Peter Dennis
Peter Dennis is an actor, born 1933.
Peter Dennis spent more than three decades alone on a stage, being Winnie the Pooh. His one man show Bother! The Brain of Pooh, built from the works of A. A. Milne, is the thing he was best known for, and a screen credit list has no way to show it.
What a screen credit list does show is the day job. Dennis was born in Dorking, Surrey, in 1933, and worked both sides of the Atlantic. The credits track the move: British television and film from the late sixties into the eighties, including the ribald comedies that filled British cinemas in the mid seventies, then American work from the nineties onward. Wine country comedy, a comic frontier western on television, a voice in an animated blockbuster. The parts are small and the range is very wide, which is the shape of a working actor's life rather than a star's.
He died in 2009. The Avengers, cited alongside Sideways as the two poles of his screen career, is not among the credits listed here.
Movies (5)
TV (5)
Where to start with Peter Dennis
Sideways is the obvious place to begin, and the honest reason is that it is the best film on this list rather than the biggest part. For the English half of the career, Hadleigh and The Famous Five are the period pieces, one a grown-up drama series, the other exactly the children's adventure serial you would expect.
Confessions of a Window Cleaner and The Stud sit at the other end of seventies British taste, and are worth knowing about mainly as evidence of what the industry was paying for then. The American stretch is lighter: The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. for a genuinely odd comic western, and Shrek if you enjoy picking a single voice out of a crowd.