Richard Goolden
He played more than 500 roles in a career that lasted more than fifty years, and embraced the classics, farce, opera bouffe, radio, films and television.
He created roles in new plays by Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard, and, in his last year, in the radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the television drama Cribb.
From 1915 to 1918 he was a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France (serving in the same unit as Ralph Vaughan Williams), ending the war as acting unpaid lance corporal.
[6] He was appointed secretary of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, with whom he visited Scandinavia, appearing in Galsworthy's Loyalties and A A Milne's Mr Pim Passes By.
[7] In London, in the same year, he played Owain Flatfish in Fagan's production of Richard Hughes's A Comedy of Good and Evil at the Ambassadors.
He was in the Lyric's revue, Riverside Nights (1926) and played the professor of philosophy in Molière's The Would-Be Gentleman (1926) in a cast headed by Playfair and including Sydney Fairbrother, Miles Malleson and James Whale.
His Shakespeare roles included Costard (Love's Labours Lost, 1932), Aguecheek (Twelfth Night, 1933), Quince (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1938), Fool (King Lear, 1943), Young Gobbo (The Merchant of Venice, 1944), Roderigo (Othello, 1944), Polonius (Hamlet, 1944) and Lepidus (Anthony and Cleopatra, 1951), Shallow (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1968), Old Gobbo (The Merchant of Venice, 1969), Verges (Much Ado About Nothing, 1970), the Pedant (The Taming of the Shrew, 1975), Sir Nathaniel (Love's Labour's Lost, 1976), and the King of France (Henry V, 1977).
He then achieved popularity as the comic character Mr Penny, "a timid fellow, who went quietly off to the office each morning only to be involved in some extraordinary adventure".
[20] Goolden appeared in films including Whom the Gods Love (1936), In the Doghouse (1961), It's All Happening (1963), The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), It!
[21] In his entry in Who's Who, Goolden wrote that he had played "a diversity of parts ranging from traditional classical repertoire to Farce, Opera Bouffe, Revue, Single Act Variety and Seaside Piers."
One of the farces was Charley's Aunt, in which he played the principal role of Babbs in 1938 at the Haymarket; another was Look After Lulu, by Georges Feydeau adapted by Noël Coward, in 1959.
[6] One of his less typical roles was Nagg in the premiere of Endgame, Beckett's English version of his play Fin de partie.
