Henry James Fowler (10 December 1926 – 4 January 2012) was an English character actor in film and television. Over a career lasting more than six decades, he made nearly 200 appearances on screen.[1]
Personal life
Fowler was born in Lambeth, south London, on 10 December 1926. As a "near illiterate newspaper boy" making eight shillings a week, he told film historian Brian McFarlane, he was invited on to radio to speak about his life in wartime London.[2]
In 1951, Fowler married actress Joan Dowling, who died by suicide in 1954. In 1960, he married Catherine Palmer.[3]
Fowler died on 4 January 2012. He was survived by his wife and had no children.[2][3]
Career
Fowler's radio interview about his experiences in wartime London led to an invitation to a screen test at Elstree Studios and a film debut as Ern in the 1942 film Those Kids from Town, a propaganda piece about wartime evacuee children from London (co-starring alongside fellow debutant George Cole). His fee was 2 guineas (42 shillings) a day - a fortune compared to the 8 shillings a week he had been earning as a newspaper boy up to his audition.[2]
His early juvenile roles included Hue and Cry (1947), usually considered the first of the Ealing comedies. Fowler later married Joan Dowling, one of his co-stars in the Ealing film. Dowling committed suicide in 1954, aged 26.[4]
He played Harry Danvers in the clerical comedy Our Man at St. Mark's (1965–66) opposite Donald Sinden[6] and made several appearances on children's television during the 1970s, reading on Jackanory and hosting the series Get This and Going a Bundle with Kenny Lynch.[4] Fowler also made several appearances in the consumer affairs sections of the Eamonn Andrews Show on ABC TV in the late 1960s. He is also noted for having narrated Bob Godfrey Films' Great: Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1975), the first British cartoon to win an Academy Award.[7] His familiar voice was regularly used for TV commercials.
In 1975, Fowler took the part of Eric Lee Fung, described as "a Chinese cockney spiv", in The Melting Pot, a sitcom written by Spike Milligan and Neil Shand. The series was cancelled by the BBC after the first episode had been broadcast.[8]
In his book British Film Character Actors (1982), Terence Pettigrew wrote that Fowler 'was as English as suet pudding...his characters were neither honest nor irretrievably delinquent, merely wise in the ways of the streets, surviving through a combination of wit and stealth. He had a certain arrogance, but there was an appealing vulnerability, too.'
