His major films covered 20 years, including Alexander Mackendrick's A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) Fred Zinnemann's A Man for All Seasons (1966), with Paul Scofield, in which Davenport played a powerful Duke of Norfolk and two directed by Hugh Hudson, Chariots of Fire (1981), in which he played Lord Birkenhead, and Greystoke (1984), as Major Jack Downing. From this hectic few years at the heart of the new wave of English drama, he turned to television and film he had made his first TV appearance in 1952 and was soon in demand on screen as a character actor of real distinction. Having played Horner in The Country Wife at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in 1955, he returned there to appear in Joan Littlewood's production of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958), making his Broadway debut with that play in 1960. In the next two years he was in the Sunday night "without decor" tryouts for two important ESC productions, NF Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle (directed by Gaskill) and Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen (directed by John Dexter), as well as appearing in John Osborne's Epitaph for George Dillon (again directed by Gaskill, with Robert Stephens in the lead) and John Arden's Live Like Pigs. That experience, and his personal friendship with Richardson, catapulted him into the Royal Court opening season in 1956, when he appeared in Angus Wilson's The Mulberry Bush, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (as Thomas Putnam), two plays by Ronald Duncan, Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity and Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan (with Peggy Ashcroft), and played Quack in William Wycherley's The Country Wife. After a season at the Shakespeare Memorial theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1953, he estimated that he played no fewer than 75 roles at the Chesterfield Civic theatre company in two years that constituted his formal training as an actor. He had done his national service in Germany, where he worked as a disc jockey with the British Forces Network.ĭavenport made his London debut in 1952 at the Savoy theatre in Noël Coward's Relative Values, playing the Hon Peter Ingleton, a role he had at first understudied. At university, he was a contemporary of Tony Richardson and William Gaskill, both later colleagues at the Royal Court, and appeared as Bottom and the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi with the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Davenport was educated at St Peter's school in Seaford, East Sussex, and at Cheltenham college before studying philosophy, politics and economics (changing to English) at Trinity College, Oxford. His father was the bursar at Sidney Sussex College and was awarded the Military Cross in the first world war. ![]() ![]() He grew up in the village of Great Shelford, near Cambridge, the son of Arthur Davenport and his wife, Katherine. ![]() The "odd" eye was the result of an operation to correct a childhood squint gone wrong, but this only added to his raffish singularity, which made him ideal casting for hirsute, frequently moustachioed, villains as well as the large roster of high-ranking soldiers, aristocrats and monarchs – he was a superb King George III in the BBC television series The Prince Regent (1979) – he embodied with an easy charm and natural entitlement. With his huge bulk, fruity, growling voice and gleaming left eye, he was as hilarious as he was genuinely alarming. In a recent rerun of the BBC's Keeping Up Appearances, he loomed as a lubricious old navy commodore coming on to Patricia Routledge's Hyacinth Bouquet in the back of a cab driven by a vicar.
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