He is best remembered for his roles in sitcoms and television comedy dramas, including: Rumpole of the Bailey, Only When I Laugh, To the Manor Born, The Bounder, The Irish R.M., Lytton's Diary, Executive Stress and Perfect Scoundrels.

[2] His father was Herbert Reginald Bowles, valet-companion and chauffeur to Drogo Montagu, son of the Earl of Sandwich, then a butler to the daughter of Lord Beaverbrook.

[3] Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Bowles's father was sent to Rolls-Royce Aero-engine factory in Hucknall, Nottingham, where the family lived in a small "two-up, two-down" house.

[3] Bowles began his career with the Old Vic Company in 1956 playing small parts in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida and Richard II.

[4] Bowles then joined the Bristol Old Vic Company for a season playing character parts and taking two Shakespeare productions to the Baalbeck Festival.

[10] (Bowles had last played there in 1963 in Anthony Powell's Afternoon Men in a cast that also included James Fox, Alan Howard and the actress and pop artist Pauline Boty).

After Running Late Sir Peter Hall began to offer Bowles a succession of leading roles in West End theatre, including Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables opposite Patricia Hodge.

His other West End theatre plays include Coward's Present Laughter,[19] Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth,[20] Peter Nichols' Born in the Gardens,[11] Frederick Knott's Wait Until Dark[21] and in 2004, Simon Gray's The Old Masters.

Other parts include Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion and the General in Jean Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors, both at the Chichester Festival Theatre;[25] and Judge Brack in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (translation: Frank McGuinness) opposite Francesca Annis.

[3] Indeed, his early career in television consisted mostly of playing villains (usually foreign) in such shows as The Avengers (Bowles featured in four series), Danger Man, The Saint, The Persuaders!

The success of To the Manor Born, playing the part of Richard DeVere (a nouveau riche millionaire supermarket owner originally from Czechoslovakia) which had audiences of over 20 million for all twenty-one episodes, changed Bowles' life.