Derek Waring

Derek Barton Chapple (Derek Waring), actor: born London 26 April 1927; married 1963 Dorothy Tutin (died 2001; one son, one daughter); died Petworth, West Sussex 19 February 2007.

At a time when ITV was screening long-running, raucous sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbour and Bless This House, the actor Derek Waring was starring in a gentler comedy that brought the channel another winner with audiences, albeit for only two years.

In Moody and Pegg (1974-75), he was the divorced antiques dealer Roland Moody, who moved into a London flat but found himself sharing it with the single civil servant Daphne Pegg (played by Judy Cornwell). Both had what appeared to be a valid lease on the same property from a rogue estate agent, so they reluctantly agreed to share.

Up to 15 million viewers regularly tuned in to the series, following the comedy - cleverly mixed with drama in the scripts by Julia Jones and Donald Churchill - that had a permanent undercurrent of antagonism between the two singletons, who each regarded the other as a squatter.

The actor was born Derek Barton Chapple in Mill Hill, north London, in 1927, the son of Wing Cdr Harry Barton Chapple, an electrical engineer who assisted John Logie Baird in his early television experiments. (Derek's elder brother, Richard, went on to become a sitcom writer and BBC script editor, under the name Richard Waring.)

After serving in the Indian and British armies, and gaining a scholarship to train at Rada, he adopted Derek Waring as his professional name and spent five years in repertory theatre. He made his cinema début as an RAF officer in Call Back Yesterday (1956) and followed it by playing a surgeon in the comedy Barnacle Bill (1957) and taking other parts credited and uncredited, in various forgotten British films.

On television, Waring appeared in episodes of early ITV series such as The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1957), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1957, 1958), Ivanhoe (1958), William Tell (1959) and No Hiding Place (1959), and was even seen modelling men's spring fashions in Flair, a 1959 advertising magazine - a type of programming finally banned three years later.

Following his 1958 West End début in The World of Suzie Wong (Prince of Wales Theatre), Waring acted on stage in Call It Love (Wyndham's Theatre, 1960) and the revue Not to Worry? (Garrick Theatre, 1962). Then came three years with the Royal Shakespeare Company (1962-64).

While at the RSC, Waring met and married the actress Dorothy Tutin and, together, they later starred as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in Portrait of a Queen, both in the West End (Vaudeville Theatre, 1965) and on Broadway (Henry Miller's Theatre, 1968). He returned to the West End for the musical Cowardy Custard (Mermaid Theatre, 1972), Michael Pertwee's Sextet (Criterion Theatre, 1977), the Agatha Christie thriller Cards on the Table (Vaudeville Theatre, 1981), a revival of The Boy Friend (Albery Theatre, 1984), George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell (Haymarket Theatre, 1987) and Leslie Bricusse's short-lived Sherlock Holmes - The Musical (as Dr Watson, Cambridge Theatre, 1989).

In between these stage runs, Waring found more prominent television roles, first as Detective Inspector Neil Goss (1969-73) in the groundbreaking police series Z Cars, before becoming a familiar face in sitcoms. After Moody and Pegg, his biggest role was in Partners (written by his brother, Richard, 1981), in which he played Rupert Bannister, the boss of a bathroom fittings company.

Waring also played Commander Flint in the Royal Navy Second World War comedy Thundercloud (1979), Robert, one of the British expatriates in Spain, in The Sun Trap (1980) and Bassington, an ice-cream salesman in The Happy Apple (1983), as well as appearing with Derek Griffiths, Debbie Arnold and others in the sketch show The Funny Side (1985).

Anthony Hayward

Interesting? Click here to explore further