Philip Jackson

Philip Jackson was born in Retford, Nottinghamshire, and came to acting through university drama before working his way round the repertory theatres of Leeds, Liverpool and London. There was no breakout. He was already a working character actor when he turned up in the borstal drama Scum in 1979, and he has essentially never stopped since.

What he does better than almost anyone is play officialdom without contempt for it. His Chief Inspector Japp, across the long run of Agatha Christie's Poirot, is the hardest version of that job to get right: the format needs Japp to be a step behind the Belgian, and most actors would either play the fool or sulk about it. Jackson instead plays a competent policeman who has quietly worked out that using the clever foreigner is good detective work. The same unshowy steadiness powers Abbot Hugo in Robin of Sherwood, a churchman who treats piety as an administrative matter, and Burkinshaw, the surveillance man in The Fourth Protocol.

Out of uniform he is one of British film's reliable working-class presences: Jim in Brassed Off, George in Little Voice, and two Mike Leigh pictures nearly thirty years apart, High Hopes in 1989 and Peterloo in 2018. Television kept him in comedy as well, from Porridge in the seventies to Little Britain and Hustle. In 2022 he appeared in Sherwood, a drama set in the Nottinghamshire he was born in, which is a neat piece of circularity for an actor whose earliest fame came out of the same forest.