Leslie Phillips

Leslie Phillips was on screen as a boy extra in prewar British pictures, doffing his cap at a parade in 1939 and loitering in a Baghdad market in 1940, and he was still taking film roles in his eighties. Close to seventy years is a long career even by British standards, and it contains at least three separate ones.

The first is the 1950s and 1960s comic: smooth, upper class, faintly predatory, built on two catchphrases, a drawled 'Hello' and a delighted 'Ding dong'. He was in the Carry On films and the Doctor series, and on BBC radio in The Navy Lark for years. The persona is a period piece now and it was extremely precisely made. The voice does almost all the work, sliding a whole sentence downhill into innuendo without changing a single word of it.

The second career is character work in other people's films, where he is the plummy English functionary: Sir Joseph in Out of Africa, Maxton in Empire of the Sun, Lord Astor in the Profumo drama Scandal, a bit part in The Longest Day in 1962. In 1992 he returned to Carry On for Columbus, three decades after the last one, which tells you how long the type stayed useful.

The third career is the late dramatic one and it is the best. Venus in 2006 put him opposite Peter O'Toole as two old actors circling a young woman, and Phillips plays a man with the comic mask off: tired, jealous, decent. It was a BAFTA-nominated role. He had been nominated for an Olivier for a comedy performance on stage back in 1977. For a whole generation he is a voice and nothing else, the Sorting Hat in three of the Harry Potter films, doing in a few lines what he had done for sixty years: making a plummy English voice sound like it knows something you do not. He died in 2022.