Peter Barkworth
Peter Barkworth is an actor, born 1929.
The awards came from television and the films handed him small parts, which is a very English shape for a career. Barkworth won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor twice, for Crown Matrimonial in 1975 and then for Professional Foul and The Country Party in 1978, and starred in the ITV series Manhunt in 1970 and the BBC's Telford's Change in 1979.
What he was good at was authority worn lightly. He played a great many senior Englishmen and the trick was that he never raised his voice or signalled the rank; the power sat in how carefully the man chose his words and how long he took over them. He was Stanley Baldwin in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, Tsar Nicholas II in a BBC Play of the Month, the prosecuting counsel Charles Gill in Wilde, Hugh Neville in Secret Army. The recurring figure is a man who has been briefed, knows more than he is saying, and is working out how much to release.
The films used him for exactly that in a quarter of the space: Berkeley in Where Eagles Dare, Colonel John Welkin in Patton, Nick Embiricos in Champions, a cypher clerk in the 1953 Malta Story near the beginning of it all. He was also Martin Hewitt in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and appeared in Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime and Maigret, which turns his page into a small tour of British detective television.
He was born in Margate in 1929 and died in 2006. He is worth knowing about partly as a reminder that the best British screen acting of his era was on television, and that most of it is now harder to find than the films are.
Movies (5)
TV (9)
Where to start with Peter Barkworth
The BAFTA-winning productions are not among the credits listed here, so start with Manhunt, the series that made him a lead and the closest thing on this page to a proper showcase.
Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years is the other essential one: his Stanley Baldwin is a study in polite obstruction and considerably better than that part usually gets played. Then the films, all small parts done exactly right. Where Eagles Dare and Patton are the two everyone has seen; Wilde gives him the single most memorable scene, cross-examining as Charles Gill; Champions is the warmest thing on the list.
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime are for anyone working through vintage British detective television, and Malta Story is where it started, with him barely in it.