Bernard Fox

Bernard Fox, born Bernard Lawson on 11 May 1927 in Port Talbot, Glamorgan, Wales, was a Welsh actor who worked across stage, film, and television for the better part of seven decades. He died on 14 December 2016 of heart failure at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, California, at the age of 89. He is survived by his wife and two daughters, Amanda and Valerie.

Fox came from deep theatrical roots. Both his parents, Gerald Lawson and Queenie (née Barrett), were stage actors, and his uncle was the British actor Wilfrid Lawson. As a fifth-generation performer, Fox made his first film appearance at eighteen months of age, and by the time he was fourteen he was working as an apprentice assistant manager of a theatre. His formal acting career was interrupted by military service; he served with the Royal Navy in both World War II and the Korean War before returning to the profession.

His screen career spanned from 1956 to 2004, encompassing more than thirty cinema films. Among his most distinctive film credits was his participation in two separate dramatizations of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, separated by thirty-nine years. In A Night to Remember (1958), he appeared uncredited as lookout Frederick Fleet, delivering the line "Iceberg, dead ahead sir!" from the ship's crow's nest. Nearly four decades later, he portrayed Colonel Archibald Gracie IV in James Cameron's Titanic (1997). His other film work included the comedy Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977), in which he played Max, and Yellowbeard and The Private Eyes, in the latter of which he played a homicidal butler. He provided the voice of the Chairmouse in the Disney animated features The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under, and played former Royal Flying Corps airman Winston Havelock in the 1999 adventure film The Mummy. His final screen appearance came in Surge of Power: The Stuff of Heroes (2004).

On television, Fox built a substantial body of work in American series beginning in the 1960s. He appeared in three episodes of The Andy Griffith Show between 1963 and 1965 as English valet Malcolm Merriweather. On The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1964, he appeared in three episodes, including episode 117, "Girls Will Be Boys," in which he played the father of a girl who repeatedly beats up Richie Petrie, as well as "Teacher's Petrie" and "Never Bathe on Saturday." In 1965 he made a guest appearance on Perry Mason as Peter Stange in "The Case of the Laughing Lady." Between 1965 and 1970, he portrayed the bumbling Royal Air Force group captain referred to on screen as Colonel Rodney Crittendon in eight episodes of Hogan's Heroes, with the rank of colonel used in place of group captain to avoid confusion for American audiences. Fox first appeared on Bewitched in 1966 not as his signature character but as witch debunker Osgood Rightmire; he subsequently portrayed witch doctor Dr. Bombay across eighteen episodes of that series between 1967 and 1972. He reprised Dr. Bombay on the 1977 sequel series Tabitha, again on the soap opera Passions in 1999, and offered a comedic variation on the character as a "wish doctor" in a 1989 episode of Pee-wee's Playhouse. At the time of his death, Fox was among the last surviving adult cast members of Bewitched. He appeared in two episodes of Columbo, "Dagger of the Mind" and "Troubled Waters," and in the Murder, She Wrote episode "One White Rose for Death" in 1986. Additional television credits included McHale's Navy, F Troop, M*A*S*H, Knight Rider, and two episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in 1966. In the early 1980s he co-starred as Dr. Watson opposite Michael Evans's Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock & Me. Earlier in his career, in 1961, he played Malcolm across all twenty-six episodes of the British comedy series Three Live Wires.

Fox also brought his work to the Broadway stage, appearing in 1978 in the production 13 Rue de l'Amour.