drama. Yet the highlight, by a country mile, was the late Anthony Head’s performance as a drunken, linen-suited literary critic, Jeff Golding, which remains one of the most memorably flamboyant and scene-stealing ‘turns’ - I can think of no other word - that I can remember seeing on stage.

Jeff is not a nice man. He is the kind of character who comes on stage half-cut, helps himself to his reluctant host’s Scotch, rails against Australians and the BBC, tears into a “turgid little turd of a novel” and decries literature as “a bloody boring racket”. Another character on stage is the protagonist’s stiff brother, an English teacher named Stephen, who announces before Jeff arrives on stage that “I shall particularly never forget his announcing that people - he meant me, of course - only went into public school teaching because they were latent pederasts”, and, when Stephen takes exception to this, “he offered to take back the latent, and congratulated me on my luck.”

Stephen, naturally, stands up to Jeff by saying that he is a schoolmaster at a public school - Jeff’s first, immediate reaction is to ask “Major or minor” - and then, when it’s quite clear his interlocutor doesn’t remember him, says “Would you like me to remind you? I’m the latent pederast.” I still treasure the way that Head, after a perfectly timed pause, replied “Then you’re in the right job.” I wonder if the echoes of the laughter that this sally produced can still be heard somewhere in the rafters of the Oxford Playhouse.

Head was, of course, best known for three things: firstly, his regular appearance on British television in the Nescafé Golden Blend adverts, in which he enjoyed a flirtatious on-screen friendship, or more, with Sharon Maughan; secondly, his performance as the tweedy but immensely decent librarian Rupert Giles in the cult series Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and thirdly, his moustache-twirling villain Rupert Mannion (he seemed to like playing Ruperts) in the immensely popular Ted Lasso, in which he introduced a welcome air of cynicism into a show that otherwise became increasingly cloying in its sentiments.

He excelled in all of these parts, but expressed open regret about his lucrative work in the Nescafé adverts, which made him a household face - if not a name - but also condemned him to typecasting that he had to flee to America to escape. It was probably no coincidence that his best-known roles were in American shows, which made him a financially comfortable man, but it is also a shame that he was not given the kind of interesting, meaty parts in Britain that his considerable talent merited.

Of course, there were good roles - his Blairish PM in Little Britain, bewildered target of his aide’s frenzied affections, a louche fiftysomething libertine in Manchild, an apparently iconic Frank N. Further on stage in The Rocky Horror Picture Show - but it is hard not to feel that he was somehow typecast in parts that didn’t require the slightest bit of effort from this charming and much-liked man. There was a lot of work - he must have been one of the most prolific character actors of his generation - but it was all ephemeral for the most part, although I did thoroughly enjoy his villainous and ironically named Mr Gently Benevolent on the radio, in the comedy series Bleak Expectations. Yet it often seemed as if Head was cast in the kind of roles that Bill Nighy or Colin Firth had turned down, and so the obituaries, while generous in their acknowledgment of Head’s great personal decency and versatility, struggled to highlight much beyond the headline roles.

If there’s anything that I remember about Head, other than the versatility, it’s that he had the ability to convey charm, magnetism, intelligence and a kind of twinkling loucheness with effervescence and compulsive watchability. I would never have described him as one of my favourite actors - he was too much a constant figure to actively seek him out - but he was, in his own modest way, a committed scene-stealer (he was, by far, my favourite aspect of Buffy) and I now realise how much I enjoyed his work and actively looked forward to seeing him in anything on screen or on stage. And now I never will again, and that is the most enormous pity.