Albert John Moffatt (24 September 1922 – 10 September 2012) was an English character actor and playwright, known for his portrayal of Hercule Poirot on BBC Radio in twenty-five productions and for a wide range of stage roles in the West End from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Moffatt's parents wished him to follow a career in a bank, but Moffatt secretly studied acting and made his stage debut in 1944. After five years in provincial repertory theatre he made his first London appearance in 1946. In the early 1950s he was cast in small parts in productions headed by John Gielgud and Noël Coward, and achieved increasingly prominent roles over the next decade. He was a member of the English Stage Company, the Old Vic, and the National Theatre companies. His range was considerable, embracing the classics, new plays, revue and pantomime.
Moffatt began broadcasting on radio in 1950 and on television in 1953. His most enduring role was that of Agatha Christie's Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, in a long sequence of radio adaptations of her novels, beginning in 1987 and continuing at intervals until 2007. In 1992/3, Moffat played M. Comeliau, the Examining Magistrate, in ITV's Maigret starring Michael Gambon. He was, perhaps, less well known as a film actor but took part in twelve films between 1956 and 1987.
He made his first stage appearance in 1944 at the Liverpool Playhouse, playing the Raven, in a touring production for children of The Snow Queen.[2] He made his debut in regular theatre at the Perth Repertory in 1945, where his colleagues included Alec McCowen, with whom he established a lifelong friendship.[4] Over the next five years he learnt his craft playing more than 200 parts in repertory companies at Oxford and Windsor, and the Bristol Old Vic. At Oxford he and the young Tony Hancock played Ugly Sisters together. Moffatt retained a fondness for pantomime; he became a celebrated Dame, and was the author of five pantomimes.[5]
London
Moffatt made his first London appearance in 1950, as Loyale in Tartuffe at the Lyric, Hammersmith.[1] At the same theatre played the sinister waiter in Anouilh's Point of Departure, with Dirk Bogarde,[6] making his West End debut when the production transferred to the Duke of York's.[3] In 1951 he made his first appearance in revue, in Late Night Extra.[1]
In 1972 Moffatt was narrator and one of the main performers in the revue Cowardy Custard at the Mermaid, a compilation of the words and music of Noël Coward, who was present at the premiere. Moffatt later played the playwright Garry Essendine in Coward's Present Laughter, another of his favourite roles.[2]
In The Bed Before Yesterday by Ben Travers (1975), Moffatt gave what The Times considered one of his subtlest performances as the hen-pecked husband opposite the sexually rampaging Joan Plowright. The Daily Telegraph commented that he made a touching theatrical virtue of both ruefulness and inadequacy.[3] In The Play's The Thing (1979) an adaptation by P. G. Wodehouse of a play by Ferenc Molnar, (Greenwich, 1979) he played a monocled, acid-tongued theatre director. In The Observer, Robert Cushman wrote, "John Moffatt, a master of the languishing comic art of flicking off a line without ever losing it, may be giving the performance of his life."[7]
William Gaskill's production of The Way of the World (Chichester and the Haymarket, 1983–84), was overwhelmingly a triumph for Maggie Smith as Millamant (described by The Guardian as "one of the great high comedy achievements of the past three decades"),[8] but according to The Times, "the other great collector's performance is John Moffatt's Witwoud, a harmless old bitch got up like a coffee meringue, whose lines have never enjoyed more flawless touch and timing".[9]
In Ronald Harwood's Interpreters (1985) Moffatt played a Foreign Office official striving to keep the peace between Maggie Smith's Nadia and Edward Fox's Viktor.[10] His last West End play was Married Love (1988), Peter Luke's play about Marie Stopes; Moffatt received good notices for his performance as Bernard Shaw, but the play, and Joan Plowright's direction received harsh criticism, and the piece ran for less than a month.[11]
Moffatt made his television debut in 1953, as Grebeauval in The Public Prosecutor,[13] and appeared many times on BBC and commercial television over the decades. He played Joseph Surface in The School For Scandal, Brush in The Clandestine Marriage, the Prince of Aragon in The Merchant of Venice, Casca in Julius Caesar, Malvolio and Sir Andrew in two different productions of Twelfth Night, and Ben in R.F. Delderfield's The Adventures of Ben Gunn. Other television appearances during the 1970s saw Moffat appear in Granada Television's daytime legal drama series Crown Court, in which he played barrister Adam Honeycombe QC.
After retiring from stage acting in 1988, Moffatt regularly appeared with Judi Dench and her husband, Michael Williams in a verse compilation Fond and Familiar. After Williams died in 2001, Dench and Moffatt performed the show with Geoffrey Palmer.[4] The critic of The Independent wrote, "Limericks, epitaphs and autograph-book exhortations jostled with old war-horse recitations and some inspired lunacy. I especially liked … the solemn singing, in canon form, of the rule 'If you haven't been the lover of the landlady's daughter, then you cannot have another piece of pie'."[16]
After a long illness, Moffatt died at his home two weeks short of his 90th birthday. He was unmarried, and was survived by a sister, Marjorie.[4][5][17] Radio Four Extra planned to mark Moffatt's 90th birthday with a series of radio plays he had recorded throughout his career, upon his death the plays were broadcast earlier than scheduled beginning with Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie in which Moffatt played Hercule Poirot and Julia McKenzie played Ariadne Oliver.[citation needed]
