There Was A Lot More To Richard Briers Than 'The Good Life'

The life and career of the actor and former Bedford Park resident, will be recalled at the Chiswick Book Festival

The affable character Richard Briers played in the successful television series The Good Life, may be his best known role to the public, but in the world of the theatre, he is regarded as one of its most under-rated serious actors.

James Hogg, who has written his biography, More Than Just A Good Life, (Constable, launched in paperback this week) says that while Richard Briers in life was also a happy-go-lucky person, much like his screen characters Tom in The Good Life, Marriage Lines and Ever Decreasing Circles, he also had another more serious sider, particularly when it came to his career.

"He swore like a navvy, he loved a drink and he was a smoker. I think most people think of him, and I used to as well, as this guy who liked wandering around churches, drinking afternoon tea and reading a lot of PG Wodehouse Yes, he did all that, but he was an industrial smoker, he was married to the profession, and he was very much an actor's actor. He could only have married another actor, which he did."

James spoke to dozens of actors and directors who worked with Richard, all of whom were loud in their praise of him. "Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Alan Ackybourn, everybody was happy to be interviewed. The only other actor so univerally adored was Peter Cushing, who had a similar reputation in that he never had a bad word said about him. He was just universally liked, and that is almost unheard of in that profession."

Richard Briers, who lived in Bedford Park with his family for nearly fifty years, will be celebrated at this year’s Chiswick Book Festival when James will appear on stage interviewed by Festival director Torin Douglas ( Friday September 13th 2019 8-9pm at the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation Theatre, Arts Ed, in Bath Road)

Also on the panel will be Lucy Briers, his daughter, an accomplished actress (Mary Bennett in BBC's Pride and Prejudice) and Peter Egan, who starred with him in Ever Decreasing Circles.

James is a biographer and ghost writer (Brian Blessed, Torvill and Dean, Kenny Everett) and had originally contacted Richard Briers with a view towards co-writing an autobiography. Sadly Richard was ill with emphysema and died, aged 79, in 2013, before the project could get off the ground.

Some time later James got in touch with his family, wife Ann, and daughters Lucy and Kate, and they set about producing the book.

Brought up in Raynes Park, Richard Briers spent the war years based in the RAF in Northolt as a filing clerk, and was advised by his cousin, the comic actor Terry Thomas, that if he wanted to be an actor he should find a drama school. After the war, he studied at RADA, where his contemporaries included Peter O Toole and Albert Finney. It was at RADA that discovered his natural affinity for comedy.

He was offered a scholarship to join the Liverpool Repertory Company, which was where he met Ann Davies, then an actress and stage manager. They married and shortly afterwards he had his West End debut.

The fast witty repartee of intelligent farce, came easy to Richard Briers but although he is best known for his roles in The Good Life, Marriage Lines and other TV comedy series, he played several weighty Shakesperean roles, including possibly his most famous performance as King Lear, directed by Kenneth Branagh who had set up the Renaissance Theatre Company. Briers appeared in eight films directed by Branagh, including Hamlet, Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing.

Richard Briers pictured while touring in 1990 as King Lear

Alan Ayckbourn considered Briers “a straight actor with an uncanny comic instinct”; and said his talents could just as easily be deployed to great effect in the tragedies of Ibsen and Shakespeare as they could with the comic work of The Good Life writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. When Richard Briers appeared in the first of many Ayckbourn plays – Relatively Speaking – in 1967, the playwright nicknamed him “Anadin” because “nothing acts faster than Richard Briers”.

Richard lived in Chiswick in Bedford Park with his wife Annie (Ann Davies) for nearly fifty years, and he loved to stroll up Chiswick Mall in the early evening to one of Hammersmith’s riverside pubs. He also loved spending time with his daughters, Kate and Lucy, and later his grandchildren, at the family home.

Of his famous Good Life character Tom Good he once said: "The moment the character, Tom Good, leaves his job as a draughtsman for a company that makes plastic toys for cereal packets and attempts to live off the land in Surbiton, he becomes much more interesting. He wasn’t an idiot; he was hard working and actually thought about what he was doing. Felicity Kendal was perfectly cast as Barbara, his long-suffering wife, and Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington as the neighbours Margo and Jerry Leadbetter. I don’t remember a single row between us all."

The show was a huge hit and there were three more series between 1975 and 1978. The last episode recorded was performed in front of the Queen, which he described as "a nerve-racking and emotional experience"

It was ironic that while he became a household name for playing a character who extolled a healthy lifestyle, in real life his heavy smoking exacted a price and he revealed just weeks before he died that he had emphysema. He died of a cardiac arrest in February 2013.

What does James Hogg believe is his legacy?

"It largely depends on who you talk to. If you speak to theatre people it will be his work with Branagh. Riichard was actually the most prolific British actor of the second half of the 20th century. Nobody worked as much. He was one of the best Lears, the best Malvolio, a formidable actor, even other actors used to be frustrated by his lack of recognition- John Gielgud even said so in an interview after they had worked together.

"He once said to Penelope Leith that after The Good Life things would never be the same. I mean the last performance was a Royal Command performance recorded in front of a monarch, and you don't get higher than that.

"So if he were here, I think that he would say, 'All roads lead to the Good Life'."

Festival website:

Tickets for the event £10, bar open from 7pm.

www.chiswickbookfestival.net

June 14, 2019