George Sewell
He was one of British TV’s most recognisable faces, an East Ender playing Londoners in a series of gritty roles … and the occasional comedy. A gravelly voice and rugged looks would always secure George Sewell a safe living playing cops and heavies, though as is so often the case with solid character players, he was a much better actor than many gave him credit for. With his death on 2 April aged 82 ends a prolific career - because Sewell was acting right to the end.
Like so many actors, Sewell didn’t take the drama school route, but stumbled into the profession. He was 35 before a chance meeting with a group of actors in a West End pub propelled him to the stage.
Sewell was born in 1924 in Hoxton: his dad was a printer, his mum and her family flower sellers. Although George had a boxer’s looks it was his brother Danny who went into the ring. George meanwhile left school at 14 and became a printer’s apprentice. World War II and a shortage of paper put paid to that. He moved onto building work - there was plenty going, repairing houses damaged by enemy bombs. Towards the end of the war he joined the RAF, trained as a pilot, though was demobbed before he saw any action.
Now followed a bewildering array of jobs in post-War Britain: from street photographer to drummer and road manager of a rumba band. He joined the merchant navy and became a steward on a Cunard cruise ship. Back in Britain he became a coach courier for a holiday tour company, using the German and French he had acquired on his travels. At one point he was helping manage a French roller-skating troupe. By 1959, when he wandered into that West End pub, George was ripe for a career change.
Among the well-refreshed troupe was Dudley Sutton (best known to many of us as Tinker Dill from the Lovejoy series). Sutton pushed Sewell to audition for a part with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, at that point attracting all sorts of untried talent to the stage of the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Littlewood would quite deliberately cast actors against type: she once selected 17-year-old Howard Goorney (another Theatre Workshop member who died recently), as the Old Shepherd, ‘the oldest man who ever lived’, in a production of Hasek’s Good Soldier Schweyk. As it was Howard’s first acting job, this must have been quite an intimidating role. George Sewell, however, she cast as a policeman, a part he was to play time and again over the years. George became a mainstay of the Theatre Workshop around the turn of the sixties, appearing in Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be and then as bus driver Bert (living with Barbara Windsor’s Maggie) in Sparrers Can’t Sing, and going on to appear in the movie. Other Theatre Workshop productions took him on his travels again - this time to Paris and Broadway.
Sewell became a fixture on British TV. His work included Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Power Game, Z-Cars, Man in a Suitcase, Softly Softly, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Paul Temple, Minder and - most recently - Doctors and Heartbeat. Movies included This Sporting Life, Get Carter and Barry Lyndon. The list, as they say, is endless. Completists should go to www.imdb.com and tap in ‘george sewell’ to see the CV of a man who never stopped working. Brother Danny had by now quit the ring and followed George into acting.
During the early seventies he seemed to never be off the small screen, with major roles in UFO (as Colonel Alec Freeman) and in Special Branch (as DCI Alan Craven). His skill at playing such authority figures was only matched by his adroitness at playing heavies - in a standout cast in Mike Hodges’ 1971 classic Get Carter, Sewell manages to shine convincingly as a cockney enforcer sent to Newcastle to fetch Michael Caine’s Carter back to the Smoke. The skill of his performances lies in the fact that Sewell manages to convey menace while rarely lifting an eyebrow, let alone throwing a punch. It was a skill he surprisingly, yet effectively transferred to comedy. Playing the straight man to hapless lead characters such as Rigsby in Rising Damp and Frank Spencer in Some Mother’s Do ‘Ave ‘Em, and later in the Jim Davidson vehicle Home James, he managed to suggest a powerful yet contained presence who might, if pushed, get nasty.
Of course, the real-life Sewell was a far gentler proposition: survived by wife Helen and daughter Elizabeth, he was a doting grandparent, dividing his time between London and his house in the south of France, a country he had fallen in love with all those years before.
George Sewell born 31 August 1924, died 2 April 2007.