Anton Rodgers

Anton Rodgers was an English actor and occasional director born on 10 January 1933 in London, the son of William Robert Rodgers and Leonore Victoria, née Wood. During the Second World War, his family was evacuated to Wisbech, Isle of Ely, where his father worked for Balding and Mansell, a firm that printed ration books, permits, and passes. As a result of this wartime relocation, Rodgers is sometimes incorrectly identified as having been born in Wisbech. He received his early education at Westminster City School before training at the Italia Conti Academy and LAMDA. He died on 1 December 2007 in Reading, Berkshire, at the age of 74, having resided in Whitchurch-on-Thames, Oxfordshire at the time of his death.

Rodgers began performing on stage at the age of 14, making his first West End appearance in 1947 in Carmen at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. That same year he toured in an adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, playing Pip, and in 1948 he toured the United Kingdom in the title role of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy. Following repertory experience in Birmingham, Northampton, and Hornchurch, he returned to London in November 1957 to join the cast of The Boy Friend at Wyndham's Theatre. His stage work spanned a wide range of styles, from contemporary comedy and satirical farce to Restoration comedy and the works of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, and Peter Nichols.

Rodgers brought his stage career to Broadway in 1965, appearing in Mr. Pickwick. His film work was equally varied. He appeared in The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) and in the musical film Scrooge (1970), in which he performed the Academy Award-nominated song "Thank You Very Much." He subsequently appeared in The Day of the Jackal (1973), The Fourth Protocol (1987), and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), in which he played Andre, a comically corrupt French policeman who assists Michael Caine's character in romantic and financial schemes.

On television, Rodgers became widely recognized for his work in British sitcoms. He starred in Fresh Fields, which ran on ITV from 1984 to 1986, and its sequel French Fields, which aired on ITV from 1989 to 1991. He also held a long-running role in the BBC sitcom May to December, which ran from 1989 to 1994. Earlier in his career, during the 1960s and early 1970s, he appeared in numerous productions associated with the Lew Grade Incorporated Television Company, including a notable appearance as the villain in the 1968 Department S episode "One of Our Aircraft Is Empty." He also narrated the children's animated series Old Bear Stories and served as a patron of the Angles Theatre in Wisbech.

In his personal life, Rodgers married ballet dancer Morna Watson in Kensington in 1959; they had a son and a daughter before later divorcing. His second wife was actress Elizabeth Garvie, with whom he frequently appeared on stage and toured in readings drawn from the works of Jane Austen and Robert Browning, among others.