Jeremy Clyde
Jeremy Clyde had a pop career before he had an acting one. As half of the folk duo Chad and Jeremy he had a hit in 1963 with Yesterday's Gone, and the pair went on to do considerably better business in the United States than at home, which was the standard shape of the British Invasion for anyone who was not the Beatles.
What followed was four decades of English television, and his credit list tells the story with unusual clarity. Lord Buckingham in The Musketeer. Lord Privy Seal Dennis Tipping in North Sea Hijack. Sir Anthony Maylor in The Chief. A chief superintendent in Ashes to Ashes. Hermann Gessler, the tyrant of the William Tell story, in Crossbow. He has spent a career playing men with titles, authority, or both, and the reason casting directors kept calling is that he plays that class without contempt for it, which is harder than the sneering version and much more useful to a script.
The range runs from a BBC Christmas ghost story to a small part in The Iron Lady. It is not a starry filmography. It is the sort a working actor assembles when he is dependable, recognisable, and exactly correct for one specific kind of Englishman.
Movies (4)
TV (6)
Where to start with Jeremy Clyde
A Ghost Story for Christmas is where to go first, and not only for him. The strand is one of the genuinely distinctive things British television has done, all restraint and dread with very little shown, and his episode is among the strangest of them.
For the everyday version of his work, Ashes to Ashes is the most watchable series here, and his chief superintendent is a good small example of playing authority without doing an impression of it.
North Sea Hijack is the entertaining one, a thoroughly silly 1980 hostage picture in which the British establishment is played almost entirely by faces like his. Crossbow is the guilty pleasure, a European adventure series that lets him be the villain outright. The Iron Lady and The Musketeer are the prestige and popcorn ends of his film work, and neither asks much of him.