Remembering Peter Bowles and his perfect parting shot in Chichester

The English have never quite managed to come up with so neat a way of expressing that thing you wish you’d said as you departed.

The actor Peter Bowles, who has died at the age of 85, certainly had no need of it.

When he suddenly left the Minerva Theatre stage in Chichester in 2007, he instinctively found the right words to say – the mark of the true professional.

Leaving the rest of the company rather non-plussed, Bowles announced: "I'm going to put the cat out" before stumbling off stage not to be seen again that night.

The production later resumed with a stand-in script in hand; it was later confirmed that Bowles was suffering from a virus.

But what a way to go. It almost felt like a paraphrase of that line in Macbeth: “Nothing (on the stage) became him, like the leaving it.”

And now he has truly left the stage, it feels right to remember an actor who enjoyed considerable TV success, perhaps most notably opposite Penelope Keith in the BBC comedy series To the Manor Born, but who was also a formidable presence on the British stage.

He did two Festival season plays in Chichester – Pygmalion in 1994, Waltz of the Toreadors in 2007 – and he also took to the Chichester stage in a couple of winter-season touring plays.

He was always good fun to interview. He was that ideal thing: an interviewee who unfailingly had something interesting to say – especially when he visited the Chichester Festivities in 2011 to talk about an autobiography he had loved writing.

“The chief executive officer of the publishing company came up to me at a restaurant, introduced himself and asked if I had ever thought about writing my biography,” Peter told me. “I said no, and he said that he would be extremely interested.

He recalled “I got myself a literary agent and realised that it would be a very profitable thing to do so I just sat down and started writing it.

“I deliberately didn’t use diaries,” says Peter, who proceeded to merge colourful stories of actors such as Richard Burton and Rex Harrison with poignant memories of his own family and childhood.

“The book just flowed, and people who know me have been extremely kind about it, saying that it sounds just like me talking. When I sent it off, they sent it away to an editor and it came back and all the style had been changed. I said to them ‘I will give you your money back’, and they said, no, no they really liked it, that it was just that they thought that that was the style it should be.”

Peter’s response was that it was his book – and so it remained, published to wide acclaim. Not that anything made any more sense in retrospect, he insisted

“But the interesting thing was that my first leading role wasn’t until I was 49 and then my whole life changed. I had played To The Manor Born, but I was not the star. That was Penelope Keith. I wasn’t even invited to the press launch or the BAFTA awards. I was simply a supporting actor, but obviously I had had a tremendous impact on the series.

“One of the things that happened was not so much that lots of offers came in, but that I was able to approach people with my thoughts and ideas. My first big starring role was in The Entertainer by John Osborne, with whom I became very good friends – though with that, I wished I had done more theatre work. I had been doing television work for years and then with really very few preliminaries there I was doing The Entertainer!”

Definitely, a turning point, he said. And he remained an actor who enjoyed a challenge, as he told me in 2003 when he toured to Guildford in a play, the romantic comedy Our Song.

Peter explained: "What attracted me to the piece was that I knew it was going to be very, very difficult. It won't seem difficult. That's my job to make it not seem difficult. But it is difficult because I speak a lot to the audience and I enact scenes and I talk from the scenes to the audience.

"And I have to change in my emotions on a sixpence and I also have to change the tense that I am in. Sometimes I am in the present. Sometimes I am not."

But for Peter the difficulty was the point: "There is no point doing it otherwise. I don't want easy things. I have been acting for 50 years. My first professional job was in 1953, in Julius at Nottingham Playhouse and then after that I went to RADA."

Many many tributes are sure to follow the announcement of his death.

Chichester Festival Theatre spokeswoman Lucinda Morrison said: “We’re very sorry to hear the news – Peter Bowles was an actor who brought so much pleasure to audiences. We send our sympathies to his family and friends.”

For the latest breaking news where you live in Sussex, follow us on Twitter @Sussex_World and like us on Facebook @SussexWorldUK

Have you read: So many reasons to celebrate as Chichester's Pallant House Gallery marks 40 yearsHave you read: Search begins for 2022 Sussex Young Musician

Have you read: The Art of Chichester: 60 Years of Creativity - major new exhibition

Have you read: Everything you need to know: Chichester Festival Theatre summer 2022

Culture Spark set to ignite Chichester district arts and community celebration

Celebrating one of Britain’s most beloved performers, Dame Vera Lynn

A book about loss and hope

A remarkable tale of recovery from a rare form of cancer

New book inspired by days out with the family