Bernard Cribbins, a British actor who played roles in ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Fawlty Towers’ and whose contributions to children’s programs delighted young audiences over a career spanning seven decades, has died, his agent said Thursday. He was 93.
In a statementthe management and talent agency, Gavin Barker Associates, did not say when or where Mr. Cribbins died.
Cribbins worked well into his 90s, the agency said, in a career that influenced some of Britain’s best-known comedy, drama and children’s programs. He started acting at the age of 14 in Oldham’s repertory company. This period of stage work expanded into other mediums, including television and film, for which he became widely known, according to IMDB.
For three decades, Mr Cribbins appeared regularly on ‘Jackanory’, a BBC children’s program in which an actor read books to young audiences. The program, which ran from 1965 to 1996, was designed to stimulate interest in reading.
In one of his more than 100 lectures, from “The Wizard of OzIn 1970, Mr. Cribbins voices Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard and other characters with a fully dramatic repertoire of whispers, tremors and screeches.
When he received a BAFTA Special Award in 2009, he became serious in an interview when asked about the hugely popular “Jackanory” and how it had affected a young audience.
“All you have to do,” he said, “is look through the lens, find one kid and just talk to that kid. And you pull them in.”
“It really works, and you think there’s going to be little kids all over the country saying, ‘Just a minute, Mom,’ and they’ll look. And the stories, as I said before, were great,” he said.
Mr Cribbins was born on December 29, 1928, in Oldham, England, just outside Manchester, according to IMDB. After his early career, he narrated “The Wombles,” a 1970s animated television show created from a series of books about underground creatures, and joined the cast of the science-fiction TV series “Doctor” from 2007 to 2010. Who’. also appeared in a Doctor Who movie, “Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD”, in 1966.
In the TV series, which the producer Russell T Davies revived in 2005, Mr. Cribbins has a recurring role as the grandfather of one of the Doctor’s companions, Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate. In an Instagram post on Thursday, Mr. davies that mr. Cribbins “loved being in Doctor Who. He said, ‘Kids call me Grandpa in the street!’”
Mr Davies wrote that Mr Cribbins had once come “with a suitcase full of props, just in case, including a rubber chicken.” He added: “He would call and say, ‘I have an idea! What if I attack a Dalek with a paintball gun?!’ Okay, Bernard, went in!”
mr. Cribbins also starred in the 1970 film ‘The Railway Children’, based on Edith Nesbit’s children’s book. A review in The New York Times calling it “a perfectly lovely little British film” and said Mr Cribbins was “excellent” as stationmaster Albert Perks in a “simple story about three children hanging out in a Yorkshire village sharing a loving-kindness they learned at home. “
In 1975 Mr. Cribbins in an episode of the comedy series ‘Fawlty Towers’, starring John Cleese as the hapless manager of a seaside hotel. mr. Cribbins played a guest cast by the character of Mr. Cleese was mistaken for a hotel inspector, who tries to order a cheese salad for lunch and is served an omelette instead.
A list of survivors was not immediately available. Mr Cribbins’ wife, the actor Gillian McBarnetdied in October last year.
In the interview after receiving the BAFTA award in 2009, Mr. Cribbins and his “Doctor Who” co-star, Mrs. Tate, on how quickly time had passed during his long career.
“I can remember a lot of things with total clarity, total memory,” he said, before jokingly adding, “I have stories that I haven’t even thought of.”