There aren’t many actors who are as well-known for science fiction television and other cult TV classics as for Shakespeare, but one is Christopher Benjamin. A longtime member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he has won acclaim for his performances in the big comic character parts like Bottom and Dogberry, but also for his classical work in plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, and Julius Caesar. But his appearance on two episodes of the cult TV series Dr. Who in the 1970s has been enough to gain him immortality in the eyes of the show’s international following of diehard fans. While on tour with the RSC, he has been waylayed by Dr. Who fanatics begging for autographs and interviews. Even today he still gets requests to record DVD commentaries for the show. And he is fondly remembered by loyal fans of other 1960s TV series such as The Avengers, The Prisoner, and Danger Man. Aficionados of Pride and Prejudice will doubtless recall his performances in series with a more refined accent such as The (original) Forsyte Saga, Upstairs/Downstairs, and Poldark.

Acting does not run in the Benjamin family. Christopher’s father owned a music shop in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, where Christopher was born on December 27, 1934. When Christopher was twelve, his father bought Christopher’s grandfather’s farm, but the boy did not take to rural life. “I didn't like having to get up at 4 am and help my brother drag a calf out of its mother's womb,” he recalled years later. He got his first taste of acting at Lord Weymouth’s Grammar School in Warminster (a public school), when the headmaster’s wife cast him in a school production of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. “She said: ‘Benjamin, take this home and learn it over the holidays.’ I had a huge speech that was eight pages long, but I learned it and it was a great experience.”

	King Lear (Benjamin at left), with Nigel Hawthorne and Hiroyuki Sanada

After leaving Lord Weymouth’s he went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on a Wiltshire County Council scholarship and then embarked on a stage career. The regional repertory system still existed in those days, although it was on its last legs. From 1960 to 1962 Benjamin was a member of Reggie Salberg’s company at the Salisbury Playhouse. Salberg was the kind of figure who used to dominate the British theatrical scene but who no longer exists: an all-around manager who chose the plays for his company, cast them, hired all personnel (including directors, since he did not direct the plays) and ran the business side of things. In his two years at Salisbury, Benjamin played 43 different parts, and got his first taste of Shakespeare, playing such major roles as Falstaff and Othello. (He played Othello three times and was dogged by the recurrent nightmare of sitting in front of a mirror putting on his black makeup, only to see it turn white.) Although he yearned to play romantic leads, Salberg knew they didn't suit him, and proved it in a rather humiliating way. He cast Benjamin as the “juvenile lead” in a play called Mr. Pym Passes By, and even the actor had to admit that he was “quite dreadful. I wasn't a handsome young man, so it was inevitable. It rankled for years, though.”

The Avengers

At the Salberg company Benjamin met his wife, an actress named Cynthia Taylor, and the first of their three children was born in Salisbury. They then moved to Bristol (where one of the other company members was Barbara Leigh-Hunt), and when television became big Benjamin found himself in demand as a character actor, often playing foreigners or “ethnic” types. In 1978 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to do Howard Barker’s play The Hang of the Gaol, and was asked to return two years later for the troupe’s famous two-day, nine-hour Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (available on video). From then on, the RSC

	Nicholas Nickleby, with Roger Rees, David Threlfall and Suzanne Bertish

was his theatrical base. The Independent called his Lord Capulet “arrestingly intelligent,” and the Times said his Julius Caesar was “unusual but excellent . . . a manipulator, a windbag, and a self-admiring demagogue.” Playing Sir Tunbelly Clumsey in John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (with Jennifer Ehle), he was “all that the character's name implies — flush-faced, gloriously crude. But it is a lovingly detailed performance, too. It is a joy to catch his momentary frown as he removes a louse from under his wig, stamps on it and then surveys the damage” (the Telegraph). When he toured Japan with the company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Yomiuri Shimbun called his Bottom “a riot . . . Bugs Bunny teeth and Elmer Fudd arrogance.”

The crowning achievement of Benjamin’s Shakespearean career may have come in the summer of 2004, when he played Falstaff in an outdoor production of Henry IV Part I. “You only have to ponder Christopher Benjamin’s paunch, jowls, splendid snout, booming voice and genial charisma, as well as a curriculum vitae that includes Bottom and Sir Tunbelly Clumsey in Vanbrugh’s Relapse, to wonder why the RSC or National haven’t cast him as Falstaff,” wrote Benedict Nightingale in the London Times. “Good on Alan Strachan, who directs this season’s opener in Regent’s Park, for giving us this massive, majestic, hilarious yet touching Lord of Misrule. Well all right, I’ve seen slyer, more opportunist Falstaffs. Also more vulnerable, melancholy ones, notably the late Robert Stephens, whose fear of ageing and death went deeper. But I don’t think even Stephens was better at communicating one of the fat knight’s trademark traits, which is a gloriously disingenuous disappointment with a world that inexplicably fails to acknowledge his status as a great and good man.”

Charles Spencer in the Telegraph agreed. “The chief glory of the evening is undoubtedly Christopher Benjamin's Sir John, rubicund and bewhiskered, with a satisfyingly vast belly and a tremendous repertoire of snores. The fashion these days is to present Falstaff as a dark, embittered figure, draining the dregs of life, but Benjamin plays him as Shakespeare wrote him, a flawed man to be sure, but an immensely lovable one with the relish of wit and vitality about him. Benjamin handles the great set pieces — his spectacular recovery from the humiliation at Gad's Hill, the wonderful speech mocking honour — with superb aplomb, plummily savouring Falstaff's rich language while also suggesting the vulnerability beneath the bravado, and an aching love for Hal as the son he never had. When the Prince insults him, as he does so often, this Falstaff's beseeching eyes put one in mind of a whipped spaniel.”