BBC Radio 4 Hi Fi Theatre First Love Ivan Turgenev A Tribute to the late great Simon Cadell - Gone but not forgotten. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-simon-cadell-1340890.htm Strangers would still come up to Simon Cadell in the street and yell the catchphrase "Hi-de-Hi!". This was something he had become used to in the 15 years since the hit series Hi-de-Hi! was first shown on BBC television, believing it to be "part of the job". It was while playing the role of Jeffrey Fairbrother in the series, the scrawny, well-spoken entertainments manager of the fictitious Maplins holiday camp at Crimpton- on-Sea, that he first found fame. But Cadell was as much at home in serious theatre as in television comedy. If on the screen he specialised in characters whose very fallibility made them appealing, on stage he was an accomplished actor who never did straight "impersonations", which he believed were dull; rather, he tried to give the audience a sense of a fully-rounded character. Playing the part of Noel Coward in Noel and Gertie, a show which was put together by Coward's godson, Sheridan Morley, and which opened at the Comedy Theatre in December 1989, Cadell said: "You have to take what you think of the man's personality as you perceive it, and use those things and lose the rest." Cadell was himself witty, urbane and a bon viveur. Born in 1950, Simon Cadell came from a family with a rich theatrical tradition spanning three generations. His father, John Cadell, was the son of the West End actress Jean Cadell and a distinguished actor's agent, while Simon's mother, Gillian, was the Principal of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His sister Selina is also an actress. As a boy in his teens at Bedales School, in Hampshire, Simon was puppyish and chubby and disliked playing rugby. At the age of 16 he ran away because he could not stand the routine. This seemed to be a recurring theme throughout Cadell's career: he was always seeking new challenges and believed "for an actor, getting stale is the cardinal sin". His first stage appearance was in 1967 with the National Youth Theatre in the original production of Zigger Zagger by Peter Tearson. He joined the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School the same year and got his first acting job in 1969.Cadell's ability to make people laugh was, his fellow actor John Wells said, partly in his comic sense of timing and partly being able to keep a straight face. His natural sense of irony led him to see parallels between many of the parts he played. "Fairbrother was an honest academic out of his depth - Hamlet was just another character out of his depth," he said. In the tradition of Bob Hope or Jacques Tati, he subscribed to the belief that "It is the clown, the failure, the good-natured, averagely attractive man whom British women feel at home with as an entertainment figure." Playing the part of Fairbrother in Hi-de-Hi! (which was screened from 1980 to 1983 and had an extended run of 35 episodes), Cadell believed he looked every inch the innocent abroad: his thinning hair brushed back and parted on the side, dressed conservatively in tweed jackets, checked shirts and ties, always managing to look awkward among his team of self- confident "yellow-coats", and wearing an expression of consternation and embarrassment. Consistently the anti-hero, he was the only member of the cast not to have any jokes written into his script. "It is the most difficult way to be funny," he said, "and that's why I get a kick out of it. I like to do difficult things and then move on." It was on the set of Hi-de-Hi! that Cadell met his future wife Rebecca Croft, daughter of the show's producer, David Croft.Life Without George (which ran from 1987 to 1989), the television series which further popularized Cadell, was co-written by Penny Croft, his sister- in-law. He felt a certain empathy with his character Larry Wade, a prototype new man: a sensitive, caring estate agent in his thirties. Cadell considered himself a "fairly old new man". He went on to play Dennis Duval, an egotistical womanizing actor in an ITV comedy series, Singles (1991). "I enjoyed gently taking the mickey out of myself and every other actor I've met," he said.In January 1993 he received an Olivier award for Best Comedy Performance, for playing the dual roles of Aunt Augusta and Henry Pulling in Giles Havergal's adaptation of Graham Greene's novel Travels with My Aunt (1992). He took as his model for Aunt Augusta an elderly aunt of his own in Bournemouth. He withered his left arm, jutted his jaw, pursed his lips and fiddled with an invisible string of pearls. He was delighted by one of the audience claiming, "I could see the pearls." Read more here... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-simon-cadell-1340890.html

• published: 10 Oct 2013
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