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Geoffrey Chater obituary

The distinctive character actor Geoffrey Chater, who has died aged 100, was a familiar face on countless television drama series, from Dixon of Dock Green to Callan, The Cleopatras and The Bill, in the last of which he played a war hero arrested for the attempted murder of his wife when an agreed suicide pact goes wrong.

Although he had a veneer of superiority about him, a sheen of hauteur, Chater was rarely cast as a villain. Instead, his default mode of disdainful pride gave him a natural, not necessarily attractive, authority on stage and screen. A curling lip and a cruel gaze, allied to a preternatural sense of timing – he rarely played any scene in a rush – created a presence which belied his average height and build.

But he could also modulate these qualities into softer focus, as he did to some advantage in the 1985-86 television series of the Mapp & Lucia stories, adapted by Gerald Savory from EF Benson’s books. As Algernon Wyse, Chater pottered around almost genially in a monocle, plus-fours and a floppy bow tie while Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan swooped and simpered at social gatherings or committee meetings, vying for little inches of supremacy.

On film he is best remembered as the school chaplain in Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), rising mysteriously in the headteacher’s study after being shot and bayoneted by his nemesis, Malcolm McDowell’s angry schoolboy insurrectionist.

On stage at the Royal Court, he was a Tory minister called Alice in Howard Brenton’s Magnificence (1973) who, after confessing his political disillusion to an old lover, a university don called Babs, is attacked by the leader of an Angry Brigade-style hippy squat frustrated by his ineffectual rage. In a bleakly comic finale, the attacker mishandles his explosives and blows up the two of them. A waste of idealism on both sides. Chater’s status as an Aunt Sally of the establishment could be deflected more subtly through playing a variety of lords, dukes, lawyers and doctors. These ranged from Jacobean tragedy and Restoration comedy to Coward and Rattigan.

Geoffrey was born in Barnet, Hertfordshire, to Peggy and Laurence Chater-Robinson. His mother acted under the stage name of Gwendoline Gwynne, and Geoffrey first determined to become an actor himself when he saw her play the juvenile lead in Merton Hodge’s The Wind and the Rain at the (now demolished) Scala theatre off Tottenham Court Road when he was eight years old. His father composed music for dance bands.

After boarding at Marlborough college, Wiltshire, Geoffrey joined the army in 1940 and was soon promoted to the rank of captain in the Royal Fusiliers. He saw active duty in India and Burma, where he wrote and performed in comic revues. On repatriation in 1946, he dropped the “Robinson” part of his surname and went straight into weekly rep at Windsor, followed by spells in Hereford and Birmingham, making a West End debut in 1951 at the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter) as a constable in Master Crook, a thriller by Bruce Walker.

Geoffrey Chater as the school chaplain in Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If…
Geoffrey Chater as the school chaplain in Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If… Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

He was at the Old Vic for the 1954-55 season and on television (Emergency Ward 10) in 1957. His big break came with the newly formed Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 when, in an experimental season at the Arts theatre, he played a suburban stockbroker in Giles Cooper’s mordant domestic comedy Everything in the Garden and the Duke of Florence in Middleton’s Jacobean shocker Women Beware Women, a wonderful play (Nicol Williamson was also in the cast) not seen on the stage for more than 300 years but one assimilated in the RSC repertoire later into the decade.

This led to prominent billing in Domino, a French farce at the Lyric, Hammersmith, starring Renée Asherson and, in 1965, the role of a rich landowner married to Ingrid Bergman in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country – directed by, and co-starring, Michael Redgrave – at the Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford, and the Cambridge in London.

Chater was now established as an actor of both style and reliability. The Royal Court came calling for their 1969 revival of Congreve’s The Double Dealer, in which he played the complacent cuckold, Lord Froth; the cast in William Gaskill’s production included Judy Parfitt, Gillian Martell and Nigel Hawthorne; he kept the peerage as Lord Lumbercourt for a Prospect touring production of Charles Macklin’s last play, The Man of the World (1781).

Geoffrey Chater, second right, in a 1968 episode of The Saint.
Geoffrey Chater, second right, in a 1968 episode of The Saint. Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock

Back at the Court in 1972 he led a flag-waving charitable committee on a Mediterranean cruise in NF Simpson’s Was He Anyone? Their mission was to assess the merits of a “deserving cause” currently drowning. A proposal to lower the victim a grand piano was objected to on the grounds (and the water) that this might start a flood of applications for musical instruments from the poor and undeserving.

Later stage appearances included an upright Doctor Bradman in Harold Pinter’s revelatory 1976 revival of Coward’s Blithe Spirit at the National Theatre, with Elizabeth Spriggs as Madame Arcati, and a memorable Polonius to Jonathan Pryce’s extraordinary Hamlet (literally possessed by the voice of his dead father) directed by Richard Eyre at the Court in 1976. Chater played, said Michael Billington, “a crafty sly-boots in half-moon specs, given to fierce bursts of rage”.

His other few films included Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place (1971), as the barrister bringing the wrongful conviction of Timothy Evans (John Hurt); Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973), a picaresque satirical sequel to If…; Stanley Kubrick’s ravishing Barry Lyndon (1975); and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), in which he was a British government advocate grilling General Dyer (Edward Fox) after the 1919 massacre of peaceful protesters at Amritsar.

Chater was a member of the MCC and enjoyed shrimping at Camber Sands near his home in East Sussex. He married Jennifer Hill in 1949. She and their daughter, A nnabel, andtwo sons, Simon and Piers, survive him.

• Geoffrey Michael Chater (Robinson), actor, born 23 March 1921; died 16 October 2021