Robertson Hare

One of his favourite parts, which he played in the provinces before achieving West End success, was "Grumpy", a retired lawyer, in which he toured before the First World War.

[2] The following year he made his London début as one of the crowd in Gilbert Murray's version of Oedipus Rex at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

[1] After war service with the army in France, Hare resumed his acting career, and came to the notice of the West End public as James Chesterman in a new farce, Tons of Money, in which he and the actor-manager Tom Walls played supporting roles, with Ralph Lynn in the lead.

[6] Hare played in them all; his roles were: William Smith (It Pays to Advertise); The Rev Cathcart Sloley-Jones (A Cuckoo in the Nest); Harold Twine (Rookery Nook); Hook (Thark); Oswald Veal (Plunder); Ernest Ramsbotham (A Cup of Kindness); Miles Tuckett (A Night Like This); Edwin Stoatt (Turkey Time); Clement Peck (Dirty Work); Montague Trigg (Fifty-Fifty); and Augustus Pogson (A Bit of a Test).

The bald dome, with brows furrowing anxiously beneath it; the spectacles, emphasizing the shock and bewilderment with which he responded to his travails; the jerky, staccato movements as his distress grew – these made him a highly recognisable stage figure.

[1] Among his most successful creations of this kind was Willoughby Pink in Travers's Banana Ridge in 1938, in which he played a British Empire builder with a dubious past.

In 1947 he starred at the Apollo Theatre in She Wanted a Cream Front Door, 1954 saw him in the political farce The Party Spirit; in 1956 he was in John Dighton's Man Alive!

[7] In 1963 Hare played in a long-running stage musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (762 performances), in which he was cast as Erronius to Frankie Howerd's Pseudolus.

[1] In 1962 he briefly escaped type-casting, appearing with Wilfrid Hyde White in a comedy film Crooks Anonymous, in which he played an old lag, his familiar bald head disguised under a wig.