Bryan Pringle

Bryan Pringle (19 January 1935 – 15 May 2002) was an English character actor who appeared for several decades in television, film and theatre productions. Life and career Born in Glascote, Tamworth, Staffordshire, he was brought up in the Lancashire town of Bolton. After boarding at St Bees School, Cumberland, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, winning the 1954 Bancroft Gold Medal and leaving in 1955. Three years later he married character actress Anne Jameson; together they had two children. She died in 1999. Theatre work Pringle started as a member of the Old Vic company between 1955 and 1957, appearing with Coral Browne, John Neville, Claire Bloom and others in several Shakespeare plays and touring with four of them - Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Troilus and Cressida and Macbeth - in the USA. He then moved to Nottingham Playhouse, where he appeared in the Willis Hall drama Boys It's All Hell and was the only cast member to travel with the play to London. There, Lindsay Anderson remounted it as The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court Theatre in January 1959; also starring Peter O'Toole and Robert Shaw, the play transferred to the New Theatre in April. Later that year, in October, Pringle appeared opposite Robert Shaw again in Guy Hamilton's production of the Beverley Cross play One More River at the Duke of York's Theatre. In 1961 he was at Theatre Workshop, working with Joan Littlewood on the Henry Livings play Big Soft Nellie. (Ten years later he was top-billed in Michael Apted's TV version of the same play for Granada Television.) Then, having joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, he scored two personal successes in the summer of 1964, first as Stanley in Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (directed by the playwright), then as the dustbin-bound Nagg in the Samuel Beckett play Endgame. Among later theatre credits, he starred with Jane Asher and Brian Murphy in the Romain Weingarten play Summer at the Fortune Theatre in 1968, appeared as Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the Bankside Globe in 1973 (reprising the role at the Ludlow Festival 15 years later), was Michael Crawford's father in Billy at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1974, returned to Nottingham Playhouse in 1977 to play Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and appeared opposite David Suchet in the John Hopkins play This Story of Yours (Hampstead Theatre, 1987).