Bryan Pringle

Bryan Pringle (19 January 1935 – 15 May 2002) was an English character actor born in Glascote, Tamworth, Staffordshire, who spent several decades working across theatre, film, and television. Raised in the Lancashire town of Bolton, he attended St Bees School in Cumberland before training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he earned an Acting Diploma in 1955 and won the Bancroft Gold Medal in 1954. In 1958 he married character actress Anne Jameson, with whom he had two children; she preceded him in death by three years, dying in 1999.

Pringle launched his professional stage career as a member of the Old Vic company from 1955 to 1957, performing alongside Coral Browne, John Neville, and Claire Bloom in a series of Shakespeare productions. He toured with four of those productions — Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Troilus and Cressida, and Macbeth — bringing all four to Broadway in 1956. Following his time with the Old Vic, he joined Nottingham Playhouse, where he appeared in the Willis Hall drama Boys It's All Hell. Lindsay Anderson subsequently remounted the production as The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court Theatre in January 1959, with Peter O'Toole and Robert Shaw also in the cast; the play transferred to the New Theatre in April of that year. In October 1959, Pringle appeared opposite Shaw again in Guy Hamilton's production of Beverley Cross's One More River at the Duke of York's Theatre.

In 1961, Pringle worked at Theatre Workshop under Joan Littlewood in Henry Livings's Big Soft Nellie, a role he would reprise a decade later in Michael Apted's Granada Television adaptation. After joining the Royal Shakespeare Company, he achieved two notable successes in the summer of 1964: playing Stanley in Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, directed by Pinter himself, and Nagg in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Later stage work included a 1968 appearance with Jane Asher and Brian Murphy in Romain Weingarten's Summer at the Fortune Theatre, the role of Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the Bankside Globe in 1973 — a performance he reprised at the Ludlow Festival fifteen years later — and the part of Michael Crawford's father in Billy at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1974. He returned to Nottingham Playhouse in 1977 to play Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and appeared opposite David Suchet in John Hopkins's This Story of Yours at the Hampstead Theatre in 1987. In the final decade of his career he took on the role of Doolittle in a 1992 revival of My Fair Lady and played Kemp in a 1999–2001 revival of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane.

Pringle's film career began with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), in which he played Rachel Roberts's cuckolded husband. In 1962 he appeared in Lawrence of Arabia as a driver — uncredited, but delivering the film's final line. He played the rival milkman Austin in the Norman Wisdom comedy The Early Bird (1965), a role for which he became particularly well known, and appeared in further films including French Dressing, The Boyfriend (both directed by Ken Russell), Brazil (1985), Drowning by Numbers, and B. Monkey.

On television, Pringle gained wide recognition as "Cheese & Egg" in the Granada Television sitcom The Dustbinmen (1969–70). Earlier, he had played Charles Pooter in Ken Russell's 1964 BBC 2 production of Diary of a Nobody. Additional BBC credits included Len Wiles in On Giant's Shoulders (1979), Pistol in productions of Henry IV Part II and Henry V the same year, and Sergeant Match in a 1987 adaptation of Orton's What the Butler Saw. He played Albert Case in the 1980 episode of The Professionals titled Weekend in the Country, landlord Arthur Pringle in the second series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1986), Barker in the Inspector Morse episode Deceived by Flight (1989), pathologist Felix Norman in Prime Suspect (1991), and Mr. Grimsdale in the second series of All Creatures Great and Small. In 1985 he appeared in a widely recognized Heineken television advertisement playing a cockney elocutionist opposite Sylvestra Le Touzel, and in the early 1980s he featured in a series of International Direct Dialling commercials.

Pringle spent his later years in Northamptonshire and died there on 15 May 2002. He was buried alongside his wife in the cemetery of St Laurence Church in Brafield on the Green.