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Though he had a long and varied career on stage and screen, Peter Bowles achieved his greatest popular success on mainstream TV as the debonair nouveau riche tycoon Richard De Vere, head of a supermarket and catering chain, forever matching wits with Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton (Penelope Keith) in To the Manor Born (1979). From then on, the London-born actor's stock-in-trade tended to be charming, likeable rogues, rakish lotharios and flamboyant or snobbish posh types. While on screen the very ideal of style and cultivation, Bowles himself came from a relatively humble working class background, the son of Herbert Reginald Bowles (valet, chauffeur and, eventually, butler to English aristocracy) and Scottish-born Sarah Jane Harrison (who worked as a nanny for the Duke of Argyll). His parents met while employed by the family of Lord Beaverbrook. Both worked hard to send their 16 year-old son to drama school at RADA, his mother even taking on night time work at a hospital to pay for his fees. Considered a bright youngster, Bowles graduated with ease. Having made his theatrical debut at the Nottingham Playhouse Theatre in 1953, he joined the Old Vic company three years later to play small parts in Shakespearean plays.
Considered by casting directors to be either too tall or 'too swarthy' to play Englishmen on screen, Bowles spent much of the 60s as a minor TV villain, essaying an assortment of shady characters with names like Borowitsch, Mendez, Butros or Gamal. By the time he hit the jackpot with To the Manor Born, Bowles was in his 40s. At last, he was wisely employed on television, generally cast as characters who would walk that fine line between elegant heroics and raffish villainy. From the early 70s, he starred or co-starred in more than a few series, some dramas, some comedies, most of them gems: Napoleon and Love (1974) (as Murat), the hospital sitcom Only When I Laugh (1979) (Archie Glover), The Bounder (1982) (roguish ex-convict Howard Booth, a part specially written for Bowles by Eric Chappell), The Irish R.M. (1983) (Major Sinclair Yeates), Lytton's Diary (1985) (a series Bowles himself created, playing Fleet Street gossip columnist Neville Lytton) and Perfect Scoundrels (1990) (very much in character as the consummate grifter Guy Buchanan). He also played the ambitious Guthrie Featherstone Q.C. in 17 installments of Rumpole of the Bailey (1978). His final recurring role of note was as the Duke of Wellington in the popular period drama Victoria (2016).
An intelligent and versatile actor, Bowles disliked being labeled as a sitcom star and latterly lamented the fact that major classical roles on stage had eluded him, saying "... the classics are done by the big companies or by the directors from the big companies and for reasons best known to them I have never been asked." If not Shakespeare or Chekhov, Bowles nonetheless headlined in a number of prestigious plays, many of them produced by Peter Hall (including The Browning Version, Sleuth and Wait Until Dark). He also played the bogus Major Angus Pollock in a 1993 revival of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, Professor Higgins in Pygmalion at the Chichester Festival Theatre and (in a special performance) George MacDonald Fraser's colourful arch cad Harry Flashman.
Bowles was married for more than sixty years to the former actress Susan Bennett with whom he had three children. The iconic actor passed away from cancer on March 17 2022 at the age of 85.
