by 
Murray Melvin, the actor who died at the age of 90, was a leading member of one of the most significant companies in post-war British theatre, playing key roles under the direction of pioneer Joan Littlewood in two of the biggest international hits of the his Theater Workshop, A Taste of Honey and The Hostage. More recently he has become known to younger audiences for his role in Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood.
Thin, small frame, dark hair, long, pale, sparrow-like face, Melvin had a long nose that he could look down on for many of his cockney comedic effects, but he was like Geoff in A Taste of Honey (1958 ), one of the first serious portrayals of a young homosexual character on the rightful London stage, which Melvin made his name.
With what one critic called “a miracle of tact and sincerity”, in his first major stage role Melvin played the tender-hearted friend of the pregnant heroine, a schoolgirl, in Shelagh Delaney’s first play while still a student actor. In the same year he played the shy Cockney prisoner awaiting execution by the Irish Republican Army in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958), the entire cast of which had been threatened with assassination by the IRA on opening night at the Theater Royal , Stratford, East London.
“If they had fired,” Melvin recalled, “the first person to leave would have been me, the British soldier. Of course nothing happened. The theater was surrounded by Scotland Yard and one critic said that if the IRA had been there they wouldn’t have been able to shoot straight for laughs.
To most of his characterizations with Theater Workshop Melvin has brought a gentle, wary and vulnerable air of tender effeminacy. “I was so thin,” he recalled years later, “the woman who lives next door took pity on me and baked me a batch of fairy cakes every day.”
In any case, her warm if saccharine presence provided an often witty contrast to the brash and broad tradition of spontaneous music-hall comedy that was Joan Littlewood’s trademark.
He went on to play a number of leading roles not only in other Theater Workshop hits such as Oh What a Lovely War, which transferred to the West End and Broadway, but also in the film versions of A Taste of Honey (1961) and the kitchen sink comedy Sparrers Can’t Sing (filmed 1963 as Sparrows Can’t Sing).
When the Theater Workshop closed in the mid-1960s, Melvin remained in demand as an actor in the West End and took on increasingly small but crucial roles in the film studio. His big screen credits include Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie, in which he plays working-class anti-hero Michael Caine’s friend, Nat. (“It was a breakthrough film,” he recalled. “And there was a lot to break through.”)
He played the scheming old priest Father Mignon in his friend Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), the obsequious Reverend Runt in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), and Beau Didapper in Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews (1977). Other movie highlights came in The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones, The Boyfriend, and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.
Murray Melvin was born in London on August 10, 1932 and raised in Hampstead. He did his military service with the RAF and was planning to become a shipping clerk before his taste for the theater led him in his twenties to see Littlewood productions in Stratford East such as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II .
Offering him a place and a scholarship to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the young Melvin suggested to the Theater Workshop manager, Gerry Raffles, that instead of taking the Guildhall post, he should join the Theater Workshop as a student and assistant stage manager and use the grant as a salary.
Raffles agreed and Melvin began by painting the facade of the Theater Royal, Stratford. “Within an hour of walking up that ladder,” he said, “most people in the houses next to the theater knew exactly what I was doing, where I was from and what I wanted to do.
“My second job was to paint the entrance hall. That was the introduction to my university, and the university is what it used to be.
His first professional stage appearance was at the Theater Royal in 1957 as a supernumerary in the modern dress revival of Littlewood’s Macbeth. He played Belli in Pirandello’s Man, the Beast and Virtue and rich young Calisto in Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina before his success in A Taste of Honey.
“There were five people in the show because they couldn’t afford six,” Melvin recalled. “My character was not fully understood. They usually referred to him as a foundling: but when the second production was mounted they clamored out. He realized what an important step it had been in the historical context of the theatre.
“Then, of course, we had a Lord Chamberlain (as official stage censor) and when the film came out it was X certified – now it’s O level text.”
A Taste of Honey transferred to the West End, first at Wyndham’s in 1959 and then at the Criterion, with Melvin as the kindly art student who befriended the student when her black sailor lover disappeared, leaving her pregnant. Melvin was the only lead actor in the stage production to keep his role in Tony Richardson’s 1961 film Avis Bunnage as mother replaced by Dora Bryan and Frances Cuka as girl by Rita Tushingham.
Other Theater Workshop roles included Scrooge’s Nephew in A Christmas Carol (1958), Sam in William Saroyan’s Sam, The Highest Jumper of Them All (1960), Brainworm in Jonson’s Every Man In His Humor (Paris Theater Festival) and Knocker Jug in Stephen Lewis’s Sparrers Can’t Sing (1960), a role which did not exist on the first reading with Joan Littlewood of the lively story of an East End community, except in reference to ‘a chap in red boots’.
Littlewood asked Melvin, who had found the reading amusing, if he would like to be there. “I started rehearsals playing a character who isn’t even in comedy. In the end I got a big part, that of Knocker Jug.
After a stint in the Keith Waterhouse-Willis Hall revue, England, Our England (Prince’s, now Shaftesbury, 1962), Melvin returned with Theater Workshop as Pierrot in the musical Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963), which passed to Wyndham’s (and New York, 1964), and had four parts, Gadshill, Mortimer, Sir Richard Vernon and Shadow, in Littlewood’s notorious casting of the two parts of Henry IV at the Edinburgh Festival in 1964.
On Broadway that year Melvin also played the Devil for the first time in Stravinsky’s musical The Soldier’s Tale, a part he would repeat at the London Proms 11 years later. Later West End credits included Jonathan in the Arthur Kopit farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You In The Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (Piccadilly, 1965); the Orderly in Press Cuttings and Adolphus in Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, part of a triple bill by George Bernard Shaw (Mermaid 1967); Bouzin, the victimized lawyer, in Feydeau’s Cat Among the Pigeons (adapted from John Mortimer, Prince of Wales 1969).
He remained engaged in theater throughout the next decade, as Speaker in Facade (Queen Elizabeth Hall); Convict Gilbert in Kidnapped at Christmas and its sequel Christmas Crackers (Shaw); the Marquess of Dorset in The Dark Horse (Comedy); WB Bunkaus in Hoagy, Bix and Wolfgang Beethoven Bunkhaus (Round House, Chalk Farm); the Dauphin in Shaw’s Saint Joan (Leatherhead); and the Valet in French Dressing (Gardner Centre, Brighton).
In 1971 he played the orator in Peter Maxwell Davies’ Missa super l’homme armé, and later conducted his operas, Maggot (1974) and Miss Donnithorne’s The Martyrdom of St Magnus, as well as the German composer’s Raft of the Medusa Hans Werner Henze (1977).
He had numerous other film credits from the 1960s to the 1990s, ranging from Suspect, The Criminal and Petticoat Pirates to Shout At the Devil, The Prince and the Pouper, Stories From A Flying Trunk and Let Him Have It.
In his 70s Melvin starred as the conductor in Joel Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera, filmed in 2003 on the same Pinewood Studios lot where he had worked more than 30 years earlier on The Devils with Ken Russell; and has won acclaim for his portrayal of the time traveling villain Bilis Manger in Torchwood on BBC television since 2006.
Murray Melvin devoted his later years to assembling an archive of the Theater Royal, Stratford East (1884-2017), where he also served on the board. He completed the work in 2020 and the Murray Melvin Archive – a treasure trove for scholars including programmes, script material, props, photographs and cast notes by Joan Littlewood – was donated to the British Library.
Murray Melvin, born August 10, 1932, died April 14, 2023
