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Actor Peter Barkworth |
Actor Peter Barkworth makes a private exit from stage of life
Mourners from the world of arts turn out in force to pay their tributes
He left his own epitaph, more than one. Exactly nine years to the day, the actor Peter Barkworth published his own collection of poetry and prose, For All Occasions, as he called the book, to which his friends contributed.
And at his funeral, at Golders Green Crematorium on Monday, those poignant choices were read as a last tribute to his own passing, by fellow actors Angela Pleasance, Timothy West and Edward Petheridge. “To everything there is a season…” from Ecclesiastes, If I Should Go Before the Rest of You, by Joyce Grenfell, How Long is a Man’s Life, by Brian Patten, and Shakespeare’s Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun from Cymbeline.
There were quotations too from First Houses, Peter’s own reminiscences of a celebrated actor’s life that ended last week, when he died at the age of 77.
Another was Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon, the world war one poet whose work Peter wove into a one-man show he performed at Hampstead Theatre and round the country.
And there was music, another of his passions and something he was able to compose himself for concerts and shows, music from Bach, Mozart, a snatch of Elgar’s turbulent Cello Concerto and a joyous version of Jerusalem by the mourners present.
But he refused to make his final exit in public. He asked for his coffin, flower bedecked in white roses, to remain in the West Chapel, to be committed privately after everyone had gone, his last command on the stage of life.
His sister, Hazel, led the mourners past, out into the garden to recall Peter, who lived for more than 40 years in Flask Walk, Hampstead, and believed that the years he spent as a teacher at RADA were his most vital and important, despite all his triumphs on stage, in movies, on radio and on television.
His pupils included the now illustrious Dame Diana Rigg, Sir Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Edward Fox, Sian Phillips, David Warner, Tom Courtney, Simon Ward, Susannah York, Sarah Miles, Rodney Bewes and many more.
None of them were present, but a host of other actors were, among them Peter Sallis, Keith Barron, Tom Conti, Margaret Wolfit, Michael Malone, Lee Montague, and Louis Mahoney, as well as the writers Al Alvarez and Hugh Whitmore and impresario Michael Redington.
“He was a lovely man, a great teacher loved by his students,” Timothy West told the New Journal. “And very much ahead of his time as a teacher, someone who had a great sense of truth.”
Tom Conti recalled: “He was a cut above everyone, a delightful man. He was known as a terrific teacher, as well as an actor. And he taught everyone by them just watching him – now you know how to do it, he seemed to say.”
And he was a man of fun, as Peter Sallis, with whom Peter worked in rep in Sheffield, remembered. “He was the big giggler,” said Sallis. “I can’t recall the name of the play, but I recall one glorious moment when we were playing Irish peasants and were acting like peasants.
“Peter plunged this knife into the table between us and made some awful Irish oath. I went to pull it out, let go of it at the same moment and it sailed towards the audience. We giggled galore.”
The memories of such moments were in the Coda of Peter’s First Houses, as Edward Petherbridge read them…”
There is no group of people more generous, warm-hearted, self-obsessed, affectionate, critical, entertaining, high-spirited and giving than actors and actresses,” he wrote.
“And I, for one, am glad to be in their ranks, though sometimes it seems like a madness.”
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