William Fox

Published Tuesday 7 October 2008 at 13:15 by Patrick Newley

West End character actor William Fox was renowned for playing aristocratic and military types, and was much admired for his gift for high comedy.

He excelled in the works of Congreve, Sheridan and Wilde, but was equally at home with modern drama. Rarely out of work, he was also a prolific writer of plays for radio.

William Hubert Fox was born on January 26, 1911 in Manila, the Philippines, where his father was a merchant trader.

He was educated in England at Haileybury and then gained a scholarship to Central School of Speech and Drama, where he won the school gold medal.

Fox made his first professional appearance in 1930 in The Breadwinner at the Vaudeville Theatre, which enjoyed a long run. The following year, he starred in another hit, WA Darlington’s A Knight Passed By, at the Ambassadors.

He went on to appear in seasons at the Old Vic Theatre and in popular West End successes such as JB Priestley’s Dangerous Corner (1932). He was Horatio to Ernest Milton’s classic performance of Hamlet.

During the Second World War, Fox served in the London Rifles in Baghdad, after which he formed the Reunion Theatre, an association which aimed to help demobbed British servicemen and women return to the West End theatre.

He was rarely off the West End stage throughout the late forties and fifties and he also worked for Anthony Quayle with his company at Stratford-upon-Avon, notably playing Mowbray to Michael Redgrave’s Richard II.

Fox began writing plays in the fifties and then, in the sixties, returned to the West End to appear in South (Lyric Hammersmith), Two Stars for Comfort (Garrick), and Family Reunion (Vaudeville).

He broke into television in the early forties, and among his many TV credits were Crown Court, All Creatures Great and Small, When the Boat Comes In (as the Duke of Bedington), The Chinese Puzzle, Armchair Theatre and many others.

A prominent member of the Garrick Club, Fox listed his recreation in Who’s Who in Theatre as “country life”.

He died on September 20, 2008 aged 97. He was married first to the actress Carol Rees, with whom he had a daughter. His second wife, Patricia Hillard, with whom he had a son and daughter, died in 2001. His children survive him.