Geoffrey Toone

Geoffrey Toone (15 November 1910 – 1 June 2005) was an actor born in Dublin, Ireland to English parents. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Christ's College, Cambridge. During World War II he served in the Royal Artillery before being invalided out in 1942.

Toone appeared on Broadway in 1948 in a production of Macbeth. He was also a member of the Old Vic theatre company during the 1930s, where he performed alongside John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare productions. At the time of his death, he was among the last surviving members of that company.

His screen career included a prominent role in the musical film The King and I, in which he played Sir Edward Ramsay and danced with Deborah Kerr during the banquet sequence. In 1961 he took the lead role in the Hammer Films production The Terror of the Tongs. The majority of his film work after the 1930s consisted of supporting parts, typically as authority figures.

Toone appeared in two separate Doctor Who productions: as Temmosus in the 1965 film Dr. Who and the Daleks, and as Hepesh in the 1972 television serial The Curse of Peladon. At the time of his death he held the distinction of being the longest-lived actor to have appeared in Doctor Who.

His television work also included the role of Denny Lipp, a retired boxer and pimp, in the 1960 episode "Jeff" of The Westerner, a production directed and co-written by Sam Peckinpah that also featured Warren Oates. He played R. A. Crichton in the 1981 Yes Minister episode "The Greasy Pole," Lord Ridgemere in the Only Fools and Horses episode "A Touch of Glass," and Lord Bittlesham, a recurring character in the television adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster. He also appeared in the children's series Freewheelers as the Nazi officer Karl von Gelb.

For many years Toone shared a house with actor Frank Middlemass. Toone died of natural causes at Denville Hall in Northwood, London, at the age of 94.