Daneman, with Sian Phillips in Spine Chiller at the Duke of York's theatre.
Daneman, with Sian Phillips in Spine Chiller at the Duke of York's theatre. |
Paul played Dr Bellfriar in Killer.
This obituray was from The Guardian 30 1 May 2001.
He also acted a witty and unsentimentalised Justice Shallow in Henry IV - "a forked radish of a man with a rambling tongue, a senile reiteration but a shrewd eye still to the main chance and possible court advancement," as one reviewer put it.
JW Lambert wrote: "It is not clear to me how an actor whom I recall as an extremely well set up Aufidius [in Coriolanus] has transformed himself into a twig-limbed old silly." But then Daneman was a supremely good exponent of doddering silliness - or the younger variety, such as the self-torturing, anxious lover, Faukland, in Sheridan's The Rivals, whose complicated character he refused to explore too seriously, settling instead for just the right level of what a critic called "inflated Byronism."
Or what about his suave young aristocrat in BBC-TV's Corrigan Blake (1963), the breezy sidekick to John Turner's cockney layabout? He is remembered also as Commander Ryan, in the BBC's Spytrap (1972), as the suburban patriarch opposite Wendy Craig in Not In Front of the Children (1967), and, a year later, in another television domestic comedy, Never A Cross Word, playing opposite Nyree Dawn Porter (Obituary, April 12).
These performance were a long way from the feverish vitality of the deplorable Duberdat, in the Doctor's Dilemma (Saville, 1956), or his long-nosed Richard III at Birmingham Rep in the 1950s (which he repeated at the Old Vic in 1962), or his princely Malcolm to Paul Rogers's Macbeth.
Born in London, Daneman was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's school in Borehamwood, and Sir William Borlase's school in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. He then read fine art at Reading University. From 1943-47, he served in RAF Bomber Command, where stage performances for fellow service-men whetted his appetite for the theatre. Then came RADA and a Boxing Day 1947 debut, at Bromley's New Theatre, as the front legs of a horse in Alice In Wonderland.
In the early 1960s, he was Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus and Richard III with the Old Vic, before joining the Nottingham Playhouse, with which he toured west Africa. He also played King Arthur, in Lerner and Loewe's Camelot, touring Australia before taking over from Laurence Harvey at Drury Lane (1965), after starring in CP Snow's The New Men, at the Strand.
It was not in Daneman's nature to stray for long from the classics, though television was, by then, a force in the land. In order to keep abreast of the theatre, he had a way of turning up in all kind of West End plays, thrillers and farces. When, in 1979, he took over from Donald Sinden in Shut Your Eyes and Think Of England, he had a heart attack while tending one of the characters in the play who was supposed to have suffered the same thing.
So he turned to writing. His television sitcom, Affairs Of The Heart (1985) starred Derek Fowlds as a man who had had a heart attack. His novel, If I Only Had Wings, was published in 1995.
Another role which the versatile Daneman assumed was Rolfe, which Alec McCowen had created, in Hadrian The Seventh (Haymarket, 1969), in which the character's dream of being the first English pope seemed, to him, to have come true. Later stage credits were Don't Start Without Me (Garrick, 1971), Macbeth (Guildford), Henry Higgins in Pygmalion (Malvern), Double Edge (Vaudeville) and Spine Chiller (Duke of York's).
Among other television credits were The Professionals (1977), Alan Bleasdale's GBH (1991), and as Douglas Hurd in Thatcher: The Final Days (1991). His films included Joseph Losey's Time Without Pity (1956), Cy Endfield's Zulu (1964), and Dick Lester's How I Won The War (1967).
His 1952 marriage to Susan Courtney, with whom he adopted a daughter, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Meredith, and their two daughters.
Paul Daneman, actor, born October 26 1925; died April 28 2001