Alan Dobie

Alan Russell Dobie, born on 2 June 1932 in Wombwell, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, is a retired English actor whose career spanned stage, television, and film across more than five decades and over 117 productions. The son of George Russell Dobie, a mining engineer, and Sarah Kate Dobie, née Charlesworth, whose family were farmers, Dobie was educated at Wath Grammar School before training at the London Old Vic Theatre School. He was also a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Dobie's professional stage career began in 1952 when he made his debut at the Old Vic Theatre in London, playing the Page to Paris in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Over the following years he built an extensive body of work at the Old Vic, appearing in productions including Julius Caesar, Murder in the Cathedral, Henry VIII, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Love's Labour's Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, Major Barbara, The Lonely Road, Waste, and King Lear. At the Royal Court Theatre he performed in Look Back in Anger, Live Like Pigs, Major Barbara, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, One Leg Over the Wrong Wall, Chips with Everything, The London Cuckolds, and Famine.

His West End credits encompass a wide range of productions, among them No Concern of Mine, Rosmersholm, The Complaisant Lover, The Tiger and the Horse, The Affair, Curtmantle, The Devils, Inadmissible Evidence, The Hallelujah Boy, The Wild Duck, Dancing at Lughnasa, Rough Justice, Hamlet, and Waiting for Godot. Dobie also worked as a director, with credits including The Merry Wives of Windsor, Season's Greetings, and Wedding in White.

In 1963, Dobie made his Broadway debut at the Plymouth Theatre, playing Corporal Hill in Chips with Everything. That same year he took on the roles of both God and Jesus in the York Mystery Plays, an open-air production staged triennially in the Yorkshire Museum Gardens with a largely amateur cast. He later reprised the role of Jesus Christ in the York Cycle of Mystery Plays, also in 1963.

Dobie's television career was equally substantial. From 1964 to 1965 he portrayed David Corbett, antagonist to Patrick Wymark's character John Wilder, in the boardroom drama The Plane Makers. He starred in the title role of the Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb, a character created by Peter Lovesey, in the series Cribb, which ran for 14 episodes from 1980 to 1981 and developed from a Granada Television play that debuted in 1979. In 1972 he appeared in the BBC's War and Peace as Andrei Bolkonsky, and in 1977 he played Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times. In 1986 he took a leading role in Channel 4's The Disputation, portraying Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman opposite Christopher Lee as King James I of Aragon, a production based on a true story.

His film work includes The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1968, Alfred the Great in 1969, in which he played Ethelred, and Danton in 1970, where he portrayed Robespierre. He also appeared in White Mischief in 1987. In 1984 he appeared alongside his daughter Natasha in the ITV Central production TVTimes Star Challenge.

Dobie was married to actress Rachel Roberts from 1955 to 1961 and subsequently married Maureen Scott in 1963.