[2] In 1959, after leaving the army, he resumed his acting career playing Hector Hushabye in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House at the Empire, Belfast.

He then spent an eight-year apprenticeship in rep before joining the National Theatre company at The Old Vic under Laurence Olivier, who praised him saying "Benjamin Whitrow has never given a bad performance”.

He returned again in 2000, to play Sir Anthony Absolute in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, and, the following year, Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part II, a role in which, according to theatre critic Michael Coveney, he was "unforgettably hilarious".

[10] He starred in the ITV sitcom Ffizz alongside Richard Griffiths, about the joint-owners of a wine-business, which ran for two series between September 1987 and 29 August 1989.

[11] Between 1990 and 1992, Whitrow appeared in the sitcom The New Statesman as Paddy O'Rourke, a Labour shadow minister who feigned an Irish accent when in public to attract the working-class vote.

[12] In the 2000 animated movie Chicken Run Whitrow voiced the character of Fowler, an old rooster who claims to have fought in World War II.

[13] In 2009 Whitrow starred in the comedy-drama Bomber, about an 83-year-old man returning to Germany with his wife and son for a long-planned journey of atonement, which won the Best Feature award at five different independent film festivals.